Most writers face the common struggle of how to make time in our busy lives to devote to our craft, when everyday pressures leave us little room for anything else. The fellowship of other writers can often provide support and insight to help us find practical solutions.
These topics came up at a writers’ weekend hosted by longtime WiK member Rebecca Otowa on May 10-11th. Rebecca’s home deserves a special mention: her husband is the 19th generation of his family to occupy the 350-year old farmhouse in rural Shiga Prefecture. (For more on this, I recommend Rebecca’s book At Home In Japan – Tuttle, 2010.) They recently acquired the property next door and refurbished it as guest quarters, where our small group stayed.
Among the many experiences my fellow WiK members Rebecca, Karen Lee Tawarayama, Jann Williams and I share is that all of us have co-edited past WiK anthologies. We had coped with similar challenges of how to juggle the logistics of the project with our own busy lives — and we came to the same realization that prioritizing time for ourselves was not just an indulgence, but was vital to allow us to continuously approach our editing tasks with a fresh mind.
The weekend’s weather cooperated, and the predicted rain never fell. The four of us were able to take long walks around the village of Otowa, from which Rebecca’s family took its name. We foraged in their spring garden for snap peas, which Rebecca fried into exquisite tempura.
But writing remained the focus, and our conversations somehow always returned to it. Rebecca suggested we do a series of exercises to unleash our creative energy — to stretch our muscles, so to speak.
My favorite of these involved selecting a book from her large library, opening to a page and writing down a random sentence to be the first line of a story — and then passing around the paper, for others to take a turn adding their own sentences. The results were surprisingly more coherent and compelling than I had expected.
In some ways, this exercise imitated life: all of us are born into random situations, and we then make our own marks before handing everything on to those who follow us to complete. Of course, in real life, we don’t always get to read the endings — instead, we have to imagine them, and understand that we’re just a single part of a long, unbroken circle.