A to Z Poetry: Birth

Birth

An idea comes in the midst of sleep.

Drowsily you grab paper and pen

to scrawl words to keep,

before they are lost again.

Characters once asleep

 in the shadows of your mind,

come to life with a leap.
A story is born in a moment of time.

Let's start with my name
then we'll fill in the rest,

the chick says as she claims

 a home in your mind's nest. 

I want joy and strife,

a mountain to climb, a pit so deep, 

the bottom or top of my life.

will take time to reach.

I may need a mate,  but not quite like me  

we'll both need a race, a riddle, a quest, to solve.
I don't want simple or carefree

while our life evolves.

She sits on your shoulder, filling your ears.
You'll tell the tale of my life
living vicariously through my fears and tears,
laughter and love and strife.

A lifetime created with one little spark
when you read the page
written so clumsily in the dark.
Psst! My name is Sage.


~R.L.McCormack~

Thursday Epiphany: Outlining

I had an epiphany today. I have various exercises as well as a short story using the characters from Eyes that I completed while taking classes a while back.  I realized today that all that information can be incorporated into the main story as flashes of backstory or part of the story, providing clues to the characters as well as the conflict.  I don't have to stick with the conclusion in the short story since no ones read it except class mates and it isn't published, so nothing is written in stone. Such a freeing moment.  I've been writing lots of notes and started to fill out post its for the story board.  It's slow going but that's okay.  I've gotten a good start and will continue to work on it throughout the weekend.   

Doing a happy dance! 

Writerly Wednesday: Getting Organized

Our two week Christmas break from lessons is over and time to get back into the groove of learning. Every Sunday I fill out James weekly assignment sheet. The other evening I sat down to fill out his schedule as usual. I happened to look at the pile of books and notebooks in my writing nook, thinking how I'd fit my writing and blogging and everything else in for the day while he's busy working on his stuff, when the idea hit me. To do's and notes and bullet journals just were not working. I needed something simple and always accessible, not buried in a notebook. 

I should make an assignment sheet of my very own to follow weekly! 

I ignored the voice of the editor in my head saying it's another way to procrastinate from what I really needed to be working on, which is the story board. "Hey you," I say to the criticism, "I printed out the story, put it my notebook and I bought a trifold bulletin board so I'm ready to jet. Lots of changes are percolating around in my brain, so shut it." *grin* Besides, I'm being creative.  The lines aren't perfect and that's a bit annoying which I'll blame on paint and having to do a bit of rework since Word wouldn't let me save it in jpeg for some reason.  Pdf yes, Jpeg no.  *facepalm*

I'm psyched and ready to roll! 



 

Monday Intentions: Review and Rewrite

Have you ever edited the life and your voice out of a story?  I've come to realize I did just that with Eyes in the Ashes.  I wrote it several years ago and had writer classmates and friends  over a period of time review different chapters and provide feedback. Lacking the foresight to decide what was the best thing to do, I implemented way too many changes.  Every time I've gone back and looked at the story, I'd tried rewriting a bit more, but have never been quite happy with how things turned out.  In the meantime,  I've changed and learned so much about the craft of writing and grown into my skin as a writer. Plus I've written a few more stories and even one that kind of ties in with this one, as well as flash fiction and nonfiction.  But I always keep coming back to this particular story.  Things have been percolating in my brain for some time with changes in characters, points of view, and more.     

So I have decided to go back to the beginning and as my husband the engineer keeps telling me - start with the baseline.  He's a great sounding board for ideas and is totally in with me story boarding the story.  Little does he know that I may take over the kitchen wall, but for right now I'll try to keep it poster board size.  *grin* 

I printed out the original draft today and will write up the list of scenes this week and figure out where I need to delete or add scenes.   I've already decided to rewrite from my main character's point of view and have been having fun interviewing and delving into his backstory.  I know much more about him now than I did a couple years ago.   In addition, will write up a current list of things to do involving character interviews,  research and more.  I'm going to take it week by week with the goal of reaching THE END by the end of the year.    

I’ll keep an accountability record by reporting on goals and accomplishments each week. 

The first requirement in taking a step in the right direction is to take a step in some direction. ~Robert Brault

Book Review: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 

By 

Haruki Murakami 

Amazon:  Wind/Pinball, a unique two-in-one volume, includes, on one side, Murakami’s first novel Hear the Wind Sing. When you flip the book over, you can read his second novel, Pinball, 1973. Each book has its own stunning cover. In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels—Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973—that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat. Widely available in English for the first time ever, newly translated, and featuring a new introduction by Murakami himself, Wind/Pinball gives us a fascinating insight into a great writer’s beginnings.

Hear the Wind Sing is an intriguing first book which reads like a memoir. Like his later books, it meanders and introduces topics or goes on tangents that you not quite sure how they fit, but you know they fit anyway. Parts of a whole, more story to come. Derek Hartfield, NEB radio, the girls who touched his life, Rat who is still a bit of a mystery. Captures you and leaves you wondering.

The 2nd in Murakami's rat trilogy illustrates his growing style for writing in a non linear, pseudo stream of consciousness style.  The fondness for the radio station guy calling out of the blue, his love for cats and dogs, and the theme of obsession.  Murakami loads his books with oddball characters which keeps you reading, wanting to know where he is taking you. The still unnamed narrator's memoir like journey with the nameless twins.  We learn somewhat more about Rat who is an very unhappy guy, but yet remains somewhat of a mystery.    The narrator's obsession over pinball has an quirky resolution you probably wouldn't find in other stories.  I thoroughly enjoyed both stories 

Thursday First Lines: Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami

"There's no such thing as a perfect piece of writing.  Just as there's no such thing as perfect despair." So said a writer I bumped into back when I was a university student.  It wasn't until much later that I could grasp his full meaning, but I still found consolation in his words--that there's no such thing as perfect writing

Book Review: Thomas Merton - Thoughts in Solitude

I fell in like with trappist monk Thomas Merton several years ago when I read Seven Storey Mountain.  Since then I've collected several of his works and they are always enlightening and inspirational.  

Synopsis:  Thoughtful and eloquent, as timely (or timeless) now as when it was originally published in 1956, Thoughts in Solitude addresses the pleasure of a solitary life, as well as the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private. Thomas Merton writes: "When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate."

Thoughts in Solitude is a short read of 130 and packed with Merton's philosophical and spiritual thoughts on humility and silence.  So much stood out and I'll probably be coming back to this time and again. 

Part one:  Aspects of the Spiritual Life.  

"What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

The spiritual life is first of all a life.  It is not merely something to be known and studied. It is to be lived.  

Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.... It requires unending courage and perseverance and those who are not willing to work at it patiently will finally end in compromise.  Here, as elsewhere, compromise is another name for failure. To mediate is to think." 

Part Two: Love of Solitude:

"Words stand between silence and silence: Between the silence of things and the silence of our being.  Between the silence of the world and the silence of God.  When we have really met and know the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality. 

"Do not flee to solitude from the community. Find God first in the community, then he will lead you to solitude." 

He recommends reading the Psalms as well as Max Pickard's The World of Silence from which he found inspiration.  I fortunately found The World of Silence online in pdf format and began to read it last night. I'll let you know what I think when I'm done.