Help! I beg you fellow writers!
JesusTheTerrorist
Posts: 37
WRITER'S BLOCK!
I don't know what's happened. The used to be so much energy that would flow and flow when I began to write. So much would come out that I dodn't even think about before, the words formed themselves. I wrote to write and it always meant something. I could just feel the urge to write and I would produce something I loved in a minute.
But now, I scratch a few meagre words on paper and they mean nothing. I can't write more than 1 or 2 lines before I dry up. I don't know if the energy is gone, if the talent is gone, or whatever source they came from has gone. But something is gone and I don't know what it was or why it went.
I got a place in an Academy of Arts for my writing. I'm so worried that I won't be able to come up with anything while there. It's a 12 day residential course that demands 12 hours of writing every day. I can't even writefor a minute now without getting stuck.
I don't know what to do! :(
I don't know what's happened. The used to be so much energy that would flow and flow when I began to write. So much would come out that I dodn't even think about before, the words formed themselves. I wrote to write and it always meant something. I could just feel the urge to write and I would produce something I loved in a minute.
But now, I scratch a few meagre words on paper and they mean nothing. I can't write more than 1 or 2 lines before I dry up. I don't know if the energy is gone, if the talent is gone, or whatever source they came from has gone. But something is gone and I don't know what it was or why it went.
I got a place in an Academy of Arts for my writing. I'm so worried that I won't be able to come up with anything while there. It's a 12 day residential course that demands 12 hours of writing every day. I can't even writefor a minute now without getting stuck.
I don't know what to do! :(
"Provided there are no pre-conditions"
Originally posted by MrBrian -
"one day a country may just liberate america, what will you say then?"
Originally posted by MrBrian -
"one day a country may just liberate america, what will you say then?"
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And what always helps me: step outside for a minute, take a walk in fresh air. Let it simmer for a while. Seriously, works wonders gor me.
I'm not a creative writer, but I hope this helps anyway.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Vladimir Propp was a Russian Formalist literary critic writing at the early part of the twentieth century. He did a lot of studies of similarities and variations between storytelling conventions. In his work "The Morphology of the Folktale" (1929) he argues that in a conventional narrative, it doesn't matter how many characters a story has but that the characters will fulfil between them seven specific character-functions that drive the action of the tale. He says that a story will usually feature the following 'actants':
1 The hero(ine)
2 The helper
3 The donor (provider)
4 The sought-for person
5 The dispatcher
6 The false hero
7 The villain
Now, when I think of Charles Dickens's "Dombey and Son", I might say that Walter Gay is 1, Captain Cuttle is 2, Sol Gills is 3 (in that he provides the Wooden Midshipman as a meeting place for the novel's cross-social sphere), Florence Dombey is 4 in being the object of Walter's affection (and Walter himself is 4 when he goes missing at sea), Sol Gills is 5 since he goes off abroad in search of the missing Walter, and Carker is both 6 and 7 in that he is a false friend to Paul Dombey and in running off with his wife Edith proves the villain of the piece. So, I'm showing that a character in a story can occupy more than one actantial function. "Hamlet" is more interesting still. Hamlet might be 1, Horatio might be 2, Yorick's skull actantially provides Hamlet with a realisation of his own mortality and therefore is 3, Ophelia or even Gertrude may depending on your critical perspective be 4, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, sent to see Hamlet to England to be literally dispatched whilst ironically ending up dispatched themselves are 5, and Claudius (or even Hamlet himself?) is 7.
Now, I would like you to attempt a short narrative. And I would like you to try to involve each of these actants in your piece. After the end of your piece, please briefly say what character corresponds with what actantial function. Of course, one of the tricks of making this exercise exciting is in fleshing these characters out and making them seem lifelike rather than mere plot-mechanisms.
Have fun!
you'll feel like a rebirth ...
with everything bothering your pen ... purged
start then
If you do all or some of the above........your muse will return......I can pretty much guarantee it......:)
Lay off the weed.
senecablood
maker of my enemies...
I agree with that. The whole concept of writing poetry as some transcendental act of visionary seeing is tied in with a period where the "poet" was commodified for commercial reasons. Byron sold a lot more copy than a novelist such as Jane Austen in his day because people were attracted to the idea of him as some otherworldy, inspired genius. But he did work hard at his poems. Also, Wordsworth's expressionist description of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" contradicts evidence that he spent a long time pruning his work.
Yes, work at your writing.
Could you give me another example of the false hero?
....
Isabel Allende (although I admit, I don't like her books.....but her ideas on writing tie in with my feeling that it's intuitive for me and not cerebral......comes from dreams, from snatches of this and that.....)
I think writing that is methodically produced is dry and soulless......it's easy to go about it in an industrious and technical manner, but what you get is laboured, dry writing which has good technique, but no soul......I disagree with Fins and EvilToasterOaf (hehehehhe - kidding)......I think you need to abandon all ideas of discipline and structure, and have some fun, or some tears, and then see what comes out.......
I don't think many disagree that it's a little bit of both, but it's silly to discount the cerebral part of it - feelings don't mean anything, your brain is doing the translating - some translate better than others - if you can't communicate your dreams they just become mind wind
I believe writing comes from the inside, that it should come from the soul. I believe there is a sequence to thought.
Feeling - thought - words...
The ability to write is the ability to capture the feeling with thought and capture the thought in words. The ability to write well is told in how the original feeling is preserved.
The problem now is that there are no feelings to preserve, there are no thoughts to write. Whatever starts the motion has stopped. The passion has gone.
It happens in a circle...
It's like emotion.... everything is perfect, and everything seems so nice and it's easy to write and feel emotion... then there comes a rocky day.... and it just feels like a descent into nothing.... then the nothing comes...... and forever there is nothing.... until after eternity..... there's a spark......
and this happens over and over again
Originally posted by MrBrian -
"one day a country may just liberate america, what will you say then?"
The material for literature, however heartfelt and introspective, is in the outside world: the country or the city. If you want to write about deep feelings you need to sharpen and constantly re-edit your ways of using metaphor, imagery and symbolism. And you do that by getting your notebook and practicing all the different metaphors, images and symbols you can think of to describe how you feel.
So you feel numbness. What images convey numbness? How does numbness sound in vowels and consonants?
I want to revise this. No, we humans are the stuff of art, but how we describe ourselves needs reference to beyond to bring us to life on the canvas or page. What brings the Mona Lisa to life is the use of sfumato, gradient light and gentle obfuscatory shadow from around her. And it's that quality of light (physical, environmental, historical, political, ideological or religious and/or mystical), or shade from the outside world that shows us "turned out the world thought me": how we respond to that light is what we're after in poetry, I think.
You have to know what to look for but I hold a very high place for drugs specifically hallucinogenics (a gram of mushroom is my favorite state of drug writing) most importantly because drugs offer you a different perspective on the world - (prying open my third eye, as maynard said) I think one of the keys to writing is perspective - I personally am going to try and find mine through travel - when I returned home from my semester abroad I wrote like a maniac - you have to question how you perspective has changed as a result of being high, how have your thoughts changed ( mostly they come faster - I think on mushrooms you mind becomes a tornado and the thoughts that come are simply debris being thrown out of the maelstrom) but just smoking a bowl isn't going to bring a poem into life - it's still a process - just use the drugs with the advice finsbury has been giving you and explore the perspective - here's a poem I wrote about pot:
Stoned
A small bedroom sits unkempt
Socks of both white cotton and navy blue nylon hang
From the ends of half open drawers
adolescent sailors on their maiden voyage
vomiting over the bow as their vessel rocks
past the treacherous seas of lava lamps
bright red luminescence covers a blue
down blanket, as gales spit fury in globs
from the base of the lamp, the brightness
of the light moves from place to place, north
south from pillows to the foot of the bed
the blanket takes on it’s own cycle of day and night
stormy and calm, all determined by a shifting
shapeless color, powered by electricity from
the socket that sits noiselessly behind a bookcase
against the windowed wall facing the mild afternoon
A door opens slowly, muscles overwhelm
The force of friction
Created by the heaps of multicolored sweaters,
Yellow and red tie-die t-shirts, and hemp paraphernalia
So that five people can enter the room
Stumbling first, giggling second
Staring through stoned eyes, funhouse mirror lenses
That makes the sunlight appear as if it is
Sliding back and forth over the blinds,
they wipe their hands on
Corduroy pants and stare down to
clammy sweat coated palms
the room is assaulted by an odor of cheap tacos
candles cover bookcases and a dusty desk
while incense fights feverishly to regain control
of the room’s personal aroma
but the fast-food junkies are too high to notice
riding spiral straws in Styrofoam cups through the stratosphere
Bursting through rain clouds eating lightning
Stopping only to punch through the o-zone with
A forceful drum beat before passing the pipe
Floating on clouds the unshaven polytheists
Discuss Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia
And the other minor guitar Gods
Beating rhythms against their thighs
Sprawled in a semi-circle
So far from Arthur’s Camelot, but only a thought away
Amazed by the weed’s potency
So amazed they barely have enough words at hand to describe it
They stumble over token phrases
Staring into the fire, strengthened by lungs
Black rises to orange, and settles again to darkness
“yeah, where’d you get it?”
Sucking bliss through colored swirls of glass
Greens and blues and yellows coalescing
Rainbow colored smoke sinks into their blood
And peace into their smiles, half crooked and uncaring
“my boy hooks me up, you know how it goes”
Laughing and grunting like their ancestors
Painting a canvas of optimism with brushes of desire
Motion becomes unnecessary as they sink further
Into that primordial seas of human emotion and let
It wash over them, eroding to that cavernous
Labyrinth in their genetic code
Travelling down the endless roadways carved in trails of light
On the back of their eyelids
And as each lane narrows and you follow the light to an old girlfriend
Or yourself headlining Madison Square garden
When the lights dim and your microphone is a podium
Giving a state of the union that begins with, under this administration
Tyranny has ended
“Pot has been legalized!”
Licking dry, cracked lips
Imagining a waterfall rushing into their throats
Slurping from the sink will have to do
The conversation meander to conjecture in a stream of consciousness
“The trees are dying”
“The rainforests disappear”
“Bush is a fuckin’ asshole”
“Sunoco and Paul Bunyan in one”
“Paul Bunyan riding in an SUV”
The crowd disperses while smoke lingers
like a gathering storm, cool air from a fan in
the corner of a room rushed into the warm herb front
ready to break onto phish posters and spray
the crust speckled carpet with it’s toxins
noiseless but potent, repulsive to lurking
little sisters
The crowd of enlightenment seekers falls into
The niches of the house
Couches
Lazyboy Reclining Chairs
Or beds
And pass out
(disclaimer......if you are 16, please disregard all the above, although I really think teenagers understand angst a lot more anyway)......
when you're feet are pointed to the north.....you're heart is directed south....
a zen koan.....my first.....hehehehehe
when your feet are pointed to the north, your heart is directed south......
when you have lost something of value, and accidentally find something very similar which has been discarded, the thing that you have lost becomes worthless, and you have no desire for either of them.....