Many of us don't even know we are lost until someone points it out to us and then we struggle to believe the assessment. "You never find yourself until you face the truth" says Pearl Bailey. What does that mean to a writer? What is the truth a writer must face?
In each sentence a writer creates a vision of himself that he wants to become or has been. There is nothing original in the characters we create as writers; in fact, we aren't really creating at all we are recreating ourselves in every character. The on time postman or the never on time paper boy are caricatures of how we see ourselves. Really good characters are more than the one dimensional person we see ourselves as. Really good characters are multi-faceted, multi-layered and are filled with character flaws with one of those flaws rising to the surface creating a set of circumstances that becomes our stories plot.
So how do we find ourselves as writers? We find ourselves by writing and rewriting the characters we recreate from what we know of ourselves and what others tell us of ourselves; by developing that single character flaw that is who we are that at times we recognize and at other times we only learn about because someone has pointed it out to us.
No writer finds himself without writing and developing a manuscript. Over the course of my life I have 8, 9, 10 manuscripts that are unfinished all at various stages of incompletion. I am those manuscripts fragmented, incomplete, unfinished. With each one I lost interest, they became too hard to write or I became uncomfortable with the material.
How I feel about those manuscripts is how I feel about my life. I lose interest in my own life when living in my mind gets so hard I become uncomfortable in my own skin. How I deal with the hard things in life is to not deal with them at all. I can put them in a drawer and never think about them again or I can try and fix them whether they are fixable or not. Either way leaves me fragmented, incomplete, unfinished. I want more today.
It serves me no purpose to go back and dig out an old manuscript. I can't go back and recapture the inspiration I had to begin writing an idea. What I can do is change what I do today and I can only do that through and with other people.
The muse is the sayer of truth. Some truths I hear, some I don't want to hear and some I am just too filled with self to hear. How do I find me? I have to write out me until all the voices in my head quiet giving me the chance to hear the truth within me as I write me no longer fragmented, complete and finished. It is with the completion of the first manuscript that the voices quiet and the truth is heard and variations of that truth explaining who we are as writers gives us something worth saying.
How do I find me? I write me over and over and over and over until I can live with the truth of me.................
Thank you Stephanie...............................
In each sentence a writer creates a vision of himself that he wants to become or has been. There is nothing original in the characters we create as writers; in fact, we aren't really creating at all we are recreating ourselves in every character. The on time postman or the never on time paper boy are caricatures of how we see ourselves. Really good characters are more than the one dimensional person we see ourselves as. Really good characters are multi-faceted, multi-layered and are filled with character flaws with one of those flaws rising to the surface creating a set of circumstances that becomes our stories plot.
So how do we find ourselves as writers? We find ourselves by writing and rewriting the characters we recreate from what we know of ourselves and what others tell us of ourselves; by developing that single character flaw that is who we are that at times we recognize and at other times we only learn about because someone has pointed it out to us.
No writer finds himself without writing and developing a manuscript. Over the course of my life I have 8, 9, 10 manuscripts that are unfinished all at various stages of incompletion. I am those manuscripts fragmented, incomplete, unfinished. With each one I lost interest, they became too hard to write or I became uncomfortable with the material.
How I feel about those manuscripts is how I feel about my life. I lose interest in my own life when living in my mind gets so hard I become uncomfortable in my own skin. How I deal with the hard things in life is to not deal with them at all. I can put them in a drawer and never think about them again or I can try and fix them whether they are fixable or not. Either way leaves me fragmented, incomplete, unfinished. I want more today.
It serves me no purpose to go back and dig out an old manuscript. I can't go back and recapture the inspiration I had to begin writing an idea. What I can do is change what I do today and I can only do that through and with other people.
The muse is the sayer of truth. Some truths I hear, some I don't want to hear and some I am just too filled with self to hear. How do I find me? I have to write out me until all the voices in my head quiet giving me the chance to hear the truth within me as I write me no longer fragmented, complete and finished. It is with the completion of the first manuscript that the voices quiet and the truth is heard and variations of that truth explaining who we are as writers gives us something worth saying.
How do I find me? I write me over and over and over and over until I can live with the truth of me.................
Thank you Stephanie...............................
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