Partial image of timeline. Download “overview” below to see entire timeline.
Hi Readers,
At the end of each chapter of Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too), I included “Try This” activities designed to help lead you into your voice and what I refer to as your true material. I thought from time to time, I’d share ones here that didn’t make it into the book…mostly because I hadn’t thought of them yet.
As I’ve written previously, I got a bit stalled out right after I signed the book contract for DRINK (Note to self: Count on this–it’s happened twice. It will, no doubt, happen again). And in my floundering and “procrastinating,” I turned to drawing out characters from the book and trying to create visual representations of the book. This was not, as I feared at the time, a “waste of time.” This was actually working although it did not look like work. My younger daughter–thirteen at the time–would walk by my room, glance at me sitting on the bed with my sketch pad and markers, and say things like, “Aren’t you supposed to be writing??”
One of the “non-working”activities I did with my sketchbook at that time was to draw a timeline of the story of my coming into myself as a writer. Due to the limitations of my technological abilities and that of my scanner, I am not able to make a photo of the entire timeline (see partial image above), but you can see the full image here in this PDF file. Click on the word “overview” to download: overview. Please note: I made this at the time not thinking anyone else would ever see it, which is often the secret to how you create something helpful–although now I’d like to make it prettier for you but then some of the honesty of the example would be lost.
I’m sharing this timeline as an example of the Try This activity that you can do today or another day. Do it today!
Try This: Create a Timeline
1. Create a visual timeline of the story of your coming into yourself as a writer or creative person.
or
2. Create a visual timeline of a book or story you’re writing right now or want to write.
Hey, if you like your results, please feel free to share an image with me at theonestorprods@gmail.com.
Have fun!
Theo
Writing Is My Drink 
Thanks. I forget people can draw. Not a go to for me but worth the try. I just finished reading your memoir as well. It was interesting to see the growth in your relationships and in yourself.
Yes, worth a try. It’s actually pretty fun when I get past the “Is this good?” question. Thanks for reading my blog and my memoir. theo
Read “Writing is my Drink” first. Love it and am working backward to the exercises. I’m trying to learn writing from books. No college for this old lady…yet. Who knows?