Ninja Writing Practice

When I worked as a preschool teacher there were a couple of different ways you could approach making art with little kids. The first way--the only way for a very long time--was to have a project that focused on the end result. A teacher would spend hours cutting out hearts or pumpkins, or long, long ago Christmas tree shapes and making all these uniform pieces that could be easily assembled by a four-year old child with minimal mess and uniform results for all children. There weren't choices about color, shape or size. There was a wrong way and a right way to make the project and it was obvious to everyone. A child who ventured to make something different by choice or chance weren't called creative by lots of the teachers I worked with--they were just plain naughty and probably not allowed to have extra supplies.
The other way to do art with kids is all about enjoying the making and doing. It's much messier than the other way. Paint will be spilled, glue, too. Supplies will be decimated. Pumpkins may end up triangular and not the standard orange circle. Odd (to the adult eye, anyway) color combinations will probably arise. Children encouraged to experiment and take risks regardless of the mess involved will discover things about the materials and themselves that are more important than the product at the end of the line. I'd like to suggest that not much changes as we get older.
Writing is kind of like a messy art project for me. I don't know where I'm going when I start. Something shiny grabs me and won't leave me alone. An image, a sentence fragment I overhear at a coffee shop, some little piece of conversation I can't quit thinking about. I start wondering why a sad brown-eyed woman is moving her family in the rain on the bus and what her oldest kid is thinking about during the long ride across town, each kid carrying a box or garbage bag stuffed with clothes. I don't have an outline for the story because I'm writing to find out what happens next and it will take some time to figure it out. Of course, I can't really know what anyone else experiences except in my imagination. That's the beauty in this whole "process" approach to writing, and to life. Writing a story is like playing make believe when you're about seven-years old. You can lose yourself in time and space. It's magic when you're doing it and thankfully it doesn't require any special skill set to do it.
Writing is just writing--a practice, if you like, or a discipline, an art, a craft. We sit down with our tools and quiet up. We pay attention and soon enough we're writing and the time melts away. Later there will be revision and maybe soup if I get off my ass and make it but not until later.