Snippets Captured in My Moleskine

Leave a comment

An homage of sorts to my Moleskine notebook and the random snippets I am enabled to scribble into it, so quickly at times, that I don’t remember the context of said snippets. Oh well.

April 23, 2009: The princess better join a gym, buy a gun, finish college, get that promotion and save herself because no one is riding to the rescue. (I don’t remember where I culled this from…)

“The muse cannot resist a working writer.” Bradbury

April 26, 2009: Moments that are casual make the most indelible imprints in our minds. I think that’s why death and trauma make such an impact on our psyche. We don’t ever plan on dying, or prepare ourselves for a death, at least not normally. It’s usually during those everyday moments when the mind is open and unguarded that the stamp of death sears itself in the witness’s brain. Ever remembered, never forgotten. (I wonder what happened to have prompted me to write this?)

 

What Music Inspires…

1 Comment
"These Black Lines"

Image by shifty eyes. via Flickr

I love to work out with great music; I feel that a lot of times, the right music helps to increase my focus, intensity, and overall determination to finish the task at hand.  So it is with my writing.

Overall, I have different types of music for different types of writing.  For example, my “wake up, morning writing” is set to Snow Patrol and Dashboard Confessional.  I just think it’s amusing that my current writing project relies heavily on my Disturbed station on Pandora Radio.

So, just for fun…the following is on heavy rotation on my Pandora Radio “Disturbed Station”:

Disturbed: “The Game”; “Indestructible”; “Divide”; “Another Way to Die”; “Fear”; “Pain Redefined”

Linkin Park: “Given Up”; “Breaking the Habit”; “Hit the Floor”; “Bleed it Out”

Shinedown: “Fly from the Inside”; “Sound of Madness”

Godsmack: “Fully Awake”; “I Stand Alone”; “Voodoo”

Korn: “Coming Undone”; “Freak on a Leash”; “Shoots and Ladders”; “Twisted Transistor”

Flyleaf: “I’m So Sick”; “Fully Alive”

Three Days Grace: “Pain”

Sick Puppies: “You’re Going Down”

Drowning Pool: “Tear Away”

Metallica: “Fuel”; “Enter Sandman”; “Master of Puppets”

Don’t worry.  My story isn’t about death, destruction, or mayhem (though I’m not saying it doesn’t contain these things… 😉 ).  I think the music though helps me in the act of writing; to keep going and give me the drive to finish, as if I were in my squat rack, or the last interval of a high-intensity interval training run.  Plus, it helps give amazing focus, by shutting out the rest of the world, and clarity, as if my subconscious is suddenly open and available to me.

With that said, time to turn Pandora Radio on, and dream of my worlds.

Behind Closed Doors

2 Comments

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”

Stephen King, On Writing

My hubs has teased me before about shutting him out of my writing; that I don’t want him or anyone else to read my writing. It’s not that I care if anyone reads my work (I have a public blog, after all), nor that I need or want to shut anyone out. It’s more like I need to shut myself in. I need to keep all these ideas and glimpses from flying away from me, and so I need to have a way to focus and get those captured into words before forgetting.

It’s a bit like describing a dream when you just woke up, which is the reason why I call my creative process active dreaming, or describe my writing as dreaming up my words and worlds. When I’m able to capture it via stream of consciousness writing, I feel so much better that I was able to get those words out. They are now in the real world, maybe not whole, but there, and I can flesh out ideas later.

But, when I’m not able to put those thoughts into words, and they go to limbo never to be remembered again, I feel like I’m dying inside. You know that feeling when you’re having a conversation with someone, and you forget what you were just about to say? You shrug it off during the conversation and say that you’ll remember it later, but then the whole time your friend is talking, you keep saying, “what was I going to say?” and the whole conversation becomes this meaningless exercise in remembering what you wanted to say. The frustration you’re feeling is a fraction of what I feel, because I don’t eventually remember what it is I wanted to capture. And, I feel like I failed my world in a way.

Though I know it will take a lot of work to create the scenes that I need, now that I have the story plotted, I feel like it’s more anchored in this world. I can be interrupted more, because it’s easier to recall and play with things that are “real.” I can pick up where I was interrupted because it’s right there in front of me, like a photograph, and all I need are better words to make it three-dimensional.  It has changed from being subconscious to conscious.  And, shaping and re-shaping something is a whole lot easier than starting from nothing.

Plodding Along, Plotting My Novel

2 Comments

Unbelievably, and against all odds, I finished a rough outline of my story.  Tons of paper, both notebook and plain computer, collaborated together to create my story in visual.  Well, more like a plot timeline, with major scenes as the heading.  Looks kind of like a police detective white board.  At least, as portrayed by Detective Beckett on Castle.

I was trying to figure out how to get from one scene to the other, and I found that minor plotting only helped me so far.  Now that I made writing a serious goal in my life, I felt the need to employ any and every method to help set me up for success.  And, even though in the past, outlining only helped to fizzle out my passion for my story, I decided to get over it, and write anyway.

Oh, and I would also like to add, that the story that I am currently working on was a story that I had originally plotted almost in full last year, but ended up pushing it aside by the end of last summer.  But, with my new dedication to focus on my priorities in life, came new perspectives and plots that I didn’t think about earlier, and I was able to capture the whole story this time without losing the “creative spark.”  I will keep fanning that flame, and working toward my goal even if the spark of the moment fizzles out.  I know it will only be a temporary set back.

Plotting through the whole book was a minor step in the grand scheme of finishing a novel, but still a step in the right direction, and I will take it.

Next up, writing a synopsis scene by scene, through each of my POV characters, interspersed with writing out actual scenes.  I’m still debating on whether to use first-person perspective, third person single perspective, or third person multiple perspective.  I will report back on which I used, but in the meanwhile, am open to opinions on which is preferable to use in a high-concept, YA fantasy.