As I haven't posted in two weeks I was surprised to see that there was a spike in page views last Saturday. It seems that someone in France and someone in Romania may have read through the majority of the posts I've written this year. If you're reading this, I'm not sure how you came across my blog but hello!
I've ordered two of the three things I need to complete my Halloween costume and one of them shipped today so I'm pretty stoked. I really enjoy dressing up for Halloween but I'm not terribly social so I generally end up wearing my costumes while watching tv in my apartment. When I started this job I found out that my office encourages staff to dress up for the occasion but I only had a week's warning last year so I wasn't able to do much. This year though, I had a plan months out and I'm excited to see things coming together. I'll have to share a picture when I'm done with everything.
I gave blood on Tuesday for the first time in four years. Why the long break? Well, to put it simply, I hate needles. A lot. My courage was rewarded, however, with a noticeable lack of bruising. I also learned that the stinging you feel for about 30 seconds after being stuck isn't from the needle. It's from the small amount of iodine that gets into your blood from the scrub they do to sanitize your arm. And here I had thought it was just my body's reaction to having a pointy piece of metal shoved inside it. I'm not sure if this particular piece of information will ever be relevant to anything I write but it has made me more comfortable with the idea of giving again in the future for some reason.
I read a quote recently, advice from a published writer to those aspiring to be, that encouraged people to focus on feeling emotions deeply in the interest of being able to better portray emotion in writing. I consider this to be good advice in general, though I might try to focus more on being able to describe how I'm feeling rather than perhaps feeding an emotion until it's reached it's greatest depth - for two reasons. One - because if we can't describe even the most surface emotion then having gone to lengths to feel it is worthless in relation to our craft. Two - I think the suggestion to embrace and experience all kinds of emotion runs the chance of encountering the same issues found in method acting. Namely, that the pursuit of a certain mentality or emotion, especially inherently destructive ones like depression or rage, can easily have damaging consequences. A lot of people have spoken out against the idea that artists need to be depressed in order to create their best work. It's fairly easy to see the problem with such an idea but the danger here is much the same as that of indulging in anger and selfishness. Our characters will hopefully experience some of these emotions as well as more positive ones if we write them well, but I don't believe that we need to personally experience a murderous rage in order to write one any more than we need to be orphaned to convincingly write a character who has been. It's easy enough as it is for us all to give in to feeding anger, self-pity, and sadness as it is - and if you choose to pursue those things, it might turn out that no one is ever able to read that story you were writing. I want to read your stories. There are people out there who will need your stories. It might be the psychology major in me that gets me so wrapped up in topics like this but please everyone be safe. There is a difference between dedication to your work and disregard for your health.
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Thursday, September 4, 2014
learning from writing
I didn't learn everything I need to know in school and there were some specific lessons I know I missed - not because I was bad at school, but because I was good at it.
School came easily for me. I'm a good test-taker and I had a natural aptitude for most subjects which meant I enjoyed good grades and a high class standing all throughout my education. These are things I think most parents want for their kids and achievement in education is a great thing but for me, like so many other people for whom school was largely a breeze, the ease with which I passed classes left me with certain deficits. Having been praised all my life for my intelligence, as I grew I shied away from things that I wasn't immediately successful at because the idea of not doing well or, heaven forbid, failure, was foreign and intimidating. So while I graduated Salutatorian of my class, in a lot of ways I had never been challenged or challenged myself before I went to college where I quickly discovered that I didn't really know how to study and struggled to make new interests stick when I found that doing so took effort.
That sounds pathetic, doesn't it? Well, confessions of a straight-A student : P
I have found that my experience is not entirely unique - a rant for a different day about the consequences of how we praise children. This week, though, I've been thinking about ways in which I've begun to catch up on those lessons I missed in my younger years about perseverance and being okay with giving your best even if it's not the best. As you may have gathered already, these are lessons I'm learning as I write.
I've been writing off and on since elementary school, mostly off as I consistently struggled to make it a daily habit - which any writer will tell you in necessary to be successful in it. Forming this habit has been a struggle because I'm so easily persuaded by my own rationalizations of being "too tired" or "too busy" or "just not in the mood" that I'd write for a day or two in a row but once something came up I'd let it fall by the wayside. I've mentioned several times in the last two months that I've been doing really well with writing every day so what changed?
For one, I made the decision that I was going to stop letting myself cop out. We all have internal voices and a lot of us are really familiar with those that criticize us or excuse our behavior at times. I decided that I was going to give my no-nonsense-coach voice more prominence. That decision is a first step, but for me, it wasn't enough.
Fear of failure or even mediocrity has been one of my constant companions, especially when I approach writing. Expecting perfection from a first draft, first sentence is absolutely crippling and would leave me staring at the page, pen in hand, without writing a word for hours. Let me tell you, having those stories and ideas crammed up in your head without being able to get them out on paper is a supremely frustrating experience. But how do you break that barrier? The simple, and true, answer is "you write."
Write is the fundamental answer to basically all writing problems but knowing the answer doesn't always make fixing the problem easier. I don't remember where I read it, but about two months ago I read a post that addressed this sort of problem and the suggestion it gave was to try writing for 10 minutes - time yourself so you know when you're done - but just write for that 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be a story, or part of anything you're working on, and, most importantly, it doesn't have to be good. Whatever you come up with at the end of that 10 minutes can be the crappiest thing you've ever written but that's just fine. So I tried it. For the first time in longer than I can remember I let myself write without judging what I was writing and it felt amazing. No, those 10 minutes didn't give me a masterpiece, but that was okay. And for the next two weeks or so I had to continue timing myself, at varying lengths, in order to access that judgement free space in my mind, but the feeling of just writing was so wonderful that I kept doing it. I haven't timed myself in weeks, though it's a strategy I know I can fall back on if I need it. And no, I'm not a perfect writer. There are still days where all I get out is a single sentence and that's okay. I'm pushing through scenes that I'm not satisfied with and that's alright because I keep writing. I resist the urge to go back and pick apart what I've written, looking for mistakes and things to nit-pick over, and I write.
Writing is teaching and reminding me that it's okay not to do something really well, let alone perfectly, the first time around - that developing good habits and things I'm interested in may not always be easy but it is worth it - and that some days, it's totally okay to just write one sentence and let it go. I can't say what I would have done differently if I had learned these things when I was younger and "if-onlys" and "what-ifs" are pointless. I'm just glad that most lessons can be learned outside of a classroom and it's never too late to start.
So, is there a story you want to tell? Then write.
School came easily for me. I'm a good test-taker and I had a natural aptitude for most subjects which meant I enjoyed good grades and a high class standing all throughout my education. These are things I think most parents want for their kids and achievement in education is a great thing but for me, like so many other people for whom school was largely a breeze, the ease with which I passed classes left me with certain deficits. Having been praised all my life for my intelligence, as I grew I shied away from things that I wasn't immediately successful at because the idea of not doing well or, heaven forbid, failure, was foreign and intimidating. So while I graduated Salutatorian of my class, in a lot of ways I had never been challenged or challenged myself before I went to college where I quickly discovered that I didn't really know how to study and struggled to make new interests stick when I found that doing so took effort.
That sounds pathetic, doesn't it? Well, confessions of a straight-A student : P
I have found that my experience is not entirely unique - a rant for a different day about the consequences of how we praise children. This week, though, I've been thinking about ways in which I've begun to catch up on those lessons I missed in my younger years about perseverance and being okay with giving your best even if it's not the best. As you may have gathered already, these are lessons I'm learning as I write.
I've been writing off and on since elementary school, mostly off as I consistently struggled to make it a daily habit - which any writer will tell you in necessary to be successful in it. Forming this habit has been a struggle because I'm so easily persuaded by my own rationalizations of being "too tired" or "too busy" or "just not in the mood" that I'd write for a day or two in a row but once something came up I'd let it fall by the wayside. I've mentioned several times in the last two months that I've been doing really well with writing every day so what changed?
For one, I made the decision that I was going to stop letting myself cop out. We all have internal voices and a lot of us are really familiar with those that criticize us or excuse our behavior at times. I decided that I was going to give my no-nonsense-coach voice more prominence. That decision is a first step, but for me, it wasn't enough.
Fear of failure or even mediocrity has been one of my constant companions, especially when I approach writing. Expecting perfection from a first draft, first sentence is absolutely crippling and would leave me staring at the page, pen in hand, without writing a word for hours. Let me tell you, having those stories and ideas crammed up in your head without being able to get them out on paper is a supremely frustrating experience. But how do you break that barrier? The simple, and true, answer is "you write."
Write is the fundamental answer to basically all writing problems but knowing the answer doesn't always make fixing the problem easier. I don't remember where I read it, but about two months ago I read a post that addressed this sort of problem and the suggestion it gave was to try writing for 10 minutes - time yourself so you know when you're done - but just write for that 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be a story, or part of anything you're working on, and, most importantly, it doesn't have to be good. Whatever you come up with at the end of that 10 minutes can be the crappiest thing you've ever written but that's just fine. So I tried it. For the first time in longer than I can remember I let myself write without judging what I was writing and it felt amazing. No, those 10 minutes didn't give me a masterpiece, but that was okay. And for the next two weeks or so I had to continue timing myself, at varying lengths, in order to access that judgement free space in my mind, but the feeling of just writing was so wonderful that I kept doing it. I haven't timed myself in weeks, though it's a strategy I know I can fall back on if I need it. And no, I'm not a perfect writer. There are still days where all I get out is a single sentence and that's okay. I'm pushing through scenes that I'm not satisfied with and that's alright because I keep writing. I resist the urge to go back and pick apart what I've written, looking for mistakes and things to nit-pick over, and I write.
Writing is teaching and reminding me that it's okay not to do something really well, let alone perfectly, the first time around - that developing good habits and things I'm interested in may not always be easy but it is worth it - and that some days, it's totally okay to just write one sentence and let it go. I can't say what I would have done differently if I had learned these things when I was younger and "if-onlys" and "what-ifs" are pointless. I'm just glad that most lessons can be learned outside of a classroom and it's never too late to start.
So, is there a story you want to tell? Then write.
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