Tag Archives: creative process

Being a promiscuous reader: Brisbane Writers Festival

Posted in Creativity, Lessons from the Masters, Seasonal Posts by
Stack of books with spines open

Image source: Resource Freak

“I’m a very promiscuous reader; I believe we should take all kinds of genres to bed with us.” ― Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes
(pronounced something like “Beeyohkes”)
Image source: The Audio Bookstore

Today I went to my first Brisbane Writers Festival session and thoroughly enjoyed it!  Lauren Beukes, South African author of science fiction and crime noir novels, says we should read everything we can get our hands on, no matter what genre we write for ourselves.  Here’s why…

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Sting: overcoming years of writer’s block

Posted in Creativity, Lessons from the Masters, TED talks by

StingIn March, Sting gave a TED talk called ‘How I started writing songs again’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/sting_how_i_started_writing_songs_again).

As a youth, he lived by a shipyard, and constantly thought of getting free. As we all know, he did, selling more than 100 million albums and earning 16 Grammy Awards.

But something changed – he got writer’s block, stretching on for years. To overcome this, he recently found himself writing new songs by returning to the stories of the shipyard workers he knew as a boy.

I found his talk incredibly moving, as a creator and as someone who remembers a difficult childhood. In his talk, Sting sings songs from his upcoming musical, as well as my favourite of his songs, ‘Message in a Bottle’.

This ties back to my posts about incubation and writer’s block. I’ve written about how incubation of years has helped me to rewrite stories that I first imagined in high school now, as an adult. In Sting’s case, an unwanted incubation period that stretched for years (the writer’s block preventing creation) was solved by returning to childhood stories that had been incubating from even longer ago, bringing new creation.

Have you ever struggled with writer’s block? How did you get past it?

 

This post was written by TJ Withers-Ryan © 2014. Reblogging is highly encouraged as long as you credit me as the author.

The magic of the quill

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The quillIt’s an old adage that what you write with, your tools, affects what you write.

When I turned twenty, I celebrated my birthday with family but didn’t make a big deal of it to my friends. (Parties are stressful. You have to make them happen. I loved my 21st, but by then I’d come out of my shell a lot.)

So one of my friends decided someone needed to make a big deal of it, if I wouldn’t.

He asked when I was working, went to my house, snuck into my room (with my parents’ help), and left me a present.

Don’t get all excited. It wasn’t a mountain bike or a pet puma or anything.

He’d given me a pen. One of those fancy ones, with a real brand name, and replaceable cartridges that cost almost as much as the pen. And these pens cost a little bit! They’re not exorbitant, but you don’t get them for just messing around in your school books. You get them for your office, for sitting on your desk when big clients visit, for signing important documents.

When I picked this pen up, it felt heavy. Metal. Full of the promise of unwritten, unspoken words.

I checked the card:

For all the stories you will write,

and for the story you will write with your life.

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Keep on creating – lessons from the masters 2 – Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling book / movie Eat Pray Love, has always been a fascinating speaker to me.

For Elizabeth Gilbert, the success of Eat Pray Love meant a form of failure.  Her next book completely bombed because everyone who wanted a sequel to Eat Pray Love didn’t get it, and everyone who hated Eat Pray Love was annoyed that she had written another book.

But what could she do about that?  Nothing.

So she says she had a choice – to retire and move to some gorgeous villa, or to keep writing and see if she couldn’t succeed/fail again.  If she was going to avoid being paralysed as a writer and a human being, she had to get up and get started on her next book.

TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert: 'Success, failure, and the drive to keep creating'

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How struggle grows creativity

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This post begins with viniculture and ends with your created masterpiece.

Why viniculture?  Because viniculture is seriously hard.  See, wine comes from grapes.  And grapes are relatively “easy” to grow, but good wine is really difficult to make.  If you want good wine, you have to make your grapes struggle for it.

Photo of Grapes

Tasy, tasty grapes

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Does adulthood squash creativity or am I just lazy?

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This post will be a rant.  Expect it.  Don’t be too disappointed.

See how I make disclaimers?  That’s because I’m an adult.  And adults have expectations of other adults.

The expectation that I am fighting off by this disclaimer is that I should be able to write a coherent post because I am an adult and I am educated and I call myself a writer and I edit other people’s writing for a living and I got enough sleep last night.

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NaNoWriMo

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Are you running the NaNoWriMo race with me this year? Let me know by writing a comment! We can cheer each other on to victory!

‘Tis my first year, and I’m pretty excited!

I’m using this as an extrinsic force motivating me to just get my novel finished already!

 

Remember what I talked about in my last post, the one about Scheherazade and the king of Persia? Sometimes you need a gun to your head to just get things done, right? So this should be great.

 

P.S. I made it!

2013 Winner of NaNoWriMo!

2013 Winner of NaNoWriMo!

 

This post was written by TJ Withers-Ryan © 2013. Reblogging is highly encouraged as long as you credit me as the author.

The Power of Procrastination

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'Procrastination cat will do it tomorrow' from Lolcat Research

‘Procrastination cat will do it tomorrow’ from Lolcat Research

 

Today we talk about the power of procrastination!  But wait – how could procrastination possibly be a good thing?  I’m so glad you asked!

 

All you ever hear is that procrastination means putting off important (but difficult) things and doing unimportant (but more fun) things instead.  Ecclesiastes says procrastination is for the idle: “If you wait until the wind and weather are just right, you will never plant anything, and never harvest anything.”

 

And that’s definitely true.  But procrastination – if applied in a useful way – is not all bad.  In fact, Dave Windass (of the TED talk “The Power of Procrastination” http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxHull-Dave-Windass-The-Power) argues that procrastination is actually the key to being MORE productive, if used *in the right dosage*.

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Working Creatively Under Pressure

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Coming to hang out at GenreCon 2013 on Saturday 18th? Shoot me an email (see my Contact Us section)!

Today is all about being creative under pressure. In the workplace, whether you are a person doing creative work in a non-creative industry, or a person doing creative work in a creative industry, we all work to various deadlines, and you need to know how to harness your creative process in a hurry!

The best example of successfully doing creative work under pressure is fairly ancient. The story of ‘One thousand and one nights’, also known as ‘Arabian nights’, is the story of Scheherezade in Arabia.

Princess Dunyazade

A portrait of Princess Dunyazade (‘The Coffee Bearer’) by John Frederick Lewis

When a Persian king, Shahryar, discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he has her executed. He keeps on marrying a bunch of women, but each time, he executes her the morning after their wedding, before she has a chance to be unfaithful to him. It is the vizier’s job to provide these virgins to marry the king, but one day he finds they’ve run out! So his daughter, Scheherezade, convinces her father to let her be the next bride.

On the night of Scheherezade’s marriage to the king, she begins telling the king a tale, but she doesn’t give him the ending. He’s so curious to know how the story ends that he doesn’t execute her the next morning. He figures he’ll just wait until he’s heard the ending, then execute her the next morning. But that night, Scheherezade finishes that story and starts right into a new one. But she doesn’t finish it! So the king is forced to keep her alive for one thousand and one nights.

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