Lara Tupper: Swift Ink Stories

Highlight the cracks.

I recently took a songwriting workshop with a brilliant teacher, Licia Sky, and wrote about it for Kripalu Resources. ("Advice for Perfectionists"). Licia encouraged me to embrace imperfections during my writing process, to highlight the "cracks." The broken bits make us more interesting, she assured me.

I welcome this approach. 

We began with an "object-oriented freewrite" as Licia places random items in the center of our seated circle. She asked us to spend one minute writing about each chosen thing. "You can free-associate, even if the association is ‘I don’t want to do this right now.’ The point is to write so fast that you can’t block the truth from coming out.”
 
I chose a light bulb, a roll of blue painter’s tape, and a new dish sponge, still in its package. I shared my words and noticed a theme: the “perfect circle” of tape and the sponge sealed in “perfect plastic, tucked away from all potential mess.”
 
“Ah,” Licia said. “You’re a perfectionist.”

From there, I …