We’re all in the river together. I’m very happy to be in such good company.

Enjoy your days – I’ll see you on the other side : )

How can we continue when we’re convinced the whole project is pointless and that everything we ever write is utter rubbish?

By taking a pen and writing a single word. And then another.

Thank your doubts kindly for their input, and continue anyway. Reassure your critic that you WILL allow them out, when you have written your small stone and you want to start polishing it, but not until then.

Writing can be a thorny business. But then so is life.

We are all in it together. The river of stones, and the river of life. We can encourage each other (do visit each other’s blogs next month and say what you like). We can take comfort in the knowledge that every single writer ever has had terrible doubts about what they’re doing. We can learn how to encourage ourselves, and get better at this as we go along. We can eat chocolate. We’ll be JUST fine.

“Your lover, does he smell of cedar or pine, or lemon? Or tobacco? Have you ever washed an ashtray and wondered why it is so much more pungent when wet?”

This is Martha, telling her readers about our project. As she says, “…what started as a meditative process could well be a gold mine of writing prompts… or was it the other way round?”. We hope some of you might find inspiration for longer pieces in your stones, and we’d love to see them when they’re done.

Elaine has also signed up with her rather lovely blog – what peonies!

And Olivia wrote such a gorgeous piece, I’m going to share it all here. It heartened me because it describes exactly what I’m hoping for from this project. Do share your experiences of writing small stones with us.

And you know, it doesn’t have to be small stones. That’s just a label. Haiku, short stories, we’re not fussy. Sketching, taking photographs… whatever. Just pay attention.

*

“I am going to be writing a ‘small stone’ each day in January – taking notice and observing and writing. On my way to the tube station today, I decide I need to practice. It is a 7 minute walk to the tube station, maybe 6 minutes today, as I run small parts of it, as I don’t want to miss my train. Even so, I notice – the wet, soft brown leaves, mushing on the pavement, concrete resisting their composting; the stump where there used to be a cherry tree that blossomed pink in the spring; the bright red wool hat and luminous yellow jacket of a council worker, giving out and attracting light on this gray day; the yellow lettering on the road in the bus stop bay worn away so that it now reads ‘us stop’; a baby in the warm clear bubble of his pram, incubated as he is perambulated, the father turning around to smile proudly at his – wife? – behind, catching me in the arc of his smile. And I smile back.


Until I am sat on the train, and start writing, and the sounds of words start bumping off of each other, I didn’t know that was how I saw those things – they were just leaves, a stump, a hat, worn-out road signs, a pram. In the writing, I appreciate what I have seen, and what I have been part of. I am confident now that I will be able to pick up and polish at least one small stone a day.”

(From Caroline Brazier’s The Other Buddhism)

Not long to wait now.

If you’d like to get some practice in, here’s an interesting exercise I found via Matt at Morden Haiku – the author has given me permission to link to it here.

If anyone would like to make some notes about the experience of writing small stones, I’d be interested in seeing them – email them through, or blog them, or both. It might be interesting to use some quotes from you all in the introduction to the book we make.

There’s still time to join us… you don’t have to let us know, just start writing small stones on the 1st!