Category: Craft Work

Power

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft Work1 Comment

Star Date: October 30, 2011

A freak snowstorm battered southern New England yesterday, resulting in a wet, white, foreign,semi-crystallized substance that accumulated on colorful leaf-laden trees. As heavy branches snapped under the weight and crashed to the ground taking power lines with them, all forms of communication with the inhabitants were cut off.

(Except for those of us who have Internet on our cell phones and happen to have a car charger or a power inverter. Well, I don’t have either of the apparatuses to transform my gas and battery-operated Jeep into a source of electrical stimulation, so when the cell phone juice ran dry, I was left alone and lonely.)

Fast forward to 10:00 PM two nights before Halloween, and I was in the dark, cold and alone, and lighting candles all over my house. What a wonderful time to write a ghost story, I thought.

And then I realized almost everything I wanted to write required research, and I had no means of accessing Google or heading out to my local library or Barnes & Noble.

It got me thinking what our forefathers had done. There were newspapers of course, and journals I supposed, that authors could have subscribe to, but how else had they gotten their information? How had they written all those wonderful classics such as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins without the need for facts at the tips of their fingers and at lightning speed? Was traveling overseas so easy then or jobs for foreign correspondents were just plentiful?

I remember a time before computers and the Internet, and sadly it was probably one of the most creative and productive times in my writing career. I didn’t
look up anything; inspiration came from personal and physical experiences. Like a remote twisted country road, an eerie tree-lined path, the Tlaquepaque Mall in Sedona, AZ, and a torrid, sordid love affair. I used my mind and the power of my imagination to transform this stimuli into the characters and plots and settings of my stories. I used the “What If” method without even knowing it.

Why then should it be so hard now? Have I, and the rest of us, gotten so used to relying on other people for our knowledge of, well, anything that we can’t even pound out a semi-original ghost story?

I agree that the Internet is a fascinating invention that keeps us connected to a world we might never have known existed, but at what expense? With so much virtual information out there, I feel like we are becoming less and less creative. Look at this year’s major motion picture releases. How many of them were remakes of older movies? How many were based on books or comics or graphic novels?

Though Emily Dickinson might not have left her Amherst home for most of her adult life, she also did not resort to accessing the World Wide Web for inspiration and research.

It only took a few days without electricity and Internet service to realize the true power of creativity lies within our own imagination. But unlike modern
technology, if I can harness it, I will never have to worry about service interruptions again.

Habits

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft Work1 Comment

 “Habit is more important than Inspiration.” –Anonymous

Truer words have never been spoken. Because after all, inspiration is everywhere. We need only clean out our closets to find pages of ideas and unfinished stories/poems/screenplays/whatever.

From the sweet scent of petunias wafting through the open windows, to the conversation overheard at Starbucks, to the wispy clouds passing across the full moon, our problem is not inspiration; it is habit. We are not taking advantage of that 1% inspiration and we are deluding ourselves that this is the culprit of our lack of productivity.

Speaking of which, think back to a time when you were at your most creative and productive. I’ll bet you were writing all the time.  See? Habit. After all, that’s what being “productive” means, isn’t it? Bringing something into existence by working at it.

So I am challenging all of you to begin Writing 15 Minutes a Day on August 1. All you need is a pen, a journal, and a calendar. No, the calendar is not to mark off the days until August 31. It is to schedule your 15 minutes as if you were scheduling anything else you can’t get out of. Like, work for instance, or picking up your children from soccer practice, or fitting in the grocery shopping or laundry, or all of the other hundreds of things you do out of habit that take up all your time.

We are creatures of habit, but it seems like the only habits we stick to are ones that don’t nurture our soul. Or the ones that cause severe consequences. For instance, we go to work every day because if we didn’t we’d be broke and destitute, and living in a cardboard box (hopefully). We brush and floss our teeth because if we didn’t, we’d have disgusting, stinky breath and no one would want to kiss us let alone talk to us. We do laundry because otherwise we’d have to walk around naked and we’ve already decided that working out is nasty habit we’d rather not be bothered with.

Scheduling your 15 minutes is going to take some forethought and organization. Namely, when you can fit it in. Maybe it’s first thing in the morning before family members (and cats) wake up and demand breakfast. Maybe it’s after everyone has gone to bed and it’s just you and the starry night. Perhaps it’s on your lunch break, or commute to work, or a few stolen moments locked in the bathroom when you’re pretending to take a shower. Whatever time works for you is the time you’re going to schedule it. Put it on your calendar in PERMANENT magic marker. Treat that time as if there were dire consequences–like stranding your kids on the soccer field. After all, there are dire consequences; you will feel like crap if you don’t do it. But the subject of self-inflicted guilt is another topic entirely.

And don’t be afraid if you find fitting in your 15 minutes will change from day to day. You don’t have to spend the whole month writing at 5:00 am if, for instance, you find something else on your schedule conflicts with it (like sleep). All you have to do is find the time that works best for you each day.

You may also choose to use writing prompts to get you writing. But the Writing Lounge’s 15 minutes a day program will not provide any prompts. Basically, because you don’t need them. You are writers, you have brains, you have found inspiration everywhere (even in your overstocked closet).

This program is not about writing the next Great American novel or Pushcart prize-winning poetry or Academy Award-winning 120 page screenplay–that comes later after you have developed your nasty habit and, like smoking, just can’t break it. No, this month is all about getting words down on paper. (And hey, it’s cheaper than buying a pack of cigarettes.) You will not be hearing Halleluiah sung in the background or see angels fluttering their wings around your head. You will be sweating, toiling, cramping, and quite possibly cursing. But hard work does not come without its reward.  

The prize is to find that at the end of the month we feel good about ourselves, we feel accomplished, and we feel that exhiliration of writing again. Our muse is happy, we are happy, and we have banished all that self-guilt that has brought us down in the past.

Then, and only then, can we grab our inspiration and begin creating a work of a lifetime.

Are you up to the challenge?

Agatha Christie

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft WorkLeave a comment

My mom happened to be watching a documentary on Agatha Christie when I was at her house doing laundry today. I only caught the last 20 minutes of it or so, but it seemed to be centered on her summer retreat called Gardensomethingorother, which is going to be or has been opened to the public for the first time.  She spent all of her summers there where she no longer had to be Dame Agatha Christie but instead had been Mrs. M–a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother.  She didn’t write in the months she spent there; she swam, went boating, played tennis, and lazily watched the river traffic pass by.

None of this is entirely important or to the point.

I had the distinct impression, while shoving a load in the washing machine, that even though Agatha despised the fame and social aspect of the literati life (because she was shy not because she was a snob), she enjoyed what she was doing when she was doing it. I had imagined she’d been totally invested in all her stories–with the plots, the characters, the process.  They were her life and her family and she wouldn’t have dared abandon them until everything had been worked out to the end.

I want to feel that way again.

Failure

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft WorkLeave a comment

Script Frenzy is out.  Day 26 and I have four pages.  (Does one of them count when it’s the title page?)

It’s not procrastination this time (I worked on it plenty and have brightly colored post-it notes and index ccards pinned to a bulletin board to prove it); I blame poor planning and a late arrival.  Maybe some people can do it all in 30 days, but I think to effectively complete a screenplay or a novel in 30 days, you must have it mapped out ahead of time.  And I don’t just mean the character work, the motivations, the external goal, internal need, blah blah blah.  The story needs to be fully realized in your head or better yet on paper unless you want to spend a month writing incoherent scenes that have nothing to do with each other by page 100.  I don’t want to spend the whole challenge frustrated by tyring to find my story.  I want to write it.

The thing that stumped me the most was the beginning.  Well, what else could it have been if I only wrote three pages?  My Theatre Arts professor, who directed all the program’s plays, told me that often the opening scene didn’t come to him until sometime deep within rehearsals.  Granted, he already had the words in front of him, but I understand what he meant.

En Medias Res is always a tried and true method.  I think I was trying to focus more on the visual aspects of how the story would look onscreen rather than concentrate on the story itself.  Not to mention, I had no motivation for the sorceress Ilaria to abduct the young male gypsy (who coincidentally looked like a young Johnny Depp) in the opening.  Whatever I thought was her motivation had turned out not to be the case, and the opening scenes I had written were just blocking me from moving forward.  They were bridgeless.

And even though I’m a complete failure at Script Frenzy 2011, I managed to use the time to concoct a story and a plan for writing it where ideas can flow unheeded by deep chasms of crap.