What's Up Wednesday

This week...

My current WIP (work in progress): I worked on revisions and wrote a few pages to make a scene stronger. I hope to get more done in the coming week.

Quote of the week: 

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to
keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how
badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the
people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

~ Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

This quote speaks for itself. I have it printed out on fancy paper and recently put it in a nice frame so that I see it every day. It reminds me how much I want to achieve my goals. I hope it inspires you too.

What I'm reading: I'm not reading anything particular right now. I've been trying to catch up on other things, but have a trip to the library planned because I'm going through book withdrawal. :o)

Random things: There's a lady who comes into my place of work usually on Fridays to conduct business with one of my co-workers. The lady whom I'll call Miss M. is always full of good humor. Even though I have very little contact with her, she always brightens my day. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone gave bit of sunshine to everyone they met? 

Random Photo of the Week:

      A picture of a quail in the local floral conservatory. The birds run free throughout the conservatory.  

Vision Boards

Some writers use vision boards or collages to help in the pre-writing stage of their novels or as a source of inspiration or to help them visualize characters, setting, etc. Many writers who use vision boards/collages swear they help keep them on track, help them get the words down on paper, and/or help them stay inspired. The most well-known (that I'm aware of) writer who advocates the use of collages or vision boards is Jennifer Cruisie.  (Here's a link to her blog where she talks about them - Collages as Prewriting and Inspiration )

I've never done a vision board or collage for a book, but at any given time I've always collected pictures or things that remind me of the book I was writing at the time. I've just stuck them in a folder and would go through them from time to time - mainly when I got stuck on a plot point or needed some inspiration.

As I've been thinking about the goals I want to set and meet for the upcoming year, I keep coming back to the idea of a vision board. I'm considering doing one for my writing in general with pictures, words of inspiration, writing quotes, etc. I have a picture of the Rita (the equivalent of an Oscar award in the Romance Writing community) that I think I'm going to include.  While I may not win a Rita in 2015, it'll be something to strive for. I'm going to hang the board where I'll see it every day so it'll keep me inspired and moving forward in my writing career.

Have you ever done a vision board or collage for a book or for something you wanted to accomplish?

Hello Muse

My muse disappeared while I was preoccupied with the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays. With all the additional To Do's that time of year brings, writing time was pretty much non-existent so I didn't even notice when she took off for parts unknown.

I discovered her absence when I sat down to write the first Monday in January. She'd stuffed all of my ideas, lines of dialogue, and the conflicts of my hero and heroine into her suitcase and taken them with her. I tried to struggle on without her, managing a sorry page count of 3 whole pages that week.

Thinking if I spent the weekend on some Me time filling the well so to speak, I'd entice her to come back. I didn't know it at the time, but I was deluding myself. The next week, she never showed and I eked out a few more pages. I was now well behind my 100 page goal for the month of January. I started to panic. What if she never came back? What if I'm never able to finish another manuscript?

After spending that weekend trying to figure out how to lure her back, I got mad. How dare she leave me high and dry when she knew how important my writing is to me? I decided then and there I was going to write the 25 pages a week that I'd set for myself come hell or high water. Monday I sat down and wrote 5 pages. They were horrid, needed more revision that I could possible describe, but I had 5 pages. I did the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday.

Guess who showed up Thursday in a snit. How dare I write without her? She had all my good ideas, I needed her. I told her to get lost, I didn't need her after all. She stamped her foot like a 5 year old and stormed around the room muttering to herself. I ignored her and kept writing.

She stood next to me, her arms crossed over her chest. "That's really bad, you know."

"I know," I said, "but I can fix it."

She started offering suggestions, great lines of dialogue and description. I couldn't move my fingers over the keyboard fast enough. She perched on the edge of my desk with a smirk. "I guess I showed you. You need me after all."

I just smiled and kept writing because her disappearance taught me something -- I don't necessarily need her. I can write without her. It may need a lot of work, but that's what revisions and rewrites are for. 

Having a muse is nice. But not being held hostage to her whims or having to wait for inspiration is even nicer.

A Change in Perspective

Last week there was an article in the Democrat & Chronicle, our local newspaper, about a young man named Richard Masters who was in a terrible accident when he was 5 years old - A dump truck blew through a stop sign and hit the car he was riding in. Richard was left a quadriplegic.

For the last 19 years, Richard has had no motion from the neck down. Did he let such a terrible thing get him down or limit him in trying to do whatever he wanted?  No. He even stated in the article, "...I try not to be a crabby person."  Given what happened to him, he would have every right to be filled with anger. Instead he focuses on what gives him joy.

He paints. He started painting almost right after the accident as a form of physical therapy to keep his neck muscles strong. He has even made a name for himself due to his paintings. How does he manage to paint if he's paralyzed from the neck down, you ask?  He grips the paintbrush by clamping his teeth on the end of the brush and moving his head side to side. His aunt mixes his paints and holds his canvases for him while he's working.

Richard paints floral prints, still lifes, and portraits. It's his portraits that are the most impressive. Just by moving his head with the brush between his teeth, he's able to portray movement in hair, expressive facial expressions, and intricate background patterns.

Can you imagine only being able to move your head and nothing else? I have to admit I can't. After reading this article, I immediately felt that I was taking my health and the life I have for granted.  I'm trying to take a page out of Richard's book and trying not to be a crabby person who complains about minor annoyances anymore.

Someone once said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "If you want something bad enough, you'll make it happen. If you don't, you'll make excuses." Richard had every reason in the world to make excuses not to paint, yet he didn't.  I kept the article about Richard and framed it. It sits on the credenza where I see it every day. I hope it will remind me that the only real limitations we have in trying to achieve our dreams are the ones we put on ourselves.

What To Be...Or Not To Be. That is the question.

When writers begin a new story there are so many decisions to be made.  Character names, their appearance, temperament, where they live, how much baggage they have, and what they do for a living.  It’s this last aspect of developing a character that I find to be the most fun but it can be the most difficult.

Fun because we get to learn all about different occupations.  The research sometimes can even be more fun than the writing of the story.  I once interviewed a coroner, who was more than willing to share aspects of different cases as well as answer my questions. While he was careful not to divulge confidential information, he was a wealth of knowledge and had a great way of imparting that knowledge that made my fingers itch to hit the keyboard.  It can also be difficult because we sometimes want to include everything we’ve learned or found interesting even though it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the story itself and we end up including so much information that our stories become more like lectures than pleasurable escapes.

When I started writing The Muse I knew instantly that the hero, Blaine Hobson, would be a poet.  The thing is it’s hard to research how to be a poet compared to researching how to be a police officer.  I’ve never been good at writing poetry but admire those who can do it.

In my quest to learn more about poets and poetry, I read about a lot of different poets, their lives and their works.  I started with poets I was familiar with – Lord Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes.  (Of course, there’s Shakespeare as well, but I stayed away from him.)  Then I moved onto poets that were recommended to me by friends or that I found in the library.  These included Edgar Lee Masters, Anne Bradstreet, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Alexander, Donald Hall, and Billy Collins.

Of all the poems I read, I found a favorite – Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats.  Even though there is nothing similar to it written by Blaine in The Muse, I found myself reading this particular poem over and over when I wanted to get into Blaine’s head.

Have you ever been inspired by something you read or learned? Something that you kept going back to even though you couldn’t explain why?