I'm Adeli Mell, and this is The Slowdown.

I meet with a very small writing group every couple of weeks to work on various prose

projects.

Some of us are more poets than prose writers.

I am pointing to myself here, so we thrive on the deadlines the group gives us, as well

as the encouragement to write all the way to the end of the line and the page.

Some of us are working on books that have already been sold to publishers.

Some of us are working on essays, and some of us are working on novels or short stories.

Our process is simply that we bring in something to share, and we read five minutes of the

piece, and then we get some positive feedback.

That's it.

And it's wonderful.

In the last meeting, we started talking about the journals that we keep now or have kept

throughout our lives.

One of our members started talking about the journals she kept as a young person and

how she was amazed by how few feelings were in them.

They were only lists of things she did or had to do.

Another member said that hers were just the opposite.

They were all feelings, flooding on the page like loose ink, pooling on paper.

She said she wished she had written some things down, some things about what she had done

that day, anything concrete.

Instead, it was all about her emotions and what she was going through in her heart.

...