As July winds down and I finish up this months Creativity Challenge, I can only say that I'm so thankful I decided to do it. This challenge has been such a great experience, and the last 28 days have allowed me to get back into a mindset that I've missed and struggled to find for years now.
In all honesty, the challenge itself hasn't exactly gone the way I thought it would. I'm not writing every day, and I still haven't made any sort of visible progress on the story I began a while back. But I am writing more. In fact, I'm writing nearly every day, and the fact that I've been doing it more and more often makes me want to continue doing it more and more often. I'm thinking about writing all the time. I'm looking forward to it. And while my story is still stuck stubbornly in its conception stage, I'm not frustrated or upset anymore.
In fact, a funny thing is happening to me: the act of writing so much, of thinking so much of writing, and of looking at everything in terms of how it can inspire me has sort of caused this domino effect in my life. I'm being creative again. It sounds silly, I know, but I'm being perfectly serious when I say that this is monumental in my life right now. I may not be able to get to chapter 2 in that story, but I've got ideas again. Tons and tons of ideas. In those years when writing was not just a want but a need, when I needed it to be my crutch, my filter and my repository, I used to come up with ideas in daydreams, in classes, in car rides and in the middle of conversations. Dialogue would just come together like magic and it seemed so effortless to me that I couldn't imagine that those ideas would someday stop. And then they did, and I thought I'd lost something. I realize now that I was just...rusty.
This Creativity Challenge is bringing it all back to me. I now spend about an hour and half each night before bed writing something. Most of the time its just a stray scene that played across my mind sometime throughout the day, but a few times that idea has resulted in 3-4 pages of conversation and story. I don't know where or if any of it will ever be used in a larger sense, but the fact that it's becoming a wonderful, fulfilling habit for me to think them up and get them down is a reward in and of itself.
And for the first time I can offer this excuse for not having written a blog post in nearly a week: I've been busy writing something else!
So thank-you, Ashley, for issuing your challenge, and I'm so excited to continue it long after July comes to a close.
July 29, 2010
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1 comment:
It's scary that our creativity and inspiration are just as prone to atrophy as the rest of our being. But way to pump up those creative juices! So glad to hear how much you're writing...and that you're enjoying it - that's the most important part
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