December 19, 2010
Sketchbook
This is a great idea. I found this on the New York Times. Someone asked people commuting what they were reading. A good cross-section of taste.
October 2, 2010
Conscious Creative Editing
Recently I agreed to do editing for different individuals and groups to test my skills and update them. They were asking me to do more than grammar and spelling. One group wanted me to take transcriptions from talks and turn them into usable material for newsletters. An author wanted a critical eye to test the strength and creativity of her work in progress.
Editing can be far more creative than standard vacuuming for errors. I read a text like it’s a book I’ve chosen to read and then I think if the characters are what I want them to be. I trail them and decide on what basis I like or dislike them. Are their actions interesting? Can I really believe in them, for even fantasy can win us into belief? Would I recommend this to a friend and why or why not? Do transitions easily move the text along and are the paragraphs divided in a way as to make it effortless reading? Is this paragraph boring the heck out of you?
Some fixes are easy enough, such as alternating the voicing between active and passive or changing from narrator to third person. But these will cause the author to do a lot of rewriting. Although this might be resisted, my services (paid or not) are to help this person get a read from a publisher. I sent my suggestions to the writer and they were accepted.
As for editing transcriptions, this is a totally different way of thinking for me. The speaker is not meant to be fictional and, in this case, English is not their first language. So I had a lot of creative license to use. This would have been harder for me had I not known this person’s work. But it’s not that difficult to imagine what a person means, so I just pretended I did and figured they would correct me if I’m wrong.
My task was to take one talk and make it into two articles. Two themes were interwoven and I teased them apart by doing a lot of cut and paste into a second screen. Then I found opening and closing remarks from their talk. I created smooth transitions. I then did a another edit with an eye to making the two balanced in length. I left it for 2 days, read it again and found a couple of errors and then I was done. It was accepted.
Two questions I asked myself. Why did this feel creative to me? Because, to participate in another’s thoughts, I moved outside of my own and stretched. It was akin to taking a slate that was already in progress and then adding to it. I was doing my own writing. Secondly, why do this? Because editing has helped me be aware of how others might view my own writing. Even when I’m writing for myself I’m thinking out loud and sloppiness does not encourage beauty in thinking. Some philosophers say there is another self watching us. The watcher is a good editor.
June 22, 2010
Conscious Creative Writing Part. 2
| Conscious, create, creative, emotional intelligence, expression, imagination, meditative, muse, New Thought, writing |
June 20, 2010
Conscious Creative Writing
This is a first in series of articles about what conscious creative writing is and how it works.
I think it pretty well understood what creative writing is so I’ll discuss the conscious part of it. How is it that ideas come to us? Much has been said about ways to work up your way to thinking and how to overcome blocks. But what is thinking? I believe it is a marriage of mental and emotional intelligence. By using the mental we use understood processes to carry an idea forward. By using the emotional we loose a little understood part of us to sieve our experience and let surface whatever carries the strongest charge for us.
There are two ideas here that I like to air; linearity and process. Linearity in writing is the way that actually putting thoughts down helps us to shut out all but one idea at a time. There may be several cueing up, but we choose which to put on the page. This can be a great exercise of meditative-like clarity. Any activity that gives practice in choosing is good for increasing confidence, but practice it must be.
Process is the way we let ideas unfold over time. By writing regularly, we get to see from day-to-day how the subject with the most charge shifts or gets bumped by something else. If you are writing about seeking guidance on a career, for example, it might be difficult to decide in one moment or even one day, but your true muse can emerge through the process of putting it down day by day. Once you know what you want to do, this method can give daily ideas about how to refine the path to your goal.
Therefore, emotional intelligence gives the intuition and mental intelligence guides the process.
In conscious creative writing we are writing toward a goal, one of mining our own consciousness. If you come to this activity with a question in mind then the aim is to answer it. If you come to it with a desire to be fulfilled then the aim is to unleash forces in the realm of unseen activity. This may sound pretty vague and esoteric, but anyone who has engaged in this process can attest to the very real results. An analogy might be made with the internet. You may be sitting in your living room using social software such as Facebook or Twitter and evolving relationships with people on the other side of the planet, people you can see on the screen. Or you can be playing video games with people in same manner. To people alive when the New Thought movement began, this would seem hard to even imagine. Remember, you have not walked over to see this person. The most physical thing you have done is probably just sitting and using the computer. This is a very good marriage of mental and emotional intelligence with a real world effect; the development of relationships.
I believe we are on the cusp of living in contact with other unseen forces that are just as real. Most of us would be pressed to imagine the activity that brings us to internet. It might as well be an unseen force, although we’re sure it’s quite scientific. The same forces and atoms that order our lives can bring new ideas into form. They always have. People are always creating new uses for them. Whatever forces, realms, objects, or experiences may be available will emerge when we have the foresight to ask for them.
If we have a failure of imagination, it can be due to a lack of continuity of approach. It is easy to give up after a few attempts when trying a new skill. People have differing fields of expression. For those of us with utility in writing, this might just be a good way to work out of a trapped life. You might not need rocket science, just a new Read the rest of this entry »
July 31, 2009
The Pig Did It
If you want to fall all over your self with sheer glee then I recommend that you get yourself to Joseph Caldwell’s book, The Pig Did It, post haste. It stirred the handful of remaining drops of Irish blood left in my veins. Called by one reviewer, a shaggy pig story, the book is a free-for-all from start to finish.
As I learned in my youth, there is nothing so intimate as an insult and by that measure the protagonist is one loveable guy. Luckily for us this is the start of a trilogy. I truly wonder what it must be like to be as talented as Caldwell. Have I whetted your appetite? Then get to it!
July 27, 2009
Mother Nature’s Urban Art
Flowers, Photos, City Life
Quince, Apple Blossoms Read the rest of this entry »
