(no subject)
I should learn to recognize that my creative impulses run in clearly-defined cycles. I spent all last semester doing serious worldbuilding for original fiction without putting anything concrete down into the two big novel-shaped things these ideas should feed. That was okay, but then my motivation to work on them evaporated for the space of several months, and I didn't write anything at all.
I did a fair amount of art, though -- started out as concept sketches as a logical transition from that worldbuilding and has moved into all sorts of mixed media. My sketchbook's full of cattle markers used as pastels and expensive Prismacolor pencil overlaid with ten-cent highlighter. I've got an unfortunate habit of classifying my art as less valid somehow because it comes more easily to me than writing. I'm not as technically skilled at drawing as I am at writing, but it seems to come more naturally most days and that has given me a bit of a complex. Even on a bad art day I can doodle something awful and then fling Crayola marker and little bits of cut-up metal tape at it until it looks interesting, if not decent. Bad writing days result in watching the cursor blink for an hour and a half before closing the still-untitled document.
Art stuff's still running high, but I'm starting to feel a pull back to creative nonfiction. I've spent all summer collecting inspiration in the form of information: I've read biographies of astronauts, road trip memoirs, philosophy texts, all sorts of interviews, and what looks to be half the contents of Wikipedia. The only TV shows I've kept up with are Top Gear, Man Lab, and Horrible Histories: all light-hearted and generally silly, but ostentably educational.
I have forsaken MS Word for the deliberately spartan WordPad, and all sorts of interesting field notes have started to crop up. I've done a little freewriting about little details: roadside signs on I-75, the significance of a haircut, club soda, moral hangups over a fox-fur hat, the way coal plants look at twilight from a few thousand feet in the air. Nothing has been edited, and I am not worried about it. I'm feeling good.
And you can see I've gotten back into longer-form blogging. Tumblr's nice and all but a change of scenery (or more accurately, a return home) really seems to be doing me some good.
I did a fair amount of art, though -- started out as concept sketches as a logical transition from that worldbuilding and has moved into all sorts of mixed media. My sketchbook's full of cattle markers used as pastels and expensive Prismacolor pencil overlaid with ten-cent highlighter. I've got an unfortunate habit of classifying my art as less valid somehow because it comes more easily to me than writing. I'm not as technically skilled at drawing as I am at writing, but it seems to come more naturally most days and that has given me a bit of a complex. Even on a bad art day I can doodle something awful and then fling Crayola marker and little bits of cut-up metal tape at it until it looks interesting, if not decent. Bad writing days result in watching the cursor blink for an hour and a half before closing the still-untitled document.
Art stuff's still running high, but I'm starting to feel a pull back to creative nonfiction. I've spent all summer collecting inspiration in the form of information: I've read biographies of astronauts, road trip memoirs, philosophy texts, all sorts of interviews, and what looks to be half the contents of Wikipedia. The only TV shows I've kept up with are Top Gear, Man Lab, and Horrible Histories: all light-hearted and generally silly, but ostentably educational.
I have forsaken MS Word for the deliberately spartan WordPad, and all sorts of interesting field notes have started to crop up. I've done a little freewriting about little details: roadside signs on I-75, the significance of a haircut, club soda, moral hangups over a fox-fur hat, the way coal plants look at twilight from a few thousand feet in the air. Nothing has been edited, and I am not worried about it. I'm feeling good.
And you can see I've gotten back into longer-form blogging. Tumblr's nice and all but a change of scenery (or more accurately, a return home) really seems to be doing me some good.