What perfect timing.  My friend Beth sent me a link to this wonderful Youtube video featuring Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, in which she gives her take on creativity. The idea of this conversation between me and this something wondrous outside of myself, that sense of connection, is absolutely wonderful.

And what I love the most? I just have to show up – show up in front of my writing software, show up with pen in hand, pad on lap, show up, show up – that’s my job, and then it’s a matter of trust and openness.

I love it.

It felt a bit funny at first. The story idea that I decided to start with is one for which I know the ending (kind of rare for me, that). And I hadn’t been intending to start my prewriting with collage experiment with this story, either – but the other night, I was lying in bed and all of a sudden the entire first scene started playing out in my mind.

It’s a scene that I’ve actually written out before, but I never liked it. I felt I didn’t know my characters well enough, so everything was kind of rickety and wooden.

But that night, I got to know my protagonist a lot better. And that’s when it occurred to me that she would be an ideal way to start experimenting with prewriting with collage.

One thing I’d already decided I would do was use the collage method to help me get to know my characters better. I have tried almost every method of developing a character out there – creating character profiles, interviewing my characters, writing their journals, doing stream of consciousness writing about their lives – and nothing has really ever worked for me. Since I find writing to be so much easier when I really know my characters, I usually end up writing some wooden first chapters until the characters start coming alive for me.

So I thought it would be perfect to use the prewriting with collage method to develop my characters! And I’ve decided to couple it with the cool lapbooking technique that I learned last year when I was looking at homeschooling resources. (Here’s a great YouTube video showing a trains lapbook, to give you an idea of what can be done, if you haven’t come across lapbooking before).

A file folder for each character, and then a large collage for the entire novel – that’s my plan, anyway.

When I started tearing out the pictures, images and words that called to me, I was trying at first to focus on my main character. But after a while, I’d find images that suited other characters, or the novel as a whole. So in the end, I decided to just tear out anything that felt “right” for the book. What I’ll do is collect a large pile of images and words and colours, and then I’ll start sorting and creating the individual folders as well as the large collage.

And the most important thing of all – I started! And it’s as fun as I thought it would be.

If anyone is interested in doing prewriting with collage, I’d love to hear about your progress!

Encouragement

I believe that in every moment, whether or not I’m aware of it, I am always choosing my identity, and my world is always a reflection of this choice. And when I find myself mired in doubt or floundering in worry, what works best for me is to remember that, as the Field Center puts it, there is no time off from my consciousness. These reactions come about because I’ve lost sight of who I want to be; I am out of alignment with the me that I truly am. And so it’s a matter of coming back into alignment.

Easy to say, but sometimes very challenging to do! So here’s what I turn to when I find myself seeking re-alignment:

Imagination. I make the time and take the moment to embrace my imagination, and allow myself to feel everything I feel as the identity I’m choosing. This goes beyond mere visualization; I never know what might come to me, but I open myself up to the vision. I need to have the willingness to do this, but when I do, it can be magical.

Friends. I’m fortunate to have two different groups of very special women friends who are always there for me, who listen without judgment and offer tremendous support for the me that I want to be. They inspire me with their lives, and who they are, and their words of wisdom and support often lift me right out of doubt into the magic of flow.

Play. This can be writing, reading, taking out some of my art supplies and just having fun with everything. It can be watching a movie, listening to music, plotting out a story. It can mean taking a walk, going shopping, going online in search of inspiration. And the key is to have fun; I never get into that wonderful feeling of play if I haven’t first let go of the idea of results. Often it’s that feeling of “where will this lead me?” that leads me out of the dreariness of fear, doubt and worry.

Sleep. My greatest challenges seem to arise when I’m tired, exhausted, fatigued – I feel like I can’t access the energy to do anything, to be anything, to feel anything. Problems appear where there were none before, and trite things magnify, gain in size and loom over me, filling me with emotions I don’t want. And when that happens, sleep is the revitalizing ingredient. My body is telling me to take it easy, to rest, and when I honour this intuition, and rest, the energy inevitably comes back.

These are the things I reach for most often when I find myself out of alignment with who I want to be. They work – often it’s just a matter of remembering that each of these things are there to help me out.

One Brave Step

This week, I intend to (finally!) start prewriting with collage – it’s something I wrote about a few weeks ago, and I have this very strong feeling that it’s something I’m meant to be doing, that it will open up my intuition in a way I’ve been desiring for a long time. I felt so motivated and excited when I discovered this – and then found myself stuck in a week filled with deadlines.

The deadlines, I know, were simply a reflection of the fear I was feeling, that smaller me that I was being, the one who was unable to reach out and embrace the creativity that leads to the fulfillment of my dreams.

But I have the supplies. I have the time. And I have the encouragement of being part of this group of creative women bloggers, and truly, as I visit each one of you, I feel your energy and it is such an amazing, wonderful feeling. So this week, let this be my one brave step – plunging into the joy of prewriting with collage.

On Honouring My Inspirations

I didn’t end up writing a post last week for Chapter 2’s look at honouring our inspirations – I thought about it a lot, though, and I was able to get around to reading a few of the groups’ posts. So I wanted to finish up this post with my thoughts on what inspires me.

For a long time, I stifled my femininity. I found myself in a world where being a woman wasn’t much admired, and I fought for survival by pushing away all the parts of me that were feminine. And it isn’t such a surprise for me to look back and see that my creativity faded during this period of my life.

Eleven years ago, I left that life, and since then I’ve been on a journey of rediscovery. Slowly, I began to become open to the feminine within me, and I’m happy to say that I have reclaimed that part of me now. It’s been an interesting journey, especially since it wasn’t something I clearly understood at the time.

And so today, I honour the beauty and the inspiration of the feminine.

This week we are discussing where we all are in our journeys to our creative selves.

I have always been creative. As a child, I was highly imaginative; I read a lot, and spent much of my time dreaming up stories and making up characters. As soon as I learned to write, I began writing down my stories. When I was about seven, I created an entire series of books about Candyland that I wrote and illustrated.

When I look back on my childhood, the one thing that strikes me is that I was so clearly a writer. Writing was something that I did, all the time. It was my priority. It was my play. If I wasn’t reading, I was writing. If I wasn’t writing, I was reading. Books and words played a huge part in my life.

When I became a teenager, I actually preferred staying home to write rather than going out with friends. My 13th birthday stands out for me because my parents bought me this extremely old, second-hand (18th-hand, more like it) Underwood typewriter – to this day, I love the sound of typewriter keys hitting the paper and am always searching for something that imitates that sound on my keyboard.

Most of the money I came across after that went towards buying paper. I would buy reams and reams of inexpensive newsprint, and every time I came home with a new stash of paper, I’d feel like I was carrying a treasure trove. If you’ve ever read the Emily of New Moon stories by LM Montgomery, you’ll know what I mean. While my old Mint and Candyland books were lost in the midst of all the moving around I did as a child, I still have a box of stories and poems written during my teen years.

In my last year of high school, I won a number of national fiction and essay writing awards aimed at teen writers. I was poised to continue on my journey as a writer. But then, life intervened. My mom and stepfather moved across the country (only to end up getting a divorce), I moved in with my then-boyfriend and started university – and suddenly, I was a grown-up. And a grown-up has to focus on making money.

I continued to write, mostly short stories which I sent out to various short story magazines. And then, at the point when I began receiving personal rejection letters (one memorable one from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine: “Almost, but not quite. Try us again.”) … something happened. Something in me gave up. It was too hard to make a living as a writer. I was an adult now. I needed to do something that would bring in an adequate amount of income.

So I went to law school. I ended up getting married, having a baby, passing the Bar: suddenly, I was a practicing lawyer. A practicing lawyer with a little one, and another baby on the way.

It was a hectic time, and somewhere during that period, I stopped writing fiction. Time was at a premium, and there was no support for my writing, in either my professional life or my personal life. At one point, I let my then-husband read one of my short stories. It was a creepy little horror story that had a humorous ending; he thought I was trying to be “too smart”. That hit me hard, much harder than I let myself admit at the time.

That period of my life was a dark time in terms of my creativity. And it wasn’t until my divorce a few years later that I was able to find my creative self again. Even then, it started slowly.

I began my journey back to my creative self by getting to know my inner self. I started with a gratitude journal that brought light and hope into my life. And then I began writing morning pages, and for six years, I faithfully wrote three long-hand pages every single morning before doing anything else. I discovered a kind of magic in those pages; whenever I expressed a desire in these morning pages notebooks, more likely than not, the desire would be fulfilled, sometimes as quickly as that very same day. Cheques arrived in the mail, jobs showed up (by then I had my own business), synchronicities abounded.

Then, about six years ago, an astounding thing happened. It still amazes me to this day. I realized how much I longed to get that love of the process of creativity back, all those magic moments when I was a child and a teenager when I lost myself in the writing of my stories. I remembered how time seemed to stand still, and the joy that flowed through me as I wrote. I wanted that back. I wanted for my writing to be all about process, and not about the results (as in, making money).

My desire was granted, but not the way I had envisioned: one day, I picked up a pencil, and I drew a picture of my kids playing a video game. I had always thought I couldn’t draw, that I wasn’t artistic except with words. I can remember sitting outside my house when I was eleven or twelve, staring at a tree and trying hard to draw it. I couldn’t even draw a straight line – yet there I was, drawing my kids, and having a great time doing it.

For the next few years, I explored art-making, and discovered that what I loved most of all was creating portraits using charcoal. My skills improved slowly but most importantly, I had re-discovered the thrill of process.

Then life intervened again: I had a baby with my second husband. Dylan was a miracle baby, and my life took yet another turn. There was no time for art, no time for writing. I was busy, juggling my home-based business and a new baby.

When Dylan was two, tragedy struck. My baby sister, Joy, died at the age of 32. But in my grief, I realized the gift she had given me: physically she wasn’t here, but I knew she wasn’t gone. I knew this with a conviction I never had access to before. And from there, I began a spiritual journey that has changed my life in incredible ways. Shortly after, I met a group of amazing women online, all conscious creators, and I haven’t looked back since.

My writing has returned to me. During the times when I wasn’t writing, I had continued to get story ideas, lots of them. They’ve all stayed with me, and these days, I feel like I have another treasure trove in front me. Deciding which ones to work on is the most challenging thing. But the most important thing of all is that I’m starting to BE a writer again. I am deliberately making this choice, choosing this identity, resting in this identity fully. And the magic is happening, once again.

This is the collage she created for a book she’s still working on:

Jennifer Crusie’s Collage for You Again

If you click on the image, it will take you to the large-sized picture on her site. Click on that image, and you can see the details up close. It’s very intricate, and gave me some wonderful ideas and lots of inspiration for  doing my own pre-writing collages.

Reading through her process, it seemed to me to be a very good way to open up yourself to your intuition, dusting off that fossil, as Stephen King put it in On Writing.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about writing more intuitively; when you’re plotting and figuring out where you’re going with your novel, intuition can often get left behind, especially if you’re writing suspense or mystery or even fantasy. On the one hand, it’s easier to sit down and write when you have a good idea where you’re going, but on the other hand, too clear an idea where you’re headed can dampen your enthusiasm for getting your story down into words. At least, that’s what I find – I’ve always loved the feeling of writing and discovering my story at the same time. When the discoveries have already been made, methodically by the left-brained me, the writing isn’t nearly as fun.

So the idea of prewriting with collage really intrigued me. Off I went to the art supply store for proper provisions (which is a part of the fun!). I came back with a variety of supports – large foamcore boards, packages of medium-sized illustration board in both white and black, and a nice-sized pad of sturdy cartridge paper.

As I was wondering the aisles, resisting temptation as best as I could (there was a gorgeous box of oil pastels that I really, realistically speaking, didn’t need … and yes, I was very good and didn’t buy it!) I realized I could extend the process further. I would do an overview of the book I’m writing on a large foamcore board, but I would also do smaller collages for each of the major characters, and for specific locations, too.

So now I’m well-armed in the supplies area. Next up is a visit to the dollar store to see what catches my eye, then it’s going to be a day spent with a stack of magazines, letting my inner muse tear out pictures without any censoring from my logical self.

What I’m looking forward to the most? Seeing what surprises come up for me. The novel I’ll be using this technique with is one I’ve carried with me for nearly ten years now. It’s a fun book, but it’s a big book, too. I think in the past, tackling this project has always felt overwhelming – there’s just so much there, so many areas to explore. Now, however, I feel like I’ve found the way to find my way, so to speak.

And that definitely feels good.

More Links

I decided to Google around and see if I could find other authors who also use collages as a prewriting technique. It’s fun to read about each writer’s collage process. I didn’t find very many links, so I thought I’d list the ones I’d found for anyone who’s interested.

Collages with Barbara Hannay

Collaging: A Story in Pictures (Note: pdf file)

Workshop: Creating a Writing Collage

Story Collage (Yvonne Lindsay)

Tycoon’s One Night Revenge

Looking at the screen and the college-ruled paper, both forcing me to write in straight lines, immediately put up a mental wall. But having the large open space of white to write however and wherever I wanted tore that wall down.

It’s kind of like doing Sark pages, but as a writer, rather than an artist.

I have so many unused sketchbooks lying around – time to put one to good use.

So I’ve decided to set a writing intention: writing for an hour every day.

I’ve put my current novel in the sidebar to the right. That’s where I’ll update my daily progress. The novel that’s up there right now is the one that I started for NaNoWriMo; I’m still not too sure about it, but I plan to just keep on writing it while I pick what project I want to start next. I may even finish it – I’ve set the target for that novel at 90,000 words – but the main thing right now?

Keep writing.

And so I will!

NaNoWriMo: I didn’t reach my 50,000 words on the one hand, but my initial goal was never to do that. It was to simply get myself sitting down and writing. So I must say, I’m looking at my official 32,532 words with great pride.

Here’s what I’ve discovered: for me, the biggest obstacle is the first step of sitting down and opening up my writing software. Once I place my fingers on the keys, the magic happens. I’m not sure why I have such a block about sitting down and just doing it, since I really enjoy the process so much. But one step at a time, right?

Starting tomorrow, I will have a new widget thingie on the sidebar, showing my word count for whichever novel I’ll be working on. I wasn’t able to keep going with the NaNoWriMo novel these past few days because of deadlines, and also because it suddenly seemed to me that I had to change the narrative from third person omniscient to first person, but only for the scenes involving the main protagonist. Who also wants a name change, too. (I’m not too sure about that one.)

NaBloPoMo: I was actually on track with blogging every day in November (despite what the dates on the posts tell you – I personally count a day as that period of time before I sleep and wake up to the next day. Blogging software has a more rigid, machine-driven view of “a day”.) And then I went and forgot to post yesterday!

So I very nearly posted every day here. Not too shabby, I think.

Art Every Day Month for November: I couldn’t keep up. Too many deadlines, and I also discovered that the writing took priority. I only did four pieces of work, and only posted three of them because I truly didn’t like the fourth one. I may do this challenge again, but probably not until the new year.

It’s been a good month. Ive still not had the time to check out all my favourite blogs regularly, but hopefully, because the deadlines are lighter in December, I’ll be able to get back to it. It’s one of the most enjoyable things about blogging, I’ve been discovering.

I was surfing around, and came across this quote by Stephen King. It sounds like it’s from On Writing, though I’m not sure.

“Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can’t expect to become a good writer.” – Stephen King

I love On Writing – it’s one of the most motivating writing books around. So I have that on my desk to re-read. Earlier this month I started up my book review blog, and I have been loving it. Not only that, I’ve been reading steadily. Four hours a day? Sounds good to me. And I can get that other four hours of writing in, too. Just have to figure out when to squish in the paying work, that’s all.

And then, after reading this quote, I found Jolie at Cuppa Jolie. In her I Made It! 5000 Words Today … post talked about something her blog friend Holly had told her that really helped:

First, Holly mentioned (somewhere along the line) about being at a macro level instead of micro. Keeping this in mind helped me bunches. It’s the big picture story I’m working on. I can go back later, when I’m more in tune with the story and the characters, and add the details that will make all the difference. Right now, I need to make the character walk and talk and doing that helped me get to 5000 words.

That last bit especially – “Right now, I need to make the character walk and talk …”

That’s all I needed to do. Just make my characters walk and talk and move them forward. And when I started to think that way, I knew I would be able to start writing more of the novel again.

So last night, I went to bed feeling motivated again. Then, this morning, lying there in that stage between awake and asleep, a new plot piece came to me. It’s a wonderful plot piece – it makes the villain more villainy, adds more drama, and ties up some loose ends!

I’m off to write now! I don’t think I’ll get 5000 words in today, but at least I actually feel like I have something to write now.

Reading novels can actually be quite hazardous around here. One thing I’ve been keeping my eye on is not starting a book late in the day. When I do that, chances are good that I won’t get into bed until 3 a.m., which doesn’t work for me that well anymore.

This week has been a really good week for crime thrillers. I started the week off with Caro Ramsay’s Absolution, which is set in Glasgow, Scotland. This is Ramsay’s first novel, and I will definitely be keeping my eye out for more of her writing. Having said that, though, I enjoyed Absolution more for the writing – Ramsay writes in the literary crime tradition of PD James, Elizabeth George and Reginald Hill – than I did for the actual plot and characters. First of all – and this doesn’t happen to me very often – I knew who the murderer was from the moment he was introduced. In fact, I kept reading thinking it couldn’t possibly be this person, because it was just so obvious, so there must be some sort of tricky splendid twist waiting to surprise me at the end … only there wasn’t. I also didn’t like the main character at all. But the writing made up for these two negatives for me, so Ramsay is definitely a writer I will be keeping on my to-read list.

I moved from Absolution to another Scottish writer, Ian Rankin. The Naming of the Dead is the first Inspector Rebus novel I’ve read, and I found myself wondering why it took me so long to pick up a Rankin book. The Naming of the Dead is a thick twist-filled, suspenseful crime thriller of the type I particularly enjoy reading, and I liked both Rebus and his sidekick Siobhan Clarke very much. Which is nice, because there’s a long list of Rankin/Rebus books for me to catch-up on.

My final read this past week was Kathy Reichs’ Bones to Ashes. The plot, as is usual in a Reichs book, is wonderfully twisty and filled with surprises. I’m not as fond of the writing style, though. I find the “if only I had known” endings to the chapters just a little too old-style gothic heroine for my taste, and I don’t really like stories where the protaganist is threatened by the murderer, which is something that seems to happen a lot to Temperance Brennan.

This coming week? I’m juggling quite a few deadlines, so I probably won’t get as much reading done as I’d like. But I’m prepping for NaNoWriMo, and now that I’ve discovered that I get inspired to write after I read, I’m definitely going to keep hitting those books!