Making Ideals Real

“Practice what you preach.”

I am very good at giving advice, but bad at actually following the that same advice. I can tell someone the exact reason why they should practice writing every single day, but I find myself taking month long breaks from writing anything. I can make an extensive list of the reasons why blogging is a great exercise, but I struggle to remember that this blog even exists.

I need to change this.

As a teacher, I’m a model. What I do is what my students are going to imitate. I’m not only teaching them information, but I’m also teaching life skills and work habits. It’s not enough to tell my students what I expect of them, but I need to show this in real life behaviour.

I like to make excuses for my behaviour, but if I keep doing this, I’m going to have students who constantly make excuses. Are these the kind of students I want? Is this what I want my legacy to be? No, so I have to step up my game, to match what I want my students to achieve.

I’ve said all of this before. Like I said, I’m good at giving advice. I know what to do. I just need to do it.

 

Hello from the other side…

… of yet another pretty long absence. *Sigh* I will learn consistency one day in the future… maybe. Well, in my last blog post I wrote this:

I want to make a change. It’s time to keep on living my life as fully as I’ve experienced it this month, instead of vicariously living someone’s else’s life through the internet.

So, you see that I’ve been doing exactly just that since I haven’t been on the internet to post updates here. Except I have been on the internet, I just haven’t opened WordPress in 4 months.

I guess I could’ve just posted something, and acted as though there was no break in between them, or as though the break doesn’t matter, but that would have felt like a lie to me. As much as this blog is meant for an audience, it’s also meant for me, and there were things that I had wanted to share on here, to document my creative writing life. I thought about blogging about these things while they were happening, except I didn’t, which makes me feel really sad. I’ve been blogging for my classes in school, so I was feeling too blogged out to blog some more, especially when it was for a personal blog that wasn’t going to get marked as part of a project.

So, what’s happened in this gap of time that I wanted to document?

1. I began Teacher’s College at Brock University! Yay for achieving a major life goal!
2. I did a Genius Hour project based on writing a children’s book.
3. NaNoWriMo 2015.
4. I finally wrote my first villanelle.

After years of planning and hard work, I am finally in in the consecutive education program. I am taking classes where we are specifically discussing how to teach, and I am able to share all of the thoughts that I had about teaching in the past with my teachers and fellow future teachers, which is such a cool feeling. I’ve been challenged on many of my old opinions, and I’m constantly developing my teaching philosophy with things that I’ve learning in every class. Our teachers are always encouraging us to reflect on our personal growth, hence all of the blogging that I’ve been doing for school. I never quite fully realized before just how much time and energy doing a full and deep reflection takes. I have also come to realize that I do a lot of reflection in my head, and so a lot of my thoughts never make it onto paper. I’d love to record all of them, but by the time I actually have a chance to write them down, I’ve already worked through them and the words that I write down don’t reflect the rich thought process that I just went through in my head. Besides lots of reflection, I’ve obviously had other assignments that have kept me quite busy. Despite all of the business, I’ve been enjoying the overall experience of teacher’s college. I truly feel as though I’ve grown as a person since I’ve started, and I’m only a quarter of the way through.

Genius Hour is a project where students research a topic that they are interested in. They are free to choose any topic, and let their passion and interest direct their learning. My instructor for my Technology in Education course had us participate in Genius Hour.  We had create a blog to record our experiences, and you can check out mine here. I go more into depth about what Genius Hour is over there. For my project, I chose to research the topic of children’s novels, which meant that I read some children’s novels, then began to write my own. I began writing a fantastic story about a girl who discovers an empty enchanted carriage in front of a mysterious gated property in the middle of the forest one day. In true me fashion, I began the story, worked on it until I ran out of steam and original inspiration, and am currently taking a break from continuing the story. As I say for so many stories, it is a story that I definitely want to continue writing and complete one day.  I genuinely do want to return to this story soon though. I have a really great feeling about it, and I’ve gotten really positive feedback when I shared it with others.

NaNoWriMo 2015 has come and gone. Unlike last year, it was a successful endeavour, and a really great experience. Last year I had hoped to use NaNoWriMo to advance my novel (the main one that I’ve been writing for the past four years), but I miserably failed, and erased almost everything that I had written. This year though, really great things happened, and I jumped quite far ahead in the plot of my novel. To quote what I wrote on my facebook page: “NaNoWriMo update: at the beginning of the month, I had 23,000 words in my novel. I have been successfully writing something everyday, some days only 100 words, on my best day 5000, and I am currently at 34,000 words. Last year I tried doing NaNoWriMo but ended up deleting almost everything that I wrote because I had ended up running around in circles without actually advancing the plot, but this year I am loving every word that I am putting down. I haven’t had such good writing sessions for quite a while, and it feels awesome.” I completed NaNo with 41,150 words in my novel. No, I’m not done my novel yet, which perhaps means that I didn’t “win” NaNo according to the “official” NaNo challenge, but I personally felt that I won at NaNo 2015. I set a personal goal of writing every single day in November and significantly advancing my novel, and I did exactly just that. Okay, I actually didn’t write anything for the last four or five days of November, but I blame school assignments for that, and besides, up to that point I had written every single day.  I feel extremely proud of myself when I think about NaNo 2015, and throughout the challenge I felt myself falling more and more in love with my novel.

When I was high school, I was introduced to the poetic form of the villanelle. My teacher read us a villanelle that enraptured me with its beauty, and the power that came from the repeated lines. I attempted to create a poem that was as beautiful and powerful as the poem that I had heard, and failed miserably. Later, I attempted this poetic form again, and once again could not think of two lines that I could repeat so powerfully and beautifully. The villanelle became for me a lofty challenge that I would one day master, but I didn’t realistically expect to successfully complete the challenge any time soon. Well, today I strode up to that challenge and conquered it in one powerful swoop. My language arts teacher had set up stations of activities that we could one day do with our students, and one of the stations was a poetry station, and one of the forms of poetry at that station was a villanelle. Since the poetry station was the last one that I was doing, and I knew that I had plenty of time to spend there, I chose to take another crack at writing a villanelle. I scrolled through the images on the website that my teacher had instructed us to browse for inspiration, felt pulled by the image of an opal necklace, and began to write. I expected to struggle, and to arrive at the end of class with a half written poem and a disappointed sigh, but as I began to write, all of the pieces just magically fell into place, and I finished writing the last line of the villanelle just as our class time was ending. What an amazing feeling, to complete a challenge that you had thought you couldn’t complete. I had finally given myself the space to write something that wasn’t very good, just for the sake of completing something for the class, and with that mindset I finally opened myself up to actually writing a villanelle. I wrote my key lines that would be repeated, and with the pressure of finishing within a set amount of time, I didn’t second guess whether the lines would be good, or powerful, or beautiful, but finally just took those lines and wrote around them,  and ended up creating something that actually was powerful and beautiful. Writing is about vulnerability, and being willing to take a risk. Those who refuse to walk forward onto that tightrope where they constantly risk absurdity, prevent themselves from ever reaching the perch where beauty stands and waits.

 

Internet habits

I haven’t been on my computer for a while. Well, actually, I haven’t been “on” my computer for a while. I have used my computer for five to ten minutes here and there to do things like look up train ticket information, but I haven’t felt like I’ve been “on” since I haven’t taken the time to watch YouTube or scroll through Tumblr.

For the past month, I’ve been busy with either taking my own trip out to Quebec, or entertaining my cousin while she was visiting here. During both these trips, I’ve been going out, seeing things, and making memories. During my Quebec trip, the main purpose of the trip was to volunteer at an English for Kids camp, so we barely had time to go out and do any touristy things, and I didn’t have any time to sit for an hour staring at a computer screen for my single entertainment. I didn’t even bring my laptop with me since I knew that I would be so busy. While my cousin was here, I had to work my usual shift at work, and we went out to do things in the evening. I’m not used to going out in the evening during the week, and I usually use that time to let the internet entertain me. Between these trips, I’ve had some time to be on my usual schedule of internet enjoyment, but having these two trips so close together has made it feel like I’ve been “gone” from the internet for a very long time.

And the only time that I even realize that I’ve “been gone from the internet” is when the trips are over and I actually have time to sit down and pull out my laptop. While the trips were happening, I didn’t notice at all that I wasn’t seeing those cat gifs and daily vlogs, so I obviously didn’t miss them. I’ve been thinking for a while that I’ve been spending too much time just staring at a screen, barely even interacting with the content that’s flying past my eyes. I so many other interests and nearly forgotten hobbies that I’ve been ignoring in order to feed my internet habit, and yet, although I recognize that the content and experience becomes practically meaningless when devoured in such large chunks, I cannot seem to be able to pull myself away from the internet, shut the laptop and do something else. It takes a trip like the two that I just experienced to push me off and force me to do something else.

I want to make a change. It’s time to keep on living my life as fully as I’ve experienced it this month, instead of vicariously living someone’s else’s life through the internet.

 

Asking friends to proofread your story

A while ago I mentioned to one of my friends that I had started writing a new short story, and when she showed interest, I offered to send her what I had of the story so far in order to get some feedback from her. She said, “Yeah, I can do that. I’d love to help you out. But can you send me a list of questions with the story so that I know what kind of feedback you’re looking for?”

I had never thought of sending a list of questions along with my story before, but I loved the idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself, but I guess I have to admit that other people sometimes get good ideas too. I finally sent her the story tonight (when I was by a computer I forgot, and I went away from the computer and had something to do I remembered), so I don’t know how much the questions will help, but I’m super curious to see what her feedback is going to look like.

I’ve had a lot of trouble in the past with sending friends a story or the beginning of the novel and asking for feedback afterwards, and them saying things like, “Oh, it was nice” or “I think you’re a good writer” or “yes, you’ve improved since you’ve started writing” or “I like the story.” Do you see the pattern of lovely but really general and non-specific comments lacking any actual advice? Now, I love getting lovely compliments that flatter me, but when I specifically ask for feedback, I’d like to get some actual feedback. Which parts did you like? Which parts did you not like so much? In what way did I improve? What do I still need to work on? I would try to pry out some more useful information by asking these questions afterwards, but my friends would always shrug and not know what to say, which is understandable because they can’t remember the story as well I can without it in front of us.

Once my friend sends me some feedback, I will get back to actually working on it. In the meantime, I’ll continue to think about the world in general and try to develop it further in my mind.

 

Sharing Work

I have found that I typically feel more motivated to write when I share my work with other people. I love the feeling of taking a piece of writing that I feel really happy about, giving it to someone to read, and (often) getting a positive response back. The more that I hear that people like my work, the more confident that I feel about my writing capabilities, and I feel a greater urge to write more. I especially love getting comments from people saying that they want to read more of my stuff, and I feel motivated to give them something more to read.

I used to have a writing website that I shared my work on. The website, Jottify, was fantastic because it was specifically dedicated to sharing work and reading and commenting on other people’s work. I joined the website when it was only a few months old, and loved the small, but strong, community. My first couple works that I shared didn’t get much attention, but it didn’t take very long before I gained followers and became fairly popular on the site. After a while, I knew that when I posted something that it was definitely going to receive likes and lovely comments, and it fueled my desire to write. When the website gained more members, it managed to maintain the same cozy vibe for a while, but eventually, due to a combination of things, the once strong community feeling began to dwindle. Some of my friends on the site stopped showing up. I was busy with school and suffering with writer’s block on the novel that I was writing, and slowly stopped using the site myself. I recently decided to log onto the site again, but found that it had disappeared. This didn’t completely shock me since I had known that the person who had created the site seemed to have decided that the site wasn’t the success that he had wanted it to be, and had stopped maintaining it fully. Still though, the fact that Jottify had actually disappeared surprised me, and made me feel sad.

I miss having a community like the one I had on Jottify. When I stopped logging onto it regularly and posting things, I slowly lost the motivation to create, and so I am thinking that I should find a new website similar to Jottify, and find a new community to help motivate myself to create new things.

 

Lacking Motivation

Words are difficult. Translating thoughts into a format that will communicate them to an audience is challenging, and lately I’ve been losing that challenge because I haven’t been attempting to compete.

I feel such a disconnect inside of myself. I have always identified myself as a creative person, as a writer. Yet I find it so difficult for me to actually write anything. I have ideas, but I do nothing with them. My creativity dies before it has a chance to be born. Or, even if I manage to begin something, I leave it unfinished. This makes me feel horrible. I don’t want to be this way. I want to create things, to have something to show to the world.

Lately, it feels a bit like I’ve given up. I have so little motivation to write, that it’s kinda terrifying. I still have all of the same dreams and desires, though, which makes the apathy towards writing feel even worse.

I feel like this horrible cycle began a long time ago. At one point, I wrote without a care, and wrote simply because I wanted to. I didn’t have the specific aspiration to become a writer yet. I had no goals, no expectations, and no fear. Later, when I realized how much I enjoyed writing, the desire to publish something someday grew. As that feeling grew, the pressure to write well increased. The bigger the goal, the more stressed out I felt about my writing. I began to analyze my words as I wrote them, and the amount of words that I kept diminished. I began to experience writer’s block. I began to lose my motivation to work. I began to lose my impulse to create. And the once quickly flowing river shrunk to a trickle of a stream.

I try to tell myself that the first draft is allowed to suck, and that I can edit it later, but it’s so incredibly hard for me to turn off that voice in the back of my head that keeps whispering, “How does that sentence compare to [insert a famous author]’s work, and are you sure that your main character isn’t turning in a Mary Sue?” The most frightening thing that the voice whispers is “are you sure that you aren’t wasting your time and effort on this? It’s not like you’re ever going to actually get published.”

My response to writer’s block has always been to walk away from the work, and return to it once I feel the urge to work on it again. Whenever I try to sit down to write, I cannot write. I can only successfully write a substantial amount when I’m “in the mood” or struck with inspiration. So I wait “to be in the mood”. I’ve been wondering lately if this is actually a good idea, or if I’m just “not trying hard enough” when I sit down to specifically try to write.

All I know is that I want to create, and I’m struggling to be able to do that lately.

 

What is an Author (a found poem)

The circle of life,

providing immortality,

possesses the right to kill

particular individuality.

The dead man in the game of writing.

The consequences of their discovery,

the real meaning of his disappearance-

.

Reconstruct through the text

a thought or experience,

theoretical and technical-

.

The deleted passages?

A multitude of questions,

blurring and concealing,

circumvent references,

symptom or sign-

.

Transcendental anonymity:

the test of oblivion,

the hidden meaning,

obscured contents.

.

Writing as absence.

 

Don’t Leave

Yesterday I was looking through some old papers and happened to find back a short story that I wrote a year or two ago. I really love these kinds of moments, especially when I find back something that I completely forgot about.

---

“I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I.”

“How do I know this isn’t a dream?” She reached up on her toes to wrap her arms around his neck.

He leaned his forehead against hers. “Wish I could tell you.” He pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear.

They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, then their lips met, eyes closing. His arms wrapped around her back. When their lips parted, she whispered, “Don’t leave.”

“I don’t want to.” The porch light above them turned on. “But I think your Dad has other thoughts on the subject.”

She sighed, and her head to the front window. Her father waved at them. She shook her head as she returned her attention, smiling slightly. “Thank you for the best night of my life.”

“It was my pleasure,” he smiled back. “And to think you might have spent it watching t.v., and eating chips… who’d have thought I’d love reruns so much!”

She punched his arm. “It’s my favourite show.”

“What if I had pulled my camera out and recorded the whole night?”

“I think I might have a new favourite show.”

The porch light flickered on-off a couple times. He released her back. “Night.”

“Night.” She slowly lowered her arms and entered the front door backwards. Once a click hid her face, he turned and walked down the driveway.

“I need to go buy a camera.”

 

What I’ve been working on lately

With the revival of my blog, I’ve been thinking deeply about what I should write about as a blogger. Before, I had all these grand plans to write about different aspects about writing, like how to do character descriptions, or advice for how to create a brilliant title, just like other writing blogs that I had come across. But that was the problem with my idea: I was planning to imitate other blogs and do what they had done. If I had followed this plan, I would have been writing about things that I only moderately understood myself. When I was making this plan, I had thought that I would naturally learn about these things as I wrote about them.

I don’t think that this was the worst idea that I have ever had, but it definitely wasn’t a good one. You want proof that it was a bad idea? Well, how about the fact that I stopped blogging before I had even started doing my “brilliant plan”. I had made the plan thinking about what would be “popular” or “beneficial for my readers” instead of thinking of doing something that truly interested me, that would authentically show who I am and that I would genuinely want to continue writing.

So, I’ve decided to write about something far more personal to me: my writing process.

I am an extremely slow writer, and I often take very long breaks between bouts of writing. I typically get really excited, write a lot for a short amount of time, then don’t touch my work for at least a month. While this is one way to write, it’s not one that I would really recommend to someone getting started writing. I want to write more consistently, even if I’m working on multiple projects instead of just one. My hope is that if I continue to post updates about my writing on here, that I will naturally put more effort into actually writing so that I have something to mention when I post an update.

So, what am I working on right now?

I am currently working on a fantasy novel about a young girl who gets separated from her family when their house is mysteriously burned down, and then is magically saved by a sorcerer who helps her get to the safety of her uncle’s farm. I have written 30779 words so far, which may sound like a lot, but it’s really not that much considering that I’ve been working on this novel for over 3 years. I have a basic idea for where I want the story to go, but I have no clue how the story is going to end, or even a completely clear understanding of what the backstory is. I absolutely love this story, but I often find it hard to really make progress while writing since I have such a clear picture of what I want the next few chapters to feel like, and whenever I try to write them, they feel wrong and so I feel the urge to delete what I’ve written. I really need to let go of my judgments, and focus on just getting out a basic first draft so that I at least have a complete idea to edit, rather than editing as I write, which is what I’m currently doing with this story.

The other project that I am actively working on is a short story set in a steam-punk world. I created the world for this story quite a while ago, and I have an idea for a novel that I want to start writing, but I feel a little stuck since I’m not quite sure how I want to begin. This short story is set in the same world, allowing me to learn more about the world, which I’m hoping will help me later when I try to actually begin writing the novel. I am 4195 words into the short story, and feel like I’m about half-way done. I’m really enjoying writing this, and feel a lot freer while writing it since I don’t have a set story line in the back of my mind to make me feel guilty if I deviate from it. I want to finish writing story fairly quickly, so I’m going to put the majority of my effort into it.

Let me know in the comments if you are working on any stories right now, what your writing process is like, and how your progress on the story is going.

 

The World Doesn’t End

The world doesn’t end

when tragedy strikes.

Yes, it’s broken, beaten, bruised,

and cannot be restored

to the way it once was.

We feel the pain

of things lost,

things we won’t even realize

until later.

But

the world

doesn’t end

when tragedy strikes.

We are resilient, flexible,

we will will remember who we were

while we acclimatize to what

we have become.

Just because the landscape

around us is different

does’t mean that it isn’t

beautiful

in its own way.

It is fresh, and exciting,

full of new discoveries

and new lessons.

We will have to change

but if we allow that change

to happen

we will transform

into something

amazing.