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Keeping Calm: When Things Don’t Go As Planned
It goes without saying, but a lot of times, things don’t really go as planned. This extends outside of the writing scenarios that we have often used as frames for our posts, and definitely into life, in general. From plans being rescheduled at the very last minute, to traffic jams becoming problematic because you have a lot of things to do and you’ve already mapped them out, except you’re being held up, to so, so many other things that we can easily get stressed over. In a day and age where everything moves fast, and everyone demands so many things from everyone else, one cannot exactly afford to get stalled…
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Chasing Dreams: The Importance of Inspiration
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London The quote from Jack London seems terrifyingly aggressive, but rather fitting. Artists of all kinds – writers, musicians, and painters, to name a few – often owe much of their work to muses, or inspirations. And inspiration comes in all shapes, sizes, and forms, often elusive, often ephemeral, always hitting you in the head when it comes and drilling an idea that festers under your skin until you actually work on it. And the argument is that inspiration comes when it comes – which, as the quote has already pointed out, can be…
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Keeping Focus In Writing
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Dreams and Nightmares: So Your Dream Job Is Writing
British author Tim Lott wrote an article for website The Guardian, and the piece is his reaction to a poll that says that 60% of Britons want to be an author (you can find Lott’s article here). Now, no writer – whether published or unpublished – needs to be told that writing is not as fun as it seems. It’s the kind of thing that is both fun and arduous, by turns liberating, sometimes limiting, frustrating, and suffocating. Writers know this kind of feeling, being torn between wanting to write and wanting to throw the laptop out of the window and forever get rid of an idea that refuses to be tamed. Also,…
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Why Even Write?
It’s a question all writers come to, at a certain point in life. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re published, or from where you’re coming, or what your day job is or how positive the people around you are. At some point, a writer starts questioning himself or herself. Why do I write? What’s the point? Stories that seemed incredibly brilliant at the start begin dragging on the more you write. Characters start feeling two-dimensional, as if your writing does not give them any justice – or even a semblance of. Events go downhill, plot twists start feeling contrived, and you’re just stuck in a bog and you don’t…
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What It Means to Write
In this post on CreativInfluence, I talked about what it takes to write, and a brief recap would bring us to four key elements I’ve mentioned: awareness, patience, discipline, and courage. These four essential elements that a writer should have will be, however, for naught, if we lose track of the meaning and purpose of writing. I’ll talk about that today, though I did touch on that in brief, in the aforementioned post. To start, I will bring in, again, J.G. Ballard, with a brief quote about the writer: We live inside an enormous novel… The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. – J.G. Ballard Ballard’s…
