Spectatoring, a fine line

Being a writer is a non-stop adventure of self-discovery. So here’s the latest clanger:

The cat dies, everyone is heartbroken and a section of my brain detaches itself and starts chewing on… how would I write this? How do you adequately capture the depth of emotion brimming over in a kiddies heart that runs out in tears down their cheeks?

Sometimes I burn dinner. Do I scurry around scraping together Plan B? Well, eventually. But first I get sucked into putting words to the stench in the kitchen, the blackened pot. What phrases would work best to convey the head-slap I should give myself for being careless? Hmmmm….

And so each moment of life is analyzed and tagged, tucked away for the ‘write’ moment.

And sometimes I forget to just live. Feel the feelings, cry. Without the log.

So there’s the fine line… to live as a writer is to be a sponge of life, but never to the point that you become a permanent spectator. That in itself is worth writing about.

Breathe…

Feel…

Move…

Live…

Love!

WRITE

Severely flawed or just a writer?

I’ve been becoming increasingly concerned about myself. There are some character traits that I cannot shake, no matter how hard I try or pray. For one thing, I am a complete night owl. If I didn’t know better, I’d be concerned that I was harbouring latent vampire genes. If real life didn’t demand that I put in an appearance while the sun was up, I could probably go for weeks productively busy between sundown and sunrise.

I’m also obsessive over details. I get caught up like a burr in woolen socks over whatever my mind hooks onto. If there are no current WIP’s to take centrestage, then my brain will look for something to chew on – a conversation, a look, a feeling. Analyze analyze analyze… process… allow the resultant emotion to take hold of me and dictate. This is not always a good thing and I’m working on it.

I’m also somewhat anti-social. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just like being by myself. School holidays are a real challenge as the days often start with a bed full of sprogs before you are actually ready to open your eyes and continues in a flurry of mom-demanding activities until way past the time you would like to be closing them. By the time peace and quiet arrives, you are way beyond tired to do anything by surrender to the soft cooing of the duvet.

I was chatting to God this morning, and He gently flicked a switch in my brain. It all became obvious – I’m not odd, weird or degenerate… well, maybe just a little… Truth is, all the stuff above are good ingredients for a life given to churning out words. To write an article, story … novel – one needs to be consumed with details, labour alone for long hours and the best time for this is when the world is asleep.

So I’m not bizarre, just built for a purpose.

That’s a really good thing to know!

Tell me what you are built for…

Living a double life – confession

Before you start dialling the men in white coats – let me just say: I am not a secret superhero chick who runs around with my undies on the outside looking to clobber baddies. Let’s get that straight. I may turn into dragon lady when the clock strikes bedtime, but that is something between me and my kidlets and certainly not what I’m on about today.

I do lead a double life though and it’s becoming more difficult to keep my alter-ego stuffed away in the closet on the days she’s not allowed out. You see, in my normal life, I do design work for my church from home. They’re a lovely bunch, you should meet them sometime. (www.hcc.org.za) There are rhythms to this work that means for two weeks of each month, writer-Di gets banished as designer-Di gets caught up in chasing articles, photos, layout & design and print deadlines. Once the vicious deadline-monster is fed, writer-Di can come out to play.

This sounds like a workable arrangement and – believe me when I say – I am utterly thankful for a shift in my working life that has freed up some writing time and brain space. My insides are alive again! So here’s the catch:

During the two non-writing weeks, my brain accumulates ideas and possible stories like leaves in a pool on a windy day. By the time I open the closet door, the spread of things-I-could-write-about is so vast and varied I get a bit bunny in the headlights – frozen and overwhelmed. So I go make a cup of tea. And come back and look at the leaves and decide maybe another cup is in order.

I’ve tried ‘just writing a little bit’ during deadline fortnight and I’ve learnt my lesson… Bad idea. I get sucked in and swallowed up and when I look again I’ve got six hungry eyes demanding dinner and a deadline that promises sleepless nights to be fed.

So there you have it. I’m queen of the charade, master of the flip-flop. I make sure my two halves stay on seperate sides of the room and nobody gets hurt. As for all the leaves in my pool? Methinks its far better to have too many ideas than none at all.

Blow inspiration wind, blow!

Sending a leaf hurricane your way…

Word Herders. AKA writers.

I read a headline on a lampost today that said:

Woman, 100, killed in crash.

That got me thinking…

Change just 2 things, and it’s a completely different story:

100 women, die in crash.

For us writers, this is a significant fact to get to grips with.

A simple shift of word order and a swap of a single letter and the tragedy increases exponentianlly. The conflict heightens like the conquering of Kilimanjaro. Hmmm.

This is something we can use for sure.

We have the noble job of herding words… rounding them all up and pointing them in the right direction. It’s in our power to render them weak and ineffective – or put them in such an order that they rend hearts and sear minds.

Being a shepherd is not for the faint-hearted. You with me?

Multi-writing… A writers version of multi-tasking!

I’ve always been fond of the word “focus”. In fact, it was one of my eldest kiddo’s first words. My chest nearly popped with pride. My vocab is constantly littered with phrases like ‘one thing at a time’, ‘first things first’, ‘finish that before you start this’ and so on and so on ad nauseum. If I were a horse, I’d be begging for blinkers.

Life seldom dishes up what we want though… At this stage, I feel like a schizophrenic apple tree that keeps producing fruit salad.

More and more, I’ve found myself the victim of the strange malady, multi-writing. So much for focus. It’s as foreign to me as an ice cap to a surfer. Kid’s stuff, quizzes, humour pages about cats, spiritual stuff about dancing… it’s all become a big mushy stew in my synapses. If I’m not careful, I’ll have a praying zebra doing pirouettes, a cat doling out dating advice and some other written mutants raging rampant from my fingertips. *shudder*

So – do I split my brain in sections?

Or maybe assign a day a week per genre?

Do I write in order of the hungriest deadline, or follow the sweet lure of inspiration…

Multi-writing. I can’t beat it into submission, can’t shoo it away with a stick. I’m going to have to make it my best friend. Methinks that is the best way of being a fruitful writer.

So how do you guys manage?

Writing is a dangerous business.

Writing is a seriously dangerous business.

Once it’s in your blood, you’ve had it. There is no escaping that irresistable urge. Take it a step further and you’re in even more trouble… Start thinking up a specific article, a story. Before you know it, your entire brain downs tools to get involved.

Forget normal life – work deadlines, hungry children… a pot on the stove. It all fades into the background while your WIP dances centrestage in the auditorium of your mind. Until it is finished / edited / polished and emailed, it becomes the hub around which the rest of live revolves.

A novel is even worse. That puts your life on hold for months, sometimes years at a time. The characters come alive in your head with such force that instead of sleeping, you watch movies of the next chapter that kick in the moment your head hits that pillow. The world in your head is stunning in its technicolour brilliance, while reality looks on bleakly with nothing to say.

It doesn’t end once it’s emailed off to some editor / agent / publisher. Then the email addiction kicks in. It doesn’t matter that there was no response 2 minutes ago, maybe if I check again there’ll be an email waiting for me. You never know, you know.

So friends. Please tell me I’m not alone.

A slap from the soggy sock, reality

When it dawned on me that I was born to write, I thought I had something special to offer. I knew it would only be a matter of time till my books were on the shelves and I was working on number 4… 5… 6… Even my first few rejections were scalps on my belt, scars that put me in good company of all those rejected writers who are now bandied around millions of homes at bedtime.

Then I joined Twitter.

And found myself in the trenches with dozens, no… hundreds of others, just like me. Hopefuls with heads full of stories, dreaming of the day we snag the attention of an agent, a publisher. Bravely picking ourselves up after yet another No Thank You, brushing up our queries and trying again. And again. And again.

Somewhere in all this I lost my sense of special. Turns out I’m not unique or alone in my dreams. A drowing voice in a noisy sea of many fish.

Yet, you know what else I’ve discovered? Here in the slush and mud of I-wanna-be-published are some of the most amazing people I’ve ever had the joy of getting to know. Writers with immense talent, characters honed by patient (and sometimes not so patient – go on, admit it…) waiting. Wordsmiths generous with everything they’ve learnt along the way, happy to share tools, always picking each other up and plodding on cyber-hand-in-hand.

And then I got it. Just because we share the same dreams & hopes, does that make each of us any less special? Do we still have a unique contribution to make to the hallowed halls of the published? Here’s the test – dump us all in a room with an alligator and ask us to write about it. No two stories will be the same. I see the alligator through eyes coloured by a life’s worth of experiences… and so do you. The khaki green of his back that I see, is different to the shade of green you see. The possibilities are infinite.

And so are the opportunities waiting for you and I. Let’s go get ’em!

Neglect…

My dear, neglected Blog. I do still care about you. I will be back so keep a space for me, okay?

With much love,
Your Writer

Living on a seesaw

Issues – now there’s an euphamism. I’ve often wondered whether I had some bizarre multiple personality disorder. How can one soar so high through the chubby clouds of joy only to crash to the dreaded dumps of despair… all in an hour… regularly. And then do it all again within a heartbeat. Normal? I think not. It’s like living on a seesaw.

I was in my teens when I began suspecting that there was something very very wrong with me. It took a while to diagnose, but I’ve finally nailed it. Figured it all out. Doctors can do nothing for me, a psychologist would be useless. The truth that I need to make peace with is this:

I’m a writer.

There. I’ve said it. All my personality issues can be traced back to this one fact. Why? The truth is that we writers feel things more intensely than others – both the highs and the lows. We perceive colours more vividly, music moves us more easily. In fact, it doesn’t take much to send us spinning into the blank canvas of our minds, wordbrushes ready. We also have a polished aresenal of words to throw at every patch of trouble that crops up… Feeling ‘sad’ sounds a whole lot easier to deal with than ‘grovelling in the darkness of ones soul’. See what I mean?

YET! It’s this depth of feeling that stirs us to create things that really touch our readers. We move others because we ourselves have been moved. Fantastic stuff!

Until you have to live with me. Then it gets a little scary. Pity my hubby & sprogs. Add to that mix the seesaw of hope and rejection when it comes to the circus of wanting to be published, and you have a built in recipe for a complete trainsmash…

Unless… (and this is my current challenge) we can round up all the angst, the dazzling joy and craft it carefully into words, capturing the heartstopping intensity for our readers. I have a suspicion, that if we can thoroughly discharge all the excess emotion into our writing – what is left may just be stable enough to thrive in normal life. I’m going to give it a good go and see.

Would I trade this seesaw life for something less emotionally demanding? Not a chance!

Am I alone in my weirdness? I’d love to hear from you…

Slice ‘n Dice – tackling this messy thing called “life”

Don’t know about you, my life refuses to play along. No sooner do I think I’ve nailed it to the floor, when it wriggles and morphs and evades my desperate clutches… again…

I want to be organised, productive and fruitful in everything I do. I want to bounce out of bed each morning, slaughter a few giants, mow some mountains down to size and go to bed knowing the world is a better place for having me in it.

I guess there’s always next week.

You see, this week I sat with my sick kiddo cuddled on my lap at 2:30am because she was feeling rotten and couldn’t sleep. This week I sewed sequins onto my niece’s dress so she can do that modelling contest her heart is set on. This week I made lunch – five times. Dinner? Five times. This week, my car got an unscheduled internal wash courtesy a frozen lolly that got away from my 2yo. I revised collective nouns and Afrikaans tenses with my 12yo. This week I watched her play flute – alone in the middle of a huge hall, scared silly because of her new braces and cried because I was so proud I thought my chest would explode. This week I phoned my sister on the other side of the country, snorted and sobbed our way through an overdue catch up.

There’s no way I could have planned all those into my diary at the end of last week, but there is equally no way I’d call any of them wasted time. Even now I can feel the sulky glares from the have-to’s in my diary. And I’ll get to them. Even if it’s during the 10 minutes between one thing and another.

So I’m taking a page from http://www.10minutewriter.com/ . I’m going to make the minutes count. Can you kill a giant in a ten minute chunk? Probably not, but you can get a good nibble off his toes. The trick is to stay at it.

Right, these 10 min’s are up. I’m off to play taxi.

Keep nibbling, your giants will fall!