Writer Dame

Thursday, hmm?

‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Is it boring to write about the day of the week? Probably.

Am I doing it anyway? Yep.

Well, kinda.

Thursdays are always a bit weird for me. A kind of reckoning about how well my to do list matched my capacity this week and then a reset of priorities for Friday.

Not an exciting thing to talk about and it would definitely be a short post.

A boring and short post.

BUT!

Sometimes you have to let yourself be boring so you can build a habit.

Creative practices, like drawing or writing or blogging get easier the more frequently you do them.

If you stop for a while, you tend to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to create something good or interesting in order to make the practice worthwhile.

The truth is, though, that if you take away the pressure to be good or interesting, you are more likely to be able to create often. When you create often, it is easier (as I mentioned above) and, oddly enough, you are more likely to create something interesting or good.

For an interesting story (stories) about that fact, visit Austin Kleon’s blog.

So, since I want this kind of writing to be easier, and (eventually) interesting, I’m going to just plug away at it, even if I’m boring sometimes.

GIF of a kid lying across an office chair idly spinning around.
Image description: GIF of a kid lying face down across an office chair, spinning idly. The chair is in an open plan kitchen/living room area with a wooden floor. The space looks lived-in and cluttered but in an ordinary living sort of way not a overwhelmingly messy way.

Good News: I like my book!

Various papers and writing tools rest on a cloth surface.
Image description: A clipboard, post-it notes, a typed page and handwritten notes in a notebook are resting on a cloth surface.

I spend a good chunk of today reading my novel draft and making notes on various characters.

It was boring to do the work but the reading was really fun.

I was happy to discover that I really like my book – the characters are interesting, the plot is pretty good, and the writing is pretty solid.

There is a lot of work left to do to make it into the novel that I want it to be but I am very happy with this starting point.

Revisions

I’m on a writing retreat this weekend so I can start revising my novel.

I’ve revised stories and articles but I have never revised a whole book before.

(No, I don’t think I can do it all in one weekend. This is just for starters!)

Wish me luck!

GIF of a man typing on a laptop and saying ‘This is good.’
Let’s hope this is how I will feel tomorrow. Image description: A GIG in which, Nick, a white male character from the TV show ‘New Girl’ is typing on his laptop in his messy room and saying ‘This is good.’

Not the boss of words today

I generally find it pretty easy to write.

Sure, it might be hard for me to actually get myself to sit down at my desk but once I have the document open and I start typing things usually flow pretty well.

In fact, I often describe my writing as bossing words around.

Today, however, I was not the boss of words. They did not want to pay any attention to me and they flatly refused to line up on the page in a logical fashion.

Luckily, I’ve been writing for a long time. These kind of days are going to happen. They don’t have any special meaning about my writing, or my writing skill, they aren’t a sign of anything.

Today’s frustrations only mean that today was frustrating.

There’s always tomorrow!

A GIF of a monkey typing.
Image description: a monkey (or maybe a chimpanzee) in a pink shirt types on an old-fashioned typewriter.

A is for Art

I’m doing the A to Z Challenge again this year.  My plan was to have a theme but that hasn’t worked out yet.  One may develop as the month goes on. 🙂 

I think that a lot more people are drawn (ha!) to art than we realize, and maybe even more than they realize.

I can remember when I was a kid, I used to draw these endless pictures of two hills with a sun rising between them, and a blue sky and clouds with a perfect arc of a rainbow. I included a river sometimes and little tufts of grass, sometimes there would be trees. Occasionally there would be seagulls (really just v-shapes in the sky). It wasn’t a good drawing per se, but there was something satisfying about drawing it. I knew what it was going to come out like, I liked using the art supplies, and it was fun. I would never have called it art, of course, and it wasn’t even particularly creative, but it made me happy to do it.

At that point in my life (and for a long time after), I didn’t know that you could learn to draw, that you could learn art techniques. I thought that you had to start with *some* talent and that you could improve on what you had, but if you didn’t have any natural skill then you might as well choose something else.*  So after a while, when no natural talent appeared, I just stopped playing with crayons and I stopped drawing the hills and rainbows.

But I still felt that pull, I still WISHED I could draw. And I did, sometimes. I drew things for my kids, or for birthday cards for my family, that sort of thing, but I never really did any actual practice because, after all, I wasn’t an artist. (I’m moving away from that position but I’ll write about that another day, this post is about that pull to create.)

I think that there are a lot of people in that position though. A lot of people who can’t name what the feeling is but they feel pulled towards creativity – they flail on dance floors, they spraypaint graffiti, they doodle on walls, they make weird comments (online or in real life)**. They may not have an appropriate channel for their creativity, but they feel that need to put their stamp on things, to say that they were here, that their ideas matter.

They may not recognize that art is what they need, they may not understand that art is available to them for that purpose, and for those that do ‘get it’ they might not think that they have ‘permission’ to create art, but they do.

Part of my work as a creative life coach is giving people permission to do the creative things in their hearts. I just wish that I could let them know that they had the power to choose it all along.

 

 

*I believed this about a lot of things, not just art.

**No, I don’t think that every shitty internet comment comes from a thwarted artist, but I think that some do.