Fire practice: The scene you’re reporting
On Fire, presence and the writer who steps back from her own work.
In 2025, I created something I didn’t fully understand while I was creating it.
Spirit said we doing this, so I sat down and got to work. Four months, four elements. A curriculum that didn’t exist anywhere in any form before I made it. I wasn’t adapting someone else’s framework or putting a spiritual spin on known craft theory. I was receiving something new and trying to transcribe it faithfully — in real time, without a map, without knowing where it was going until it arrived.
And it was good work. People learned from it. Something true came through.
But I’ve been sitting with it lately, now that I’m on the other side of it, and I can feel something I couldn’t feel while I was in it. I was writing from outside the experience. Reporting what I saw from the trench instead of writing from inside it. I was faithful to what Spirit gave me, but I was standing at a slight distance from the material, holding it up to show you rather than pulling you inside it with me.
I know this because I wrote something two weeks ago that felt completely different.
It was the opening to my most recent essay. About Women’s History Month and what it actually means — or doesn’t mean — for Black women. I didn’t plan it. It arrived. And by the time I finished it, I was standing at my desk with the thing sitting low in my belly, knowing I’d said something I’d been meaning to say for a long time without having the right container for it.
Writing the curriculum felt heavy. Important, true and necessary, but heavy. Like carrying something large across a long distance.
Writing that opening felt like saying the quiet part out loud. No weight. Just heat.
That’s the difference between reporting a scene and inhabiting one.
And that’s what Fire is.
Not plot. Not pacing. Not the number of things that happen on a given page. Fire is whether the writer is in the room with you while it’s happening. It’s the thing that makes you forget you’re reading. The stakes don’t have to be high, but because presence does. A quiet essay about grief can have more Fire than a thriller if the writer is fully inside it. A single paragraph can burn hotter than a hundred pages if the writer committed to the sentence she actually heard instead of the safer version that followed.
When Fire is weak, the writing feels like a list of events. This happened. Then this happened. You’re reading a report from someone who was there. You’re watching from outside the glass.
When Fire is strong, you’re not reading anymore. You’re walking through it.
Here’s what I want to be vulnerable and name directly, because it matters for this practice:
The performance wound was inside my Fire work.
When I was writing the elemental curriculum, I worried — not always consciously, but it was there — that people wouldn’t understand it. That they wouldn’t take it seriously. That I was making a claim about a framework that existed nowhere else and had no institution behind it, no canon to cite, no authority to borrow. So somewhere in that writing, I managed the heat. I held it at a careful distance. I reported what Spirit gave me with precision and faithfulness, but I didn’t fully trust that the experience itself was enough to carry the reader. I kept explaining. Kept contextualizing. Kept standing just outside the room making sure you could see in.
The performance wound doesn’t just block your writing. It shapes the temperature of it.
It teaches you to manage the heat instead of let it move.
The Fire practice this month is simple. One question. One revision move.
Find a place in your current draft where you’re standing outside the room describing what you see.
You’ll know it because it’ll feel like reporting. Like you’re being accurate and faithful to the experience without being inside it. The sentences will be correct. They just won’t have heat.
That’s the place.
If you want to know what it feels like to write from inside the room instead of outside it — the full practice and a writing prompt are waiting for you on the other side.
