Falling for the Myths & Tripping On Our Truths

        After seeing "The Book Thief," as a movie, it struck me that we sometimes live the myths more than our truths in attempting to write. In the movie, Liesl is taught to write through describing the outdoors to Max, as narrated by Death. We see the falling snow in the beginning, are with Liesel as she steals her first book and buries her brother, but don't experience all the pain, betrayal and heartbreak that made Markus Zusak's book a must read.

        Although movies allow us the illusion of immediacy, it's in writing, painting, creating animated features, and other forms of creation that we give birth to our truths. I have a friend who can write his life, but stops short of encouraging others to experience it by trumpeting that he got a gritty short story in a recent anthology.

        One of the books I'm working on tackles both my childhood and ovarian cancer, and it makes me cry. That won't guarantee that anyone else will share that gut-wrenching visceral experience. But without the emotion that underlies good writing on all levels, the words lose their meaning.

        Getting back to the myths, although this may be a repeat of past posts, we need to understand the mechanics to ensure we don't stand in the way of finding a way to explore in words what we cannot allow our brains to process.

•  Myth: Only write what you know, can touch, see, or taste. 

•  Truth: Everything we write comes from how we perceive reality. One person's golden sun is another person's skin cancer demon. Many of the great books also owe a great deal to imagination and research.

•  Myth: Youth is an advantage.
• Truth: Age means little to nothing in writing. What matters more is knowing your audience and understanding enough about your language to break the rules when necessary to express yourself. 

•  Myth: A mentor is necessary to write effectively and publish.
•  Truth: For most writers, teachers and others can serve as muses or dictators. The Internet is a cornucopia of tutorials, publishing alternatives (including the more visual mediums), and communities of writers and artists as support groups. My only advice is write first, ask questions later.

         As always, this blog is about possibilities. It's up to each writer to determine for her or himself which myths keep them from a full writing life and what truths could let the writing flow.

Back & Still Breathing

Tonight I am going back and forth between projects for two classes, Pinterest and now a blog post long overdue.

Looking forward, I anticipate earning a master's degree in organizational learning and instructional design by December 2014. Writing, in all its freedom and promise, helped me find and pursue a dream of possibly helping others lost in school systems that teach to the middle. (For all those teachers out there who teach to the passion, not the test, please forgive the wide brush.)

Courses on adult learners reinforced what this blog has been trying to convey: We need to find what makes us happy even when we don't earn a dime off of the efforts. We live in a time when you can find tutorials on almost everything, and no one leads you to them or grades you on the efforts. It's possible to visit countries and take in almost everything but the smells, and write that into credible and lyrical prose.

My latest major project is tiling my kitchen, and attempting to build up a freelance writing business that I've neglected because my focus split between building online courses for adults and writing for pleasure.

This blog is my connection to the writer who seeks to communicate through images rather than research.

Time Outs

Heading into the new year, it struck me that the one thing that would help my personal writing is a time out. I'm talking about not doing anything considered productive. Just sitting.

We are taught to keep going. So I hear people undergoing cancer treatments say that they aren't doing enough. As if they aren't in the battle of their lives and need to rest, maybe for the first time since they learned to walk.

If you have created New Year's resolutions and the need to organize, clean or take an extra class is on that list, take a deep breath and put it aside for a moment.

Take yourself somewhere that doesn't look out on the room that needs cleaning or the papers that need organizing, or the book that needs editing. Close your eyes, if you just can't resist list making if your eyes are open. Try just five minutes and hum or count or recite poetry, if it gets your mind off everything you "must" do. This isn't meditation, just a few minutes to regroup.

I'm going to put myself into a time out after finishing this post.

If I don't get back to the blog before 2013, Happy New Year!

Tis the season...to write!

It has been awhile since the last posting, but many months of research and writing for university courses.

Now, I'm teaching myself jQuery, JavaScript, Ruby and SQL. In other words, one of the best aspects of being a writer to me is the ability to create worlds with HTML and the codes above, which make it possible to turn a vision into an immediate visual.

For now, and between class sessions, I want to talk about passions and how those translate into doing what we love instead of watching the clock and measuring our lives by the seasons.

Do we write for the pleasure or to survive? The answer matters because writing should be a passion, not a way to get through a day, a week, a month, a year, to the next vacation or holiday.

The flow touted as a creative nirvana is open to any creative individual who wants and needs to focus on an hour or a day of sheer exhilaration. It's a breath of inspiration that comes only from committing to the vision you have and following it without anticipating where it will lead. If you have ever been writing and looked up to find that three hours had passed and it felt like 15 minutes, you have tasted this creative flow.

So this season, gift yourself with an afternoon at a coffee shop, or bundle up and sit in your backyard, with a pencil, pad of paper, or your computer. If you can let yourself go,  you might rediscover a passion for writing that knows no season or even a reason for being. It exists because you do.

Think Big! Write Small...

I'm working on several projects for school that involve research, writing and visuals. Over time, this blog, which is an endeavor of the heart and mind, needs to evolve. This will be the next step in adding video, albeit a short one, and animation to the dialog.

The overall philosophy, however, is that we build our writing talent and muscle over time by taking the small and writing it into a whole. No matter how each person accomplishes this feat, it starts with a single thought, an observation, a smell that triggers an emotion, the anger or joy that is followed almost immediately by an urge to write.

As I emphasize over and over again, this process is organic. It grows from our need to communicate and to make something amorphous into something concrete. The one desire we all share is to write, but how we get there is uniquely styled and yet familiar.

First comes the thought, the feeling, the experience... It starts with the smallest breath of inspiration.

Finding Our Way Home

I'm not talking about a home page, more that writing is where my heart is for the long haul.

On any given day, I'm thinking about a character, closing my eyes in a movie theater to picture another scene triggered by the sound effects and finding ways to look at a different story angle spurred by an encounter with family or strangers.

It is surprising at times what triggers the urge to follow a story line to its quite unnatural end, if that is where the whim takes me. Fortunately, as writers we find ourselves constantly moved by events both seen and imagined.

This pull away from the mundane is the true charm of writing, even when we write about everyday feelings or events. Just as each of us learns in our own way, we also put together words based on that unique styling we call our own.

Again, our home as writers lies in the writing inspiration we wrap ourselves in at any given moment.