Big projects

Nothing makes me feel more connected to my creativity than having a big project going on. Each morning when I sit down to the computer, I know exactly what to work on and I sit with the work in a different way. That deep sense of ongoing involvement in my creative life is a source of great meaningfulness and satisfaction to me. 

When I’m not working on the project, I think about it. At odd moments (in the shower, on the treadmill, driving to an appointment), I’ll get insights or ideas or solutions to problems on the project. Today when I was walking my daily mile in the neighborhood, I realized I needed to review the personality of a main character because I wrote about her in one part of the novel at one time and the second part many months later and I'm not sure that she's enough the same. Because I'm immersed in this big project, I'm with the characters often during the day. 

While you may want to play small in your creative writing at first, consider taking on a big project. Remember it isn’t the product that’s important, it’s the process, and a big process is way more fun than a little one.

Some ideas for big projects:

1.    Write a series of poems on a topic rather than just one. Determine the number of poems in advance. When you’ve written all the poems, see how they fit together into a whole. Consider creating a chapbook of them (a self-published collection).

2.    Write a novel from a prompt. All three of the novels I’ve written started out as 10-minute prompts about fictional characters. Each time I knew it was an intriguing start to something. I wanted to know what happened to these people. How they got to this moment and what happened after. Don’t know anything about writing a novel? Who cares? You can always learn. The apprenticeship continues.

3.    Hone your dialog skills by writing a play. Write a trilogy of them.

4.    Write the libretto for an opera or the script for a musical play. Team up with a song-writing friend and go for the whole production. 

5. Fascinated by a historical character. Start researching a biography or a historical novel.

6. Write a series of personal essays on a subject dear to your heart.

Routine, regularity, and ritual

One of the things I value most about writing and creativity retreats are their basis in what Eric Maisel calls the three “R’s” of creativity: routine, regularity, and ritual. When I write every day on a retreat, it becomes routine, and in a good way. My mind, spirit, and body expect it, and I have grown to need that form of satisfaction in the same way that I used to “need” a drink. When I do my art regularly, it creates a groove in me and in my day that makes me happy. And when I include a small ritual in opening and closing my creative session, I add a touch of the sacred and the spiritual and I have closer contact with my Higher Power.

Some small creative rituals

 1.    Light a candle to begin your writing session and blow it out when you are finished.

2.    Ring a small bell or chime to begin your session and ring it again when you have finished. When you ring the beginning bell, sit for a few seconds and honor the creative impulse in yourself that has brought you to the session. When you ring the closing bell, sit for a few seconds and honor the perseverance that has kept you creating even through disappointment or frustration.

3.    Create a small altar in your creative area. Your altar can be as simple as a piece of colored construction paper that a votive candle sits on or you can lay down a small cloth for your candle, your bell, and several inspirational objects. You can also build or keep your altar in a shoe box or other container when you aren’t creating. 

4.    You may wish to pick a talisman for a creative project. Maybe there’s a photo that represents the writing you are doing or a postcard of a painting by an artist who inspires you. Maybe it’s a stone or a rock or a feather. A writer of my acquaintance always drapes a shawl made by her grandmother over her chair when she sits down to write.

5.    You may wish to listen to sacred music while you create. I like Gregorian chants for painting and Japanese flute for writing.

6.    Some artists meditate before beginning a creative session; some say a prayer of thanks or dedication.

How we make the space and activity sacred is as individual as we are. But taking that extra moment to connect with something deeper can go a long way in making our writing or creative practice a bigger part of our lives.

Happiness in creating

This was forwarded on to me without attribution. My apologies to the original author. 

"The way to be happy," said Winston Churchill, "is to find something that requires the kind of perfection that's impossible to achieve and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it." I've always liked that idea--it's one of the main reasons why painters keep coming back to their studios and squeezing out.

But, as most of us know, perfectionism has its problems. Some of us don't handle it very well. Current study identifies some folks as "adaptive perfectionists" while others are "maladaptive perfectionists." It seems that some of us use the ideal of perfection as a healthy route toward excellence, while others are stymied and made dysfunctional by the thought of it.

• Accepting the inevitable proposition that striving for your own idea of perfection is going to take you down a long and bumpy road of frustration, here are a few ideas:
• Turn on your experimental mind. Everything is an assay. Be inventive and prepared to be surprised.
• Do not at first commit yourself to onerous or impossible projects with too many potential pitfalls.
• Be aware that disappointment and failure are stepping stones to satisfaction and success.
• When something you do gives you joy, go once more (and perhaps again and again) in that direction.
• Do not beat yourself up when you fall down. There is no vendetta. Dust yourself off. Be practical.
• Know that perfection is just an ideal and that notes, colours, forms, designs, etc., can only approach that ideal.
• Avoid exposure to potential critics until well along on a project. Don't let anyone prematurely pop your balloon.
• Be philosophical. The happiest people take an "agnostic" approach where curiosity and questioning give more joy and stimulate more wonder than pat answers. We live our short spans in the vortex of a miracle, and while we may not be the center of that vortex, it is magic to be anywhere in there. Be happy! The gods insist on it. The philosophers can find no higher ideal. The pursuit of it is written in the US Constitution. It's the pursuit that matters. 

Juggling multiple writing projects

As a freelance editor, I often have multiple projects to do. Usually I am able to do them one at a time, but sometimes a long-term project needs to get set aside so smaller rush projects can happen. I don't like multitasking anymore; my brain doesn't seem well suited for trying to hold a lot of information about different things if I don't have to. That is certainly true of my editing work. I count on my brain holding a lot of factual information in the interim memory: spellings of names from earlier pages, amounts of money, uses of conventional punctuation. And if I work on more than one project, it confuses that memory, which seems to have only one track.

In my creative writing, I like to have one project going at a time. That keeps those characters in my mind, those stories in the hopper, as it were, to tumble and polish and resolve themselves. But I find myself working on three books at once at the moment. I've decided to self-publish my first novel this fall; I'm working on a small book on creativity and long-term sobriety that I'd like to publish in December, and novel #3, with its full first draft completed in August, is waiting for me to come back to it.

I'm having to compartmentalize my energies in a way that isn't all that comfortable. So I'm making a big list of smaller tasks for each project and focusing on one task at a time, rather than one project at a time. This week I focused on formatting Novel #1 and making some final revisions so that I could send it to friends and colleagues for advance reviews. Now I'm turning my attention back to the Creativity book.

There's an impatience in me to get back to Novel #3 but it's a good lesson for me in one task at a time.

The changing face of books

I'm getting novel #1 ready to self-publish. I'm planning on using CreateSpace, through amazon, and having both a Kindle version and a paperback version. So in addition to working with the edits from my proofreader and some ideas from an early reader about one of my main characters, I'm also trying to sort out copy for the cover.

I have a title I really like and I've painted an image and scanned it for the cover. It's the back cover that has me stumped. I know I want a blurb, a brief description of the story that will entice the reader to buy and read but do I put a bio on the back with a picture or do I get some advance readers to give me comments?

I personally don't read a lot of reviews. I read the first pages of books and make my buying and reading decision on that and on the blurb. I find out from the blurb if it's a subject/story that interests me and I find out from the first page if I like the author's writing style. That's more important to me than what someone else said. But when I've surveyed some of my writer friends for their opinion, all but one said do blurb and comments, and put the bio inside.

Now here's the changing face of books dilemma: my book is probably not going to end up in bookstores. With self-publishing, the bookstore route is difficult, tedious, and not profitable. Big chains won't take self-published books and independent bookstores will only take one at a time. So selling my book will be mostly on amazon. People won't pick the book up to read the cover. They'll see it on line.

The other way I'll sell books is at workshops and conferences and people will be interested if they heard me speak and liked me, not what others said about me on the back of the cover.

So what to do? Any thoughts from you readers?

My muse

I attended a wonderful workshop on poetry as therapy this weekend with John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine and Finding What You Didn't Lose. In addition to writing some good poems and hearing some great ones, I met a whole new sisterhood of writers. I am so lucky!

Here is one I wrote about my muse.

A heaviness comes
unbidden, unannounced.
A hot breath
on the side of my neck.
A huff, a growl
so low, so tender
so familiar
that my cells turn
as I sleep.
And the dreamtime
turns gold and red.
And the scent of huckleberries
and hot pine pitch
and the coming cave
lie over me like down.
And when I wake,
there is a sharp knowing
at the third eye
that her claw
has penetrated
my is and will be.

Anachronisms: Sorting out technology in fiction

As I close in on publication of my first novel, I sent it to a trusted friend for a final proofreading. She found a few things but even more importantly, she brought up the issue of technology and a time-setting for the book.  I wrote this book in 2008-2009 about three people in their late 30s/early 40s. It was set in 2006 and includes the technology I myself was using then, not necessarily the technology others might be using.

In the book, I have the following:

• Characters using email
• Characters using answering machines
• Characters using cell phones and land lines
• Characters passing along information on a slip of paper (a phone number) [instead of telling someone to look it up on the web]
• Characters looking up information on the web
• Characters leaving each other notes on a door or a car
• Characters writing love letters to each other through snail mail
• No characters are texting
• An artist sending images on a CD to a gallery
• Same artist has a web site
• Main character has a CD collection

Jan argued that I need to rethink all of these things or set the time back 8-10 years. It poses an interesting dilemma. Which of these are anachronisms? Which of these are characters' idiosyncracies? (I know both young and older people who collect vinyl records). So I will go in and look at all these places.

Something to consider as we write.