Once again, I’m encouraging you to play. Forget what really happened; change cause and effect to suit yourself, to suit your story, to suit your characters. For the love of gobstoppers, have fun!
You believe the lie that following your dreams is selfish. You believe the lie that going after your creative passions is wrong. You believe the lie that says you can’t. The lie is insidious, and it numbs you to who you truly are. You don’t have to listen to it. You don’t have to let it continue spreading through your soul. You have the right to protect your creative self — and that right is sacred.
When I sleep, my brain goes to the place where creativity flows. When I sleep, my conscious self gets out of the way, and my mind goes down to the pool and drinks deep. I am a writer, and I thirst. Constantly. I’m willing to be that you do, too….
I’m not terribly interested in penning critiques week after week; I’m way too much into Read-It-For-Fun for that. However, upon occasion I do come across a story I enjoy so much that I want to delve more deeply into it by analyzing, speculating, ruminating, and other gerunds of a thoughtful nature. Yann Martel‘s Life of Pi is one of those stories that makes me want to write about it and write about it, and then write about it some more…
Alan Alda said, “Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself.” Humor is a writer’s best friend. We need to laugh, because the action of laughing pulls the lid off that well of creativity, giving us access to our most important and abundant resource. Yes, we need to take our craft seriously…but we need to learn not to take ourselves too seriously…
In Heroes, Claire is changing as a result of growing up. That change is necessary and good. So why am I perturbed over her relationship with her roommate?
As I read McCarthy’s The Road, I just had to drop my jaw at how the man uses words. McCarthy is a master of vivid detail and excellent characterization in a minimalist style. Talk about stripping your prose — McCarthy even does away with quotation marks and apostrophes, which I’m sure has all you purists out there howling with indignation. (I whimpered a bit at first, myself.) Still–if you’re looking for fiction trimmed of all fat and frills, I doubt you’ll find a leaner example than McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalypse.
Graphic novels engage parts of my mind that standard novels don’t. Not only am I reading a story, I’m seeing it unfold; in a way, this is counterpart? companion? to watching a movie with subtitles. Not only do I get the pleasure of piece-by-piece revelation, I can take the delightful time to admire the artistry of characters brought to life in color, line, and shading.
If memory serves (and, sometimes, it does–wearing a get-up not unlike that of a roller-skating carhop), I first came across Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves in a Facebook® ad. Yep, that’s right: I succumbed to a social networking site’s shameless commercial lures. I went with the flow, I yielded to temptation, I clicked a click that click-clicking clickers should refuse to click. Shame on me.
To writers and/or Stephen King fans, his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (a title I do hope is self-explanatory) might seem the most obvious source of WILAWriTWe material. Yet nay, my dearest inklings, my King-related thoughts for today come not from his how-to, but rather from one of his how-dids. Or maybe I should call it a how-didn’t. By the time I finish writing this, I might have a clearer picture, and so might you–but I’m still not going to change my previous sentence, because I like it, and this is my article, and I don’t have to kill my darlings if I don’t wanna. Nyah.
