Here’s some writing advice that made sense to me. I found it in an anonymously written column called “The Notebook” in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette.
“He is teaching a writing class at the regional high school, via Zoom. Students are on the screen, in the now familiar grid, in various outfits of comfortable clothes. He talks about the importance of voice and specific details, and he talks about excavating the unconscious.
“Imagine going forth into the mind with a pick-axe and shovel, he says, to dig through the substrata and get to the good stuff: the buried treasure of so much forgotten laundry. The key, he says, is not thinking. Trying to think keeps you on the surface, with the Frisbees and flowers and wandering butterflies. Instead, grab a random detail, the first one that comes to mind and start writing. Then watch as other details magically rise to the surface, first in the mind and then on the page.”
Read the Notebook, fellow Boomers and striving writers, and forget the money you might have squandered on this hustle in the 60s:
dream ranch 