Category Archives: I Write, Therefore, I Write

It’s What I Do, Beyond That, There Is No Definition For This Prolific Addiction

Will Work For Question

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~Questions need Answers~

~Questions need Answers~

Writers Block? Blogger Block? Hypnotized by a blank screen and a blinking cursor?

Have someone ask you a question……

It’s a simple enough concept. A question is always fuel for the fire in a writing mind, especially when one is looking to keep a bonfire going strong for 30 days. 

Questions beg to be answered and I’m game for anything that keeps me writing. I appreciate questions. In conversation, in writing, from children, around the coffee table. Questions can be the perfect crutch to initiate forward movement and for that I thank you Jana, for the question and for being such a good sport about my daily teasing~

“What scares you the most about being a ‘huge success’ as a writer, not whether you will be, but if you were?” Question from the fabulous Jana A.K.A the person I blame for my 30 day/30 entry marathon

Ok, so next question please ~pretty please ~I know you haven’t read my writing long enough to know how quickly I dodge personal spotlights. My entire blog experience is a self prescribed therapy session to get over my reclusive writing behavior.  So, this sort of topic is one I never dream about because if it happened, I’m afraid I would be awful at it.

….. All right. I shall pretend~ Rebecca wrote the great American novel, it’s swept the nation as a must read, climbed the best sellers list to number 1 and Oprah just called for an interview.  Once I recovered from that scenario by means of mouth to mouth, a heart defibrillator and drank two diet cokes for balance, I would try resisting the urge to move to a remote cabin without electricity, phone lines, and Internet. That would be my first gut reaction. If I could make it past the run and flee mentality, I would probably try to keep exposure and talk shows, interviews and book signings to a minimum. I would be highly uncomfortable, daily.

Individual success, in theory, is the crown pinacle of achievement. Success brings admiration, acceptance and praise. Success also breeds jealousy, criticism and negativity. I don’t think anyone can achieve the level which you implied, without feeling the joy and burden of both sides, hard and center. I would struggle with that. That is what scares me. The duality dance that goes on between good and bad. In my world when someone compliments me I do feel uncomfortable, however, I’ve learned to smile and humbly embrace praise like a friend giving me a hug. Even now when someone tells me they like the way I write, I feel joy and accomplishment. I can’t imagine that feeling could get any better, be it a comment on my journal, an email, or a call from Oprah. I believe the positive side of ‘huge success’ would be a humbling experience, one bursting at the seams with gratitude.

As for the negative side of success. Critical opinion on a person is bound to happen. Maybe that’s why on a personal level, we all seem to inner critic ourselves, the preemptive conditioning to potential outside opinion. I try my best to quiet the human nature I recognize inside myself that breeds emotions like self-doubt and second guessing.  Unfortunetley with success and public exposure, the choice is taken from the internal battlefront to external warfare. It becomes open season on anyone that achieves a spotlight in this society. I struggle with that potential situation.  I know myself and know I would need to stay away from reviews of my work, good or bad, and resist googling my name.

I think in the situation you proposed, I would need to cling, with fingernails and a smile. to perspective like a life jacket. A writer, an artist, a photographer, a designer…etc….We all expose the most intimate and personal aspects of our hearts and mind. That makes us vulnerable to outside influence. Unfortunately, any creative endeavor is subjective and putting it out for public consumption makes it fair game for interpretation. It’s good to remember it can take ages to produce a piece of work that a stranger would bother taking a few minutes to critically opinionate on……..Perspective would be my antidote to success~

HA! Day 3. 

I’m pretty sure I’ll need more fuel for the fire. Questions anyone?

The Hand That Writes

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writing_handI’ve been feeling a bit under the weather all week. One of those, I’m not sick enough to claim “sick”  because I can’t pinpoint what feels wayward, but I’m not feeling great. I’m running a low grade fever, feel weak, headache sporadic and just something……..is off kilter.

Now, I may be a strange individual on this point, but if I’m not feeling well, I want to feel positively rotten so I have every excuse in the book to curl up in bed, round the clock. I want to be surrounded by good drinks, fabulous books, a few DVD’s and let my daughters kick into nurturing mode and spoil me like the good little nurses they can be.  

My current status hardly qualifies for mandatory bed rest, but it’s making it difficult to accomplish much. Motivation is lingering somewhere between I should be doing something, I have no desire to do anything and I’ll try to do something just to feel productive. Since I have a week of that under my belt, I can say it’s like pinging around a room with a blindfold on doing the motions of action and wondering 3 hours later what I’ve been doing the whole time.

I have discovered I do like writing in this state of mind, so a little notebook has been my constant companion. An atmosphere of thoughts that feel foggy and transparent through the mind of a semi-ill consciousness shouldn’t be ignored. Since I have no idea how other minds operate throughout the day, I can only observe my internal monologue with thoughtful observation. It seems when I’m not feeling well my mind kicks into overdrive issuing out sentence after sentence that was previously residing in thy mind vault.

In my world, every story I write is born through a single sentence. That is my ultimate starting place.  I’ve read that other people who write, see an entire timeline of a story or envision characters engaged in an action or reaction. I’ve read some see a scene inside their head like a clip from a movie while others take a circumstance they want to focus on and build around it. That is their beginnings, the  ’it’  that triggers a novel, or poem, or anything they tell others.

 I hear sentences, words piling on top of each other. Inside my head there is a word puzzle thrown on a table, each puzzle  piece is a word and my thoughts are constantly (and I mean, insanely relentlessly) trying to link them up to form a sentence that grabs my attention. Once that sentence is realized, all sorts of creative imaginations start to go from liquid to solid form around. Sentence first…..imagination next.

Now, these sentences can be slippery little suckers. Once the words line up into a single sentence, they march out of my mind in single file formation that I usually get one chance to claim.  I have to be quick to catch them or they’ll escape and fly away from me like wordbirds escaping their cage. (Think word on the tip of  your tongue, but can’t quite recall) This is one of the reasons I usually appear like a super spy with my notebook and pen on my person at all times.

I’ll be out to dinner with a group and one of those sentences will make a break for it and if I don’t capture it on paper, there’s a good chance I won’t remember it an hour later. I’ve had to explain occasionally why I’m listening to someone and rudely start sifting around in my purse for writing utensils, then with a smile and a nod to encourage the other party to continue on, I’ll chicken scratch a sentence down while keeping my eyes trained on them. Makes me wonder how often someone has thought, “Damn, I was talking and she just started writing without even looking at her paper, strange lady” ……..

So that’s it. The starting motivation to all my writing. A single sentence I can build from. Some sentences have inspired short stories, some sentences have 50,000 words behind them and more. Some of my escaped sentences I find beautiful, some I find downright strange and some motivate me to venture forward. Some make it into my online journal and some remain forever barren and alone…..Makes me wonder, does anyone else start stories, books, poems, etc in this manner?

And since I’m sharing today, here are some examples of sentences that have tried to fly away from me but I captured within my notebook………

  • The unexpected embrace of a smile…..
  • The Crucifixion of an idea…….
  • What is the currency of a well intended idea……
  • I bevel my thoughts into the fallacy of memory. Truthful illusions…….
  • I dare not let time be the erosion of my identity…….
  • Umbrella imaginations, that is the world of a child’s mind, and my own? Blanket possibilities…….
  • The fraudulent behaviour of lavender fields……..
  • Wicked world and mercy streets. I’ve often thought those words as the circle in which my truths were based and my all illusions compared…..
  • In the Shadow of the Iris……
  • Provocation of Mine (d) …………(I caressed that one for awhile until it decided it wanted to be a journal name)

Four Square Reality

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It’s been awhile since I waxed online about my ventures in writing. I still do it, beyond this sort of medium that is, prolifically. My Mantra in life should be, “Hi, my name is Rebecca and I’m a writeaholic…….” 

This morning I finished a book. Nothing unusual about that right? Well, I find myself mouth agape, eye’s bugging in a not so attractive way and dumbfounded by a sweeping discovery.

I was at the bookstore a week ago and purchased a newly released book that looked appealing. It has the  sort of cover that stops me short and beckons a person in for a closer look. The title was succulent (it has the word river in it) and a quick overview on the back produced content that felt a bit….familiar? I had to purchase it.

So I became the reader (who writes a lot), and started to devour the words of said book. From the beginning to end, I uncovered more and more similarities between what I was reading, and something I have been writing about for sometime..(ouch)..The reading process of this book became a tisk for task. A pro and con situation with potentially disastrous results. I started to wonder, did this author crawl inside my head? Or vice versa, did I somehow channel her thoughts? Not good. Not even salvageable good. So much for thinking one’s idea’s are original, enough. That theory has been officially buried in shit.

It was a good book and NO, I’m not going to say which one it was publicly (google factor). I also have no desire to try and re-work 75,000 words of my own to make my work less, similar. That notion feels like a logistical nightmare. I have other projects I can work on that I haven’t found a fraternal twin to side them up with. (notice I didn’t say identical twin, but fraternal twin is too close for my comforts!)

Here’s the reality of writing a story. Unless you venture into a fantasy world, something supernatural, science fiction, magical or make believe, you are boxed in with plain old simple humanity. When you look at humanity through a writing approach, people and situations are as cliched as the poem roses are red and violets are blue. 

Try to break the mold or redesign reality any way you wish, but when it comes down to it, writers (and humanity if you think about it) carry the responsibility of telling (living) the same stories (over and over) in a new manner. Pulling a mystical Chris Angel to defy the binds of reality and the mold of originality only works if you set the tone of that possibility out the gate. However, that tosses one back into the above mentioned fantasy worlds. Either you make it true to life believable, or you ask a reader to imagine along side you in fantasty world. Break the rules and you’ll get tar and feathered for cheating.

So we who write, try to take the realities of humanity and sew them up in a new squares. The challenge is finding a slice of the  quilt someone else hasn’t already penned a stitch in. This is not as easy as one may think it should be…………..

New HouseKeeping’s.

1) For my blogspot friends, I found and added a Google Friends Connect~~~> over there. I’m not sure if it’s the same as what we have on Blogspot, that is still undetermined, but sign up if you would so I can test it out~
2) Do I look too skinny? As in, someone had emailed and said the font was extremely tiny on their screen. So, I’m trying to figure out if that’s an individual issue, or an over all problem. Input? Font opinion?