Since about 2006, I've been working on a story. It started while I was working on a drawing.
"What was the drawing?" you ask.
While I would love to tell you what that drawing was that led to 6 years of trying to write a Novel based on it, I feel that wouldn't be a good idea........just yet.
It took me years to get really good at drawing and painting. So much so that I will never be able to create what I really want because its a constant learning experience. But, I had started young and it's now second nature when it comes to pencil, paint brush, or pastel in hand, to go with the basics and build up from there. Writing stories however, isnot something I'm very familiar with.
I had no interest really in writing, (that was my Moms area) but, I have caught myself a few times during my teens and early 20's scribbling tiny paragraphs of an odd idea (that usually corresponded with what I was drawing at the time) on already doodled sketch paper I had tossed aside for trash. I never kept them because I barely kept up with all the projects on canvas or board I had going. Plus, there was also the very creative offspring that I had in 1997 keeping me busy :).
However, in the early 2000's I became really serious about my art and invested LOTS of money (which does not mean you need to spend silly amounts of money to take art serious, at the time however I was "experimenting" and impractical.) into supplies, research, floor space to home said supplies and research (usually in the form of stacked drawers). Safe to say my living room turned into a massive art studio with barely room for couch and TV.
There were easels of all styles, a desk that held well over 2,000 pastels, paper racks, boxes, you name it I had it crammed in there somehow. Then a spurt of inspiration came to me to create something I had never done before. A portrait of mythical character. A character I had thought about off and on since I was 12.
All of the sudden these questions about her just would not leave my head! A painting started to form in my minds eye but, it didn't want to be a painting. It wanted to be a real Story. My drawing that I had been working on of her strapped to one of my best easels had turned itself into something bordering obsession.
I had no idea how to write a story. Hell, I'm barely able to coherently explain what I did yesterday without my verbiage attacking innocent ears and minds, making me sound like a loon.
I started researching "How to write a Novel". And, like my inability to stay linear with explaining things vocally, my research jumped all over the place. Sometimes I would get bored and another idea would pop into me brain about another story that I would love to read but there weren't many books out about. But, again......
Life interrupted. Moving, Divorce, living on my own for the first time ever, finding a job after being out of the workforce for 10 years, etc. Any projects I had going were all put to the wayside as I also tried to start a Custom Airbrush business. That didn't last long as life interrupted my art again.
I did however have moments, in that incorrigible minds eye of mine, of my mythical character going through some kind of situation or another, which led to several scraps of paper being scribbled on once again, but this time I kept them.
Idea after idea, scene after scene, stacked on top one another for years. Until 2010. I got serious. I bought notebooks, wrote down all my research about Novel writing, my mythology, and worked on my characters. Did this off and on til early 2011. I went back through all of my notes and started to piece them all together. Nothing really worth stitching mind you, because most of it was "way out there". Possibilities have you.
After another move, this time to a small town a mile from a beach in North Carolina, I became interested in my art again. Spent more money, then hard times hit, sold all the supplies again, then said the hell with it.
I kept what I could and now those supplies are in stand by anytime I need a creative fix that is not related to typing, writing, or reading.
I started to notice that writing is not like painting in several ways. You can write anytime you want and don't even need expensive supplies to do it. Hell, you really don't need paper and pencil if your memory is good enough, (giggles like the cynical 'tard that she is at that statement because her memory likes to pack up and leave at the most inconvene times.)
With that said, the physicals of writing is like painting. There is the "skeleton": The bare bones of the structure that you will build upon in layers. (Unless you're one of those Alla Prima painters, in which case there's actually a word for that in the Writing Realm.....Pantster)
(Just got a minds eye moment of William Alexanders method of painting. The loud and entertaining German oil painter that was on TV back in the day. He would slap paint all over the canvas, making you think he was insane and questioning where the whole "he's a genius" oil painter came from. Until he takes one brush and starts chiseling out these beautiful scenes from the glob of paint and you sit back, jaw dropped and go "Holy shit, the mans a genius".) That vision right there kinda explains how my Novel is going at the moment (though I will admit, if there is any "genius" going on, it's the fact that when I read it to someone else they say "What the hell? That's awesome. How come when yesterday you tried to explain this to me (from memory) it sounded like you had no idea how to form a thought let alone a sentence but all of the sudden you have this?!" to which I reply, "Actually, I wrote that some months ago, I just didn't know if it was good." Their response: Maybe you should write more and talk less." Which the "genius" is coming from the listener and not the story teller.
I would happily concur with that advice if I was allowed to get away with that mode of social-ness/less.....you know what I mean. Right? (giggles)
Sigh...
Let me start over.
This blog is about how I went from being an Artist (the painterly type) to being (trying really hard) an Artist of the Word type.
Thank you.
"What was the drawing?" you ask.
While I would love to tell you what that drawing was that led to 6 years of trying to write a Novel based on it, I feel that wouldn't be a good idea........just yet.
It took me years to get really good at drawing and painting. So much so that I will never be able to create what I really want because its a constant learning experience. But, I had started young and it's now second nature when it comes to pencil, paint brush, or pastel in hand, to go with the basics and build up from there. Writing stories however, isnot something I'm very familiar with.
I had no interest really in writing, (that was my Moms area) but, I have caught myself a few times during my teens and early 20's scribbling tiny paragraphs of an odd idea (that usually corresponded with what I was drawing at the time) on already doodled sketch paper I had tossed aside for trash. I never kept them because I barely kept up with all the projects on canvas or board I had going. Plus, there was also the very creative offspring that I had in 1997 keeping me busy :).
However, in the early 2000's I became really serious about my art and invested LOTS of money (which does not mean you need to spend silly amounts of money to take art serious, at the time however I was "experimenting" and impractical.) into supplies, research, floor space to home said supplies and research (usually in the form of stacked drawers). Safe to say my living room turned into a massive art studio with barely room for couch and TV.
There were easels of all styles, a desk that held well over 2,000 pastels, paper racks, boxes, you name it I had it crammed in there somehow. Then a spurt of inspiration came to me to create something I had never done before. A portrait of mythical character. A character I had thought about off and on since I was 12.
All of the sudden these questions about her just would not leave my head! A painting started to form in my minds eye but, it didn't want to be a painting. It wanted to be a real Story. My drawing that I had been working on of her strapped to one of my best easels had turned itself into something bordering obsession.
I had no idea how to write a story. Hell, I'm barely able to coherently explain what I did yesterday without my verbiage attacking innocent ears and minds, making me sound like a loon.
I started researching "How to write a Novel". And, like my inability to stay linear with explaining things vocally, my research jumped all over the place. Sometimes I would get bored and another idea would pop into me brain about another story that I would love to read but there weren't many books out about. But, again......
Life interrupted. Moving, Divorce, living on my own for the first time ever, finding a job after being out of the workforce for 10 years, etc. Any projects I had going were all put to the wayside as I also tried to start a Custom Airbrush business. That didn't last long as life interrupted my art again.
I did however have moments, in that incorrigible minds eye of mine, of my mythical character going through some kind of situation or another, which led to several scraps of paper being scribbled on once again, but this time I kept them.
Idea after idea, scene after scene, stacked on top one another for years. Until 2010. I got serious. I bought notebooks, wrote down all my research about Novel writing, my mythology, and worked on my characters. Did this off and on til early 2011. I went back through all of my notes and started to piece them all together. Nothing really worth stitching mind you, because most of it was "way out there". Possibilities have you.
After another move, this time to a small town a mile from a beach in North Carolina, I became interested in my art again. Spent more money, then hard times hit, sold all the supplies again, then said the hell with it.
I kept what I could and now those supplies are in stand by anytime I need a creative fix that is not related to typing, writing, or reading.
I started to notice that writing is not like painting in several ways. You can write anytime you want and don't even need expensive supplies to do it. Hell, you really don't need paper and pencil if your memory is good enough, (giggles like the cynical 'tard that she is at that statement because her memory likes to pack up and leave at the most inconvene times.)
With that said, the physicals of writing is like painting. There is the "skeleton": The bare bones of the structure that you will build upon in layers. (Unless you're one of those Alla Prima painters, in which case there's actually a word for that in the Writing Realm.....Pantster)
(Just got a minds eye moment of William Alexanders method of painting. The loud and entertaining German oil painter that was on TV back in the day. He would slap paint all over the canvas, making you think he was insane and questioning where the whole "he's a genius" oil painter came from. Until he takes one brush and starts chiseling out these beautiful scenes from the glob of paint and you sit back, jaw dropped and go "Holy shit, the mans a genius".) That vision right there kinda explains how my Novel is going at the moment (though I will admit, if there is any "genius" going on, it's the fact that when I read it to someone else they say "What the hell? That's awesome. How come when yesterday you tried to explain this to me (from memory) it sounded like you had no idea how to form a thought let alone a sentence but all of the sudden you have this?!" to which I reply, "Actually, I wrote that some months ago, I just didn't know if it was good." Their response: Maybe you should write more and talk less." Which the "genius" is coming from the listener and not the story teller.
I would happily concur with that advice if I was allowed to get away with that mode of social-ness/less.....you know what I mean. Right? (giggles)
Sigh...
Let me start over.
This blog is about how I went from being an Artist (the painterly type) to being (trying really hard) an Artist of the Word type.
Thank you.