I had the chance to go to Eagle Rock School in Duvall. I had lots of fun with that. I'm always blown away by the hunger that children have to learn. They just soak up information.
I'm also reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. This book is provocative, and I think it might help you find your original voice.
It's pouring down rain here today and it's cold. I find it hard to find summer fun in this dreary weather. It feels like a reflective day and that said I thought I would write an idea or two about story. I have always found a connection between story and music. I like books that are like symphonies with movements, phrases and crescendos.
There is a deep rhythm to stories, and in the end I think that they are driven by a need to let others know what has happened. If I don't like a story, it's because the author didn't dig deep enough. I want to feel the ancient rhythm of the beginning, middle and the end. I want to feel the happiness and the sadness. I want to know the hope and the despair. I want to reach beyond and dig deep within. My soul searches for this.
There is completing in me when I hear a good story. I usually know something about myself that I didn't know before. I'm more aware. Those connections that lead from one scene to the next - those connections bring sense to the senseless universe for me. I can tell this hunger for story dwells in many of us.
Many are hungry. Pick up your pen. Open your laptop. Let the next great story flow.
So my doodle of the week is TREES. Trees remind me of stories too.
©Molly Blaisdell, all rights reserved. If you want to use my cool doodles ask permission first. It is so wrong to take people's doodles without permisison! I find the following very true:
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story.
Max Ehrman
4 comments:
I check your blog every so often. Your post are inspiring, and echo much of what so many writers feel—the ups and downs....
Thanks for sharing and all your wonderful posts.
Keep writing...
Hi Alison,
Glad you drop by. I hope that you keep writing too. I'm happy you've found some inspiration in my journey.
All best,
Molly
Hey Molly, I'll offer more encouragement and also point to one of your own posts to answer another one. I just finished a big day-job book that's largely about kaizen, and I agree with your observation that much of it applies to writing (and life). Two things: a kaizen principle is "fail forward fast" -- that is, it doesn't matter if what you're attempting isn't perfect, or fails outright; what matters is that you're attempting because that alone will ensure you are better and further along tomorrow than you are today. Second, kaizen embraces a passion for the process as the one and true enabler of the product; try to remember to enjoy -- I might even say wallow -- in the process as much as you can, (which I'm sure you do, since you say you'd write if you never got paid a penny), because in the end there's a lot of luck in this biz, and a lot of disappointment buried behind the accomplishments, and the process is ultimately all we can really control. Or enjoy. Hang in there! It's not okay to quit, but it IS okay to rest and regenerate for the next leg of the mountain climb.
Oh, and I might add, I have to keep reminding myself to appreciate the readers we already have -- crit group members DO count. Maybe it's just time to swap ms's with another writer (like me) who will just be a reader, without expectation of critiques. E-mail me if you want to do something like that. Like a journey that starts with a single step, an audience starts with a single reader.
Joni
Yes I hear the words as music too, Molly and was writing that very thing in my journal this morning. One of the reasons writing a good scene is so challenging is because it is symphonic -- so many instruments are playing all at once -- yet the words do not fall on the page simultaneously the way musical score can, they are put down one word at a time. We writers are challenged to capture the chaos of life through a single instrument (words) playing a liner tune (sentences). Oi!
I hope I'm making sense here.
Thanks for your thoughts on writing today, Molly.
Back to the book . . .
Janet
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