Amen to the openness to the universe. That's the reason I sacrificed some physical well-being to get a 30-hour job, because I really struggle to be open to anything when I'm working full time. I really admire people who are able to keep the creativity going while working so much.
I have tons of little tricks, and they're very fluid and very fickle sometimes. The most important thing is honestly for me to have some slack-off time programmed into my life. I used to think all I had to do was slot out time for writing, but honestly, I need more than that. I need lots of down time for my imagination to balloon up into.
RE: false starts, I do that a lot too. My "creative process" I put up recently wasn't really an exaggeration...I have to crap out some seriously bad drafts and struggle long and hard before I even have something to show someone.
Man, writing is hard. Let's do something easy like being rock stars or something. I do the same thing, reading a lot and watching plays and movies and looking at art. I eavesdrop like a fucking freak, too. I like some really lowbrow stuff, because I'm drawn to the grotesque and to pulp influences sometimes, so keeping open to all sorts of freaky stuff and letting it fuse and mingle with the more erudite stuff is what propels me. Sometimes I get a vision or a phrase and it takes off, but more often I get a compulsion (before my jurist story I had a period where I couldn't stop researching serial killers, for some freaky reason, even though I'm not interested in scandal rags so much as interested in weird psychologies. It was the fact of my compulsion as much as anything else that fueled that story). I get hung up on some weird thing and won't stop picking at it until it's a story. It figures that the spirit would manifest in my life as some kind of unbalanced freaky neurosis. Ha.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2007-02-12 08:47 am (UTC)I have tons of little tricks, and they're very fluid and very fickle sometimes. The most important thing is honestly for me to have some slack-off time programmed into my life. I used to think all I had to do was slot out time for writing, but honestly, I need more than that. I need lots of down time for my imagination to balloon up into.
RE: false starts, I do that a lot too. My "creative process" I put up recently wasn't really an exaggeration...I have to crap out some seriously bad drafts and struggle long and hard before I even have something to show someone.
Man, writing is hard. Let's do something easy like being rock stars or something.
I do the same thing, reading a lot and watching plays and movies and looking at art. I eavesdrop like a fucking freak, too. I like some really lowbrow stuff, because I'm drawn to the grotesque and to pulp influences sometimes, so keeping open to all sorts of freaky stuff and letting it fuse and mingle with the more erudite stuff is what propels me. Sometimes I get a vision or a phrase and it takes off, but more often I get a compulsion (before my jurist story I had a period where I couldn't stop researching serial killers, for some freaky reason, even though I'm not interested in scandal rags so much as interested in weird psychologies. It was the fact of my compulsion as much as anything else that fueled that story). I get hung up on some weird thing and won't stop picking at it until it's a story. It figures that the spirit would manifest in my life as some kind of unbalanced freaky neurosis. Ha.