Studio of Stories

Writing as a practice, a memory, and becoming.

As I begin creating this portfolio piece, I am immediately taken back to a creative writing course I once took. It required the students to write at least a page a day for three months in pocket sized notebooks that were provided to the students by the lecturer. It was exhausting, intimate and felt like a meditative discipline. Sitting here now, facing this new text, I can feel the echo of the experience in the way I usually approach a blank page: with a mix of hesitation and inevitability.

My first thoughts, as I start writing, carry a quiet awareness that beginnings are rarely grand. In this writing course, my “first words” each day were often clumsy or mundane. The writing was mostly on observations about the weather, stray thoughts, fragments of images. And yet, those imperfect openings taught me something that I seem to be re-learning now: the act of starting is more powerful than the content of the start. So today, as I name the feeling of entering this task, I sense myself repeating an old ritual: placing one sentence down so that the next sentence has a place to land. I do not begin with a complex vision. I never did. Not even after three months of daily writing. Instead, I learned to walk into the next page with curiosity, trusting the writing to reveal its own direction. Schön describes reflection-in-action as thinking with the material while shaping it, and I see now how that writing course trained me for this: every paragraph becoming a negotiation between intention and discovery. As the text evolves, I notice myself slipping into the same rhythm I used to fall into during those months. I write a line, pause, sense whether it feels true to the emerging shape, adjust it, and continue. The writing becomes a sort of a conversation rather than an execution. Back then, I thought writing meant knowing what you wanted to say, and now I understand that writing is the way of finding out. What comes easily is the flow once I am already moving, the way thoughts in my head are untangling themselves as my fingers move across the keys on the keyboard, or as my pen flows on the paper. What challenges me is the weight of decision-making: what to leave in, what to let go of, when to trust the messy draft and when to shape it. This tension was also a constant in a daily writing practce too. Some days the page felt generous, and other days it felt like I was dragging a reluctant part of myself into the light.

And just like before, I notice moments of doubt. Halfway through the writing process there is always a dip, sort of a whisper in my head that questions whether the text I am writing has any real purpose. During the creative writing course, those moments were often the days when the writing felt flat or repetitive. It took weeks to understand that these dips were not failures but rather thresholds. Those were passages towards better clarity, not away from it.

One aspect I’ve never particularly enjoyed, then and now, is returning to the beginning once the piece if almost done. Revising the opening always feels like rewriting the memory of how the text was born. It brings up a softness that I sometimes resist, the vulerability of admitting that the first attempt wasn’t quite right. But there is also something deeply human about this circularity. Endings that rewrite beginnings, beginnings that anticipate endings.

As I reach the final shape of this reflection, I see how strongly that three-month writing practice still lives in the way I work. It taught me that writing isn’t a linear act but an unfolding process where each moment of decisions becomes a small reflection-in-action. And today, as I am creating this portfolio peace, I find myself engaging with Schön’s idea not as a concept but rather as a lived memory: writing as thinking, thinking as making, and making as becoming.