Tag Archives: Writing

365 Days of Creativity

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Giraffe Drawings_3784

One of my friends, K, whom I had originally met in a painting class said something on Facebook just a short while ago about looking forward to starting a new art class as she hoped this would get her painting again, something she’s been finding hard to do lately. I understand the frustration of wanting to create things and feeling held back by lagging motivation. In my reply to her, the idea just popped into my mind that maybe I could start a group and/or blog where people would be encouraged to post a creation every day, in whatever medium they choose. Back in March, I blogged about wanting to find a project that would entail me showing my creations on a daily basis and gave myself a month to think about what I could possibly want to do every day for at least 365 days. I set myself a deadline to figure out what that thing would be: April 11th. This date is fast approaching and up until today I’ve been dreading it. Making that process interactive and having other people contribute their own creations too however… that seems a lot more exciting to me. I’m thinking that a group effort will encourage participants to keep going and stay motivated if only for the pleasure of sharing their creations with others.

I’ll think this over and share what format this group/blog will take on (making it user-friendly being a priority), when the start date will be, as well as how others can join me in this project, etc this Sunday April 11th. I’m hopeful that others will want to start this 365 day adventure with me or at least participate occasionally. If you’re interested, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment—I’d also be curious to know what you think you might like to contribute, though I encourage everyone to participate in whatever medium they are most comfortable with, be it photography, painting, drawing, knitting, doodling, poetry, design, recipes, short stories, music, sewing, videos, haikus, baking… basically ANYTHING that is your own creation and which you can show others via internet. Anyone from beginner,  or amateur to professional is encouraged to participate. We’re not looking for perfection; participation is the only goal and any kind of effort will be encouraged. Suggestions are welcome.

Whether there are other participants willing to start on Day One with me or not, I’ll set the whole thing in motion in hopes that others will want to join along the way, though I’d love it if at least a couple of people joined from the start. Are you in?

This photo by Smiler was originally  featured in this post.

Mistakes, We’ve All Made a Few

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I want for this day to be over with already. I’ve never equated being alone with being lonely before, probably because as an only child, I’ve always had a knack for entertaining myself with whatever happens to be on hand. But I have to say truly and honestly that there is no other lonelier day to spend a day alone than Christmas day. I did wake up late this afternoon feeling quite excited about a vivid dream I had just had and thought: “wouldn’t it be the best Christmas gift of all if this dream actually prompted me to write a novel??” But then when I switched on the voice memo application on my iPhone and started taking verbal notes, those dream sequences which had seemed so full of story potential just fizzled away into random incoherent sentences.

Eventually, I decided to surf around the net to distract myself from all the unpleasantness going on inside my head. For some unknown reason, I had a Wikipedia page about Chlöe Sevigny up on my web browser. I’ve seen her in the movie Boys Don’t Cry and in the HBO series Big Love, but other than that I can’t say I’m a fan of hers, or that I know anything much about her and her body of work. I’ve never quite understood why she acquired fashion icon status (though I do know she was one of the original icons of all things fuggly back in the early days of the very funny site Go Fug Yourself). Reading on out of sheer boredom and curiosity, I found out that she sparked controversy with her lead role in a 2004 movie called The Brown Bunny, which involved Sevigny performing unsimulated fellatio on co-star, writer, director and producer Vincent Gallo. After the film’s release at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the William Morris Agency dropped Sevigny as a client, one source stating: “The scene was one step above pornography, and not a very big one. William Morris now feels that her career is tainted and may never recover”. Ever the trouper, Sevigny went on record after the Cannes screening saying “It’s a shame people write so many things when they haven’t seen it. When you see the film, it makes more sense. It’s an art film. It should be playing in museums. It’s like an Andy Warhol movie.” I viewed the scene in question—all in the name of research of course—and I must admit that I couldn’t help but wonder what drug cocktail might have convinced Miss Sevigny that taking part in this project might be a good idea. That being said, I will not join the ranks of Sevigny-bashers based on that performance. Not today. Instead, I wish to thank Chlöe Sevigny for the fact that she still continues to make a living as an actress and a public figure, and to this day defends her performance in a project which would have been best left to die in Vincent Gallo’s mean little egomaniacal head.

Mistakes, we’ve all made a few. On this lonely Christmas day, I can always console myself with that fact that in this, I am far from being alone.

It’s All About Quantity

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5,553 words. That’s the exact amount of words I need to write today if I want to stay on track with my NaNoWriMo daily average. I just like to stay ahead of the game. Not that I’m competitive or anything…

But then, today doesn’t lend itself to long bouts of writing what with a couple of outings on the agenda (including dinner with the Bipolar Ladies Club—aka ‘K’ from my painting class and me). Of course I could do several short writing bursts, but then I prefer putting it off to another day and doing a 7250 word spree tomorrow. No biggie. That’s how it goes with automatic writing and me. It’s like the difference between shooting with a revolver versus firing with a machine gun. Not that I know the first thing about assault weapons. A better analogy might be that of playing the piano… once you play for a while and your fingers get limbered up, you can just get into the flow of the music and play for hours with hardly a thought or any effort required at all. Not that I actually know how to play the piano, although I’ve watched my fair share of recitals in my formative years. Which makes me think maybe I should have one of my characters be a concert pianist as well as a gun-wielding psychotic murderer. Which might eventually entail lots more research. Or TV watching. Or something.

Right. I’ll stop here and save up my energy for the next 6,961 words I need to get typed up between now and tomorrow. Sometimes it really is worthwhile to just focus on quantity. Quality can always be distilled from the resulting raw materials down the line.

What’s In a Name?

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I can’t believe I named one of my main characters Marcus. Makes me cringe every time I write out his name (sorry to all the Marcus’s out there…). It’s just a placeholder, but still. There’s also a Palmer. Palmer? Where the heck did I get that one from? Oh right, this scandinavian mystery I’m reading right now. The women’s names are pretty benign so far; there’s Katherine and Naomi and Nancy. I’ll have to come up with a really ugly one to even the score. Like Phyllis or Eugenia or Tarkneisha. Tarkneisha?? Yep. You can thank Google for that one. There’s not much humour in my story so far and an ugly name well… usually brings a smile to my lips.

The Human Condition

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“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward,
but he who has hope for it is a fool.” ~ Albert Camus

“Remember, no human condition is ever permanent.
Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too
scornful in misfortune.” ~ Socrates

“Every man carries within him the entire form
of our human condition.” ~ Michel de Montaigne

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how
all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage
to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear,
which is inherent in a human condition.” ~ Graham Greene

Sometimes when I don’t feel so hot, I remind myself that it’s all part of the human condition. After all, as the Buddhists say, Life is Suffering. That noble truth makes things more easy to bear (sometimes). But then there are times when nothing can make me feel good about feeling bad. Go figure. These days I’m taking my general confusion and frustrations out on my novel characters. They’re each more miserable than the other, and most certainly more miserable than me. Graham Greene would approve. I have to say there is something cathartic about piling up all this suffering onto these fictitious characters, none of which are very likeable. You’ll notice I haven’t posted any of my writings on my NaNoWriMo blog this year though, and that is because I don’t feel it’s appropriate to inflict this latest novel draft on anyone else. There is enough suffering out in the world without me adding my own miserable take on it. So far the story really is all doom and gloom. Everyone’s distasteful secrets splashed all over the place, just the way they do it in the tabloids, and I guess it could make for good reading if you like delving into other people’s misery. I don’t, generally speaking, so I’m not sure why it is I’m spending all this time writing something that basically offends my own sensibilities.

My principal character hasn’t spilled the beans about what she has to hide so far, and I’m hoping it’ll be something really juicy, like maybe she has superpowers and is able to kill people by just thinking about it or something. She’s on the run right now, and there are people from her sordid past who are trying to catch up with her. She may or may not have created a new life for herself to put it all behind her, but one way or another, she won’t be able to outrun them forever. I’ve been putting off dealing with her story by writing about all these other unfortunate characters who are dealing with loss, cheating, lies, heartbreak, kidnapping, rape, self-hatred and self-delusions, freakishly small penises and so on. The longer I draw the whole thing out, the more pressure I put on myself to make this woman’s past truly horrifying. You know, just so the wait will have been worth it at least, otherwise it’ll end up being totally anticlimactic, and that, in my opinion, would be worse than just writing a bad story. “They say write what you know”, I keep reminding myself. One person’s nightmare is another person’s reality and vice versa. Goodness knows I’ve got plenty of personal history to draw upon, between things that I’ve personally experienced and things lived vicariously through others (real of fictitious). Whatever the big secret turns out to be, it’ll end up being part of the human condition, and that’ll just have to be good enough for me. For all we know, maybe her big secret is that for all her independence and the efforts she makes to remain uncommitted, she keeps a copy of Martha Stewart Weddings hidden under her bed? Not that I do that anymore obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t tell you about it now would I? :-)

Hijacked By Dreams

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Looking at the date today, I’m not quite sure what happened in the last three days. I recall going to the day hospital to finish up some of my crafts pieces yesterday, where T and E where friendly familiar faces who have since followed me here to blogland (you are most welcome of course). I’ve helped my friend M narrow down the selection from the hundreds of shots we took last Friday (and was reassured to see how naturally that part of art directing still comes to me. Some things really are like riding a bicycle). I remember eating jam and cheddar toast with Earl Grey tea, which is a no-brainer since I like to start off my days with that combo lately. There was an early yoga session with J and a evening of wrestling with M on Tuesday which has left every muscle in my body screaming ever since. There wasn’t so much writing for NaNoWriMo since I felt both mentally and physically exhausted.

This morning was slated to begin with an early yoga session again, but my body would not cooperate. Then the doorbell rang at 10:30 and I was so engrossed in my many confusing dreams that I couldn’t understand how it was possible for my mother to come ringing at my door like that when just the day before she had still been writing me from France. Of course, by the time I actually made it to the door it wasn’t my mother at all, but an accountant I had made an appointment with who was coming to collect papers to finally get my taxes done as agreed. But I was so out of it that, after apologizing profusely, I sent him back saying I was coming down with something and couldn’t possibly get on with our meeting today. He didn’t protest too much. These days, with H1N1 seemingly looming in every corner people will pretty much leave you alone if you imply you might be getting a bout of the flu.

Many hours and many more dreams later, my friend M put his head through my bedroom door to see how I was doing. It was well past three and I had been sleeping all day, lost in one series of dreams after another. There was lots of traveling, there was lots of flying (which apparently I’m getting more and more proficient at), there was a cyclone and a stay at a posh and deserted hotel waiting for the weather to calm down (five suites with four rooms each to share among a couple of hundred people with limited food supplies to distribute fairly, and somehow people were looking to me to make major decisions. I think they figured if I could fly, I was probably also good at survival skills in general). There was a pregnancy which lead to birthing hundreds of tiny little animals; cats of course and tiny elephants and giraffes and snakes and lions and horses and countless other creatures. I was meant to feed them but they were eaten first by the many predators who were surrounding us and not having the resources to fend them off, they got to most of my brood and only a few of them were able to survive for a while and grow a little bigger. There was a serial killer who sent his victims beautiful picture postcards before striking and I was hired to foil him somehow, being an image specialist and all. We finally managed to arrest him because of some violation with Canada post he had apparently repeatedly committed. There was a job for domestic defence involving putting a sign up in front of a juvenile prison parking lot warning would-be escapees that the stealing of cars would be severely punished, then a road trip across North America tied up to the top of a truck to avoid being seen by various affiliated gang leaders who apparently wanted to exact revenge on me for helping prevent an all-out bloodbath at the juvenile detention centre. Then a late-night TV show starring me as a tall blonde in my late 40’s who didn’t look like me at all, throwing around a basketball in a modified game where the hoops were three times as high as usual and the all-girl team wore uniforms composed of leggings and flowery tunics—very pretty but kinda silly. Somehow this was very important gig for me because it could lead to more career opportunities in late-night tv programming, even at my advanced age.

I’ve been up for almost four hours now, and two cups of tea (with jam and cheese toast, of course) later I still can’t seem to shake off the dreams. My main consolation is that this sort of thing where my waking life is overtaken by the dreams is happening less frequently these days, because there have been periods fairly recently where this state of affairs was the norm. On the upside, I guess this is the right headspace to be working on my NaNoWriMo novel right now, since I’m running behind on my word-count and this business of not being all there sure is conducive to automatic writing. Of course it could lead to even more unexpected occurrences for my characters and chances are it won’t help make my already convoluted story lines any more decipherable, but as it happens, that isn’t a consideration I need concern myself with at this time, so may as well just go with it.

Sleep-Writing

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There are now so many characters in my NaNoWriMo draft that I can barely keep track of all the storylines each of them is leading me to. I haven’t even bothered to name them all yet. I just sit there and switch from one to another from one chapter to the next, making them more and more unlikeable and creating as many unpleasant situations for them as I can come up with. I do all this while I sit in front of the TV half-watching whatever is on the movie channels (Edward Scissorhands, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bored to Death, Dexter, and now Underwold: Rise of the Lycans). I’m hoping that by some kind of magic, all these imaginary’s people’s lives will somehow converge and this will all form a cohesive story. But something tells me I need to be paying more attention if there’s any chance at all of that happening. Then again, I HAVE read some best-selling thrillers and wondered page after page what these overpaid authors were doing while they were writing their own drafts for those crappy novels. But unlike them, I don’t have a formula down yet, and I doubt my work will ever get published. You never do know though. For what it’s worth, I’m enjoying the process. And I can’t really ask for more considering I’m so tired I fall asleep a little every time I blink. Energy comes and energy goes, yet somehow I manage to write through it all. Go figure.

mes de los muertos

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Two of a series of four small paintings from today’s Painting as Expression class. Of course the originals look very different and even with my best efforts I couldn’t get the colours quite right here on the screen. Our teacher Vicki had asked us all to bring materials which we could share to inspire each other; images, books, poems or various readings which were in keeping with the prevailing themes of the month; autumn, change of seasons, the dimming of the light, death and dying, Halloween, etc. None of us remembered to bring anything, although I had intended to bring along my book of Charles Baudelaire selected poems to read a piece such as The Enemy*:

My youth was filled with storms; dark thunderheads
Lit up by sudden sunshine. Wind and rain
Tore at my garden, left the ravaged beds
Stripped bare of soil. How few ripe fruits remain!

Now it is autumn; my ideas turn brown.
Look at the land; I’ll need spade, rake and broom
To clear that flooded mess. The sodden ground
Is full of holes, each bigger than a tomb.

I dream new flowers now: but who can tell
If they’ll take root in this exhausted soil?
The nourishment they need is strange and rare.

Time eats at life: no wonder we despair.
Our enemy feeds on the blood we lose.
He gnaws our heart, and look how strong he grows.

Yes, this poem would have been completely à propos today. As none of us was able to contribute anything, Vicki showed us paintings she’d selected from art books she brought along and then had us do an exercise called Wild Mind Writing (better known to most as stream of consciousness writing) to provide us with a starting point for our painting session. She gave us the first few words then gave us five minutes to write whatever came spontaneously to mind: When the light enters darkness… Here, an excerpt from what I wrote:

When the light enters darkness
awakenings of colours emerge
with shapes aglow inching closer,
wider, always glowing until the sounds
overpower our sense of vision.

Red, orange, more red.
Red on bicycles, orange bouncing
up and down, blue mean streaks
across red fields.

The light enters the darkness
to awaken all the senses,
to reshape the world; awash in colour.

~

* Here, Baudelaire’s original version:

L’Ennemi
Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage,
Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,
Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.
Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées,
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.
Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?
— Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!
~ Charles Baudelaire

NaNoWriMo Jitters

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For the third year in a row, I’m at that crucial point where I start telling myself: “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m no fiction writer! Why did I have to go and tell the whole world I’m participating in this stupid NaNoWriMo competition? I haven’t even got a decent storyline to work with and it’s starting in less than two days! Maybe it’s still time to just call the whole thing off?”

What is NaNoWriMo you ask? “National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” This year will be the 10 year anniversary for this worldwide event which started out in the San Francisco Bay area in 1999 with just 21 participants. As of last year they had over 100,000 novelists on board, including published writers and countless aspirants. It just keeps growing every year as the word gets around thanks to good organization and a web site which, among other things, provides connectivity for all the participants and supporters out there.

I should know better than to commit an idea to memory because 9.9 times out of 10 I am bound to forget said idea, no matter how “good” or even “brilliant” it seems. Around this time last week I came up with a “genius” idea about what and whom my novella would be about this year but forgot to PUT IT IN WRITING and now it has all but vanished. All I know is that there will be a despicable character in the mix: a married man with two kids who decides to troll around on internet dating sites to get himself a little extra action on the side. I don’t know much about him yet—have no clue whether he’ll be a principal character or just be mentioned as a passing anecdote—but interestingly enough, there is one very intimate detail I am absolutely certain of: the guy has a freakishly small penis. I have Anne Lamott to thank for teaching me this great literary device when the need for vengeance becomes too great (a small penis as a literary device? Why not?) though she suggested this trick for those times when the inspiration for a character is taken directly from a real person in order to prevent said muse to sue the writer’s pants off. It’s pretty well my idea of retaliation after a friend went through a terrible shock immediately followed by a difficult separation very recently because her Cro-Magnon of a husband never once considered that sitting down with her and having an honest talk might be a good idea.

Other than that, I know the brilliant story idea I had in mind was very clever, and very suited to my writing style, and… (did I mention it?) very clever, but that’s about it. Funny how the cleverest ideas are the ones you can never quite remember. I’ll just have to do what I do best—sit there in front of a blank screen and let my fingers do the storytelling; there’s a part of my brain which apparently knows what it’s doing. This is not a guarantee of good writing, or of a story that people will actually want to read but sure enough, if I sit there long enough and drink plenty of tea, and dutifully punch out 1667 words (or more) every day, something is bound to happen. Can’t hardly wait. Well, that’s not quite true, but in terms of letting creativity take over, it’s a pretty good way of passing the time and a challenge that’s just difficult enough to bring plenty of satisfaction along the way. After two consecutive wins, can a third be far behind?

Gone?

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I can’t write. The muse is gone. Hopefully she’s just away on vacation, as opposed to gone forever. Five whole days of joy followed by five days of discontent. We’re even now I should hope? I wouldn’t mind landing somewhere in the middle. Keeping up with myself is just too much work.