Summer's End

 Summer always ends too quickly! I'm never ready. 

Linear Perfectionism vs. the "Miyazaki" Method

Confession: so I have at least five novels where I wrote over 100 pages, and then I just . . . stopped. I am afraid I'm too much of a linear perfectionist! If I can't get my chapter outline ordered just right, all too often writer's block slams me and I just give up after awhile and trash my story. 

However, after reading an article about legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and his creation method for his animated movies, I decided to try something new in my own writing. Miyazaki doesn't begin with a perfectly written script. Instead, the genesis of his story begins with "visual storyboards," and then he builds the rest of the story around these powerful core images.

I was stuck on a chapter of my own WIP Agent Regalia that was very important and introduced a lot of key players in the story. But the more I sat in front of my computer and stared at the mocking blink of the cursor on an empty white screen, the more daunted I felt and the less I knew what I wanted to say. So, I thought about a future scene in the story that I could really visualize and filled me with excitement, and I wrote that instead. I skipped the line! I ended up writing a whole other chapter that actually helped me understand what I wanted to distill in the previous chapter. And now I feel a bit more confident about stepping back into the linear track and tackling the hard part . . .

I guess what this experience has reminded me is that there is no one right way to write. And that one writing method may help sometimes, and other times, perhaps a different ink hack will do the trick. Good luck with all your creative endeavors!

Shiny Corners

In some ways, I feel like throwing my words out into cyberspace and the sea of submissions is like tossing pennies into the void. Most of the time, no one will even notice the splash of my middling ink. And the older I get, the more I begin to wonder if it isn't better to live one's life as elusive as Enya, weaving lyrical dreams in solitude beyond the reach of the mundane world . . .  

But I suppose if I keep tossing pennies, I'll end up with a very shiny corner.