by Dan Millman and Sierra Prasada

The following is an excerpt from the "Discover Your Creative Writing Compass" on-line course. If you would like to enroll in the course, click here.

YOUR PRACTICE:
We all spend much of our lives answering the questions of others, and moving in whatever direction they point. But the more you conceive of your own questions, the more you'll be making the decisions about where you want to go next.

That said, if a journey's starting point and destination were the same, there would be no journey. So we'll begin by posing some questions for you.

In this first exercise, we'd like you to respond to the following questions in whatever way feels most productive to you at this moment. If you write down your answers -- on computer or in a journal -- you'll have a record of your present thinking. If you prefer to merely reflect, then do so. We'll ask you to write next week. Whatever you choose this week, permit yourself to dream and observe:

1. When or where do you find yourself dreaming? What are you doing at the same time? Are you listening to music? Reading? Watching something? Moving around?
2. Do you prefer to dream alone? If not, who's nearby doing what?
3. In what form do ideas appear? As words? Images? Sounds?
4. What do you do with these ideas? Do you record them? If so, how?

We hope it goes without saying that there are no right answers to these questions. Your first answers may be your most intuitive, but additional reflection may force you to reconsider earlier impressions -- to begin, in other words, to question yourself, what you do and the way you think about it.

More than anything else, this practice -- an internal conversation that we'll address directly in the next lesson -- will engage you more deeply with the stories you choose to tell and the life you choose to lead.
We hope that you'll develop in this course a new kind of introspection, as you yourself become a lens through which to see, appreciate, and better understand the manifold possibilities around you.