100Words
That’s the flow of life when we take the time to notice. Some days nothing can go wrong. Days and nights are filled up with bustle and boom. Stuff gets done. Plans get made. Ideas get fertilized. Then the contraction happens. That’s been me for the last couple of weeks. Creative contraction. The idea of writing a story a day, even though it was to be only one hundred words long, has become too much.
It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything constructive. I’ve been doing lots. Even writing. Just not that particular kind of writing.
And I haven’t neglected cultivating the MFA path as I might have believed earlier in my life. No, I’ve been working on all of the things that need to get taken care of so that the path to and through the MFA is as clear as it can be. I think the word I’m looking for is “commitment”. I’m making the commitment and it is taking a kind of work I wasn’t expecting. Not bad. Just different.
I’m more excited about the pursuit of writing than I’ve ever been before. It’s as if everything else has led to this cliche of sorts. Interests I’d only briefly engaged are making much more sense bumping up against what I usually consider to be distractions or diversions. For example, as much as I love the intellect of Samuel Delaney’s science fiction, it wasn’t until I read a blurb that mentioned his world-building that things hotted up for me. World-building is my newest fetish. It’s what I do when I write my NaNo novels. Yes, I look through the eyes of characters, but the point is to build the world as well.
And my passing interest in game theory and my desire to turn the novels into a game? Just found a decent book on writing for video games. I’m sure the book has been around for a while. It’s just that these things are coming together in my world and not just as something “over there”.
I realized that what I’m looking forward to is seeing my writing mature. The only way I know of maturing myself is by squeezing as many different and vaguely related things together and. stripping away everything they don’t have in common, work from there.
The most interesting thing I’ve discovered on my contracture is that I write to play. I didn’t know that about me. I’m not much into games, or sports, or any kind of real hobby. Writing though, even this kind, is play. I get to fiddle with words and get things right. And when I do, I laugh. Who knew? So, does taking it “seriously” mean I’m not going to have fun anymore? No bloody way! That’s what I’ve figured out during my retreat.
There’s a couple of games being played among some of us. One is to use just three words. That’s not too challenging in itself. And, by itself, it is fun. But of course, being as verbose as I am, I couldn’t stop there. Nope. I found myself writing three more words, and then three more. I called it “Cubes” and the rest of the gang ran with it. Yay.
I’m not yet at the point of studying why some collections of words have more impact than others. Close though. However, I do see that writing in such small packages maximizes the space I can examine such things in. It’s not quite poetry. At least not to me.
Here are a couple:
I feel ornamented.
Your attention embroiders;
Your love spangles.
An era ends;
I give up.
Only confidence, now.
Just wake up!
Remember the light!
Rise and Shine!
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