Tag Archives: Writing

Inspiration Monday: Telling Details

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sussex church

The Zen of Details

At the moment, I am fascinated by ‘telling details’.

At our writers’ group last week, my friend read out the first pages of her novel, a description of a little girl watching her mother as she used a sewing machine to make a new dress for her little girl.  It took me right back to my childhood, watching my own mother labour over the sewing machine.

It was the little details that transported me.  The jar of spare buttons which the little girl was allowed to play with.  The thunk of the presser foot being let down onto the fabric.  The smell of sewing machine oil and new cloth, unwashed, still fusty from the haberdashery.

I have re-ignited my enthusiasm for my writer’s notebook with these details.  Using the little components of life.  Scribbling them down when I notice them.

The way the local cockerel sounds like he has a sore throat when he crows.

My husband saying ‘Marriage is about sharing’ when he farts.

The dust that builds up in the corners of the treads on the stairs, and how gritty it is.

Puffs of pollen falling off the sunflowers I have rescued from the storm-lashed garden, falling like yellow flour on the tabletop under the vase, powdering a biro that had been abandoned there.

These are the little glimpses of our everyday life that we mostly ignore, but when someone draws our attention to them in prose or art, they enrich our perception, throng our minds with memories, ground us in the present in a way nothing else can.

At the moment I am working on a series of short fanfics that are grounded in these details.  I am trying to use a single detail to spark each story.  Each story then contributes to a wider portrait of a relationship.  This means collecting details. So here I am with my notebook, going back to the very beginning of my writing career, ‘back to basics’ if you like, collecting scraps for here and there and jotting them down.  I feel like a mosaicist building up a mural made of broken pots.

And it is delicious.

 Creative Exercise:  Lists

Unearth your notebook, if you haven’t been using it much recently.  If you are an artist, grab your sketchbook.  Now open your mind.  Start noticing things.  It takes practise to be sufficiently present in life to recognise the tiny details that contribute to the big picture of shared experience, but once you start, you will find them coming thick and fast.

  • Walk around the house and look at the piles of stuff that have built up.  Write down where they are.  Make a list of what is in them.
  • When you visit the bathroom at a friend’s house, look at their lotions and potions.  Make a list to jot down later.  What do the bottles and jars tell you about their life and health?  If you draw, make a sketch of them, or if it’s easier, draw the contents of your own medicine cabinet.
  • Standing in the queue for the checkout, look in other people’s baskets.  What are they buying?  Another list.  What does this say about them?  Can you make a still life that communicates what they are eating, who they are eating it with, and why?

Open your eyes wide.  Your mind is constantly sifting sensory input, picking out things that may or may not be important.  Usually, you toss most of your perceptions aside.  Instead, write down as many as you can.  Use them later in your work.

Happy Creating,

EF

Smorgesbord

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sleep sketchI usually try to post on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but this week’s Wednesday post got missed because I was ill.  I’m still ill, but my brain is slightly clearer today and I am giving myself to thinking time.

Thinking about future posts for this blog.  Thinking about writing and notebooking.  Thinking about art.  Thinking about clearing space in my life for more creativity.  Its a luxury I have to lie in bed and consider which direction I am going in creatively, and I recognise that.  Few people get that option.  I may be feeling terrible, but I’m enormously grateful I can use this time to be present with my work.

I thought I’d share a few things I have been mulling over with you.

Here are the thoughts of Elmore Leonard on writing, an enormous inspiration.

Here is Stephen King, saying illuminating things about both ‘The Shining’ and about the attitude of critics, something I really needed to hear this week.

Talking about critics, Jack Vettriano has been savaged by the art establishment over the years, but now he’s having a retrospective at the Kelvingrove.  Oh, the irony!  (And lets just remind ourselves that this man is self-taught, which may be why critics hate him so much.)

If you are interested in art, check out this site.  I love its brightness and enthusiasm.

I want to do this course next.

And to end, a little light reading.  I’m pursuing a new project of short stories and vignettes which explore life inside an established relationship through fanfiction.  The series is called ‘Geography of a Shared Life’.  You can read my latest piece here at A03, and here at FF.net.

Happy creating,

EF

Do you have a Creative Vision?

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This man has a vision (click on the link below and watch the film clip):

Portraits of St Davids residents

He knows what his project is.  He knows what he is after.  He is going for it.  The breadth of his vision, as well as the beauty of it, and of his work, is dazzling.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Vision over recent days.  Wondering what I am really after, what I am trying to achieve.  I can’t just be driven by fear anymore.

My fear is that I will die without getting all these pictures out of my head and into the world so that other people can enjoy them as much as I do.  I find the inside of my imagination highly entertaining, and I want to share it.  Does that sound vain?  I don’t know.  All I know is that I feel compelled to transmit the pictures in my head.

I watched the film, ‘The Reader’ the other night, based on the magnificent book by Bernhard Schlink.  It was wonderful.  It stirred up so many complicated and conflicting feelings inside me.  It is a true tragedy in the Greek style, a man forced to face the truth about the love of his life, and her part in unspeakable acts.  So much love.  So much horror.  This story is designed to spur debate about the morality of our actions, about good and evil, about the excuses people give, about love and literature and illiteracy and shame.  You could call it a romance, but thats only a tiny part of the story.  Schlink’s genius is to use romance as the vehicle to consider more difficult moral problems.

After the film had ended, I was getting ready for bed, cleaning my teeth and staring into the mirror, as I mulled over the storm of feelings going on under my ribs.  And I realised something.

This is exactly what I want my readers to feel when they finish reading one of my stories.

Complicated emotions.  The vast, unquenchable yearning of love.  The conflict of being caught in morally complex situations.  The struggle for answers.  And that iresistable siren call of need that drives us towards one another, even when we understand that pain can be the only result.

Is this too big a vision for someone of my talents?  I’m not saying I want to be Dickens, after all.  I guess I am aiming higher than that, in a way.  These issues seem to me to be at the core of our existence as emotional beings.  We struggle with them, just as we struggle with the philosopical questions of why we are here, and whether there is a God.  This is what I want to examine with my writing.

So its more than just getting the pictures out of my head and onto the page.  It is observing the emotions that make us love, too.  Call me a hopeless romantic, but that is what I am interested in, and I think I always have been.  I just never really thought consciously about it before.

I know what I’m trying to achieve now.  The thought has given me purpose.  All I have to do is go out and do it.

Do you have a vision for your creative work?  Maybe its worth thinking about.

Happy Creating,

EF

Tips on Writing a Eulogy (Because you never know when you might need to.)

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cropped rosesToday’s post is something of a reactive one.

A friend emailed.  He told me that another friend had died suddenly, unexpectedly.  He was in his forties.  My friend has been asked to give the eulogy at his funeral.

‘What do I do?  Where do I start?  You’re the writer, you tell me.’

As it happens, I have written a eulogy myself.  I wanted to give a speech at my step-father’s funeral.  I wanted to talk about how much he meant to me.  In the end, because of family circumstances, this became impossible, so instead I read his favourite poem and luckily, that summed up a lot of what I wanted to say about him anyway.  I still have the speech I wrote, tucked away somewhere.

You never know when you might be called upon to give such a speech.  Unexpected deaths happen all the time, and even if the death is expected, it’s still a tough call when you are asked by the chief mourner to stand up and ‘say a few words’.  That makes it sound so easy, doesn’t it, that phrase?  Like you can just burble out the right thing off the top of your head.  No one does that.  You have to plan.  Here’s a handle on where to start:

  • Think of a list of adjectives that best describe the deceased as you knew them.  Don’t go overboard trying to make a huge list.  Four or five will do.
  • Now think of memories of them which illustrate that quality.  Maybe your adjective is ‘kind’, and the memory might be an occasion when they sat up with you all night after a bad breakup, not really saying anything much, just listening to your sorrow and comforting you with their presence and understanding.  Maybe ‘talented’ is the word, and the memory is of going to hear the premiere of their latest musical composition at a local concert hall.  Perhaps ‘inept’ is the word, and your memory is of them falling into the river whilst trying to row a boat and impress everyone on the bank!
  • Don’t choose too many words and memories.  People at a funeral can’t sit through too much.  Try three, and see if that gives you an overall picture of what meant most to you about the person.
  • Think carefully about the situation.  If someone has died young, or without fulfilling their potential, the audience might appreciate hearing of some lesson the deceased taught you that may serve as evidence of a legacy.
  • People don’t like to hear ill of the dead.  Don’t tell the mourners about the horrendously blue best man’s speech he gave at your wedding, or how she borrowed your best dress and left lipstick stains all over the hem.  They don’t want to hear the small things any more than they want to hear that the deceased was a child-murderer or cheated on their spouse.  We deify the dead, and only get angry at their shortcomings much later in the grieving process.
  • If you are angry at the deceased, reflect on your anger carefully before you give your speech.  If you don’t, your words might come across as bitter.
  • Read your speech out aloud and practise it.  Show it to sympathetic friends who you trust to say ‘you can’t say that!’, or ‘That’s perfect!’
  • Don’t ramble on.  Keep your speech short and to the point.
  • Be fond, and include a gently amusing anecdote if you can.  This diffuses tension and helps mourners think of the happier times.
  • Expect to have a rollercoaster of feelings on the day.  You may have trouble speaking at all without weeping.  Or you may experience a sense of enormous calm descend on you, and give an Oscar-worthy performance.  Or more likely, a bit of both.  Either way, don’t judge yourself.
  • Always try to end on a positive note, emphasising some way in which the deceased enriched the world with their presence, however brief.

That’s a few ideas off the top of my head.  I hope that this is not something you are facing right now. If you are, please be assured you have my deepest sympathies.  If you have written a eulogy yourself and have some tips, do please share them in the comments section.

This post was written with fondest love to Mad Mark the Maniac,

EF

The Wild Donkeys: A Strategy for Choosing a Creative Project

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donkey

‘So, how’s the writing going?’

This from a man who is one of the Blessed Few.  A writer whose work was picked up by an agent straight from the much garlanded MA in Creative Writing at the Unversity of East Anglia.  Alumni include Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain, Hanif Kureshi, Tracey Chevalier and, well, you get the picture.  He is in glittering company.

He is also a really lovely man and a dear friend who takes a genuine interest in my work, so I rein in the envy monster and give him the polite and honest answer.

‘Fine.  Well, actually, I’m a bit stuck.’

‘Creative block?’

‘No, too many ideas.  I don’t know where to start.’

‘You should be writing a novel, you know.  I read some of your Sherlock stuff the other day.  It’s really good.’

‘Thank you.  I’ve written seven novels so far.  Writing a novel isn’t the hard part.  Its choosing which one to write that’s difficult.’

‘Well, just pick one and start.’

I love men.  Everything seems so easy to them.  And they are so good at handing out really practical advice.  (You’ll also notice that I don’t ask him how his novel is going.  That’s because I know.  I recognise that pained look.  I’ve seen it in the mirror too many times.)

OK, I know its good advice.  The right advice.

As Leonie Dawson puts it, I need to choose a wild donkey and ride the shit out of it till its done.

Every writer has a place where they habitually get stuck.  A psychological Marianas Trench on the road to getting their work into the readers’ hands, one that they tumble into every time.  For some it is grinding the words out, which for them is like sweating blood.  For others, it is coming up with the idea in the first place.  Some worry when they get to the middle because that’s always where they get bogged down, and some will spend ten years writing the first page.  We all have our Achilles’ heel.

For me, its choosing which idea to stick with.

So I have decided to take September off.  Not from writing; quite the opposite, in fact.  No, I’m taking the month off from worrying which novel to concentrate on.  I’m in a physically stuck place right now, and I need to concentrate on my health, on getting my body moving again after a summer of boom and bust energy.  I’m looking to create a smooth, even flow in my life, in my health, and my art.  I have faith that if I can manage to attain a relative level of consistency in my body, the answer will come to me.  Yes, maybe that sounds mad, but its just how my creative process works.

And in the meantime, I’m refreshing my theory knowledge, reading, working on my notebooking, and bashing out some major fanfiction.  I’m easily distracted, and having short stories and novellas on the go is a great way to handle that.  But sooner or later, I want to create something major.  Something big.  Something that shows both me and you, dear Reader, what I can really do.

Happy creating,

EF

The Only Two Books a Writer Needs (Part 2)

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BookshelfIn the last post, I waxed lyrical about why you need a good dictionary on your bookself.  Have it to hand when you are reading.  Reading is an act of Input that every writer needs to undertake.  And no, its not stealing.  Its looking for inspiration, in the same way that artists study and copy the Old Masters in order to improve.  Reading helps you learn what works and what doesn’t, but more on that another day.

So that’s the Input.  What about the Output?  This is where the next book comes in – the writing part.

The Thesaurus

If you aren’t familiar with thesauri, my lovely Chambers Dictionary describes them as:

“…a book with systematically arranged lists of words and their synonyms, antonyms etc, a word-finder; a treasury.”

If you are serious about making your writing more vivid, you’ll need a Thesaurus.  I was introduced to Roget’s Thesaurus, probably the most famous thesaurus, while still at school, but the technique of using it is cumbersome and it completely foxed me.

Now I use a very nice, fat Penguin Thesaurus, which is alphabetical, and quite thorough enough to meet my needs.  I keep my Roget in reserve, just in case.  And yes, I have finally worked out how to use it properly, but it’s a pain, so I keep things simple.

The nice thing about a thesaurus is that it helps when you can’t think of a word (which for me is a lot!), or are looking for a more sumptuous way of explaining something.  You want a word like ‘magician’, for instance, but are looking for something a bit more, well, exotic.  Dip into your ‘thes’ and you will find:

Sorcerer, wizard, warlock, sorceress, witch, enchantress, necromancer, thaumaturge, miracle-worker.

Mmmm.  Never heard of thaumaturge before!  That’s pretty exotic, as exotic goes.  See what I mean?  Grab yourself a thesaurus and have a moodle about within its pages.  Yes, its perhaps just another way of defining words, but it defines around them too, enriching them in unexpected ways.  It will help you widen your vocabulary but also makes your stories more sumptuous.  As with anything rich, however, don’t go overboard.  Too much cream can make you sick.  Too many adjectives and adverbs (especially) will put your reader off completely.  Its a case of using the right word, not lots and lots of words.  Be vivid, not verbose.

The Others

Yes, there are other reference books I rely on on a regular basis.  I wouldn’t be without my Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, for example.  Or The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Chambers Biographical Dictionary.  All of them are fascinating and deeply useful – and not just when you are wrestling with a crossword!  But they are not what I could call ‘necessary’.

A dictionary and thesaurus are as necessary to a writer as a saw and chisel are to a carpenter. On a scale of need, they are prerequisites for the writing life.

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, I have lots of books about writing.  I promise I will tell you about them in another post.  In the meantime, ferret out a good dictionary and thesaurus and keep them close at hand.  Look up any word you don’t recognise, and also those that you think you know what they mean, but have a lingering doubt about whether you are right.  Write down the ones you really love, and use them.    I promise you’ll have no regrets.

Happy wording,

EF

The Only Two Books A Writer Needs (Part 1)

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BookshelfThe bookshelf by my desk

It’s that ‘Back to School’ time of year, when I can’t walk past a stationery shop without nearly having a heart attack.  Every time I go to Staples, I feel like I want to rip all the notebooks off the shelves and writhe about in them like an ecstatic horse.  The Martha Stewart Home Office line gives me palpitations.

But there isn’t enough money to buy everything I want, and besides, I have cupboards full of notebooks and pens already – how many does a writer really need?

Need is not something we really think about much these days.  It is not a First World problem, because most of have enough to meet our primary needs, and at that point, the word morphs into that seductive, purple velvet lined entity that is ‘Want’.

Want becomes most acute for me when I am in a book shop.  It is very hard to avoid the conviction that that my life will not be complete until I have the latest edition of wotsit, or that Benedict Cumberbatch will fall in love with me, if only I buy that particular tome.  I’m too much the magpie.  I like the latest sparkling things.  It’s a terrible affliction.

My new office space, and all the decluttering that went with it, has focussed my mind on this issue.  How many books does a writer really need?  And more to the point, how many books on writing does a writer really need?

The truth is, horrible though it may be, I don’t really need every copy of every book about writing that comes out.  I can get them from the library if I want them.  I only really need two books:

The Dictionary

In my opinion, no house or building, or even tent, is complete without a dictionary.  A reasonable one.  I’m not saying you have to go out and buy the full length Oxford English Dictionary, which runs to an insane number of volumes, and which only public institutions and Russian oligarchs are probably capable of affording.  You don’t even have to buy the two-volume Shorter version, which is still prohibitively expensive.  Lets face it, you could probably look up the more obscure words that these monsters contain online.

But you need a dictionary.

A dictionary is your friend.  A dictionary provides meaning in the world.  It provides knowledge.  It makes sense.  Even if English is your mother tongue, and you think you know everything it has to offer, believe me, there will always be a seven letter word beginning with L that turns out to be a seventeenth Hungarian stomach pump that you never knew existed.  That’s why I love the English language.  In all its glory, it is like an endless adventure through the Amazon jungle, where thrilling new words are always lurking under unexpected leaves.  And you never know when they might pop up.

Best to have a dictionary close at hand when you are reading.  You never know.  (You wouldn’t believe the number of times my husband has lost his temper with me in bed at night, when I have been reading my bedtime novel and found a word I don’t know – and asked him what it meant.  He’s got a PhD, and wields words like ‘hermeneutics’ on a daily basis, so I assume he knows everything.  He gets a bit short-tempered when asked about seventeenth century Hungarian stomach pumps when he’s sleepy!)

If you are intent on expanding your vocabulary, as I am, keep a little notebook too, to scribble down new words and meanings so that you remember them.

I have a very nice Chambers Dictionary, which my mother-in-law gave me.  It was second hand, but the meanings it gives are accessible, and it has a wide enough variety of words to satisfy my needs at the moment.  It is also a chunky 5.5cm thick, with nice fine paper, and so is a really satisfying thing to handle too.  You can pick up reasonable dictionaries in stationers and book shops this time of year at great ‘Back to School’ prices, but second hand bookshops and charity shops are always a good bet too, because dictionaries are slow to go out of date, and the basics will always be of use.

(Some readers will be bouncing around in their seats at this point, and crying the praises of online and digital dictionaries.  Yes, I get that they are useful, but they do not have the browsing dimension that real books do, and therefore I still recommend you get the hard copy.)

I originally wrote this as one post, but it got so big I decided to split it.  I think it words better that way, and I hope you agree!  So the next post, on Friday, will be about the second crucial book you need to have on your bookshelf.  The thesaurus.

Meanwhile, Happy wording,

EF

On Process: Too Many Ideas, Too Little Time

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Usually creative people complain about creative block.  I don’t.  For the most part, I have the opposite problem.  Too many ideas.  Not enough time to execute them.  I have this constant fear that I shall die suddenly without sharing all the pictures in my head.  That would be a great incentive to work if it weren’t for the fact that my poor health is a huge brake on my capacity to work.

And then there is the fact that I have the mind of a butterfly.

The Buddhist masters often refer to the concept of ‘Monkey Mind’.  This is what your mind does when you try to meditate, and your thoughts bounce around like gibbons, and feel impossible to control.

Welcome to my world.

Actually, that is not entirely true.  I can be deeply committed to one idea for a short period of time.  The most I can normally manage is about three months.  Then I bounce off to find another sparkly thing.  Most of the time, I come back.  Occasionally, I manage to actually finish something.  Occasionally it gets shelved for good, or the idea gets incorporated into something new, because its too good to waste.

I’ve been socialising a lot this summer, and people have repeatedly asked me the same questions:

‘How’s the writing going?  What are you working on at the moment?’

Below is the honest answer (i.e. the one I don’t give nice people at parties because its too complicated to explain, especially if they’ve never met me before.)

The things I am currently working on:

  • A series of short stories about John and Sherlock in a stable relationship
  • Finishing a work about Sherlock’s pursuit of public sexual humiliation because of his guilt about his faked suicide.
  • A novella about a Viking Princess
  • My novel about Victorian sexuality, currently titled ‘The Butler Did It’ (Please could somebody suggest a better title, I’m getting desperate!)
  • My journaling ebook

Other ideas I have churning about in my head include:

  •  A possible novella about a young man getting over the death of his male lover in a road accident
  • A short story based on a line from a deliciously naughty Johnlock fanfic I read the other day, The Red Box by Cleo2012
  • The third Evenlode novel (vampire gangsters ahoy!)
  • A Loki fanfic set after the end of Thor 1

(And this is before I have even begun to tell you about the paintings I want to make…)

I was explaining this smorgasbord to a friend, and she said ‘How on earth do you handle all that?’

The answer is, ‘I have no idea.’

I suppose I have a good memory, but the older I get, the more I am going to need to employ my writing notebooks to record all this.  The truth is that ideas are far easier to come by for me than the wherewithal to execute them.  And there just isn’t enough time in my day to get all this done, and execute my duties as wife, friend, aunt, guidemother, part-time carer to elderly, sick in-laws etc etc. and still protect my health.

Triage is necessary.

I just have to grab one sparkly thing and run with it for as long as I can.  I have to choose the most important thing to me at the time.

Most creative people complain about creative block, but the other side of the coin is equally disabling, and I know for a fact I am not the only one who experiences this problem.  Choosing which is the best idea to work on.

If you have any ideas on how best to deal with idea overspill, please let me know in the Replies section.  I’d love to know what you do.

Happy Creating,

EF

On Cabbages and Trombones – Making Language Strange

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The expression ‘cabbages and trombones’ was one used by the poet Ian Macmillan at a recording of a poetry radio show which I went to see with a friend a while back, and the phrase stuck with me.  He was talking about how poets seek to make language strange and startling, how they seek to use it to weave a rich tapestry of image and idea.  That, after all, is the purpose of poetry, to enrich our experience of life with pattern and syllable.

The concept chimed with me again when my husband was wrestling with a writing problem of his own.  Besides being an academic, he runs an online whisky company, and occasionally works as a whisky writer.  He had been asked to contribute reviews of a variety of whiskies for this book.  Little bottles duly began to arrive in the post every morning, and off he went at a rate of three or so per evening.  Everything was fine for the first thirty tests or so.  But then he began to run out of descriptors.  Just how many new adjectives can you come up with when you’ve got 60 whiskies to review?  They can’t all taste of TCP or green jelly babies.  Can each review really be different from the last?

And today, as I busy myself with planning my new writing schedule, and working on new stories, it has come back again.

Experts say those with a college education generally have about 12,000-17,000 words in their vocabulary, but as writers we need to have far more and we need to use them in unusual and riveting ways.  I realise that I have dropped into the habit of reading very little but fanfiction, and if you are a fanfiction reader yourself, you will know that there are a lot of linguistic ruts involved.  Favourite words include laving, ravishing, carding (of luxuriant hair), trembling and so on.  No fanfic is complete without somebody emitting ‘ragged breath’.  If you have read enough of these, you begin to spot the clichés.  If you read too many, they scream out of the screen at you.  (I hold my hands up and say I am as guilty as any of falling into this trap!)

The trouble is that if you don’t read more widely than just what other people write on the internet, your vocabulary stays static.  This is what mine has been doing.  Now I am writing again on a daily basis, I have realised how stagnant my linguistic skills have become.  Of course, its not just words, but metaphors and similes.  I need to polish up my style, make it strange and new.  I need to expand my consumption, and open my mind.

 WARNING:  Incoming Master Plan for Expanding Lingustic Skills:

I’m taking a two-pronged attack:

  1. Widen my reading
  2. Use my notebook at all times

I’ve been reading just fanfics and nonfiction all summer, and its been a long time since I actually finished a proper novel.  You can’t be a writer if you don’t read.  Mostly I just read at bed time, a few paragraphs to help me drift off.  But I need to take Stephen King’s sage advice:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Stephen King, “On Writing”,

Hodder and Stoughton (2000) p164

 Of course, I’ve got a whole pile of books lying around, waiting to be ploughed through.  Top of the pile are ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern, and ‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan.  I don’t especially like McEwan, but I am determined not to let this bloody book defeat me.  It’s the third time I’ve tried to read it, after all, and I refuse to be beaten!

I have also decided to follow Ian Macmillan’s advice.  Poetry is the way to go.  I’m not a reader of poetry – I’ve barely read any since my degree – but if you want to know about making language strange, go to the experts.  I went to the library yesterday and got out two collections, one of Ted Hughes, and one of Simon Armitage, because I had heard of them.  I’ll let you know if it works.

The second prong (I love that word, don’t you?) is more nebulous.  Out comes my little red Moleskine.  I need to think about how I am going to get the ball rolling on this particular aspect, but just jotting down a few ideas on what the weather feels like, smells like, tastes like, or overheard conversations, or the colours of shadows, might be a good start.  Again, I’ll let you know how I get on.

In the meantime, here’s to cabbages and trombones.  And whisky that tastes of TCP and green jelly babies.  Both of which have taught me a lot about writing.

(Incidentally, you may like to know that I am currently publishing a new fanfic called ‘A Shadow of His Former Self’.  You can find it here at A03, and here at Fanfiction.net.  I hope it takes your fancy.)

Happy creating,

EF

The Need for Habit

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calendarI’m crabby.  It’s been two days, and I’m not fit to know.  This should not be happening.  I’ve had a lovely holiday, nearly two weeks with the Husband at home, sunshine, dear friends and family visiting, trips to the beach and great food.  Yesterday, even the Husband noticed I was out of sorts, which is saying something!

This morning I was fed up to the back teeth with myself.  I really hate feeling like this.  Stale.  I sat down with my journal and worked it out.  What is it that is making me so grumpy?

Turns out, it’s the very thing that should be making me happy.  My holiday.

The critical mass of creativity has now built up to such an extent that I need to get back to work.  Holidays are great, and important times for reflection and rest.  Don’t get me wrong.  But I’m ready to get back to it now.

What I’ve been saying all along is true.  You need the Habit of Art.

Well, I need it, in any case.

I need to get back into my routine.  I need the Husband to go back to work so I can have the house to myself.  I need my thinking time, my moodling time, and I can’t have that with someone else in the house, no matter how much I love them (and I do), because my first reflex is always to consider them first, and put myself and my art second.  Even inside my head.  I find myself resenting the people I love, and my family and friendship commitments, if I don’t have this mental and creative space.  My well has been filled, my Muse is ready to let rip, and I am bubbling with ideas.  What I need is the time and space to get to it.

I need my routine back.

I can’t do this yet.  I’ve a bunch of things to get through first.  Lots of socialising with dear friends.  There will be more trips to the beach, and strawberries to eat in the garden in the sun.  My Muse can get as grumpy as she likes, but I can’t let her out just yet.

It’s not long now, though.

And it’s great to know, thanks to my journal, that it’s not the fact that I have run out of ideas that is making me a bad-tempered cow.  My creative juices haven’t run stale.  It’s just that there is no space right now to get the words or paint on the page.  I must be patient.  The time will come.  I have had my rest, refilled the well, and now I am revving at the start of this new race!

And then, come the green light, and Hooray for the Habit of Art!

Happy creating and holidaying, whichever you are doing,

EF