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Living Ish-fully Ever After
My five year old daughter loves the book ISH by Peter Reynolds. It's a lovely little story about being creative without needing to be "perfect," that the joy of creating far outweighs the need for an exact product. When she draws something now, she tends to say "This doesn't look like a lighthouse, Mommy, but it looks lighthouse-ish." In the book, the main character learns that he can also write ISH-fully and ultimately relax ISH-fully. Life, he finds, is in the ISH.
This year, I read ISH to my high school creative writing class the first day of school and a wonderful thing has happened. My students are writing ISH-fully. When I see them struggling with a prompt, or trying to get an idea down on paper, or even just feeling blah about what they're working on, I like to remind them to be ish-ful. What's important about their work is that they create something that hasn't been there before, ink to paper, ideas fleshed out and played with, even if nothing whole comes from it. It sure takes some of the pressure off.
And even earlier today, when I was working on a new novel of my own and found myself hung up on a certain scene, I told myself "let this scene be ish-ful" right now, knowing I can come back to it eventually, knowing that sometimes, as writers, we just need to get something out so we can move forward, and I found myself realizing that living ish-fully ever after is pretty perfect after all.
This year, I read ISH to my high school creative writing class the first day of school and a wonderful thing has happened. My students are writing ISH-fully. When I see them struggling with a prompt, or trying to get an idea down on paper, or even just feeling blah about what they're working on, I like to remind them to be ish-ful. What's important about their work is that they create something that hasn't been there before, ink to paper, ideas fleshed out and played with, even if nothing whole comes from it. It sure takes some of the pressure off.
And even earlier today, when I was working on a new novel of my own and found myself hung up on a certain scene, I told myself "let this scene be ish-ful" right now, knowing I can come back to it eventually, knowing that sometimes, as writers, we just need to get something out so we can move forward, and I found myself realizing that living ish-fully ever after is pretty perfect after all.
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