If you love to write, then you know how it goes.
One day you’re writing, drinking French wine and smoking imported tobacco in a garret, showering the village with sheets of your glorious thoughts and tales.
The next thing you know, Old Jed’s a Millionaire is about the most brilliant thing you can think of and you find yourself hiding from your own blog and taking pictures around town of things like this:
What to do….what to do….you love to write. You love your blog. You need inspiration.
I say try what my friend Karan and I just did. Go to lunch, talk about everything under the sun, maybe even talk about writing, but don’t over-analyze it. Then drive home from lunch while the sun shines, listen to some music, blur the mind’s eye and — ta da! Receive a gift of energy and inspiration.
Karan and I both cherish writing, and we both find ourselves thinking and talking about writing a whole lot more than we are actually WRITING.
So here’s the deal: Starting on Monday, we will trade stories about life in Charleston, West Virginia. Our writing prompts to ourselves will be simply our experiences around town. Those experiences may be sad, happy, funny, enraging, or anything at all. What they have to have in common is that they are real. One of us will post, then punt to the other writer. We will share each other’s stories with our networks and encourage your thoughts on our posts.
We are going to tell you some real stories, and we hope you will come along for the ride. We call it Esse-a-Go-Go.
Are you ready?
Let’s go!
I’ve developed an annual tradition of mentioning a “Top 10” list of Esse Diem posts at the end of the year. I started with the most viewed, but quickly learned that post views provide limited information about how good anything actually is, and almost no information about how a piece of writing influenced anyone’s thinking.
Esse Diem 