On poetry

So yeah, poetry. I write a lot of it. I used to write a lot of it and then there was this black hole in the middle of no writing at all, and now I'm back to poetry. My first poetry was that silly junk you write in middle and high school - pretty much all about boys and praying to God that you might actually get one. Then it changed. In my junior year I started branching out into what I still think are some deeper thoughts. It was no longer about the pubescent feelings that were rocking through me that I couldn't control. I expanded my brain and my writing skills a little bit - only to stop. I stopped. I didn't really write for most of my time in college. Once in a while, I'd start doing one of those multi-person RPG sorta things in email, but writing essentially stopped. Part of it was the depression and part of it was my completely insanely genius writer roommate who should have been published at age 20, but was too afraid to show her work to anyone, so never was. Yeah. But poetry has come back into my life. I have a friend who writes professionally and also blogs. I caught onto her blog one day and thought "Huh, I could give that a go." And here I am, writing poetry all the damn time. I have other things I want to write - a novel idea that I've been kicking around for more than a year and I'd love to learn the art of the short-story, but I'm not really hitting it home with any of those. There's something about poetry - there's a completion of thought without going too far. I truly believe that it's the short nature of poetry that allows me to actually finish it, but I've not finished the other projects, so there's no telling what it is. I guess with poetry I just complete my thought. I have it down. I'm not trying to say much more than one or two things (usually just one) and so I get to complete that thought without building an entire world about it first. Which is something else I've been doing - building a world. I'm on day 6 of the NaNoWriMo prompted "30 Days of World Building". It's going along nicely. I have a lot of it already partially figured out, so this is really just expanding my mind. Part of me wants to focus on a few particular points of that world and write an entire series of poetry on it. I could do it region by region, person by person, lesson by lesson - I've got all these ideas in my head and they're all related, but I can't get them down on paper in a way that effectively relates the massive web of culture in my head unless I write history-like essays. Which I've also done and been told that I need plot - well DUH, they're historical essays about a fictional world that I've created. They're not supposed to have a whole lot of plot of than a sequence of historical events. But that's not what happens - I have all these character developments and few plot points to hinge them on. The world building is helping me to broaden how I think about plot points, so hopefully that will help. Perhaps I should just write the poetry series. Perhaps that should just be the research. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll finish something longer than a poem.

Initial thought: Poetry
Time: 10 minutes

Writer's Itch

I'm getting that itch again. No! Not that one - that's disgusting. No - I'm getting the itch to start novel writing/world building again. My fingers have been itchily typing words like "how to build a world" and "map making schemes" into the google browser again. This is getting pretty bad. Luckily I have something that I've been working on for a while to go back to - now that I've had several months of hiatus from it. I'm starting to really get the want to create again. I never completely finished the world (not that you can ever completely finish a world) and my mind is really rearing to start filling in some of those gaping holes that I left the last time around. I think it all started with me trying to get my husband to take a break from thesis writing and to go back to story writing. That was a failure as a line of argument, but it got me thinking too. I also recently responded to a Red Dress Club prompt with a letter from one of my long term characters and I really liked the new take on this character. I found that I have lots of interactions, but only one of my other characters has written any significant amount of letters to what I call "off screen" characters - I'm such a movie influenced girl - who never appear in the book (or at least I'm not planning for them to do so). I'd really like to start back up - I've got to change my character's name though, which will either A) completely ruin said character for me or B) give me the new perspective on her that I need in order to focus on her movement as a character. I'm really hoping for the latter. I found her name was already used in a YA fantasy series, so I can't really go that direction, now can I? I mean, I innocently found that name at behindthename.com, which is where I go to find almost all of my names. And I found it several years ago when I started writing something completely unrelated to where I took the character. Either way, it must change. Interestingly enough, this character kinda already had two names and so I guess I could just focus a bit more of the second one. The thing is, if I start writing this world again, where am I going to post it? It's not the kind of thing that I'm sure I want to post in either of my blogs for anyone to go reading yet. It's just development projects at the moment. On the other hand, I don't want to restrict my writing to just my little books - I mean they're good, but the thing about writing in books is that it's not easy to move material around as necessary in order to organize my thoughts. Not that there's really any easy way of doing that. It's just frustrating as a thought. I've thought of story boarding. I think taking some things visual might really help me and get my creative juices flowing.

Time: 10 minutes