A Writing Dare: The One-Inch Picture Frame

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Calling all writers! I challenge you to join me in creating a one-inch picture frame of words.

The talented author, Anne Lamott, shared this concept in her famous book: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Confession: sometimes I have so many ideas percolating in my head that I don’t know where to begin!

At about that time, binge watching a series on Netflix or scanning the rabbit hole of the internet for hours starts to look very appealing — anything to avoid the sometimes, overwhelming sense of sitting down to write.

Enter, Anne Lamott’s ingenious solution to a writer’s (sometimes) tendency to avoid creative angst:

The One-Inch Picture Frame

“It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story.” -Anne Lamott

Whatever genre you find yourself writing in, Lamott’s metaphorical small picture frame offers us a contained playground for us to explore without losing our way. It’s the writer’s equivalent of rock-climbing with a…