Monthly Archives: January 2012
Everyone Loves A Monster
Really? Do we really love monsters?
Growing up on a farm, our family was overly large [numbers, not mass], my parents were blue collar workers and there wasn’t a lot of money for things like going to the movies or taking the kids to Disney Land. So the entertainment in our home on a Friday night was homemade fudge, popcorn , and movies such as The Monster From The Black Lagoon, Dracula and The Mummy. For the remainder of the week it was Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The one made me scared to go to bed, the other beckoned me to become the hero that slew them all.
From literature to film, from history to modern day viral feeds we are bombarded with the opinions and belief systems of others. Many of us grew up being influenced by folklore, mythology, religion and philosophy as the interpreters of cultural events both past, present and future. And more recently we’ve added; You Tube, reality TV, news casters and biased journalism – all of whom report on the world through the lens and paradigm of whatever corporate monolith is footing the bill.
It’s interesting to look back on our lives and trace our actions to our thoughts, our thoughts to what we’ve been taught and what we’ve been taught to the cultural media we took it from. How many of us believe what we believe, not because we came to these conclusions through our own personal journey of seeking, knocking and finding, but through vicariously absorbing what we’ve seen, read or heard from other‘s?
When someone told us that the wall was white, did we just nod our heads in all the right places and accept that it must be so, or did we say, “Hey! Wait a minute. I’ve got a pocket knife here, so let’s take a moment to scrap some of this paint off and see if the wall really is white.”
I’ve discovered over the years, that the real monster’s are not the ones hiding under my bed, or the big screen or internet browser of my lap top. It ‘s not the loud mouth reality star or biased new caster, the political leaders or even the disturbing legislation of whatever current leadership is trying to rob us of our rights under the guise of trying to keep the citizens of our wonderful nation safe.
No the real monster is the one in my own head that tells me not to ask whether the things I believe are true, or question why I even believe them in the first place. It’s all those little voices denying the need to be willing to have my mind changed – screaming that even admitting such a thing is too frightening to consider.
Real monsters live within ourselves and they need to be slain every day of our lives, because let’s face it, the true hero’s in the story of our lives are the ones who aren’t afraid to look a monster in the eye and yell ‘Boo’!
From the laptop of an uncensored dreamer,
SSpjut
Filed under My Favorite Authors, Short Stories, Uncategorized
Getting It Down On Paper
Writer’s Blog Stardate 1-29-2012
Dear Bloggers and Wannabe’s:
Today’s challenge: Moving the novel from my brain onto the page or laptop. Wow! It all sounded so glorious and easy when I first started talking about it. I mean, how difficult can it be to transfer brilliancy from one space to another? In my naivety I imagined booting up the PC, opening a Word document then taking a deep breath and watching words flow miraculously from my fingers like lightening through a wizards wand. And in this fantasy like fairy tale, I imagined re-writes to be nothing more than mild corrections in grammar and punctuation with possibly a chance of an occasional change in the chosen adjective or adverb.
Boy does the reality ever suck.
Just learning how to take the story from my imagination and getting it down on paper is an art form in itself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back over what I’ve just written and discovered that I have suddenly developed dyslexia. I think “How in the heck did my fingers type that?” Or how at the end of my writing session I’ll print off what I’ve just written, with the sole intent of just doing a light edit, and discover that what I’m reading isn’t anything like I thought it should be [thank God some of it was actually better - not worse].
Then there’s the whole; ‘getting lost in the forest because I got so caught up in the trees I forgot where I was going to begin with’ dilemma. It’s not easy keeping track of the story when all these great, unsolicited ideas keep popping into your head and you find yourself embellishing on things to such an extreme that they no longer resemble the original idea. Often costing you time, ink and paper because like all good things that should have been deleted at birth, you discover in the re-read just how badly off course you actually got.
“MERCY DELETE”
Thank God there is tons of really good advise out there on some of the ways other writers have discovered how to keep track of plot lines, scene and information so they don’t lose track of where they are and where they need to go, or how to keep from giving Peggy Sue red hair on page 12 and green hair on page 36. Thankfully, my A type personality thrives on information [I am secretly an information junkie and am currently attending Type A anonymous meetings 3x per week] so I devour as much information as possible. And like any good filtration system, I keep what I can use and discard what I can’t.
As a result of this painful – yet still fruitful learning curve is that in the future, should I come across such web sites or books, I’m going to try and remember to list them here on my blog site so that other wannabe writer’s can make use of them as well. I figure if you’ve invested ten minutes of your time reading this, then the least I can do is reciprocate with a little free info.
From the laptop of an uncensored dreaming writer.
SSpjut
Filed under Articles, Tools For Writing, Uncategorized, Writer's Journal
Can Your Work Ever Be Too Perfect?
Writer’s Blog Stardate 1-28-2012
Good morning blogger’s and wannabe’s
The other day I was sharing with a friend how I found myself re-writing several sections of my novel and that it was probably the umpteenth million time I’d had to do it. They were aghast! How can you call yourself a writer if you’re continually re-writitng what you’ve already written. It was actually suggested that I might be trying too hard to be perfect and that I should cut myself some slack and not try so hard.
Well I gave that all of about a nanosecond of thought and responded, “Can your work ever be too perfect?”
So my question to us as writer’s is, “Can our work ever be too perfect?”
I am a voracious reader and I try to mix up the genre’s in order to learn from other author’s. Unfortunately something I’ve discovered doing that is, that there are alot of new authors with a lot of work out there, but there aren’t that many that are good. There are even some you have to ask the question “How in the world did you get published?” [and that was after the third book in the series]
Sorry, but its true. It’s not that they had a bad idea for a story – but rather that they were allowed to do a poor job of telling it.
We are surrounded by every type of media and resource to be able to create imaginable [and some unimaginable], but that shouldn’t be an excuse for us to do something poorly. If we expect others to spend hard earned cash on something we’ve created, then don’t we owe it to them to make it ‘perfect’? Shouldn’t the effort we put into creating a story, poem or play be with the expectation that when we have finished the work, it is as near perfection as is humanly possible for us to make it?
But even more importantly – don’t we really owe it to ourselves? Do we really want to leave a legacy of garbage for other generations to judge us by? We only have one life to live, so why don’t we choose to live it with excellence rather than mediocrity? Wouldn’t it be better to have created one thing that was truly brilliant, that two or three hundred years from now people are still using it as a measuring guide of greatness than a lot of not so brilliant things that won’t be remember six months after they were published?
So what does this mean for me?
That I’m in this for the long haul, for that one brilliant piece of creative work that will still be on a bookshelf a hundred years from now instead of the bargain table of .50 books that no one wants to read the first time let alone twice. It means that I’m back at the key board writing and re-writing something until I just can’t squeeze out one more ounce of perfection. It also means that I’ll be getting up in the middle of the night because I’ve suddenly realized that yesterday I may have had a great idea , but the reality on page isn’t worth the time it took to type it out and I won’t rest until I’ve given it the ’mercy delete’ that it truly deserves.
From the lap top of an uncensored dreamer
SSpjut
Writer’s Blog Stardate 1-27-2012
Filed under Uncategorized
No Writer Is An Island
Good morning bloggers and wannabe’s.
There’s an old saying, ‘No man is an island.’ I think that this is especially true for writer’s as well. As much as we’d like to be able to writer whatever, whenever we’d like and not be accountable to anyone else for what we put on paper, in my opinion, this is not only highly narcissistic, but unprofitable to boot.
When I first began this adventure, I tried to read as much as I could about how to get an agent, find a publisher and the fastest tract on becoming the next Anne Rice or Terry Brooks. [What can I say, I have illusions of grandeur just like the rest of you.] But much to my growing disappointment, all roads led back to the same place: find a group of people who will read your work, give you their brutal yet helpful opinion and help you write, re-write and re-write again and again until your flowery prose either becomes a fine tuned, pared down version of the original or slips into the watery grave of ‘mercy deleting’ that it should have been sent to in the first place.
In other words, you can’t truly ever become a great writer if your the only one that ever sees your work. It takes a village to grow a writer. So, being the over achieving A type personality that I am, I set out to find myself a writing group that would be brutally yet helpfully honest.
Your probably thinking the same thing I was; with all the current cultural emphasis on believing that its ok to blurt out whatever thoughts happen to pass through our minds - with no regard for the consequences - that my search would have been easy. Not so.
In the hunt for the perfect writing group with which to share my heart and soul, I realized that they, like a new pair of shoes, have to be worn for a while before you truly feel comfortable bringing them along on anything more than short trips around the block. If these individuals are truly to be trusted with bits and pieces of our souls, then just like those new shoes they must prove themselves a wise investment and not just another compulsive pairing to assausage the advise of agents and publishers. These are the men and women who are investing in our futures. They are the individuals standing silently beside you as you type ‘The End’ to your last re-write, send off that two hundreth literary query to the one hundredth agent and eventually find yourself being asked to write the The Acknowledgment’ page of your first published work,
Finding the perfect writer’s group is as hard as finding the perfect life partner. It takes time, it takes mutual investment and it takes alot of Kleenex.
From the lap top of an uncensored dreamer.
Filed under Articles, Intelligent Blogging, Uncategorized, Writer's Journal
