Quick catch up

Turning off my Bangkok topic Twitter stream has been very good for me. It’s still bloody awful out there and everywhere I go I hear people say their company is sending wives and children home. But going on Twitter now means I hear my writing and blog friends talking about normal stuff and not dead bodies and fighting. I feel less anxious. 

I won’t go home until Son has done his exams… so we went to school this afternoon for a geography exam – it was only open for exams today – and we got there and back without seeing anyone with guns; we saw no razor wire, or burning tyres.  I did see some sand bags but I pretended they were for the rain. I waited the three hours in the coffee shop with my laptop rather than going home.  And I wrote. Well I got myself ready for the next step of writing.

In the gym on Sunday (oh yes! I was there voluntarily…) I was listening to A Conversation on The Writing Life with Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. One of them described the different drafts that they do. In their second draft they write out a description of each scene’s business and they stick it together and then up on the wall. I’ve always been a cutter and paster: actually cutting up my essays and sellotaping them back together again in an entirely different order so this idea resonated with me. Then Liz said something in her post here about writing a synopsis in order to diagnose where the plot holes are.

I am struggling with the gargantuan thing that is my draft. It’s too big to see any sense in it so I’m going to make a mixture of these two pieces of advice in the hope that it gives me something of a manageable size to work with.

Oh and check this out: I'm one of the 32 blogs! Please come back on Thursday. I can't wait. Caroline's work is extraordinary. Her writing is like poetry that I can understand without having to read it six times. (Oh dear, don't think too badly of me.)

I'm going on a bear hunt...

There was a black dog scratching at my door yesterday.

It was my sister’s birthday and I didn’t get to speak with her because of the time difference and her being at college.

I found out while on the ‘phone to my Dad that someone else has died. This makes three since the beginning of January.

So today, I am going off piste; I am going on an adventure into parts of Bangkok not covered by the Nancy Chandler map because I am feeling in need of change. I need to get lost in my head, see new things, embark on a mission to nowhere; an artist’s date if you will.

I am already feeling cheerier.

Recovery

Oh there’s no pulling the wool over your eyes, eh?

“I think the plan is to gather information now, find out who the characters are, and then write, write, write over July while I’m in England.”

No, you say, get on and write now. Caught procrastinating again!

*****
I’m reading ‘Floor Sample: a creative memoir’ by Julia Cameron. Yes, THAT Julia Cameron: Julia ‘Morning Pages’ Cameron, whose ‘artist date’ is an essential for when the well feels empty. Flicking through The Artist’s Way in my final year of my fine art degree rescued me from a horrible and lingering ‘I can’t do this’ crisis.

I’m about two thirds through it and I really can’t put it down. She’s fascinating. Brought up a catholic she sought “a personal God … I wanted a God as intense and personal as my spiritual questioning. I wanted a God who just plain liked me.” She had a doomed marriage to Martin Scorsese – doomed essentially because she was an undiagnosed alcoholic and admits “I confused alcoholism with creativity.” She got sober (of course it wasn’t as easy as I’m suggesting) and draws parallels between reliance on a higher power working to help bring sobriety as well as helping to bring other things, such as ideas. Told by her sober alcoholic friends to consider God her new employer, she should appeal to Him for ideas.

Now I don’t have a faith – not a religious faith at all – but I am aware that faith … in myself or my ability or something - is crucial to being able to write or make art. I guess you could call it ‘confidence’ or ‘self belief’ but I don’t, it’s most definitely faith – I have pretty much zero confidence in my creativity. I think it’s also the subconscious rather than an external being (not that God has to be external – maybe that’s why He’s different for everyone) but it’s made me think harder about asking for help for the things I want to solve.

It’s also made me realise that ‘on flicking through The Artist’s Way’ isn’t really good enough. I am going to try to do the twelve weeks course from start to finish.