I’ve been going through a stage of writer’s block for the last couple of weeks now. I’ve just had no real motivation to write anything. At first I was putting it down to the fact that I’ve started a new job and have been stressed about it. But that’s never really stopped me from writing before. The more I think about it, the more I think that location is at the heart of the problem.
Filed under Scribbling a Path
Why can’t I read a story for its purpose? Why does everything need to be dissected? This has been something that has been troubling me recently. I’ve been reading ‘How to Write a Novel’ books and reading quite extensively. I’ve been doing this to help me with my novel. These have their value in helping with structuring my own work. However, I’ve been wondering about whether or not I’m removing the joy of a creative work by reducing it to a formula to be studied.
Filed under Scribbling a Path
I was at a family gathering last night back in Ireland. It happened at my late grandmother’s house; the place where I spent some of the best days of my childhood. The nostalgia crept up on me instantly as I walked up to the farm. It was the place where my cousins I and first allowed our imaginations to run wild. They were the days when I created my worlds physically to run amok within. In some ways I suppose it was where my love of the imagination grew from. I don’t think that I’d be a writer today if I hadn’t spent my childhood making stories among those fields. A broken down tractor that became a multi-functional vehicle. A collection of trees that became the set of a million different dramas. The bales of hay that became a wrestling ring. However, when I began to think about writing about what I saw; I couldn’t.
Filed under Scribbling a Path
I’ve been thinking more and more about publishing recently; which is strange since I currently have nothing anywhere near publication standards. Yet it seems to be something that needs to always be on your mind as a writer. The entire purpose of writing is to get your work out there and get people reading it. So it seems to stand to logic that how you go about getting your work out there needs to be of central importance. There is a wealth of articles suggesting the best or easiest or newest ways of getting your work published. The general consensus is to self-publish or publish as an e-book. But where has the physical hardback book gone?
Filed under Scribbling a Path
John Milton – after going blind in his later years – was heard to have walked around the house muttering ‘I want to be milked. I want to be milked.’ Though this seems like a symptom of dementia; it was in fact his way of describing his frustration to write when his squire was late to transcribe what he said. However, even with this qualification, the analogy does seem rather ludicrous at first glance. Can the act of writing really be described as the release a cow gains from being milked?
Filed under Scribbling a Path
Freud asserts that ‘a piece of creative writing, like a daydream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.’ Is that what the writer is doing when she write? Playing a game? In some ways, I have to agree. The writer – like the child – gives into her imaginative side and allows herself to roam free from this world and into the ‘worlds’ of her own mind. I know myself that my own sanity at times relies on the fact that I do write.
Filed under Scribbling a Path
Does life become more or less meaningful if the world and everyone in it are possible fictional subject matter? Since setting up this blog I’ve been thinking more than ever about this question. As a writer you instinctively go through life looking for inspiration in the world around you. It’s a natural process and one that you don’t get a choice in. Well that’s the way that it is for me anyway. Everyone I meet is a potential character and everything I see could have a place in my fiction.
Filed under Scribbling a Path
Scribblings and Broken Glass 