Don't Live on the Sidelines

For twenty years one of my writing disciplines has been to write one haiku poem per day. I write them whether I feel like it or not, mostly in the mornings while looking out my home office window. The view outside is always and never the same, reflecting the inward view of my own psyche.

Twenty years ago I did not know this haiku practice would change my life, but it did. At the time I worked for the marketing department of a large technology company, and tried to pacify my lifelong dream of being a “real” writer by writing “on the side.” One evening while on a business trip and staying in a nondescript hotel, I was reading a book about writing I had brought from home. I have since forgotten the author and title of this book; the only thing I remember was that the author suggested would-be writers might try to write just one thing per day, no matter how small. Even a three-line haiku would be enough, the author said, to prove you were a real writer, a real artist.

“I can do that,” I thought. Even though I was a single mom with a demanding job, surely I could manage seventeen measly syllables each day. So I determined I would try. I wanted to fulfill the dream I’d had since childhood. I wanted to lay claim to that powerful statement, I am an artist.

It worked – boy did it work. Five years after I began writing my one haiku a day I left my corporate job and became a full-time freelance writer, writing not only haiku, but books of fiction and non-fiction, both for me and for others as a ghostwriter. Despite my – and my family and friends’ – fears of poverty, I survived and it is what I am still doing today. And in honor of the discipline that has enriched my life, I devote every Friday on my blog to “Haiku Friday” in which I share one of my haiku and invite others to share theirs.

In the seventeen syllables of one of my daily haiku:

come when you are called

on the sidelines of your life

nothing will happen

Kim Pearson is an author, ghostwriter, and owner of Primary Sources, a writing service that helps others become authors of professional and compelling books and articles. She has authored 6 books of her own, and ghostwritten more than 30 non-fiction books and memoirs. To learn more about her books or services, visit Primary-Sources.com.