Some Reading
and a video…
I am totally wiped out after my Covid booster, a visit to the optician and then the flu jab, so my concentration hasn’t been up to much in the last week.
So apologies for not writing a post for you today, and instead, here’s some stuff I’ve read in the last week which you also might find helpful or enjoy.
First, this post from Sam Brightwell at Taking Tea with the Tao
To Expand Your Capacity for Joy, Be Willing to Live In Squalor
Sam makes a great point about priorities - and although having a chronic illness, I’ve understood this for some time, I always need reminding.
There are so many little maintenance jobs in life which can easily occupy all of our time.
But if you have a goal or intention to create something, to be creative at all, you have to limit your busy work, and protect clear blocks of time for doing your creative thing.
As women, it’s super-hard to do this. Most women I know are caretakers and nurturers and they willingly put other people’s needs before their own. It’s the kind of work we often don’t have any choice about doing, like looking after elderly parents.
Protecting time for your creative work is like building a muscle by working out. At first it’s challenging. You don’t believe you’re going to manage it. But as you begin to put a few boundaries in place around the demands that encompass life, it begins to get easier.
Sam Brightwell
On Querying
As I am steeling myself to start submitting novel 3 to agents in the very near future, I found this video from agent Juliet Mushens very helpful.
A Different Approach?
And finally this from Austen Kleon - The Art of Creating from Scraps
“Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing — I can really only speak to writing here — always, always only starts out as shit: an infant on monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.”
David Rakoff in Half Empty
I do love the metaphor there, taken from cooking - although as a reasonably adventurous cook I am astonished that I can still sometimes take perfectly wonderful ingredients, all of which I love, and create a meal which is pretty much inedible - or as my beloved has been known to describe such meals - ‘nutritionally adequate.’
Kleon quotes this passage from Rakoff, and adds it to the evidence of the importance of shitty first drafts.
But then he goes on to say that he loves collage because he can just keep on layering scraps until he creates an image that pleases him.
I started wondering if it might actually be possible to do something similar in writing - and then remembered watching a webinar where Susannah Clarke described the writing process she used when creating Piranesi (which I wrote about here).
It was a process forced upon her by her ill health and particularly the symptom of brain fog - and it did indeed create an excellent multi-layered finished novel.
It’s the sort of approach which might work well for someone considering NaNoWriMo this year… and could also be a good way to look at putting together and outline.
So a few things to think about
Ann
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