The Transformative Power of Music

There’s a long history of the creative arts being linked—visual artists garnering inspiration from musicians, visual artists moved by poets... music begetting dance, dance begetting poetry, poetry begetting song. A tradition of creative growth, an evolution of inspirational symbiosis that continues forevermore.

(That’s pretty much straight from my first year of creative writing, by the way... feel free to Google it. I’ve basically remembered—and lived—that, along with the internal struggle of killing the baby, which I’m currently living..)

Er...

(Note:  No worries, said baby is figurative—there’s no actual baby killing going on, so don’t call the authorities. The baby is my manuscript, and the entire phrase is a metaphor for embarking on the editing process, so chill.)

Music has always been inspirational for my writing. Not simply lyrics, but musical scores as well. Atmospheres, emotions evoked—it doesn’t always follow a song to the letter, but if it does, it can give me the chills.

Even if only one line applies to my work in progress, I can fluff up a vision all my own; a personal, mental music video that I will relive every chance I hear that melody.

Of course this is equally a blessing and a curse.

The blessing of course being the ease with which I can slide into an emotional atmosphere conducive to the tone of a particular scene, and motivating myself to write.

The flip side of this is the ease with which can slide into an emotional atmosphere conducive to the tone of a particular scene—regardless of situation, be it at the laptop or driving the car—and have reality melt away in the onset of mental immersion, or find my mood affected instantly.

Mr Lannis knows certain songs to avoid, certain artists I gravitate to and therefore shouldn't be on a playlist for a long drive. Others I’ve managed to hide from him, but there are some he knows without a doubt transport me elsewhere.

I think the easiest way to explain the sensation is when a particular piece of music is tied to a something of your past, and whenever you hear it you’re suddenly shifted; you find yourself reliving that moment in time.

In my case it's usually reliving a scene I've written.

Many writers have playlists for particular works. I know I do.

And sometimes I need to remember the basics; to use the tools I have to help bridge the gap I’m living.

Music will get me back in the mindset of my broken manuscript, and hopefully allow me to fix what needs fixing. And I've been putting it off far too long.

I need to let music return me to Jane.

Over-Thinking

I over-think things.

I like to believe it’s a part of my creative nature—the ability to analyze and fabricate possibilities from nothing, but the truth is this particular ability is a double-edged sword.

Sure, I can create multiple scenarios to any given situation—some likely, some not—as well as perfectly sound justifications for rather unsound possibilities, thereby giving them a credibility they would otherwise lack.

It’s a skill.

And no, I’m not talking about lying—something I’m actually rather terrible at—possibly because my knee-jerk reaction is to call people on their bullshit and the best way to do that is with the truth; and possibly because I’m inherently a lazy individual, and lying means you need to put work into remembering your fabricated details, whereas with the truth you only have to remember the, well, the truth.

(In processing this ramble I’ve suddenly recalled I have a shitty memory, and realize that yes, this doesn’t exactly bode well for the last statement, but then again I’m not lying about events, as clearly my own actions will be remembered by someone who can vouch. And besides: despite occasional appearances to the contrary, I’m actually rather boring—there’s nothing to remember or lie about. Heh.)

Anyhow.

Point being... my imagination is rather, er, active, even at rest. In other words: I have the uncanny ability to create stress where there is none. (Go figure.)

I call this an overactive imagination; and coupled with my double superpowers of rationalization and justification it can do a lot of damage. (Seriously: you want to buy that 1970s Hulk cookie jar on eBay? I can give you seventeen reasons why you absolutely need to have it or ZOMFG you will effing die in a fire by midnight so click click click that BUY IT NOW button! DOOO EEEET! Trust).

It was brought to my attention the other day that this particular oddity—the ability for my own creativity to analyze, and over-analyze, and dissect a situation with the meticulous inspection of a forensic coroner—might simply be considered over-thinking, and perhaps detrimental to my own mental well-being... you know, when I've managed to become stressed and frantic with those same imagined horrors.

Why would I do this to myself?

Um, well, there are times when it’s put to good use—brainstorming and plotting story lines and narrative tension.

Then there’re the other times, when clearly my brain has nothing constructive to deal with, and begins fabricating possibilities that have less chance of actually happening than our winning the lottery—except that doesn’t lessen the panic riddling my veins as I stare at the ceiling at 3am.

(My kid has anxiety... what can I say? He comes by it honestly.)

Anyhow. My friend went on to question: why aren’t I currently harnessing this energy? Why am I staring at the ceiling at ungodly hours of the night worrying about the safety of Mr Lannis in a bush in Northern Ontario (it’s not like the deer have firearms, though arguably that would make it more fair), when I could be skimming through possible plot lines and conflicts for as-yet-uncreated characters?

Not that the insatiable energy of inspiration humming through my veins would mean I’d sleep any more...

More than that, this friend reminded me I need to write, said it’s talent wasted. (I’m flattered, truly, but my terminal realist shouts that that has yet to be proven. So pffft to that.)

But the sentiment is true: I need to redirect my thoughts and get back into writing, for multiple reasons.

And creative writing. (Read: not blogging.)

Or at least, less blogging, or blogging as a break.

And then I remember the why... 

Why I can't jump yet. Why I'm hovering on the edge of hacking three manuscripts to bits.

You can’t push it.

I need to be ready. When it’s there, it’s there.

It’ll come. It’ll return, and I’ll hum. I’ll be glued to the keyboard again, a frenzy of sleepless focus that will somehow expel 50k - 85k words in four to eight weeks.

It’s happened three times before, and it will happen again. This I know.

I need patience.

In the meantime I need to breathe, and stop over-thinking.

Because for fiction, it’s great; but for reality, it’s goddamn stressful...

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott - Book Review

[Note: This review was originally published on April 27, 2011, on PostWhatever.com.]


Rating: 4/5 -  A satisfying read that’s worth every word.

Title: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Author: Anne Lamott

Format: paperback

Published: 1994

Genre: Non-Fiction

Publisher:  Anchor Books

Landed in my hands: purchased myself


Summary (from the cover blurb):

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Review:

Today I’m offering up a little something different for perusal. Non-fiction. Not a place I’ll be delving very often, but this is a book that had first been recommended to me, oh, ten years ago or so, and I’m a lazy ass who takes forever to get to non-fiction recommendations it’s taken me this long to seek it out. I’ve finally come to a place in my life where I not only needed to read Bird by Bird for my creative sanity, but I needed to read it for my soul.

The subtitle says it all: some instructions on writing and life. Lamott has poetically put forth a writing manual that not only gives excellent insight into the writerly condition — anecdotally painting the same situations and insecurities I know I, myself, have felt viscerally — but she also manages to gently tap the glass of the window into the soul. Lamott simply and elegantly describes the human condition, and that mutual need we all have to be understood, to be special, and to be heard.

As a writing handbook, it has wonderful tips on allowing those shitty first drafts, on observing everything around you, and on the importance of cheerleaders. While I disagree with the statement that "nothing is as important as a likable narrator" (I'd argue an interesting narrator is an excellent substitute — I'm sorry, but Vladmir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita was anything but likable), there are many other gems that rang true for me. Overall it describes discovery writing more than outlining, though it does touch on the importance of working structure. There are excellent jump-start ideas for blocks, and delightful anecdotes and metaphors for process, and inspiration, and attitude. There’s also a healthy dose of humanity and humour.

It's stories from someone who's been in the trenches.

One of my favourite passages illustrates perfectly the writer’s slow progression into paranoid insanity from being solitary.

[Research] is one great reason to call around. Another is that if you make the phone call while sitting at your computer, you can consider it part of that day’s work. It’s not shirking. Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone — and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp. If you are in a small workspace, your brain will begin breathing and contracting like the sets in Dr. Caligari. You may begin showing signs of schizophrenia — like you’ll stare at the word schizophrenia so long that it will start to look wrong and you won’t be able to find it in the dictionary and you’ll start to think you made it up, and then you’ll notice a tiny mouth sore, one of those tiny canker sores that your tongue can’t keep away from, that feels like a wound the size of a marble, but when you go to study it in the mirror, you see that it is a white spot roughly as big as a pinhead. Still, the next thing you know — because you are spending too much time alone — you are convinced that you have mouth cancer, just like good old Sigmund, and you know instantly that doctors will have to cut away half of your jaw, trying to save your miserable obsessive-compulsive head from being cannibalized by the cancer, and you’ll have to go around wearing a hood over your entire face, and no one will ever want to kiss you again, not that they ever really did.

I love it.

Bird by Bird is honest. It’s relaxing. It’s quirky. It’s charming. It flows. It’s as if Lamott were whispering secret truths about writing in your ear, sharing humanity and weakness, and in that quirky vulnerability, lending strength. It’s a heartening read, probably for anyone, but especially for writers. She gives writers permission to be insecure, permission to be courageous, permission to be human.

Without going into details, I was lucky to have found this book when I needed it. Perhaps it found me.

Thank you, Ms Lamott, for writing this book. The writer in me thanks you, and my soul thanks you, as well.

Secrets of Pinterest

I'm going to share a secret, ready?

I have no idea where people come from on Pinterest.

Seriously. It's like they trickle out of nowhere and suddenly I have a flood of people following my boards. I'm on Pinterest, like, twice a week. Maybe. And usually just to pin PostSecret postcards, because I plan to use them as creative writing fodder.

See, the secret with PostSecret is that it changes every week—but if you pin the image on Pinterest, you get to see it weeks after it's been lost to the rest of the Interwebs. Nice, eh?

Anyhow. Overall I've been too busy lately to actually peruse the Pinterest marketplace or even just check out what the people I follow are pinning... it's been that busy around here.

But people keep following me... and I have posted some odd shit in the past (still do, to be honest). At one point I was pinning stuff from a Tumblr blog (it's since shut down) with a highly inappropriate name just to see if anyone noticed...

Stuff like this (I'll let industrious individuals go on the hunt for the site name if they choose... ha!):

 

Inappropriate site names or not (or more likely: unobservant people, ha!) I only gained more followers.

(Well, I can hardly blame them. Tie + light saber + kissable lips does equal win...)

These followers have taught me something, though. I haven't censored myself on my Pinterest boards. I've been as weird as I want to be; my boards are as obnoxious or as idiosyncratic as I choose...

Something something be yourself... ? (Nah, that's not quite right...)

Something something the energy you put out into the world returns...? (Hm... closer...)

Something something like attracts like...? (Yeah, that sounds more fitting.)

It's rather reassuring to know there's a lot of weirdos out there... heh.

Deplorable: A reaction to JANE EYRE and the devolution of language.

Having recently read listened to the tumultuous ramble that is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (via audiobook—it was seventeen hours long), I made my way to an appalling conclusion of proportions which, while not wholly devastating to our society, are certainly pathetic and wont to pull, at the very least, an ounce of dismay from the reader.

My conclusion, as such, is this: language is an evolutionary beast, and, as any organism likely to change and grow over time, it has done so with meticulous care in particular areas—the newfound words deemed of import enough to be regaled with inclusion in official dictionaries as a part of the growing public lexicon—and yet in the same instant, the tradition of language has become, well, simplistic.

Yes. A miserable thing. The English language is hearty, a language of fortitude and multitudinous possibility. And yet the colloquial fashion is to cast off the vibrant alternatives in favour of the more routine options; like a bird with feathers of myriad colours, and yet we focus on scarcely any, perhaps those scant plumes found at a wingtip, turning blind eyes to the possible visual feast.

Three things, learned I, from my seventeen-hour-long travels through the (proverbial) pages of Jane Eyre.

One: Regardless of intake, I am less than inclined to civility over the gothic novel. Despite using an audiobook to retrace my once-reluctant steps through Jane’s life, I maintain that the subject matter is dry, drawn out—as one would imagine a punishment would increase the seconds of every hour under its waste—and predictably vexing, as the sensibilities and judgements towards women, deemed the “fairer sex” resound within my skull with a ludicrous knell.

Two: Mr Rochester remains a dick. No fancy words need bolster such a sentiment. A selfish dick he was years ago upon my first perusal of Jane Eyre’s pages, and I maintain the years have done nothing to shift him from such status.

Three: The colloquial language of today has collapsed; imploded, if you will, upon itself. The general population would seem to abhor the use of creative sentences—with perhaps the exception of expletives—falling instead upon habit and a dribble of vocabulary, relying on repetitive modifiers and simplicity. With the vibrant lexicon of language we, as the culture of English speakers, have at our disposal—and it is truly a plethora of possible radiant locutions afforded us—we lapse into the invariable monotony that is our familiar (and tedious) communication.

I, myself, am guilty of these transgressions.

Is it a reaction to the increase of technology? A diminutive response to the ability to have every answer at one’s fingertips with the slash of a few keystrokes and the monolith that is Google? The telling slump of a failing education?

Or the sin of sloth? Are we simply too lazy to bother?

Regardless, my impressions upon reading listening to Jane Eyre have been twofold: conclusions regarding the story itself (and Mr Rochester’s resounding dickery), but more lasting is that of the discourse—the distressing deduction that our society’s usage of terminology (when one has the breadth of the robust English lexicon at our disposal as modes of expression) is rather deplorable.

In short: simply tragic.

To Blog or Not to Blog...

Not a huge question to some, but I’ve wavered for a while. See, I used to blog periodically on The Mrs, but my partner in crime has since decided to shut down her show—completely her decision and justified, no ill-will here. I’ve also been known to write a book review or two over at Post Whatever, but content has been... lagging... for a while. Life interferes, especially with voluntary projects.

So do I open my own shop? Start writing my own blog? By running my own show I’d have a lot more freedom of choice—not that the previous partners were restrictive, but in principle, by calling the shots I only have to answer to myself...

(HEY! I can curse ALL I FUCKING WANT!)

So I lean towards doing it, but... but... but...

The thing is: it’s a lot of work.

To decide a topic, to write the post, to gather a corresponding image (the internet is a visual beast, after all), to grab a minute to put it all together and upload it for public consumption... And that’s just a single post...

What about subject matter? A focused blog? What shall I write about? Anything in particular? Or just all the rambly shit tumbling in my brain?

What about anonymity? Do I keep myself completely anonymous and let it all hang out? Or do I take a marginal step back, shield my family from strangers, but still share my posts with family and friends who know us? Blatantly labeling our family for the whole wide internet goes against my better judgement—but sharing a bit under the veil of partial obscurity, well, I could probably handle that (again).

Really, though, I wonder... do I want to commit? Do I have TIME? and if I do, does something else suffer?

That, then, is when I hit the truth...

When I was blogging on a weekly basis with The Mrs, I was highly productive in my personal writing. Now? Well, I have lots of edits that I keep putting off. Perhaps blogging would be the kick start that resets my internal mechanism into perpetual motion?

Here goes...