I have a confession to make.


I haven't written (fiction-wise) much of anything for months. A combination of stress, distress, distraction, busyness, laziness, moving, kid #3's high school graduation, weaning myself off antidepressants, I've got all kinds of reasons excuses to offer. But I'm not big on excuses.

When I don't write regularly, I get weird. Just. Weird.


This week I decided it was time to do something, so I started a novella.

I'm about a third of the way in. I'm not sure if I love the story that's appearing on my screen, but I do love the results that come from re-tapping the fiction section of my brain. I feel better.


Funny, my plunge back in has coincided with what appears to be the arrival of the "monsoon" season, breaking a couple months of extreme dryness and miserable heat here in Colorado. As I type this, it's pouring rain outside, praise God.

For you, it might be crafting, or decorating, or baking, or even a good, long walk that gets you out of a dry spell and back to life. 

If you know things are dry, don't wait around for the "right" moment, or when you "feel" like it... just take the plunge. Jump on in. You'll be glad you did.

I just wasn't inspired yesterday. Nothing. Nada.
I even tried to put something together.

Sometimes (all the time) I forget that my creativity, like my willpower (see this excellent series of posts from "The Art of Manliness about willpower) is finite. If I write a couple thousand words worth of local newspaper articles, plus a blog post, my creativity is pretty tapped out unless I make a conscious effort to recharge.

Fiction writing is different than blogging and journalism. When working on a fiction project, it's easy to get lost in the story and (excuse the cliche) go with the flow. When writing newspaper articles, you're locked in to interview quotes and facts you need to be able to back up. Creative writing skills are exercised in the form of segues, intros and conclusions to keep the reader's interest. If your article is about something as enticing as a board meeting, it can create a creative vacuum, a sort of verbal "black hole."
Blog posts are even more challenging, because they have a tendency to be a sort of "upchuck" of whatever is in your brain at the moment. Ew. Sorry for the visual.

That's why themes and memes are helpful (especially ones you didn't come up with yourself ... God bless Patty Wysong). Like the writing prompts you remember from high school English composition, themes and memes give you a place to put pencil to paper, or fingers to keyboard – a starting place for the race to "the end."

And so ... it's Tuesday night. I was "supposed" to post yesterday morning. At least Wednesday is already scheduled.
*sigh* 

Time for another {a2z4u and me} post! 

I think we're all in agreement that the letter X poses a challenge un this kind of meme.

X marks the spot. (Too broad.)

X stands for "Christ" in Greek, which is where "Xmas" came from. (Too controversial.) 

X-rays. (Nah. At our house, X-rays are depressing... the picture is from 2007... oldest son's elbow after snowboarding incident. Yep, that's an elbow.)

 So I'm opting for something a little bit, um, lighter. Fanciful, even. I'm also showing my age. For some of you, this will be completely unfamiliar (and cheesy). For others, you'll remember it well, as cheesy as it is. But, it does start with X.





Circa 1980: The Greek muses incarnate themselves on Earth to inspire men to achieve. One of them, incarnated as a girl named Kira, encounters an artist named Sonny Malone. With the help of Danny McGuire, a man Kira had inspired forty years earlier, Sonny builds a huge disco roller rink.

Here's to finding your muse!

Sesame Street will celebrate 42 years of children's television broadcasting in November. I like to think that Kermit the Frog and Big Bird and Grover and Cookie Monster and Bert and Ernie are just eight months older than me. Of course, that's not why I'm thinking about Sesame Street today. THIS is why...

Grandbaby Talen, 5 months old and already fascinated by Sesame Street.

Forty-two years on air is a pretty amazing track record. The show's creators Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett combined short films, humor, music, live action and animation with Jim Henson and his team of puppeteers to harness the childlike quality of the human imagination and yoke it together with educational teaching tools. How many of us learned how to count, how to read, even how to get along better with others while watching Sesame Street?

Oh, sure, there's been controversy ...after only one year on the air, "a state commission in Mississippi voted to ban Sesame Street because of its 'highly integrated cast of children' which 'the commission members felt ... Mississippi was not yet ready for'." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street#cite_note-missban-116)
At some point, even before the Peewee Herman debacle, someone suggested that Bert and Ernie might be gay, since they live together. In my opinion, people who sit around looking for homosexual tendencies in a couple of puppets need to have their minds washed out with strong lye soap.

Even lovable, huggable Cookie Monster came under public fire. His cookie addiction reportedly setting a bad example for children. These days, you'll find Cookie including healthy, nutritious snacks to his diet. Poor Cookie... I know how he feels, but we all have to eat better as we get older.

Oscar has been recommended as a candidate for antidepressant therapy since he's always so grouchy. But then, that's why we love him. Didn't you always want to venture down in that trash can and see what his house looked like?

Grover (my favorite growing up) probably has adult ADHD and delusional tendencies. He does, after all, sometimes think he's Super Grover. But he also has a sweet, kind heart and wants to help others.

Source: yfrog.com via Adam on Pinterest

During the years when I was "too cool" for Sesame Street and the time I had my own kids, new characters joined the neighborhood. Most notably, Elmo. Remember the tickle-me Elmo doll? Parents having knock-down drag-outs over the last one on the shelf at Walmart before Christmas? Elmo would not approve, I'm sure, since he's all about being nice. So nice he drives most people crazy.

Criticism aside, the next time you think about Sesame Street, for whatever reason, remember how powerful and far-reaching our imaginations are. Like Jim Henson (pictured at left), let's be bold enough to do things that haven't been done before, in spite of the controversy, in spite of the opposition, whether we are lawyers or teachers or writers or ministers of the Gospel.

Our God-given creativity, unleashed, has the power to extend far beyond our own lifetimes. Let's release that creativity for His glory and honor in whatever we set our hands to.

I have a love-hate relationship with my garden.

Dead tomato.

No matter how many times I turn the earth and make the rows and pull the weeds and throw out the rocks and plant the seeds, I never feel confident about it. This year is no different.

So far, I've managed to kill every seedling I sprouted in my little peat pots a couple months ago and the three tomato plants I bought at the local nursery. The rest of the seeds are buried now, and I go outside every day to water the rows and hills and scan the soil for signs of life. 

Beets

Every day, I doubt myself. Did I plant the seeds too deep? Not deep enough? Have I drowned them? Will they ever sprout? Did something sneak up from below and eat them? Have birds flown in and devoured those little seeds without my knowledge?

Lettuce

It's a lot like writing. The words, like seeds, have to be sown into the story in an orderly fashion (gardens are sometimes called "plots"). Then, day after day, those words in that plot are watered and weeded (rewrites and edits) until, hopefully, they produce something both nourishing and palatable.

I enjoy the processes in this writing-gardening life, but I hate the self-doubt that assails my mind between planting and producing! 

Where does self-doubt sneak in and torment you? What do you DO about it?

www.npr.org

I admit it, I listen to NPR. My sons insist the only people who listen to NPR are either old or nerdy. Whatever. I get two radio stations in my car consistently: NPR being one of them. So I listen, and I learn things.

Sunday I listened to part of an interview with a jazz musician, a guitar player. He quoted Miles Davis as telling him, "Play like you don't know how to play the guitar." Davis was talking about playing music not according to notes written on a page, not according to the rules, but playing from the heart. Allowing the heart of the musician to come through in the music. Okay, I can see that. There's a definite difference between music played by rote and music played from the heart.

But what if we approached OTHER activities according to that advice? Obviously, some things don't fit well. Doing the dishes like I don't know how to do the dishes will result in dishes washed the way my teenagers wash them (not well). Driving like I don't know how to drive could go either way: either I'll be more cautious and aware, which would be good, or I'll drive like an idiot, which would be bad.

As I considered the phrase, a few particular activities jumped out at me, things that could be as revolutionized as playing music, things we learn to do according to an acquired skill set based on certain rules and guidelines.

Writing was the first thing I considered. The more I've "learned" about writing the more stifled my creativity has become. There's a time and a place for following the rules and guidelines, but the first few drafts of a work are not that time and place. For writing to be creative and original, there must be a time when we give ourselves permission to "write like you don't know how to write."

Prayer was the next thing I thought of, because prayer is supposed to be creative. Really. God is not looking for us to fill out IRS-style prayer forms. He's looking for a dialogue, for a meeting of the minds, for intimacy with us. What if I prayed "like I didn't know how to pray?" Would I approach God differently? Would you?

And what about things like kissing ... what if you kissed your spouse like you didn't already KNOW what his/her lips felt like, what the response would be, which direction you would tilt your head to avoid nose-bashing. You get the idea, right? Yeah. Carry that out as far as you need to.

It's not so much a matter of throwing aside all the conventions we've learned over the years. It's a matter of releasing our God-given creativity in places we have locked down tight because we're afraid of failure, afraid of rejection, or afraid of reproach. Think about it:

• What if you got dressed tomorrow like you didn't know how to dress? 
• What if you read your Bible like you've never read it before?
• What if you talked to your child like you've never talked to him/her before?

Do you see the potential here? I'm looking forward to applying this thought to my next creative writing appointment! How about you? 

xJasonRogersx via Flickr

Someone is remaking Footloose. Zac Efron will replace Kevin Bacon in the starring role. Seriously?

Hawaii 5-0 has been resurrected from the television graveyard. What's next, a new version of M*A*S*H? Cheers? Dynasty?

Ten minutes of ANY reality television program, from "Wife Swap" to "1000 Ways to Die" to "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" is enough to convince me whoever is writing the scripts (and don't try to convince me those shows aren't scripted) have never had to listen to their own stuff.

All of it points to the gradual decimation of creativity in popular culture. Based on what shows up on the small screen and the big screen, where have the original thoughts, lines, plots, characters, and (most especially) dialogue gone?

ibtrav via Flicker

Thank heaven for books, where fresh inspiration blooms on our virtual (and real) shelves year-round like Nero Wolfe's hothouse orchids. (Did anyone else have a terrible crush on Archie Goodwin?)

Now if I could just figure out a way to read while cooking, washing dishes, taking a shower, sleeping, and driving... The library frowns on those grease spots, my Kindle dislikes water, and if texting while driving is not acceptable, surely reading and driving is taboo as well.

Does it bother you when movies, TV shows, music, and other forms of creative expression are recycled from generation to generation?

Unless you're the parent of a toddler or the caretaker of a senior citizen, constipation is not a socially acceptable topic of conversation. For some reason, discussing the bowel movements of people who wear diapers is perfectly all right, while everyone else suffers along in silence.


So what happens when writers (or artists, or musicians, or dancers, or designers, or other creative types) experience creativity constipation? The symptoms are similar: irritability, discomfort, fatigue, isolation, the ingestion of strange substances in a desperate attempt to "get things moving."

Writers with creative constipation will sit and strain, sometimes for long periods of time, but no words come forth. Any words or phrases that do appear tend to flit by as quickly as they came. There's no relief.


Shift positions. (Did you know there are yoga asanas for constipation? Are there yoga asanas for writers?) Change rooms. Change chairs. Clean the desk. Sort the mail. Defrag the computer. Make new folders for your WIP. Eat. A lot. Surely one more trip to the pantry for another handful of calorie-laden simple carbohydrates will trigger some kind of movement, right?

Redesign your blog page. Update your website. Look up inspiring writerly quotes to post all around your desk. Consider buying novel writing software. Balance checkbook. Never mind.

Go for a walk. Try to think about novel. About plot. Imagine your characters. Wonder why that contest judge made that comment. Rethink your ability to write anything worth reading. Worry about dying in a tiny apartment, surrounded not by stacks of ancient National Geographic magazines and yellowed copies of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but amid ceiling-high reams of unfinished and/or unpublished manuscripts.

Attempt snowflake method. Again. Can't get past first three steps.

Debate taking up smoking and drinking bourbon. After all, it worked for Stephen King for a long time. Once you get famous you can afford to go to rehab with Lindsay.

Oh, yeah, you're supposed to be writing inspirational Christian fiction. Opt for prayer instead of bourbon. Feel selfish and narcissistic for praying for your own success at a task you've wanted to do since long before you were born again. Does God even LIKE fiction?


Give up. Turn off computer. Go to bed. No sooner than your bloodshot eyes slip closed, ideas stir. Sentences form. Plot twists emerge.

Your creativity, you realize, isn't dead. Your writing ability, at whatever level it may be, is not the issue right now. The problem, quite simply, is fear.

You're afraid it will hurt to get that story out. Afraid to finish what you started. Afraid you'll split open from the inside and bleed to death on the pages. Or, like the toddler who screams hysterically the first time the potty chair is emptied into the toilet and flushed away, you're afraid YOU will disappear when your story becomes reality. You'll lose your identity the way mothers have Empty Nest syndrome when their children move away from home. Maybe you're afraid you're going to be embarrassed, humiliated, and rejected by others because of your bodily functions... like making a stink in a public restroom without benefit of air freshener or a fan.

What's the cure? Prune juice? Milk of magnesia? Ex-lax? Fiber? More water? All reasonable ideas that have practical applications from a creative point of view. (But you're going to have to find your own definitions for writerly prune juice.)


Step back, separate yourself from the rules and and the pressure and that big hairy deadline looming just around the corner and remind yourself why you originally started doing what you do. Just like David prayed, "Lord, restore to me the joy of my salvation." We need to have the joy of creating something, just for the fun of it, restored to us.

From one (formerly) constipated pre-published writer to another... 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tom1231/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnowitts/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amypalko/