Tag Archives: Creativity

Writing Inside the (Out)Lines – Redux: A Creative Departure

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(Or, Why Much of What You Plan in Your Outline Will Get Changed Along the Way)

A Distractions & Subtractions post for Rule of Stupid

Writing a novel is an endeavour of many emotions:

  • The excitement at having an idea take root in your head.
  • The pride you feel every time you sit down at the computer and add new words.
  • The anxiety that maybe you won’t be able to capture your idea in words as clearly as it plays out in your head.
  • The satisfaction of when all the plot pieces finally fall into place in your mind, and you’re finally convinced that yes, this story works.
  • And then, after months or even years of dedication, when the novel is finally completed, a satisfaction of a different sort that results from having successfully achieved a difficult, long-term goal.

But sometimes, this latter satisfaction comes prematurely; sometimes, satisfaction #2 and satisfaction #1 commingle, until they end up one in the same.

That is to say, sometimes, having devised a fully functional plot in one’s head (or on paper, or on the screen) feels like such a sense of accomplishment, the subsequent desire to actually write the novel disappears.

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Living an Artist’s Life in a Workaday World

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(A How-To)

A Distractions & Subtractions post for Dianne Gray

It’s hard to know whether there’s been an era more detrimental to living the life of an artist than the current one.

The temptation is certainly strong to say there hasn’t been – that the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, the Renaissance (wo)men, the Elizabethans, and the Romantics with their sculpture and architecture, their mosaics and genre scenes, their busts and paintings, their music, literature and frescos, their theatre, and their landscape-focused writing, painting, and composing that seem to burst from the pages of history texts all revered their artists.

Maybe they did.

But perhaps their artists suffered the historical equivalent to what many artists face today – that is to say, a stifling daily grind of the working world with all its attendant hassles that is the sworn enemy of creativity.

There’s the commuting, the budgets, deadlines, overtime, stagnation, trying to do more with less, spending more hours a week at work than not at work, and the constant competition for more, better, and now that exemplifies a consumer-based economy.

All of these practicalities of life leave the modern artistically-inclined especially feeling drained, de-animated, and deprived of the space, reflection, and deliberation required to let loose their imaginations and give their creative musings a tangible form.

Such is no different for national/international award winning Australian author Dianne Gray, whose writing subtraction speaks wholly to this artist/workaday dichotomy many of us struggle to reconcile.

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Me, Myself & iPhone

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Is your smartphone usage stifling your creativity?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit right here that I’m a reluctant import into the world of Web 2.0 – not exactly a Luddite, but no early adopter either, not since Gmail first launched and you needed to be invited by an existing user to join.

I’m not on Facebook, I’m terrible at texting, the predominant activity I perform with my phone is talking on it, and I don’t own a smartphone (or rather, don’t own the corresponding data plan required to boost my phone’s intelligence quotient) because

a)  I don’t want to pay for it, and

b)  I couldn’t conceivably fit any more computing time into my day

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…But Fear Itself

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Why do so many people who want to write – people who love writing, love words, love stories, and claim writing is their passion –  not actually do so?

I found myself pondering this question this week while running on the treadmill at the gym, and came to the conclusion that writing and physical exercise have much in common.

I made a similar comparison in my very first post on this blog, when I wrote that my creative muscles were out of shape, and that a mere 126 new words had strained them near to the breaking point.  But now I’m making a literal comparison.  Exercise is another thing that many people want to do – that everyone intuitively knows they should do – yet not everyone does.

I know why.  It’s not because of laziness.  With writing or with exercise.

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Why Write?

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Why do you write?

This was the question written on a scrap of paper put forth for discussion in a Vancouver writers’ Meetup group to which I belong.

I’d previously made the suggestion that a possible method of stimulating conservation among the group would be for everyone to write down potential topics of discussion on bits of paper which would then be randomly drawn from a hat.  In truth, the members of this group are already sufficiently comfortable with each other to freely converse without assistance.  Still, we tried the activity anyway for the thrill of something new.

Hence the question: Why do you write?

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The First Rule of Engagement, or “How Routine Can Work Wonders for Artists”

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You didn’t think The Rules of Engagement was just a name I gave this blog to make it sound kickass, did you?

Anyone who knows me (which, admittedly, not many do yet by way of this blog, but perhaps, in time, that will change) knows that I love rules.  Seriously.  Someone actually accused me once of taking the proverbial “rule book” to bed with me at night.  It’s hardly something I can deny; I did already out myself on my “About” tab as being fairly left-brained, rational, and rigid, and to quote (or misquote) Popeye, “I am what I am”.  But my love of rules is not because I lack sufficient imagination or ability to think for myself, but rather, I find that when the structure and consistency that rules promote is in place, creativity and imagination are able to flourish.

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