Dead Battery

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Sitting in a rainstorm with a dead car battery, I can’t help comparing this situation to my writing. For various reasons, work stress among them, I feel too drained by day’s end to write. It’s like my characters have abandoned me.

However, I’m not calling it quits. I knew what number to call for help today, so there is surely some key to storytelling locked inside me. First, I need to sit down and make the effort to write whether I feel like it or not. Taking that step is one hundred percent more likely to produce words on the page than not trying.

Perhaps I’ll start now while waiting for my savior with the jumper cables.

Then again, I have my “Artist’s Way” book by Julian Cameron. It’s designed to enable higher creativity without forcing oneself.

Rather than speaking of a drained battery, Ms. Cameron would probably tell me that I need to fill my creative well. There are many fun ways to do that. This week five of “The Artist’s Way” advises collecting images of postponed pleasures and desires. I think it’s time to go through a gardening catalog. Then I can head over to a garden center when the weather warms and put my artist’s eye toward shaping my yard into some fresh new visualization.

Weekly artist’s dates, times spent all by myself doing something fun, are another big tool from Julia Cameron’s arsenal. The visit to said garden center would make a great date even before time to plant.

What about you? Is it time to charge that battery or fill your well? What interesting venture might aid you in the goal?

Essential Ingredients

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I had an irresistible urge to re-read The School of Essential Ingedients by Erica Bauermeister today. The story follows several characters who take a cooking class in vivid detail. While each individual character’s story is perhaps too short to be truly satisfying, I can’t help but sink into the world that Bauermeister creates. Every page is a feast for the senses – tastes and sounds and smells and touches so clearly drawn that you cannot help but feel like you’re in the same room as the characters.

Now, I love food. I’m not always very adventurous in terms of what I actually eat, but there is almost nothing I enjoy more than sitting around a table with friends and family and diving into a really great meal, from appetizers through dessert. So of course I love a book that’s all about the ways food can evoke and create memories and really shape our lives.
What drew me to The School of Essential Ingredients today, though, was not so much the food, but the author’s ability to make me taste it and feel it. The language isn’t especially complex, the word choices are plain language rather than literary extravaganzas mined from a thesaurus. But each sentence is carefully crafted and fitted to its place in the story.
Sometimes I need to remember that. That it’s not always about word count or productivity, but about the craft itself, about making the words on the page really count.

Opening the Window

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Julia Cameron in her book “The Artist’s Way” likens opening our minds to gradually wedging open a door. I think of that today because I decided to open the window so I could hear the birds.

Doing that simple act made me wish it were so easy to let in story ideas and create. I did succeed in writing a short story today, but I noticed with the window open that a lot more than birdsong entered my room. There was traffic sound from the road and industrial noise from a nearby factory, but my brain filtered those out for the most part so that I could hear the cardinals sing and the squirrels chatter.

The same works for our creativity. We need to filter out distractions. Sometimes that might mean getting a nuisance chore out of the way so we can focus. For other situations, we might need to shut the door on unimportant matters for a while.

For me, at least, creation comes from a place of peace. I’m learning to cultivate a sense of that by uplifting important matters to a higher significance and balancing out the rest the best I can. I hope you manage to do the same.

Work, Work, Work – Darla’s Whiny Wiley

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Back on October 13th of last year I posted a Wiley titled “Show Instead of Tell”. It’s something I continue struggling to improve. The latest evidence of my battle is in a story written about a year ago. I decided to put forth this tale in a mentoring program without having looked at it for some months.

The results were eye opening, to say the least. A humbling critique on a single page from the middle of the story completely floored me. Apparently I failed not only to show instead of tell but didn’t always convey the scene particularly well.

My inner critic is telling me that I should just go back to writing stories for my own pleasure and forget trying to publish. It’s a very tempting proposition. After all, I’ve not actively sought publication outside of one short story being included in a science fiction anthology. I honestly enjoyed writing a lot more before learning anything about the business end.

Either way, the important thing is to keep creating. And I’ll look at my mentorship piece as a diamond in the rough. Whatever I decide to do with the finished product, I’m going to make myself work through this manuscript with the hope of becoming a better writer.

Well, it’s time I go back to polishing. However you choose to create, I hope you enjoy yourself!