The simplicity of my day to day. |
PROMPT 2: Sept 2 – () Comment on this 20-minutes video. The idea we must have or need a muse, is one that is prescribed only to writers, sculptors or painters. After all, do other professions need someone or something to urge them to go to work, other than their need to earn a wage? All writers, either professionals or what I call Sunday writers, have experienced people asking “what have you published?” It’s as if whatever you’ve written is bad or useless if you are not earning a monetary reward. Yet would you ask a golfer why they play golf? Or your grandmother why she knits? They do it because it’s something they enjoy doing. Yes, it’s sometimes frustrating. The golfer loses his ball in the lake, the knitter drops stitches or reads the pattern incorrectly and has to unravel her work, and the writer is often at a loss for words. Yet we continue to do what we love. I actually have a muse, it’s my husband. When I get stuck I ask him to help with an idea. I actually rarely use his ideas but simply by bouncing ideas around with him reignites enthusiasm. Writing can be dispiriting, I admit. Sometimes I feel the well is dry, that I’ve written (painted) myself into a corner, nowhere to go but to sit there and wait until the virtual floor is dry enough to walk on again. The only thing to do when all inspiration has fled is to write anything. Abandon the project which is giving you grief and write in your diary, or blog. Write about how frustrated you feel or write about the dog, the weather, the woman who did that crazy thing at the shops. Write about the things you’re afraid of, like the author in the TED talk says she’s afraid of seaweed. Actually when she spoke of her dislike, or mistrust of seaweed, I felt a urge to write a story about seaweed having an evil intent. Has anyone ever written that story? |