Category: Writing

Just Squander Yourself

5th December 2020
QuotesWriting
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Waves crashing on the beach. Photo by Mihaela Limberea
Waves crashing on the beach, Fregate Island, Seychelles.

The task is always to write every single piece like it’s your only one. It has to have that energy. Use your best material now. Just squander yourself. Enjoy it. I don’t want to read anyone’s tepid writing.

Parul Sehgal 

The quote comes from this excellent interview with Parul Sehgal, book critic at The New York Times, and former editor and columnist at The New York Times Book Review.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard, along the same lines.

How To Handle A Creative Block & Avoid Distraction

2nd December 2020
Writing
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Creative Block?

As creators, we’ve all been there, showing up to do the work, and nothing happened. Going through the motions, following the ritual (you do have a ritual?), yet the creative spark is gone, not even smoldering ashes left. The empty page.The blank canvas. The feared creative block. “Is it all gone? Will I ever be able to write anything? What’s happening?” That’s scary. I know it because I’ve been there. Too often.

Try Visual Writing Prompts…

One of the tricks I’ve learned to jumpstart my writing when I feel stuck is visual writing prompts. I would pick a random photo and force myself to write the beginning of a story based on the image. Something short and easy to get me going. You can see an example at the end of this post.

I try not to use one of my own photos but something completely different, to force my brain into something new. A site such as Unsplash, offering free photos for download, is great for the purpose. (I may want to use a text in the future, so it’s good to know I won’t need to worry about licensing).

This gets me started at any time, just because I don’t have any expectations to produce something extraordinary or brilliant. I’m just supposed to write a few words; I can do that.

… And Avoid Distractions

Close up of a Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly on a daisy. Photo by Mihaela Limberea.
Don’t fly from flower to flower as a butterfly. My photo from my old garden.

However, more often than not, as my writing starts to flow, it takes me in a new direction. I’m suddenly drawn into a new story, and curiosity pushes me to continue instead of returning to what I was working on. It’s good fun, and the temptation is to go with the flow. The brain is skilled at taking the path of the least resistance, that old rascal.

This is where discipline comes in. I can’t afford to start on a new story; I have to finish what I’ve started before going in a new direction. It’s tempting to abandon the work when the going gets tough and respond to a new project’s sirens’ song. But all this approach does is make sure I don’t finish anything, ending up with many great starts with no ends. Ask me how I know.

Use a Slush File…

This is where a slush file comes in handy. What’s a slush file, you ask. This is where all good but seducing ideas go. Got a great idea for a different project? I write it down and return to the project I was working on. Once I’ve finished it, I’ll visit the slush file and pick a new project.

… And Keep It Simple

My slush file is very straightforward: a bullet point list in Apple’s Notes app, points grouped by project. Something like this:

  • End of the world story, a prepper & his cousin.
    • “Prepper John” has a so-called shack middle of nowhere, in fact, a well-stored bunker. Remote island??
    • Cousin (she), a journalist, meets him at the shack for an interview on prepping.
    • Zombies!!

I keep the Notes app easily accessible on my phone’s home screen. I don’t need to search for it, or open folders and files. As soon as I get one of those tempting ideas, I just write it down quickly in Notes, and resume whatever I was doing at the time.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Visual Writing Prompt Example

I leave you with an example of a visual prompt. I found an everyday photo of a garage on Unsplash; these are a few story beginnings I wrote. I can tell you that I’ve used my slush file after this exercise. (Yep, I love a good zombie story, I admit. And terriers called Jexy.)

  • I was tinkering with my old motorcycle in my parents’ subbasement garage, with Jaxy as sole company, when the first zombies reached Stockholm. That saved my life.
  • Having my own space was the most important thing back then. Even if it was just a run-down garage with an astronomical rent and rich in cockroaches.
  • My new home office didn’t look much to the world, but it was my own. Only Jaxy seemed to think differently and barked at the battered van. I had to agree, “some renovation needed” was an understatement.
  • The morning the first undead burst into the city, Mats woke up in a dilapidated garage, his head pulsing with the mother of all headaches. A dog stared at him, tail wagging furiously back and forth. Where the hell was he? What was he doing in this, this…place? With a terrier? If it was a terrier, Mats didn’t know much about dogs and frankly, didn’t care. Of course, had he known about the undead, his view of things may have been slightly different.

Related Posts

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About Art and Artists

7th September 2020
ArtWriting
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A Sea Star
Sea Treasures Photo © Mihaela Limberea

A few weeks ago, I stumbled over an interesting article about art and artists, How to Be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic. The whole article lists thirty-three points and is worth reading in full. I have inserted below a few points that resonated with me. Especially the last one. LOL.

  • Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.
  • Your skill will be whatever it is you’re doing differently.
  • Writers need editors.* No exceptions.
  • Life is your syllabus: gather from everywhere.
  • The best definition of success is time – the time to do your work.
  • Be delusional: I have one solution to turn away these demons: After beating yourself up for half an hour or so, stop and say out loud, ”Yeah, but I’m a fucking genius.”

* My comment: definitely; it’s sufficient to compare Andy Weir’s The Martian (self-published) to Artemis (published by  Ballantine Books). QED. I love Science-Fiction, and I did read the whole Martian. But I wished all the time for an editor. I almost grabbed a pen and started editing it myself.

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The Theory Of Willlessness

29th August 2020
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A pine tree top against a background of dark storm clouds.
Before the storm. Photo © Mihaela Limberea

Nothing can be willed into being, only waited on, for, or waited out.

A.K. Ramanujan from “Journeys: A Poet’s Diary”

I often find myself thinking of Ramanujan‘s words, especially when the blank page stares at me, the cursor steadily flickering its accusatory blink. I delete more than I write. The inner critic is always on duty. But write I do, in the end. After all, “you can always edit a bad page; you can’t edit a blank page.” Jodi Picoult would know.

There Is No Time For Despair

25th April 2020
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Photo © Mihaela Limberea

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art. – Toni Morrison

As always, books are comforting. Both to write and to read. To give away, to loan, or to borrow. To read aloud or listen to. A shelter from the madness outside. Consolation. Oh, the “sweet serenity of books,” as Longfellow puts it. 

I write a bit; I delete a bit more, pause, stare through the window at the rough sea and the white clouds of the surf. A blackbird jumps back and forth on the grass, looking for worms. The cat suns herself, lazily licking her paw. I write away the virus, the anxiety, the madding crowd.

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Writing Lately

4th April 2020
CreativityWriting
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Taking my own advice, I continue writing, despite alarmist media reports, gradual movement restrictions in Sweden, and my own distraction. Creativity is hard work at any time, not only during a pandemic. So, I sit down every morning, turn on my computer, and start typing. 

I’m writing a short story at the moment. I was working on a novel but decided to pause it for a while. With a story, I can (hopefully) be done quickly, and that would give me a feeling of accomplishment. It’s also good fun writing it, and fun is a good thing these days. 

The funny thing (see what I did there?) is that I had completely forgotten about it. I had a few loose ideas, but I was working on a different thing at the time, so I just wrote them down, saved them in a “Writing Ideas” folder for later, and then promptly forgot about it. 

A few days ago, two years later, I was looking for something else and came across this file titled “The Author.” I had absolutely no idea what it was. I opened it, read the couple of pages it consisted of, and, not to sound my own trumpet, but they were good! With a few funny twists thrown in for good measure. So, I grabbed the file, got to work, and ended up in that creative bubble where everything seems far away, even the coronavirus, and the world is warm and nice, and fuzzy.

The learnings?

Koala by Mihaela Limberea www.limberea.com
A cute koala for your enjoyment. Photo © Mihaela Limberea

1) Always carry paper and pen with you and jot down any idea that you get. You will not remember it later. I’ve placed small blocks of paper and pens strategically everywhere in the house and in my pocket when I’m out. You could argue, of course, that you can use your smartphone, but I favor paper and pen. I enjoy leafing through the pages, slowly, back and forth, for the incommensurable joy of the unexpected connections that sometimes may jump at you from the pages.

2) Use a folder to organize these loose thoughts so you can easily find them later. Whether the folder is digital or analog doesn’t really matter, it only needs to suit your organizational system. You do have one I trust? 

Then let them marinate for a while, while you can carry on with your ongoing projects. You can come back any time to look for some ideas when you’re stuck or ready to kick off a new project.

Chance, fate, or just the butterfly effect may sometimes lead you to the end of the rainbow too. All you have to do is trust your creative genie.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay calm and soldier on. And don’t forget to laugh. 

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Our Power Is Patience

30th March 2020
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“Novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQ as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

Photo © Mihaela Limberea

I find solace in this Kurt Vonnegut quote in my moments of doubt, struggling with a text that doesn’t resemble in any way the picture I have in my head. I continue hammering at the keyboard, hoping to reach that exhilarating state when everything becomes possible.

From Suzanne McConnell’s book, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style.

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Catching The Heart-Beat Of Life

21st March 2020
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The secret of it all is, to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote. No prepared pictures, no elaborated poem, no after-narrative, could be what the thing itself is. You want to catch its first spirit – to tally its birth. By writing at the instant the very hear-beat of life is caught.

Walt Whitman on writing from ”Walt Whitman Speaks: Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America.” You can find it here.

The New York Review of Books published the introduction (in a somewhat different form) in the April 18th, 2019 issue; a good read available here.

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C as in Creativity. Or Corona.

19th March 2020
ArtCreativityLifeWriting
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151 words. That’s all I’ve written yesterday. 

527 words. That’s how many words I’ve deleted yesterday.

Welcome to the corona world!

While I’m not anxious about the coronavirus (yet), I do feel some healthy concern, and I admit that I find it hard to concentrate on anything. Every day, I sit at my desk from 9 to 12 and write, mostly my new book, sometimes the blog, sometimes a poem. Some days everything is easy, the words flow, and I feel on top of the world. Some days … not. And that’s OK. As every creator knows, ups and downs are part of the creative life. We muddle through those days and hope for a better day tomorrow.

But this is new. It’s not writer’s block or lack of inspiration or ideas. This is just staring at the monitor while wondering whether I should check the WHO site or the corona tracker for updates, call my parents to check they’re still fine, talk to my sister who’s, of course, working from home, or just work in the garden and escape from it all.

These are unsettling and, for lack of a better word, weird times. The uncertainty, not knowing what will happen, not knowing how long it’ll take or what the long-term impact would be, take its toll. And it will get worse before it gets better. This is just the beginning.

So how are we to live through this unreal and frustrating reality? Holed up in our homes, social distancing and binge-watching all TV series? 

Dark storm clouds.
The storm clouds are still gathering. Don’t lose hope. Keep calm and carry on!
Photo © Mihaela Limberea

I don’t think so. 

Granted, there are certain constraints that we simply have to live with (sorry, grandma, no visits!). However, I think we should try to hang on to some degree of normality. Working from home? Get out of pajamas and dress for work. Then work, not check Twitter for “a five-minute break” and be gone down the rabbit hole of social media for an hour. Have a set schedule for work and follow it. Do your chores as you would normally do. Do your laundry on Fridays as usual. Get out the trash on Wednesdays as usual. 

The mundane is the new black. We shun the everyday life, dreaming of adventures in faraway lands, but in a crisis, we find ourselves longing for that everyday. We wish to be able to sit in a traffic jam again; to rush breathlessly from work to the kindergarten before it closes and be greeted by a teacher giving you the evil eye; to quarrel with the neighbor about his tree leaning dangerously over the fence. 

So, what now? How do we keep writing? How do we keep creativity alive in the times of corona?

Simple. Working.

The worst thing in a crisis is to be idle. It just gives you more time to feel anxious. The danger is that anxiety spreads faster than the virus.

Creativity is your butt on the hard chair, every day, whether you create or not. Creativity is hard work, whether you feel like it or not. Especially if you’re not feeling like it. Do the work. Show up. Every day. Share on X

Me? I’ve done my time, written some paragraphs in my book, and a blog post. Now I’m going out to work in the garden. It’s a whooping plus five degrees (that’s 41 Fahrenheit) here in Stockholm, and the sun is out!

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay calm and soldier on. And don’t forget to laugh. 

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It Was A Hand In The Darkness And It Held A Knife

10th March 2020
ArtQuotesWriting
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Tree
Photo © Mihaela Limberea

I finally found some time to listen to Neil Gaiman talking to Tim Ferriss in ”The Tim Ferriss Show” (a podcast that I highly recommend; it’s one of my favorite podcasts). The interview is almost two hours long, and I wanted to have time, and peace of mind, to really enjoy it. And take plenty of notes.

It’s always such a pleasure listening to Neil Gaiman’s hypnotically soothing voice talking about creativity and writing, books, his friendship with Terry Pratchett, fountain pens (he writes with a fountain pen) and the New York Fountain Pen Hospital (yes, there’s such a thing, the place to go if you want to buy a new fountain pen or repair the one you have).

I have included below a few points that have resonated with me. It wasn’t easy; I could have gone on much longer but wanted to keep the length of this post manageable.

* About Ian Fleming’s writing process (yes, James Bond’s creator), who didn’t like writing. His method? Lock yourself up in a not too good hotel, in a not too good room in a town you don’t want to be in (as to avoid distractions and getting comfy), and write ”like a fiend” until you’re done.

* Most important writing rule: you can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing, but you cannot sit here and do anything else. All you are allowed to do is absolutely nothing or write. You give yourself permission to write or not write, but you end up writing eventually as doing nothing is boring, and your wandering mind will start sparkling ideas. Not having to write takes off some pressure as well.

* On first drafts: nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. That is just you telling the story to yourself.

* Setting up a Groundhog Day: writing (a novel) works best if you can do the same day over and over again. Figure out a daily practice that works for you, and repeat that day, every day, day after day after day. Austin Kleon used the same image in his new book ”Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad”: every day is a Groundhog Day. 

You can read the whole podcast transcript  (and, of course, listen to/watch the podcast) on Tim Ferriss blog.

Neil Gaiman Quotes from the Podcast

All I’m allowed to do is absolutely nothing, or write.

What I love about that is I’m giving myself permission to write or not write, but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. (…) I think it’s really just a solid rule for writers. You don’t have to write. You have permission to not write, but you don’t have permission to do anything else.

Part of what I discovered, particularly about being a novelist, is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again. The closer you can come to Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself. (…) I would do that day over and over and over and over. 

 I also think that the most important thing for human beings is to be aware of the change. The biggest problem we run into is going, “This is who I am, this is what I’m like. This is how I function.” while failing to notice that you don’t do that anymore

The biggest thing, looking back on it, that I learned from Terry <Pratchett> was a willingness to go forward without knowing what happens. You might know what happens next, but you don’t know what happens after that, but it’s okay because you’re a grownup and you will figure it out. 

Bonus: listen to Neil Gaiman’s audiobooks read by himself. Such joy! My favorites: Art Matters (this should be handed out for free in all schools, by the way!), The Graveyard Book and Coraline.

Complete with: Tim Ferriss interview with  Amanda Palmer (singer, songwriter, playwright, author, director, blogger, and Neil Gaiman’s wife); and Austin Kleon’s A Portable Routine.

Wondering where the post title comes from? It’s a line from one of Gaiman’s old notebooks that eventually become the beginning of The Graveyard Book; Gaiman talks about its genesis in the interview.

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