Writing
My life has become a crazy, confusing, chaotic, jumble of a beautiful thing. Everything has changed in the last few months, especially me. In this nameless place, my life-raft remains and sustains writing.
Sometimes all that matters is that you get some words down, even if they’re the wrong words. Write what you want, your secret fantasies, find a way to make them real, make them make sense, build a world around them and live them. Let submerging yourself in them ease the ache of living a life you wouldn’t have built for yourself. Write what you see, what you know, what you want to know. Put every beautiful thing you’ve ever seen into your stories so others see. Explain your pain so that others can feel it, taste it, cry over it. Tell a story and sweep others away with it, take them with you and show you the place you’ve built in your head.
Really you’re doing it for yourself, but readers will thank you. Build a safe space for yourself and others, a blanket fort in the livingroom of beautiful words and thoughts and feeling.
The more we write about magic the more it becomes real, don’t let it fade away. What does your magic look like?
Ask hard questions, of yourself and others. Don’t accept the easy answer! Focus on the answers, let them linger and build something in your mind, an answer or a story. Let them build words, let them build worlds. Do not run from the hard questions because they must exist or they would have never come to you. Be brave and ask, be brave and answer.
Write because it creates. Because it creates you.
Quote of the day
This
Photo by Rob Bogaerts
“The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.” – Umberto Eco
While At Work
You know you’re a writer when: you are pissed off at work because you just heard the best conversation that needs written down, but you’re not allowed to use your phone on while clocked in!
When I Write
When I was 20 years old, I was told that some day, I would write love the way people have been trying to capture it for generations.
That statement has become one with my spirit, it isn’t discouraging or overwhelming, it is driving. It is part of the fuel that keeps me writing, that keeps me awake when there is story that need written.
I never had plans of sharing my writing. I can hear the snorts of laughter and incredulity from people who have read my blogs. Yes, I’m more used to the idea now, but writing started as my Emily Dickinson time capsule.
When he said that, it forced me into the light. 13 years later, that thought has grown. More than wanting to write something that makes people feel, I want to write something that lingers. I want 1000 years from now, when we are the ancients and someone is excavating my house, for them to find my tales and feel like the person who first read Homer felt.
I want to write something that adds to what we are as a people.
I was reading a paper for a school assignment called The Sound of Ice by Tyler Lacoma and he said:
“The stories of the Eskimo peoples have collapsed beneath us. Ka-krack. All we have are pieces. Legends and tales were passed down, orally, from family to family until they grew so fragile they now crumble to dust at a glance. It’s hard to explain how this feels, until you understand that these little fairy tales are the lifeblood of a people. Who are the Greeks without grey-eyed Athena and cunning Odysseus? Who are the Norse without grinning Loki and blustering Thor? Something…but less.”
I haven’t even finished the paper (I am so relived to finally be assigned to read something in a class I actually like so far) but I feel the weight of words that feel like a mission statement…. And I wrote a quick short story in Seraphim City, the first in months.
I should be doing homework but this is better.
Why Do You Write?
Love this
The Story
When I was very little, my grandfather would set me on his knee, open a picture book or magazine and ask me what was happening in the picture. We would sit for hours (or as it seemed to a small child) and make up stories about the political comics or what an eagle was thinking in the wildlife shot. I remember reading Anne of Green Gables years later and finally feeling like someone got my brain. There was a chapter where she said she had invented colorful back stories for all the members of her church. Yes! This was me all the time!
People always ask what I read. I don’t read much any more. People ask what I write. I haven’t written a lot or at least anything you can find. But I have a love affair with stories, sometimes loving the world the story was written and the back story more. I probably was the only person who want to know more about Hobbiton or wished there had been a chapter or two more on Diagon Alley.
There have been more disappointing news with my stories coming to life, I’ve had trouble getting together with my new artist but every time we speak he says he’s still interested in the project but with a surgery coming, everything gets to be pushed back again. Even with all that, don’t give up on me and I will continue to fight to make these stories real!
The Writing Wringer
Found a rant in my drafts. Thought it would be appropriate since my blog’s been a little quiet lately.
I call myself a writer. But in privacy. I call myself a writer but I am afraid to say it out loud. I want to give an elaborate explanation to the world that the act of arranging words into sentences – often ambiguous, seldom meaningful – is a craft. I am a writer and saying that should be simple. It’s not something I get paid for. It’s not something I’m forced to do. It’s not a full time job. It’s not a part of some religion. It’s nothing but who I am. I write, therefore I am, right?
I find that all of my writing is ingrained in a deep sense of grief, inexplicable and a continuous sorrowful feeling, tragedy and insurmountable sadness. I don’t know how to be any other way…
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Our New Artist!
Or should I say illustrator? Which sounds better? Personally I like Artist more because it speaks to more than one…..
What am I doing?! Seraphim City is happy… Gleeful to announce our new artist in residence Don Brown… Or Donald E Brown the 3rd if you go from his fancy contracting business card. I took 3 months, 20ish applicants and a few serious thoughts of quitting writing altogether before it was determined that Don had the talent needed for the stories. He is a Pittsburgh resident, father, contractor, tattoo artist and thankfully draws so that you can feel the emotion of his art. I have already seen a few of his rough sketches of his interpretation of the stories and you are going to love them!
Join me in welcoming the new team member Don and if you know anyone who needs a new tattoo in the meanwhile, give him a call!
Jill
Why I Read
Worth a read…
“Bret Lassiter,” by Marge Simon
I think writers are as necessary as doctors. Like a doctor, the writer performs the vital functions of diagnosing patients, advising them, and healing them.
Diagnosing: Through the generations, writers, like doctors, pretty much say the same things over and over, but in fresh, personal language. That’s because the human condition does not change. We must be told we are mortal, that we can and will get hurt, and that we should take better care of ourselves and loved ones.
Ernest Hemingway’s magnificent tale of war and loss in A Farewell To Arms remains one of the most powerful and vivid tales of the madness of World War I. Of course, its narrative is timeless because humanity is still being dazed and bloodied by conflict and loss. I still recall reading that book in high school, and how it shook me to the core the way it made…
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Seraphim City 