Challenging Creativity

Posted on Feb 10, 2009 in Write Anything, Writing | 2 comments

To be creative you must be challenged.

There is a chef on the local news channel who seems to have lost his creative spark. Here’s are a few of his recent segments:

• Broccoli & white beans side dish
• Egg, Bacon and Romaine Salad
• Oven Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Braised Red Cabbage

While there’s nothing wrong with these recipes, there’s a definite lack of originality that one expects from a professional chef. It doesn’t even seen that he takes much effort to name his recipes. We sometimes joke that were he to publish a book of his recipes it would be called “The Dishes I prepared on the Local News During the Calendar Year 2008.”

For a while now, this is how I’ve felt about my own presence here on Write Anything. It’s been nearly three years now, and each week it’s more difficult to come up with a topic. And even if I do have an idea, I find my own writing lacking.

This is what happens when creativity is not challenged. Creativity is a process of conflict, of success and failure, or experimentation. This is one of the reasons that the starving artist is such a powerful cliche—because it’s so often true.

So I’m looking forward to the upcoming changes on Write Anything. We’re making changes designed to challenge ourselves, and our readers, to be better writers. I’ll leave it to other to unveil the specifics, but I think it’s fair to say that following this blog will be a much more active experience than it has been in the past.

I, for one, am looking forward to the challenge.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Writing v. Technology

Posted on Jan 27, 2009 in Tech, Write Anything, Writing | 2 comments

Generally when you hear about writing and technology you hear how they can compliment each other. But today’s tale involves how they can sometimes be at cross purposes. Today because of the fact that I am a writer I have hit a tech wall.

You all know people like this. People who swear it’s easier to spend seven hours typing and retyping a letter on an electric typewriter because they refuse to learn how to use email. Or who refuse to get a cell phone even thought they desperately need one. You can find them easily enough by seeing who’s explaining to younger generations about how tough they had it.

Well today I have had to admit one of my technical limitations. I will never be good at texting.

In recent months I’ve been texting a lot more. Not “a lot” by the standards of anyone under the age of 30, but it’s more than I’ve done in the past. I have a moderately good phone for it. It’s a Palm with a full, if cramped, keyboard. And for someone who generally uses two fingers to type, being limited to one isn’t much of a handicap.

No, what is stopping me is my inability to use TXT Shorthand. Yes, I’m referring to the LOLs of the modern world.

I’m never ROFL. I will never BRB. I don’t VEG, but smile. And I couldn’t care less about your A/S/L. Y2K was a hysteria, not an “Aw, shucks.” And even if I do KWYM, I won’t admit it.

It’s not just an unfamiliarity with this terms that get’s in the way. Like anything else, I know I could learn it. It’s just that taking the time to learn them seems about as much fun as learning to play fingernails on a chalkboard and calling it music.

In fact when I text I seem to purposely distance myself from these abominations by testing in complete sentences and proper punctuation. I’ve even been teased for sending texts with compound sentences complete with semi-colons.

Maybe this all is the technological equivalent of complaining about walking 10 miles through the snow to school, through the snow, uphill, both ways. But if hating TXT is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

How Do You Read?

Posted on Jan 6, 2009 in Write Anything, Writing | 1 comment

It’s a misconception that the creative process is actually creative. It is, rather, a process of reorganization and performance. The input comes from everything around us—our home, our family, our friends, our neuroses, our parent’s habits, our friend’s foibles, the bedroom from our childhood, the odd accent of our 3rd grade teacher…you get the picture.

The creative process is really just the way our minds (or souls…or what have you) filter, combine, splice, recombine, marinade, and ferment the various inputs, in the attempt to create something interesting. And while we do control the output to some degree, it’s also directly affected by what we choose to put into ourselves.

By design, this blog tends to focus on the output of the creative process; nurturing the fragile writer’s ego, to help us output something we will be happy with. But we shouldn’t neglect the input side of the equation. As writers the easiest way for us to influence the input into the creative process is by choosing what we read.

How do you choose what you read? Are you one of those who carefully choose the next few books? Or do you zip off in new directions on a whim? Is your reading list guided by the random fluctuations of the local library? Do you stick to one genre, or move freely between the sections of the bookstore?

There is a idiom in writing that you should read what you want to write, so it follows that if you want to write something particular, you should read books that will nudge you in that direction.

I tend to read in mad bursts. I’ve always been a heavy reader. Several years back—out of college, but before I had a family—I kept track of my reading for one year, and it amounted to 276 books. But from the time I arrived in Raleigh until April of last year I read almost nothing. Right now I’m on a tear, averaging about a book a day. If I find an author I like, I’ll probably read everything at the bookstore by them before moving on. Often, browsing the citations of an author will send me off a wild chase through a less-traveled area of the bookstore.

This leads to a rather disorganized bookshelf. My to read shelf is crammed with wildly disparate titles. And some books that I very much want to read, will sit untouched for months as my subconscious chases down one elusive idea or another. I just counted my to read shelf—72 books.

This all leads to a wild streak in my own writing—one I have yet to tame (and truthfully, I’m not sure I want to). I will simultaneously work of a humorous sword and sorcery story, a hard sci-fi, a psychedelic story about insomnia, and a character-driven non-genre short.

So, how do you read? And how does it affect your creative output?

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

2009 New Year's Anti-Resolutions

Posted on Dec 30, 2008 in General Silliness, Write Anything, Writing | 0 comments

I know it’s not quite the new year yet, but as it’s my last post of 2008 I thought it a good time for my annual New Year’s Anti-Resolutions.

These are really more of a writing exercise than real resolutions—a way to get the new year off to a creative start. Although, if you do it right, these resolutions should be a breeze to keep.

The rules are simple:

• List ten things you resolve not to do in the upcoming year.
• Be as creative as possible.
• Post them on your blog and leave a link in your comment below.

To get thing rolling, here are…

My 2009 New Year’s Anti-Resolutions

1. I will not get my kids hooked on coffee in an attempt to keep them little by stunting their growth.
2. I will not post my daughter in a fake auction on eBay, just to see how much I could get for her.
3. I will not go to the library and put misleading, handwritten notes in the margins of books to throw off other researchers.
4. I will not propagate an internet hoax alleging that our new president’s speeches contain secret advertising messages sold to US companies as a way to help fight the recession.
5. I will not try to convince my kids to punch up their essays for school through liberal use of the elusive seventh vowel.
6. I will not advocate the use of disposable batteries to create home electroshock therapy kits.
7. I will not subject the world to the recipe for tofu chip cookies.
8. I will not preach belief in the ancient Norse Gods as a way to return to Family Values.
9. I will not teach my six-year-old how to play craps so that he can hustle his classmates to supplement his lunch allowance.
10. I will not fake disturbing conversations over my Bluetooth headset in public, as a way of determining who is eavesdropping.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Decoding Shakespeare

Posted on Dec 23, 2008 in Shakespeare, Write Anything, Writing | 1 comment

Sometime in the last few weeks, while Christmas browsing on Amazon, I discovered that one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore, has a new book coming out in a few months. Fool is the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear, told from the tale of the court Jester (a minor character is Shakespeare’s original script).

I’m a big fan of Christopher Moore, but also of Shakespeare, humorous novels, and particularly of literary parodies; so it would be difficult for any book to be more up my alley. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I’m looking forward to it, but before the books release in February, it seems I have a little homework to do.

You see, King Lear is one of the few Shakespeare plays I haven’t read. After Books like The Eyre Affair and To Say Nothing of the Dog, I’ve learned my lesson that literary parody is so much richer if you’ve actually read the work being lampooned (Also, once you’ve read the parody, it’s too late to read the original, because you know how the story unfolds).

So while at the bookstore for a last minute gift, I headed over to the Shakespeare section, for a copy of King Lear. And once there, I found an array of new versions of Shakespeare, written with the intention of making Shakespeare a little less intimidating.

Having read most of his plays, and seen many in movie and play form, I don’t find his work all that confusing. But I can remember a time when that wasn’t the case. So looking forward to a time in the not very distant future, when my kids will be looking for help understanding the Bard, I started browsing what was available.

I’d be shooting for dramatic understatement if I said that I was impressed with what I found; particularly with the recent additions by Spark Notes. Spark Notes started out with study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes, generally used as a substitute for reading whatever work they summarized.

But it seems there are more robust choices now. I picked up two books, both from Spark Notes No Fear Shakespeare collection. The first is King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare) which presents the original text of the play, coupled with a line-by-line modern day translation on the facing page. This is great for anyone who wants a little help with the text, without loosing all the structure and nuance that is layered into the Bard’s plays.

The second book is Macbeth (No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels). This version keeps the original text but presents it as a graphic novel. This one has the advantage of preserving the wonderful language of the Bard, but presenting it with some visual context—and I know seeing the play in addition to reading it was always helpful to me. Plus it comes packaged in a graphic novel format, which many kids already enjoy.

I like the fact that these newer entries into the genre are trying to help raise the reader up to Shakespeare’s level, instead of trying to dumb him down to ours.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Fiction Friday

Posted on Dec 19, 2008 in Fiction Friday, Write Anything, Writing | 8 comments

[Fiction] Friday Challenge for December 19, 2008:

Write a short scene, with exactly two characters that involves a terrible Christmas (or similar holiday) present.