Do you ever have one of those days when you want to write – you really do – but everything that comes out of you is sheer crap? I’m having one of those today.
On a happier note, I handed in what I consider another eight pages of utter drivel for my short story course today. Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. I hope it’s not. But I wasn’t allowed to polish it since it had to be a rough draft, so I certainly wasn’t happy with it.
It’ll at least be interesting to see if my professor sees the same things wrong with it as I do.
So unless I get a reprieve from this creative brain fart I’m having today, my NaNo wordcount is going to pot. I am so due for a weekend off – it’s been five weeks.
Maybe after 48 hours of solid sleep this weekend I’ll be back into the swing of things. Back in the saddle.
Back to being creative enough not to keep falling back on proverbs.
Or maybe I’ll feel better after a good night’s rest tonight. After all, tomorrow is another day.
“Write what you know.” It’s one of those things we’re told to do, along with “show, don’t tell,” and a bunch of other guidelines we’re given as writers, that will apparently give us the tools we need to make us better writers and bring home our first million. It’s the “write what you know” thing I want to focus on today though, and I’ll tell you why.
I almost got hit by a bus today.
Don’t panic, I’m okay, but it was a close call. I’m talking inches. Millimeters even. It got me to thinking about my NaNo project, as does everything in my life – when I decide to write a novel, I live and breathe it, almost literally. Having something as dramatic as a real-life near-death experience happen to me (okay, okay, the mirror of a bus moving half a mile an hour nearly clipped my ear as I walked along the edge of a sidewalk) being worth mentioning, could happen to one of my characters, right? You can bet it will.
So back to writing what you know. I don’t think they really mean it in the strict sense of writing what you do for a living outside of writing, for instance. Or even writing about characters who write, though many writers do (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). If we did that, everything we wrote would be autobiographical. And what would the fantasy writers do? I’m thinking an elf accountant would be rather boring.
I think writing what you know can be taken in a more broad sense of feelings, emotions, and yes, little experiences like almost getting hit by a small, slow-moving school bus that’s coming to a stop beside the curb.
So my challenge, for all my fellow NaNoers who are reading this, is simple. Write into your story the next time you write, about something you’ve experienced in the last week. If your characters are in space it can be a sensation, or a sentence you remember hearing or saying.
And if you’re writing an autobiography – oh what the hell. Lie! I dare you!
I had a hard time coming up with anything inspirational in yesterday’s paper, until I decided to put my dubious organizational skills to use. A headline which reads, “Have you planned for illness?”, mashed together in my little brain with a picture I took the other day, gave me the following idea:
What do you do when part of a tree collides with your house?
Are you a natural born handyman/handywoman?
…handyspider?
Owning a home is great, but the number of things that can go wrong is spectacular. If you’re like me (single and totally inept when it comes to anything more complicated than taking out the garbage) then you have to pay someone to fix anything that goes wrong. And when the boiler starts to leak all over your basement floor? (Hint: the water is supposed to stay inside the system.) You spend the next six years paying for a new one, like I am.
Easy to squash or not, there’s something to be said for being a squatter, like my little eight-legged architect/do-it-yourselfer.
I’m inspired – not by the article on the front page of the paper yesterday, but by its headline: Focus on those who inspire.
I can’t count how many times in the last month I’ve been asked the question, “What inspires you?” This question was my first assignment in my short story course and it continues to come up. Like here: on Opinionated Man’s blog just today.
My answer is ‘everything.’ All people, all things. There is nothing that can’t inspire me if I am in an imaginative mindset. And that leads me to a question for anyone willing to put forth an answer. If you consider the fact that you potentially inspire someone, does it make you want to be on your best behaviour?
Personally, I don’t think it should. After all, if everyone was always nice, pretty, clean, healthy and polite, we wouldn’t have antagonists. If our homes were always neat and tidy, would we be able to come up with a trash heap for a setting? If we all believed in the same things, would we be able to imagine strife?
Conflict is what a good story is made of. We NEED people to be at their worst once in a while. Misery, while not something most of us strive for, is necessary for the well being of the written word, as is sickness and death. Beauty is nothing without ugliness. Yin cannot exist without Yang and vise versa.
Think about it. What interests you? Conflict. Happiness that has overcome defeat. The struggle…
I can be inspired by a rock if it’s in the way, or if someone trips over it, because it’s all about the human interaction for me. It’s even better if, whoever trips over it swears like a sailor. Yes, I can be inspired by a scenery. But without life, it’s only a scenery.
What inspires you? Or, better yet, WHO inspires you?
In other news, the tree formerly known as Nosehair is sporting a fancy new orange eyebrow
Hallowe’en is coming and houses are being decorated in preparation for the big night. Parents will usher their kiddies up and down the street, teens will dress up one last time in hopes of scoring a vomit-worthy stash. Our little ghouls and goblins who are out to trick and receive treats are anticipating not only the sweets, but also the scares. The frightening begins and ends with monsters, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns and creatures of the night. Or does it?
Personally, I find the worst – the most chilling of the lot, are the yearly list of warnings:
Check the candy before you eat it!
Don’t accept anything not prepackaged!
Of course the safety list goes on. But what the hell with the poisoned, razor-blade-ladened food? Do we distrust our neighbours this much? Is anyone actually stupid enough to still attempt to get away with such abominations? After all, it’s been what… 40 years since all this paranoia began? I suppose we’ve become so accustomed to being told that there are real threats everywhere that we accept this the way we do anything else.
So kiddies, watch out, because it’s not the vampire hovering at your window, or the mummy banging at the lid of its coffin you have to worry about. It’s the nice little old lady down the street who spent weeks making candy apples that you need to fear the most.
freedigitalphotos.net
Edit: The statistics of poisoning in Hallowe’en candy – here.
Opinions. We all have them. As bloggers we put ours out there for the public to scrutinize every day, and scrutinized they are. Some of us know more intimately than others how harshly our opinions can be crushed by a troll. But still, the strongest of us brush it off and persist.
Is it possible to write without, in some capacity, revealing an opinion? Even in fiction there must be a part of our lives, our experiences, in what we say. So we write and we hope that people out there will find something of value in what we say. If we didn’t feel passionate about what we do, or what we have to share, we wouldn’t do it, right?
After all, we could just stick to posting pictures of flowers…
The posts in the category “Yesterday’s News” reflect inspiration found in the previous day’s edition of my local newspaper. They are not a retelling of the news. This is a challenge to post a blog entry once a day, every day until Hallowe’en, and possibly beyond.
In the pursuit of changing it up once in a while, we are encouraged as writers to search for different words to say the same thing. Using the same ones over and over can distract the reader from the point we are trying to make. But at the same time, if we do a bad job of it, the wrong turn of phrase can be even worse than the repetitive one.
Take the article I found in yesterday’s paper for instance. The piece is well written; it concerns the annual recognition of immigrants, refugees and international students learning English as a Second Language. There is no credit given to the writer of the article – credit is given to the paper’s “Staff,” and I have to wonder if this is the reason why:
I don’t know about anyone else, but for me this phrase conjures up all kinds of horror.
Is it possible to take the whole “find another way to say it” process too far? Absolutely. You have to appreciate it when someone has the guts to publish it in a font four times the size of the rest of the text… but then again, whoever did, lacked the balls to put his/her name on it. I know I wouldn’t.
“Yesterday’s News” is a challenge I have set for myself to post a blog entry once a day, every day until Hallowe’en, and possibly beyond.
In the interest of trying to write at least one blog post day, I’m going to start something new. I rarely have the chance to read the papers I deliver until the next day, so I thought I’d start writing an article based on something I read in yesterday’s paper, thus the title, “Yesterday’s News.” It may not last long with Nanowrimo coming up, but I’ll give it a go.
In yesterday’s editorial section there was a piece on Thanksgiving and how we, as Canadians, should give thanks just to live here rather than a war torn country. The article mentioned people complaining about ‘first-world problems’ when there are others starving to death, homeless because of weather and ongoing battles etc. etc. It didn’t take me long to put this into the perspective of my own life.
When I tell people of my home situation (that I’m single with two handicapped kids), I almost invariably hear the same things: “And I thought I had problems!” is one of the most common. I have a hard time responding to this statement, because, I believe, it truly is all a matter of perspective. Just because I have a lot to deal with, doesn’t mean you don’t too! is what I really want to say.
I was thinking about all this this morning as I was pouring my second cup of coffee – precisely the same time I realized that the filter in the coffeemaker had collapsed and I was getting a cup full of grounds. First-world problem, I thought. See? We all have them!
Another example is this:
This is the dashboard of my 2001 Pontiac Montana. You may notice the engine light is on. The gas tank appears full, but I have to reset the tripometer every time I fill up because the gas gauge doesn’t work. I have to say though, at least it has a positive attitude.
From my perspective it is worrying to drive around with the engine light on, especially when one of my kids has an out-of-town doctor’s appointment, but I can’t afford to fix it. Case in point – the gas gauge has been acting this way for about six years. BUT, take all this from the perspective of someone without insurance, whose car is sitting in a tree after a tornado rips through, and my problems seem to hardly register.
I had a friend once, who, every time she had a bad day, would phone me up to listen to my problems, just to make her feel better. She was very upfront with the fact she was doing it, and I was happy to oblige. But it makes me wonder why we read the news from other countries. Does it make us feel better? Does it help us to be thankful for what we have in the place we live? Perhaps. But we still have to give ourselves some room to breathe. It’s okay to let first-world problems give us grief, and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for it.
Everyone has problems. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Every once in a while I feel the need to reach out to my fellow writers, and I consider it a gift to have, here at WordPress, so many friends who are sailing along with me in this boat. Up until I began my blog, writing was a solitary endeavour if ever there was one.
So, I’m here once again to see if anyone else out there shares my experience.
Inspiration comes to me from everywhere: from an unusual sight; from people I see when I’m out; from music, art… you name it. But only once in my life have I found someone who could inspire me to write an entire novel. His face, his movements, his physique, his voice – there is nothing about him which doesn’t inspire me. And without fail, every time I see him I am compelled to write the character I have found through him.
I can’t imagine I’m the only one who has felt this seemingly unlimited amount of inspiration from a single person or thing.
So tell me. What has been your boundless inspiration in the past? What, or who, is responsible for giving you the excitement necessary to write tirelessly, and on occasion, effortlessly?
From every thing that exists, when affected by another element, there comes the potential for vibration; energy transformed into sound. Consider the leaf hanging from a branch on still day. It is alive and in all its glory is a a source of energy that can be sensed by any who are sensitive to it. In its existence is potential. When a breeze picks up and the leaf brushes against another, it is able to sing. Energies clash in a song so fine, so perfect – it is nature’s own harmony.
Silence holds potential. Silence is energy, energy produces vibration, vibration is sound, silence is the loudest sound on earth.
lindaghill.com 