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Stolen
Moments: Optimize Your Writing Opportunities (Excerpt
from HowMaster: The Writer's Guide to Beautiful Word Crafting) Ideas, Ideas, Everywhere And Naught A One To Think Ideas
are everywhere, anywhere, anytime, and some of the best ones come straight out
of our mouths. When you talk to
yourself, for instance, every time you say or want to say something to yourself,
there’s an idea seed. Every time
you overhear a conversation on the bus, at the gym, or in the lobby of your
apartment building, those are idea seeds. When
you go at rooster call on Monday to the laundry room and Missus Battlesmuch
stomps in right behind you hollering that it’s her washday and you can
use only one machine at a time you get
lots of ideas. You look out seconds
before the sun slips behind the mountain and see orange and violet lay fire
across the sky and you have an article about a goodnight kiss from God.
And when the emerald green hummingbird you thought was forever gone
because you hadn’t seen it for a few years stops long enough to hover over the
petunias at the same moment you happen to be at the window, you have
synchronicity and in my case a Haiku poem. Ideas
are abundant as the cells that make up your being. Lightning struck recently in a park at the edge of our city.
Twenty-one thousand hectares continue to burn and amazingly no human life
is lost. Several thoughts rush in
(be my guest): ·
Even some of our firefighters have never faced an inferno of this magnitude.
Man, who thinks s/he can control the environment and life in general,
faces supreme power and sees or fails to see man’s insignificance in its wake. ·
Conservationists have, in protecting our forests, allowed an overabundance of
fuel for wild fires. ·
All is temporary and can be wiped out in seconds. ·
Gawkers in boats hamper firefighter attempts to fill up water bombers at the
lake, thieves ransack evacuated homes, and smokers continue to toss lit
cigarettes from car windows. ·
Smoke and cinders bring suffering to those with heart and respiratory conditions
during a time when emergency rooms are packed and there are cutbacks in medical
care. ·
Love of neighbor burns through fire as donations pour in to relief
organizations. ·
This is the second driest summer in this area in 100 years.
How did people handle forest fires a century ago without helicopters,
water bombers, chemical retardants, and all the other accoutrements of modern
fire fighting? What did they do a
century and a half ago when homesteaders hacked out space in
the wilds and fire came? ·
All our police and fire resources are busy with the fire.
What are the local bad guys doing with that opportunity? ·
Ousted wildlife has to go somewhere. What
happens when bear and cougar meet man on man’s turf? Those
ideas came with no time taken to seek them.
Ideas are everywhere, anywhere, anytime, as my daughter, Steph, a people-watcher
with writer’s cramp, says: “I
think on my feet. Usually in the
middle of something boring or monotonous, the proverbial light bulb will come on
and blind me. I will be cleaning
the shower stall, thinking about something that’s happened, like all the
people who lost their homes in the recent fire, and I start to wonder how in a
row of 10 or 15 homes, for every one standing the ones on either side have been
demolished by the blaze.” I
Don’t Have Extra Time Maybe you don’t but it gets forced on you anyway.
They aren’t called waiting rooms for nothing and the bank that claims
to serve you quickly should be made to do penance by having to stand in its own
lineup. The nice thing about banks
is that they have all those forms sitting there for us to write on the backs of
when an idea hits and we didn’t bring a notebook.
Bring your own pen though or you’ll lose your place in line. When you
see a waiting room full of magazines you know they’re not there because
you’re going to be attended any time soon so you may as well use your time to
your advantage: ·
Every time I see a cover girl with an overblown pout I think of fish and
consider how even in this era of woman power, models are made to moue up and
pose like they just can’t wait to jump into bed -- and not to sleep. ·
Those magazines are for women. Are
the cover (role?) models suggesting the reader too should flex her gills and
simper? ·
Consider the long term health implications of treatments employed to puff out
those kissers. ·
What do guys really think about all
that pout pandering? Incidentally,
did you notice that every time you decide to actually read one of those waiting room mags the receptionist calls you in
because it’s your turn now -- hey, there’s a story seed about someone who
could change events just by pre-empting them. In
my more arrogant days I believed memory would serve my writing as well as it
does for what you said to me the evening of October 14, 1956.
Not. Right away two huge
observations cackled at me. The
first is that as soon as you get busy your brain brings the task at hand to the
fore and everything else gets pushed to Incidental:
The soup I wanted to turn down as I wrote this paragraph boiled over when
I forgot -- four seconds after I got up -- and sat back down to continue typing.
Secondly, having an excellent memory serves no one because nobody
believes us anyway. Just try and
convince someone they really did say or do such-and-such on that day in 1956 and
see what happens. Write ideas down.
Carry a pocket size notepad, the kind with no hard cover and curly wire
to stick you in the eye every time you bend over.
Okay so I don’t carry one since I like to have my hands free but I do
run around begging paper and a pen every time an idea happens.
Ideas happen all the time but there is only so much we can hold so we
have to write it down. Now all I have to do is explain to Canada Customs and
Revenue what those squiggles are on the back of my T4. But My Life Is Ordinary Ordinary is normal.
The idea for my first large work came as I lay on the floor one autumn
afternoon in the living room of our tiny apartment. The radio played an old song about a spinning wheel in the
parlor and the only reason I even paid attention is my interest in antiquity.
My mind worked on nothing more serious than the way my elbow dug into the
worn carpet and how the sunlight looked as it came in the window.
Then it started. Yesterday sank its nostalgic clutches deep into my
writer sensitivities and off I went to my primitive little desk between the wall
and the foot of the bed to write a short story that wouldn’t quit until it
blew itself into a novel. The
unconscious works best when brain is idle and hands are busy, like when you
scrub the shower or lie mindless on the floor. A
seller’s policy is to think of everyone you meet as a prospect and to never
assume that any individual won’t buy. The
same goes for ideas: it’s all
prospect. Getting up in the morning is routine unless you wake up
somewhere else and don’t recall how you got there or you find the place was
ransacked as you slept. It’s
ordinary and you know it by rote, right? You’ve
never gone bleary eyed to the coffee maker to load the filter and dumped coffee
grounds all over the countertop or, like me, poured in the dark and missed the
mug? How does a blind person handle
the tasks we take for granted? What
psychological gears and cylinders are operative for that individual to learn
when the end of the loaded scoop is almost
to the edge of the filter basket? How
did my grandmother’s sightless neighbor manage to hang her clothes on the line
with same-colors together every single time?
The ordinary is never totally commonplace, there’s always mystery in
its depths which we probe by thinking around corners. Think
Around Corners? A
few years ago I read that if you want to paint a picture from a photo, turn the
photo upside down. That shuts down
logical left brain and allows right brain creativeness to take over.
Thinking around corners works that way because it looks at an issue from
all angles. Time is a good example
as we never seem to have enough of it and talk about it in terms of something we
pass, spend, waste, take, or do. What
if those verbs were story characters? What
would they look and sound like? What
would be the moral of such a tale? If
those verbs were in a race which one would win?
How? Have you ever gotten into bed and wished it were morning
because your day is planned and you’re eager to get on with it but you have
seven hours of sleep to go? When
you wake it seems you just fell asleep when actually it’s been long enough for
night to blacken and become light again. What happens around you while you’re
snug in your bed? You know what
night looks like from your 2:00 a.m. window but what does it look like in
doorways and alleys of downtown when the night crew takes over?
There is certain order to living arrangements on the street, a hierarchy
most of us don’t recognize or understand.
How do street folk manage to move around one another peaceably?
What happens when someone gets sick and can’t fend for themselves?
What could we learn from their habitation to apply to our workplace or
neighborhood? Are we so different?
How? The
difference between ordinary perception and faceted thinking is the difference
between climbing all those stairs to the old City Hall building to pay your
taxes -- and making your way along stone steps that resonate with the footsteps
of five generations of taxpayers. Ordinary
view glances at a yellowed snapshot of an unknown lady in a long dress while
creative thinking burns with a thousand questions about who she is, what her
life was like, how long she lived, whether and who she married, how many
children she had, and how her photo got to be here in the first place, and
whether the photographer’s company made it into this century.
Ordinary view is logical, beware of it. A
funny thing happens right about the time you open your thought processes and
give light to mystery. You get
happier. Life holds more meaning
because you see everything differently, even reverently.
While you walk up those everyday lifestairs, watch your step.
Closely. Sample
chapter from: HowMaster:
The Writer's Guide to Beautiful Word Crafting
http://filbertpublishing.com/howmaster.htm
or by money order $20.90 US to: Filbert
Publishing Also
available in Canada from Mosaic Books 1-800-663-1225 Linda
M. Gigliotti lives and works in the mind bending splendor of Canada’s BC
southern interior. HowMaster comes after 17 years practice as a private
writing instructor. Visit Linda’s web page at: http://www3.telus.net/public/lgwriter/
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