Change

Almost a year ago now, I wrote a post about how much I despise being alone. The dark tendrils of thought that would follow me into my solitude, wrapping their sinister black fingers around my ankles and wrists and throat until I couldn't move or breathe - the smoke that distorted and clouded my mirror so that all I could see of myself was a deformed silhouette of who I really was - that fog of black smokey tendrils was my greatest fear. I could feel myself beginning to choke every time I was alone, and rushing to find some sort of companionship to avoid going completely insane.

There has been a lot of healing this past year. And a lot of learning. You learn new things, venture to new territory, new hurts come, and healing commences again.

And then you look back. Over your shoulder. Over the landscape you have carved out of the barren earth you started with. You look at the peaceful, dandelion-covered hills, full of wishes. You scowl at the scraggly cliff-faces that still taunt you and remind you of how they bruised your shins and your heart. All the rivers written by tears and the trees inspired by dreams. The landscape looks nothing like what you started with.

And you realize how much you have changed.

The familiarity that comes with knowing yourself, the comfort you find in being able to predict your own actions, fades into a fear of the unknown.

WHO AM I?

This is the question we unknowingly spend so much time trying to answer. We don't think it consciously, but our entire lives we are testing ourselves, learning, adjusting our sails, re-assessing our surroundings, and moving on. We are exploring our hearts - foreign territory, unfamiliar landscape.

You would think our own hearts should feel like home. Our heart should be a place where the lights glow through the windows and through the darkness, warming us like a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa, tucking us in at night to tell us stories about who we are and who we are to become, leading us forward, and inspiring us with a sense of adventurous security.

But that's not always how it works....

Our hearts are scary places sometimes. We discover things about ourselves we never thought we'd see carved into our landscape, and uncover wounds we thought we'd mended and find them still pulsing and bleeding. In an effort to heal the cuts and burns, we grope at them with our dirty hands, only succeeding in filling them with infection. Somehow, we know that a cup of hot cocoa would make all the shadows disappear, but the warm lights and soft blankets are miles away, and the bedtime stories are eons ago. We have to fight the real dragons now.

A year at college is like fighting dragons - battling the dragons in your own heart, and discovering the dragons in others. Fire rages and carves out unfamiliar trenches, covers the hills full of wishes in scorch marks, and burns down the trees built by dreams.

We are left with a heart that does not look like ours.

We are left looking in the mirror and wondering who it is that is staring back at us.

But even in the midst of fighting dragons, there are those things that remind us of who we are. Those places, those people, the inside jokes, the magic that brings us back to childhood, back to fields full of dandelions...

And yet we cannot go back. We must press onward.

Learning to love who you are becoming is not easy. Learning to love that slightly unfamiliar face you see in the mirror, being willing to venture out into that strange landscape...to learn its geography all over again, even in the face of change...is not easy. And choosing to form that person you are becoming in a purposeful way - containing those fires, healing those wounds, planting new fields of flowers...that is even more difficult.

In the midst of all of this, across the battlefield, remembering the bedtime stories and the warm blankets, remembering the flowers and the wishes and dreams, and hanging on to them, becomes a vital part of moving forward. It is the memories of light and joy which strengthen us. If we think we've lost that light, that joy, then we won't even bother looking for it behind the shadows and the scorch marks. Memories of the magic which fascinated us as children helps us remember how to see it, even now that we have grown. Memories of who we were help us find who we are.

Our landscape will continue to shift and change, and we will continue to explore it. But why are we exploring? What are we looking for? Exploring must be purposeful - without a purpose, exploring becomes wandering, and our lives become aimless. Without a purpose, we plod onward, never truly understanding ourselves, never truly seeing the beautiful landscape we are sculpting. We must remember, as we traverse the tender crevices of our hearts, how important it is to be searching. Always searching. Searching for who we are...and for who we are becoming...and for the light that guides us home.

The Musings of an Alice

     Sometimes, something so significant occurs in your life, that it seems as if everyone should know about it, regardless of whether you told them. "Didn't you know?" "Didn't someone tell you?" No. They didn't. Which is why these stories must be told, at some point, even if it is told weeks after the story began.

Although the story ends
I cannot just pretend
It never happened.

In short, I was called by my director to be Alice in her production of Alice in Wonderland, though I hadn't auditioned for the show.  Surprised, flattered, honored, all of the above. I almost cried.

When things like this occur

I find myself unsure

Of whether it really happened. 

 
That was the 21st of March. Rehearsals started the following Monday (26th). The first performance was May 5th. We had a month to block the entire show, learn our lines, get/make our costumes and props, design the lights, master the background music, and build/decorate the set. The illustration below shows the result.

This is my illustration of our interpretation of the show, including costumes.

It was a wild ride, that couple weeks. The last show was May 20th, and I graduated the 5th of May (after having exams and tech rehearsals at the same time, I graduated opening night) . . . and now it's all over. But, as I said, a story must be told, even after it's already ended.

Once upon a time, a little girl named Miranda enrolled in a college, got a job, and became another little girl, all in the span of a few short weeks. This was rather overwhelming for someone so young to handle all at once, and her many adventures quite tuckered her out. Exhausted, she sat by the light of her laptop one night, and paused to sort out her mind and try to remember all the things which had happened to her.

 On Wednesday, the 21st of March,  the phone rang, and it all began. Miranda heard it from upstairs in her room, but she was trapped in the web of school, so she ignored it. Yet for some reason her ears pricked up when she heard her sister answer the phone. The director, calling for her.

"I really wanted to offer you the part of Alice..."

How could she say no?

Rehearsals until 11pm, sometimes later. Aching legs and an aching head. Blood shed onstage. Yet she would never trade any of it. The cast was eleven people, and they became as close-knit as a family. High-level-stress situations naturally form bonds between people. It's one of the great joys of showbiz, that with the stress comes a new-found family.

Opening night was fantastic, as were all three other shows. Miranda soaked every minute in, trying to savor the experience, sink into her character, relish her time onstage in Wonderland. Standing on the stage, in the dark, after the final bow, she found herself wishing that she could go back to the beginning and do it all over again. She would miss Alice. She would miss Wonderland.

And now, her life must go on. College is lurking up around the corner. Oh dear.

Hopefully it makes more sense than Wonderland. 

Further Into the Brainstorm . . .

. . . and never mind the whipping winds and whirling whirlpools, the sheets of rain, and the frosty gale that seems to tear the skin from your face!

The unfortunate thing about brainstorming is that I can share very little without giving a lot away. Thus, it is difficult to write a blog post about my specific brainstorm. As I mentioned before, I have been thinking a lot about Torrson . . . and yes, I have written the first words of my re-imagined novel. These, at least, I can share:

      Torrsøn detested the cold. It reminded him how long he had been waiting. And taunted him with the prospect of waiting any longer.       

      Sitting with his back to the wind, he pulled his stiff nobleman's jacket tighter around him, but the frills did nothing to block out the biting frost. His nose was red as his frozen fingers, he was sure of it, and dripping with his inner mucus. He wiped it desperately on his sleeve. It would not do for the novice steward to have a runny nose. 

      Growling at the cold that persisted to stab him through the flimsy court fabric, he stood with a flourish and began pacing, as if by plodding back and forth he could run away from the frost.

My notebook in which I had begun, moths previously, to jot down notes about this re-imagination, has begun to fill up with pages of tight scripted notes. Specifying character's relationships, outlining their backgrounds, detailing their evil plots, listing their names . . .

And, of course, with all this comes the character sketches. Drawing my characters always re-inspires me, and it gives me a concrete face to gravitate to when I'm writing about them. (Does anyone else feel this way?) I have their personality inside my head, and I could write it out in words if I really tried. But somehow, in the raw early stages of their development, their personality more easily pours out of my drawing pencils than from my fingers on the keyboard.

With all the intricacy of the storyline in this particular character novel - political intrigue, plots and coups, intertwines relationships and devastating scandals (intrigued yet?) - I've decided to try a new method of brainstorming/organizing. The Bulletin Board.

This concept has both excited me and scared me ever since I first heard of it. I'm not sure if writing plot points on index cards, pinning them on a board, shuffling them around, lining them parallel to each other, adding things, and taking things away, will be an effective way for me to organize my thoughts. But I have yet to truly try.

"No time for idle talk! Back to work, you scalawags! Don't you know there's a storm a-brewin'? There she blows!"

Editing . . . Groan

I've decided I hate editing.

This is something I've been dealing with for the past five months. I've avoided editing like the plague; ignored the suffering prose of my novel and tuned out the incessant cries of uncompleted school papers.

But now, of course, with a deadline of tomorrow for my Vision Forum short story, I can no longer avoid editing. Yesterday, I took my laptop and sat on my bed for an hour, managing to (somewhat) painlessly cut out the 52 extra words, plus another 16. 

This made me very happy.

Yet, after this minor victory, I remembered that  I now have to deal with content. Clarity. Keeping  my audience in mind.

And it's even more difficult with a limit of 1,200 words.

Though I can act OCD sometimes, I feel like it would be wrong for me to send in a story with exactly 1,200 words. I would feel like I 'barely made it'. I feel so guilty stretching the word-count.

Editing is annoying, but with a word-count is even worse. The way your stomach sinks when you finally find the perfect way of phrasing that troublesome sentence, and then you glance down . . . and the Word Count stares back up at you: 1,208 words.

Drat.

I hate editing. And, of course, I'm using this blog post as an excuse for not editing.

I feel antsy and restless whenever I think about going back to that Microsoft Word Page full of text, words I don't want to change. 

I always forget. Writing is work. Now to push through the grudge-y, un-fun part of it. Oh joy.

But oh, how I love it!

Pushing Yourself

It's always hard, after the excitement of Christmas, to throw yourself back into your "groove" with writing. 

That is, if you had a groove before the holidays. But I didn't.

So now, to start a new groove! As much as I hate forcing myself to write (it all feels stinted that way) I realize that the stintedness is part of being a writer. And though I feel as if I've said it over and over, I can't call myself a writer if I don't write.

Part of me is nervous that, after writing Enslaved  I became so exhausted that I convinced myself the best thing to do was to distance myself from prose, and fiction, and writing anything that felt even remotely close to the genre of my novel. I was so tired of pushing myself through the stintedness that I didn't even want to think about my manuscript. All writing came to feel stinted, and thus I shunned all of it (except poetry, which is quick to write and fun to read).

And yet, through all of this, I felt as though I was abandoning a part of myself. I wasn't just taking a break. I was throwing in the towel. Telling myself that "I can't go on any longer". "I can't look at that story anymore". I began to question if I was meant to write at all.

But none of this felt right. Even though I was discouraged, giving up didn't just feel lazy. It felt uncharacteristic. Words have always been my friend. Fiction and prose have always been a part of me. To try to convince myself that "I couldn't go on any longer" - just because I was tired - felt as though I was forgetting part of who I was.

Writing is like a workout. You start off a little tired. Then you get a rhythm going, and you throw your heart and soul into it.  But after a while, your muscles start to ache, all your 'umph' is gone, and you want to just lay down and go to sleep.

But the only way to get stronger is to push yourself through the aches and pains! Find that buzz of adrenaline in the back of your brain, exhale, and finish with everything you've got.

So here's a toast to New Years Resolutions before the new year begins! I don't know how many times I'm going to have to say it to myself before I listen to me: but I must force myself to write, or else forfeit part of who I am.

And that would be quite unfortunate.

Does anyone else feel as though they have lost their "groove"? Are there any other authors out there making New Years Resolutions to devote themselves more eagerly to their writing? 
Let's hope that new life is born in our words as the new year begins!

Keep pressing on . . .

Where a Story Begins . . .

In my junior year of high school I used a program called One Year Adventure Novel to help me plug through my first novel. The finished result: 350 pages, 66,134 words of non-stop action. It's not called an adventure novel for nothing.

Death. Captivity. Revolution. Betrayal.

One girl, enslaved to herself, trying to free her world from the twisted snares of her uncle.

I love my manuscript, raw and real as it is. I would love to see it cradled by a loving hardcover binding.

But I had to remind myself where this novel came from. It was an un-formed idea floating around in my head until I learned how to set it down in an orderly way. Chapter by chapter, character by character, disaster by disaster, dilemma by dilemma, plot twist by plot twist . . . I learned how to tell as story.

But now I have to remind myself where a story really begins! Since finishing my novel, every time I've gotten inspired by a new idea, I've found myself falling into the rigidity of a step-by-step process.
That process was brilliant to help me learn, to help me plug through, to help me finish. But now I have to remember - a story begins as a free-form idea. The rest has to flow from there. Keep the structure that you learned in the back of your mind to guide you, but let your ideas take their own course, instead of trying to shove them into an ordered list of steps.

Am I alone in this "need" for a step by step? Does anyone else ever feel that they rely too much on an ordered structure to write? Has anyone else had their inspiration sucked out by a step-by-step structure, or lost their love for writing because they constrict themselves?

I am in the midst of brainstorming for The Vision Forum Family Catalog 2012 short story contest. I refuse to let myself become constricted by a structure! Let the story come as it may come.

Distraction

I get distracted very easily.

Not to say that I'm scatterbrained or anything. I focus very hard, on everything I do, for extended periods of time, and even multi-task occasionally. 

Or, at least, I seem to focus very hard. But, more often than not, my head is not in what I am doing.

It happens so much when I write, and that's the frustrating thing. Smack-dab in the middle of a well-formed, well-thought out paragraph, my mind will wander.

Now you could never tell to read the paragraph. My paragraph stays on track. But my head isn't in it anymore - my heart isn't in it anymore.

Oh, how I wish I could totally immerse myself in my writing, without my mind wandering! But the list that I always tuck away on the back shelf of my brain starts getting longer and longer...I should be studying, I should be responding to emails, I should be cleaning my room, I should be cooking, I should be making Christmas presents, I should be practicing my audition song, I should be going over my dance steps, I should be editing my manuscript, I should be writing that paper...

And, of course, while I'm sitting there writing, my brain decides that it's the perfect time to start reading this list out loud to me.

I want my list to stop growing. I want my brain to shut up.

Yet of course it doesn't. It never does.

But anyway, back to getting distracted. I think, somehow, over the course of the last few posts, I have written a lot about the art of writing, about writing as a craft, a skill to be honed, a journey to be taken. And it's true - that's what it is. But, though I've been writing about that journey, I haven't been taking that journey myself.

It's time to crawl back to my laptop and pull out my dusty manuscript that I've tried to forget about. It's time to get this journey started. It's time to forget about that stupid list. It's time to immerse myself in writing.

Because that's what writers do. They write.

Excitement: The Story

I remember when I first started writing my story.

I say "my story", not meaning the book I actually wrote. I worked on my "story" for years, but of course it was not the story I ended up writing. (It wasn't until years of painstaking revision, rewriting, 3 different versions,  over 300 pages of writing all told,  that I eventually came up with a completely new story - new characters, plot-line, point of view, concept, EVERYTHING - and actually finished a book.)

No, I say "my story" meaning the goofy little novel that I slaved over for the first 5 years of my life as an aspiring writer. The novel that went through three title changes, three main characters, three plot-lines, three writing styles, all centered around one immature, contrived idea. The novel that grew with my aspirations,  improved with my writing, developed with my personality. The novel that shaped me into the writer I am today.

It was the story that excited me the most.

I can still remember the thrill I felt, at nine years old - still remember the fervor with which I wrote, the hours I would spend on the computer ... the joy I would feel when I would finish a chapter, the excitement I had for sharing it. Yes, I still get tastes of that excitement now, usually when I've written a line of prose or poetry that seemed appear on the white paper unbidden. But I hardly feel it the way I did at nine years old, writing that silly novel, begging to be allowed five more minutes so I could frantically pen the paragraphs of prose that were streaming into my head at rapid speeds. 

The excitement ... the thrill!

How I wish I had that excitement whenever I write now! How I wish that those lines of prose would flow so quickly and easily out of me, and bring me that thrill! Then being an writer would be so easy.

It need to find that excitement again - all people who write must find it. Writing is inseparable from excitement. Excitement is contagious. And excitement for writing gives life to the story.

When you are excited to write, that excitement will become contagious.

On Writers and Motivation

     New journeys. Swashbuckling Adventures. Old myths. Relationships. They all have to start somewhere, and yet so often we are not the brave-hearted heroes who step out of the pages of our novels. How do these heroes manage to get past that gut wrenching hesitation which comes with starting new things? That bone-chilling fear which comes with adventure?

     Pressure. Lots of it. And a couple blood-thirsty monsters besides.

     But what about us, on the outside? So often we - especially writers - loose our motivation! What about we ordinary, everyday people, stuck on the outside of the leather binding, not blessed with the pressure of life or death situations to propel us forward into new things?

     We must rely on ourselves.

     All our motivation must come from within; all of our drive, purpose, and pressure must be derived from our own internal, self-inflicted bloodthirsty monsters. But, as I've found in my experience as a writer, those monsters are not always all bad. Sometimes, they're not really blood-thirsty at all ... once you get to know them.

     What follows are 6 simple guidelines for self motivation - whether in your writing, exercise, education, or day-to-day life - to help you to get acquainted with the blood-thirsty monster within.

1) Identify what you want.

• So often, when we start new things, we end up not finishing them because we get to the middle and realize that we never really wanted it in the first place. This merely adds to the fear of starting new things: we are afraid that we will change our minds half-way in . Save yourself a lot of time and ask yourself "Is this what I really want?"

2) Figure out why you want it.

• Another reason why we so often loose our drive is because we don't know why we want what we want. Sometimes, when we reach this step, we cannot come up with any good, strong reason why we want something, and we realize that we didn't really want it at all.

3) Make a game-plan.

• Know what it is that  you need to do in oder to get what you want. So often our dream - our 'new adventure', gets lost in a sea of wishes. Make your dream more concrete and attainable by creating a list of what must be done in order to make it happen.

4) List the consequences of laziness.

• Often, after looking at the list in #3, we become so daunted by the amount of work involved that we want to throw in the towel. This is where our self-motivation must really  kick in. Treat yourself to a little healthy fear by making another list - this time of all the things that will happen if you are lazy about following List 1.

5) Visualize your reward.

• After the fear and pressure begins to set in, it can seem as though this "new adventure" thing is a long, dark tunnel with no light at the other end. Encourage yourself by lighting a happy fire beneathe your feet, and invision all the good things that will come through your hard work. Remind yourself of Step #2.

6) START.

• Perhaps the most daunting step of any new adventure. And, of course, the most crucial. YOU MUST START. No excuses. Often, you'll find, when you push yourself an inch, you'll go a mile.

     The monster doesn't seem quite as scary anymore, does he? Once we have identified our purpose, the pressure becomes our best friend. Now, obviously our purpose in life is more than what we create for ourselves. But the drive, the motivation, behind our actions - whether we are writers, artists, mothers, college students, actors, or postmen - must come from within us.