Seasonal Plume

I’ve decided to admit to cheating when I started reading Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. It’s light reading, and I would have finished it already were it not for a certain book activity which I tried doing. I cheated and read ahead to the results interpretation, so the exercise is spoiled for me; but I think I know what the results are for me anyway.

Basically, the goal of the is to help you determine what sort of writing you’re more inclined to do. I’m sure that sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes, I find that my brain ignores what’s right there in front of it. To cut it short, in my case, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m more of a short story writer than a novelist. Gasp!, oh noes! and general bellows of outrage! — the eye-opener met with quite a bit of resistance.

I suppose a part of myself has always known that I’m more inclined towards short stories than a full-length novel: there are lots of signs pointing to it. Previous finished work has always been under 25,000 words; I am irresistibly drawn towards exercises in brevity and enjoy writing them immensely. But I resisted; ever since I was a kid, I’d wanted to write books, and here was a book who was forcing me to see that I wasn’t really up for it. Or at least not yet.

The result was a long drought in writing. A subconscious strike? Maybe. I’ve been thinking more about it recently, though, and the more I think of it, the more I realize how I’m essentially strangling my writing and holding up practically every single creative thought-process. Because The Dream feels so difficult to reach, I subconsciously stopped reaching for the smaller dreams that may, who knows, one day lead to The Dream.

So, two days ago, I started fleshing out a short story plot, letting characters wake up and tell me their stories. I think I like this new phase.

I’d like to share something from the book that I’m still digesting:

…if you confess so much you are likely to go further and talk of the things you mean to write. Now words are your medium;…but your unconscious self…will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large. …You will have created your story and reaped your reward…you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

And before I leave — the culprit has been found: my namesake Angela was the one who nominated me for the Philippine Blog Awards (thank you!), who has just released the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards Finalists list. And, even more surprisingly, I made it. o.o;; I have no words as of yet to explain what I feel (such is my plight a lot of times these days). My co-finalists are: Far From Neutral Notions, Ironwulf.net: En Route, Midori-X, and Noel Perlas. You should check out all the rest. Good luck to everyone! *pompoms*

I finally whipped up a new layout and upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.1.1, from pre-2.1; I previously never had time (or much energy, actually) to try upgrading. Besides, I was getting tired of the old layout.

That over and done with, I found a gem of a website yesterday, and I’ve been itching to note it somewhere: One Sentence. Basically, people submit one-sentence true stories. From the website itself:

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.

I love websites and exercises like these, both as a visitor/reader and as a participant. For one thing, there are beautiful one-sentence stories found here, wonderfully written, sentences that struck me the moment I read them: with sadness, with joy, with nostalgia. See here:

I am pregnant with my husband’s child, so I will never get to be with the man who is the mirror of my soul.
- fallen phoenix

And there she left me clueless, on the eve of her mother’s wedding day.
- dac

As I leaned to kiss her on the cheek, she decided the lips would be better, and my heart stopped mid-beat.
- Chris

(Yes, I am a sap, they’re all about love. So sue me.) This website reminds me of goodies like Post Secret (and the 983712467322 copies), so unimaginably engrossing, but on a less sensational level. It’s so nifty I immediately started thinking of my own one-sentence-story — which I feel is a great catalyst when it comes to creative writing. Or any one of these sentences could form the basis of a story, of a novel.

That is why I hope you can…sit for some time everyday (if only for a half hour, though two hours is better and five is remarkable and eight is bliss and transfiguration!) before your typewriter,—if not writing, then just thoughtfully pulling your hair. If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. - Brenda Ueland in If You Want To Write

The above is an exerpt that’s often repeated almost everywhere, in different ways and words. And I agree, and in a way, I try to live by it, although what I usually do is a bit of journal writing, and not usually leisurely. Obviously, I’ve been wanting to get into (fiction) writing again, and have been looking around for various things to write. Unfortunately, I never seem to exactly get into writing; whenever I sit down and look at writing ideas (I loved writing collabs while they were popular!), I try to start but I end up thinking, oh no, I can’t possibly write about this. Which is, I suppose the very thing Brenda Ueland is always railing about in this book.

In any case, I’ve seen a lot of ideas and websites online that are pretty nifty, such as Oneword, 100 Words, and numerous drabbles contests and communities. Of them all, I like Oneword best; I think the pressure of writing something related to a word in sixty seconds make me just plain write, and for some reason I always feel like I like what I end up writing in these exercises. For example, for Oneword today I wrote this:

the window pane was brown, smooth and hard against my elbows, while i looked outside and dreamt of sunny blue skies and dark blue water, of smiles and sunshine and brown skin. it made me think of happiness, of joy, of laughter and madness, of the days when

And I liked what I wrote. It’s not connected to anything other than a single scene, a single feeling, a single event, made up as I wrote (pane—window pane—brown—people usually lean on it while looking outside—scene looks like person is daydreaming—nice daydream—sunny— and so on and so forth). I like the way I wrote it, more specifically.

I’ve come to the conclusion a long while ago that the short pieces of, uh, shortshorts that I write in a style similar to the one I used above, is what I personally loved writing when I was writing creatively (as opposed to journal writing). (See here, although I mean to move that to somewhere else… not yet sure where, though. :P ) However, I’ve felt very, very torn about this, and continue to feel so up to now. Almost everywhere I read, it’s always about using verbs, and action, and to cut less on adjectives and adverbs. An opinion and guideline that I actually agree with. But whenever I try to get myself to write in it, I usually don’t like what comes out.

Or maybe it’s just that I really am out of practice. Sigh. I suppose the style I like is useful and pretty for shortshorts and poetry, but never for something more substantial.

Moo, back to square one?