Find the Gold in Your Archives

Draw a house, greet your reader, and finish what you started

Pencil in hand

Pick up a pencil. Feel it press against your middle finger and listen to the scratch of graphite as you draw a house, badly and on purpose. Give it a front door and a kitchen table. I always add a sunroom, because I can’t live without my plants. There are no bathrooms, so if you need one, go knock on the neighbor’s door. That’s how we opened this workshop.

Everyone brought something they had stopped opening. Walter keeps a cubby stuffed with journals and a TikTok script that strangers abandoned after eight seconds. Margaret has run writing groups since the pandemic and has hundreds of pages of prompts, plus twenty chapters of a book that had started to feel dull. An agent told Joan that her Serenity Prayer book belonged on grandma’s wall. Leah carried a piece about her mother, who moved from West Virginia to Alaska and took her chocolate chip cookies into every new kitchen.

^{(*Names of the participants have been changed)}

The front door

At the door, you greet your reader like a guest. Who needs this idea, and what are they stuck on? Joan pictured junior high kids who ask “who am I?” and she wants to hand them a better question: “whose am I?”

The room with all the senses

I asked everyone for the color, texture, and taste of the feeling their reader walks away with. Leah told us that people show up at her mom’s house heavy, and they leave lighter, “fuller in spirit and stomach.” I could smell the cookies. Walter renamed it Chocolate Cookies for the Soul.

Margaret chose the word yearning, and I saw dark, loose soil you sink your hands into before you plant something. She decided yearning tastes like tea. Joan brought us dandelions and the joy of blowing their seeds. I pictured a little boy doing exactly that, and the same boy at fourteen glancing around first to see who’s watching.

Walter got stuck. When I asked him for the color of “what matters most,” he said, “It’s nothing I can put a name to.” Margaret called it cloudy, light and hard to grasp. So we stayed with the clouds, the wispy white ones and the low gray ones ready to split open, which Walter knows from years of climbing.

The kitchen table

We sat down at the kitchen table and wrote the letter our reader sends us after finishing the piece, in present tense and in their own words. I stopped talking and let the pencils work.

Leah read first. “Reading your piece left me feeling simply hugged.” Joan’s teenager wrote, “Joan, you rock. You don’t judge me.” Margaret’s group members told her they don’t have to be fine to show up. Then Walter read his. His reader realizes he has been making those storm clouds himself, and now he sees the sun, a warm one with puffy cheeks, “like a best friend sun.”

Walter kept going. What he really loves is hiking. Earlier that day he and a friend had gone off the trail, found busted beer bottles, and carried them far out of their way to a garbage can. He heard a lesson about cleaning up your life in that walk, and a blog name followed right behind it: Trail Talk.

That’s Future Scripting™ at work. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. When your reader already exists on the page, you stop writing into the dark.

Finish what you started

The last room in the house is the calendar. We opened ours and said a finish date out loud, because a date spoken in front of others is harder to let slide. Leah will finish her mother’s story when she gets home from a trip overseas. Joan is aiming for the deadline of a teen devotional she wants to submit to, and Walter gave himself one week.

Margaret surprised herself. She has a two-day writing retreat in the mountains coming up, and she decided to spend it on one question: what am I yearning for? By the end of the call, her twenty stalled chapters had a place to live inside that question.

I asked everyone to copy their reader’s letter onto a sticky note and put it where they write. On the mornings guilt can’t get you back to the draft, that letter will.

What you’ll leave with

One abandoned piece pulled back into the light, a reader you can picture at your door, their letter on a sticky note, and a finish date on your calendar.

Bring the piece you stopped opening, a pencil, a blank page, and a cup of coffee or tea.

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“Rewrite your story. Rewire your identity. Reprogram your future.”

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Your pen is your permission slip. Let’s rewrite the season before it rewrites you.