And so our days went: three-hour morning sessions with a “lesson” each day, then a writing session, a break, some discussion, another writing session. After a two-hour lunch break, we had an afternoon session in the same format. We averaged three solid hours of group writing each day.
Not to say that it was all easy. Sometimes I sat down and didn’t feel like writing, or wasn’t sure where to begin, or was just tired. I never sleep well when away from home and I was sharing a dorm room with seven other women. But I stayed with it, as he encouraged us to do, and found it easier to drop into the work. I came up with a tactic I learned from my years of studying piano and cello: when I end a practice session, I make a note of where to begin the next day, providing me an easy entry point for the next writing session.
The group results were excellent. By Friday people worked out whatever they were grappling with. Some figured out what form their project would inhabit; others discovered that they wanted to continuing writing; one person finished his ten-minute screenplay. Along the way, Eric offered us bits of wisdom from his life as a writer and as a creativity coach. He understands the anxieties artists face and has tactics for dealing with them all.
I brought to the workshop a rough draft of my biography of mantra musician GuruGanesha Singh, hoping to pull it together, find places to incorporate research material, and bring the draft closer to completion, so I can hand it to my first reader. I’m going home happy with the results. And I started writing for an hour every morning, with the intention to continue this once home.
There was only one downside: I knew Eric offered these Deep Writing Workshops around the country. What I found out after I arrived was the June session is in Paris. If only I’d waited.