“Basic Practice #1: Waking Up the Word Mind Begin with freewriting, as in the exercise from Chapter 2. Get your pen moving across the page, or your fingers across the keyboard, without stopping. Remember to relax; there’s no rush. Once you feel comfortable, see if you can shift your mental focus: Turn your attention away from what you are saying to the words you are using. At first you may find this difficult; that’s fine. Just keep trying to bring your mind back to words. You may also find that your writing stops making sense; that’s fine, too. (If a great idea occurs to you while you work, however, by all means write it down!) You may find that you stop writing sentences altogether and move instead into listing words. Try as best you can to keep from judging the words that come to you. There are no right or wrong answers in this practice. Instead, as you write, listen to your words; pay attention to what you hear. Afterwards take a moment or two to reflect, on paper if you wish, about what happened when you did the exercise.”