So I know it's a week after Easter and the fluffy bunny, sugary sweet metaphors are officially "un-seasonal" but I just had two of my brain cells knock together and come up with something interesting so bear with me while I indulge in some retrospective Easter motifs.
Life, especially for the creative minded, is like an Easter egg hunt. As a writer and an English Major turned nursing student turned completely confused floundering maniac, I have often felt that the answers to my creative cunudrums are somehow like those obnoxiously fluorescent goodies my parent's used to hide in bushes (thanks for the poison ivy, mom) or under flowers (and the bee stings) and that they were in some mythical magical "out there" and just waiting for the right inspiration to strike and voila everything would be solved. The words would runneth trippily from the tip of my feathery quill and I would be Shakespeare and people would quote me to sound smart and in a hundred years they'd suspect I was a cluster of many anonymous writers, and gay, and that perhaps I never existed at all but boy whoever wrote my stuff was awesome.
The more I attack the creative problems that assail both my manuscript and my life goals the more I realize that the playful Easter egg hunt is not so much external to myself. It's not OUT THERE. I'm the obnoxiously fluorescent egg (hopefully a blue one, I love blue) and inside me is the sweet seeds for a novel that will probably not be anything like Shakespeare, and maybe in a hundred years no one will read it. But for the time that I am here I should be giving a piece of myself, and not some inspiration from somewhere else. Furthermore that I have the power to solve my own problems, and that the control to form and embrace my future isn't as out of my control as I thought a little while ago.
This my friends, I think is what we call a turning point...and it's about time!
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Stolen Moments
Just a quick post before I head to work tonight.
Had a flicker of insight about writing and sharing ideas with people. I know it's tempting. I know if writers are like me they want to share what they're working on because they are proud of their progress and their characters and their story and usually the end result is to have OTHERS read your stuff. But hold off if you can from giving people drafts of your work. Here are some reasons why:
1.) The Draft WILL Change- you wouldn't wear a half finished pair of pants to work, nor would you get into a half finished car. If you're still working on ideas, if you're still hammering out kinks and plugging up plot holes you wouldn't want to offer someone a half finished idea. First of all it can hurt how much they like the whole story because what they read now may not be how it ends up. Things may improve information excised or expanded and you can confuse your reader.
2.) You may scrap the idea altogether- if you're working on something and share it all around and then scrap it, it's not really a good look for you as a writer. You want to be taken seriously as a craftsman of the written word and not a wordflake (i.e. a person who starts writing projects and doesn't finish them). If you keep your work to yourself until it's more formed and finished then you'll already know the idea has promise and is truly a work in progress, not some scribbles that don't have the strength to make into a whole book.
3.) Idea thieves -someone with less scruples and more time to write could steal your idea. Protect your plots and your characters. They're your creative property so limiting the amount of eyes on your work is a good way to keep people from siphoning off your creative juices.
4.) The Reveal- you are a word magician. You want your work to be fresh, new and exciting to as many people as possible. Don't give away the secrets of you creative process by over exposing your work. Let it be a bit of a mystery.
There you have it, four good reasons why you shouldn't show off your novel! And now I'm off to work, and an overtime paycheck next week!
Toodle-loo!
Had a flicker of insight about writing and sharing ideas with people. I know it's tempting. I know if writers are like me they want to share what they're working on because they are proud of their progress and their characters and their story and usually the end result is to have OTHERS read your stuff. But hold off if you can from giving people drafts of your work. Here are some reasons why:
1.) The Draft WILL Change- you wouldn't wear a half finished pair of pants to work, nor would you get into a half finished car. If you're still working on ideas, if you're still hammering out kinks and plugging up plot holes you wouldn't want to offer someone a half finished idea. First of all it can hurt how much they like the whole story because what they read now may not be how it ends up. Things may improve information excised or expanded and you can confuse your reader.
2.) You may scrap the idea altogether- if you're working on something and share it all around and then scrap it, it's not really a good look for you as a writer. You want to be taken seriously as a craftsman of the written word and not a wordflake (i.e. a person who starts writing projects and doesn't finish them). If you keep your work to yourself until it's more formed and finished then you'll already know the idea has promise and is truly a work in progress, not some scribbles that don't have the strength to make into a whole book.
3.) Idea thieves -someone with less scruples and more time to write could steal your idea. Protect your plots and your characters. They're your creative property so limiting the amount of eyes on your work is a good way to keep people from siphoning off your creative juices.
4.) The Reveal- you are a word magician. You want your work to be fresh, new and exciting to as many people as possible. Don't give away the secrets of you creative process by over exposing your work. Let it be a bit of a mystery.
There you have it, four good reasons why you shouldn't show off your novel! And now I'm off to work, and an overtime paycheck next week!
Toodle-loo!
Monday, February 11, 2013
My Eyes Are Bigger Than...
It's been pretty hectic. I've moved out of my house to my first apartment where I am taking care of my grandmother who has dementia. I now work full time, and go to classes at night. On nights like tonight I just want to breathe but there is just so much going on that it's hard for me to find time to inhale. It's amazing how the responsibilities keep piling up....
On a happy note my manuscript draft took off!. About two weeks ago I made some really great progress. Now I'm back to brainstorming the next chunk of it. Also trying to fight new ideas for new novels and keep them at bay long enough to get this one finished. I know the moment I sit down to write any bit of my new ones I'll get distracted from the half project in front of me. I'm a classic "eyes are bigger than my stomach" kinda girl. I just keep piling it on and before I know it it's just mutated into this evil doubt that makes me question how much I feel I can do. But in writing, it's important to not get distracted by new shiny ideas. As long as you can still see the greatness in your original idea you should see it through to the end. Maybe jot basic ideas but don't focus on developing new ones right away. If you think about it the more you work on simultaneously the easier it is to get bogged down and overwhelmed with it all and just walk away from it.
I keep thinking I can handle more and more and more and in the end I'm lucky if I get to steal a few minutes to get a bit of a break before I force myself to sleep in an unfamiliar place with my angry cat who has taken to sitting on my face the moment I shut my eyes. I think it's revenge for the cat carrier and the car ride to my new place, or she's just had it with me and is trying to off me altogether. I'm thinking pacification and asking for terms is the safest route to go on this one.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Revisiting Ghosts
It seems that life has that cyclic nature where things tend to circle back to their original starting point. For a while my life has been unrelenting. Btwn nursing school and work I'm lucky to be able to sleep and eat let alone sit down organize a good post. It seems that fate and the New Jersey courts system have different ideas. I'm sitting in a Grand Jury room counting ceiling tiles when I remembered what smart phones are for. So here I am.
I'm giving this another concerted effort side much of my life lately seems spent on things that inch me closer to any goals do painfully slowly I feel like if I don't do something with measurable results soon I'm going to scream. The mounting frustration has been at the heart of my discontent with the snails pace of progress lately. It seems that life gets more complicated and solutions get less plentiful.
So I write, it seems a vehicle for relieving the feelings of ennui and entrapment. I read once that its not what you write, or how but why you choose to write it that's the most important. If I write to escape maybe others will escape with me. We all want to go somewhere other than where we are. Even if it's not a physical place we all have goals or desires like so many quavering flames.
So here I am.
I'm giving this another concerted effort side much of my life lately seems spent on things that inch me closer to any goals do painfully slowly I feel like if I don't do something with measurable results soon I'm going to scream. The mounting frustration has been at the heart of my discontent with the snails pace of progress lately. It seems that life gets more complicated and solutions get less plentiful.
So I write, it seems a vehicle for relieving the feelings of ennui and entrapment. I read once that its not what you write, or how but why you choose to write it that's the most important. If I write to escape maybe others will escape with me. We all want to go somewhere other than where we are. Even if it's not a physical place we all have goals or desires like so many quavering flames.
So here I am.
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