This life is more than just a read through. – Red Hot Chili Peppers, Can’t Stop
Riverwalk, San Antonio, Texas
Chili Pepper
Prickly Pear
“Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the KingdomBetween the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very longBetween the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the KingdomFor Thine is
Life is
For Thine is theThis is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
—-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Prickly Pear in bloom
The Alamo
San Antonio, Texas
Daily Writing Tip 76 of 100, Anger is Fuel
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Anger is Fuel
Source – The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Recovering a Sense of Power
AngerAnger is fuel. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards. But we are nice people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but listen to it.
Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.
Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.
If anger is fuel, then why am I tired all the time.
Why I’m Sneezing So Much
“You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
You belong with your love on your arm
You belong somewhere you feel free”
― Tom Petty
(click to enlarge)
Baby Ducks
“Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent’s Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?”
― Nick Hornby, About a Boy
Huffhines Park
Richardsion, Texas
(click to enlarge)
I have a list of goals that I work towards. One of those goals was to buy a new camera. My old one was good, but getting long in the tooth. There have been a lot of advances in sensor technology in the last few years. I have been saving since the middle of 2015 and finally crabbed together enough to buy a Nikon D3300 (thanks to everyone that helped).
Learning to use a new camera, especially a new DSLR, is more of a daunting task than you would think. Everything becomes so instinctive it’s like starting out all over again. The sharper images in the new camera are a lot less forgiving – every error is magnified.
So I take bags of old moldy bread out to the ponds and creek behind my house to attract the semi-wild life there and practice. I’ll have more than a few photos of ducks for a while.
Sorry.
Taps
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Beer Taps at The Underpass, Dallas, Texas
The Modern Family
And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokeness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Kyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas
Daily Writing Tip 75 of 100, Put Your Heart on the Page
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Put Your Heart on the Page
Source – What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter
Too many writers avoid their own strongest feelings because they are afraid of them, or because they are afraid of being sentimental. Yet these are the very things that will make beginning work ring true and affect us. Your stories have to matter to you the writer before they can matter to the reader; your story has to affect you, before it can affect us.
….The Exercise
Make a notebook entry on an early childhood event that made you cry or terrified you, or that made you weak with shame or triumphant with revenge. Then write a story about that event. Take us back to those traumatic times, relive them for us through your story in such a way so as to make your experience ours.
The Objective
To learn to identify events in your life that are still capable of making you laugh and cry. If you can capture these emotions and put them on paper, chances are you will also make your readers laugh and cry as well.
It takes courage to do this. When the letters of strong old truth start the fall onto the page, the Resistance wells up and is strong. This must be fought through. This fight is the essence of living a worthwhile life.
Daily Writing Tip 74 of 100, Let My Fears Rest Where They Are
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Let My Fears Rest Where They Are
Source – Walking on Alligators, A Book of Meditations For Writers by Susan Shaughnessy
If we wait until the fear of writing goes away, we will never write.
If we wait until the fear of self-exposure goes away, we will never be published.
If we wait until the fear of failure can be somehow managed, he will never attempt anything.
If we wait until the fear of being laughed at goes away, we will indeed stall out. Studies have shown that children’s greatest fear is ridicule – not the dark, not being lost, but instead the embarrassment of being mocked.
All these fears are valid. They have deep roots in the truth. If you write, you will court failure. If you publish, you will court exposure. These fears will never be banished. But perhaps they can be harnessed.
More important is that by writing you will encounter inner reserves you never dreamed up – stores of serenity, courage, and confidence.
These treasures will be doled out to you little by little, as you come to write each day.
Today, I’ll let my fears rest where they are. I will write, and by writing I will discover my inner resources.
This is very good advice and I certainly hope that it is true.
Daily Writing Tip 73 of 100, Don’t Stop Too Soon
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Don’t Stop Too Soon
Source – The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham
Good stories result from the writer’s taking a few days off to rest, then returning to the fray to take one more cautious and caring look at the “finished” work.
Revise, revise and be ready to revise again. After all the work you’ve done, it would be tragic, wouldn’t it, if you stopped a day or a month away from making those final adjustments which could make all the difference in the product’s acceptability?
Writing isn’t writing – editing is writing. First drafts are just pouring letters onto paper. It’s the revision where the real story – the one hiding in your unconscious mind begins to get teased out.
It is so hard, though.
Bill Chance 