Advice For My Teenage Self - #bloganuary

 Gosh, looking back at my teenage self has been quite the experience. I've remembered people who I haven't thought about for 40 years and the scary thing is I can picture most of them in their teenage 1970s guise. Here goes with the advice...

Be brave and believe in yourself. You're more capable than you know but you lack self confidence. Sure, you're good at faking it but when it comes right down to it you step aside and don't go there. Just step up to the plate, grab life by the lapels and strut your stuff. There's a star in there so let her out.

Don't worry about not being one of the popular kids. They're not actually having such a great time, it's all an illusion. You'll make friends who will be with you for life, friends who will lift you up and make you feel brilliant. None of them were the 'cool' kids at school, they were the genuine people who shared the good times and bad with you. So celebrate the normal kids who get you, they'll be there for ever.

Those popular girls, the ones with all the boyfriends and the stunning social life? They aren't having such a good time. They're being used and abused, taken advantage of and laughed at. They're damaged by those boys, they're damaged by their social lives, they're damaged by those experiences. Not something to aspire to so just be grateful that you miss out on the abuse.

Sometimes it's hard to know what the right thing to do is. Please have confidence in your judgement. If you want to do something, do it. Don't worry about what everyone else thinks. It's your life not theirs. I'm not saying go out of your way to hurt other people but you worry too much about what other people will think or say that you risk missing out on some great experiences.

Most of all, stay true to yourself. You turn out ok and your life will be good. Good luck!

Oh, by the way, take more pictures - I'd love to have evidence of some of the dodgy hair styles and bizarre fashion choices.

Time For Takeoff?.

 Every now and then something comes along that knocks me off the path I was on and gives me a totally new perspective. Yesterday I had a moment like that and I thought I'd share it with you.

I am relatively new to podcasts. I don't listen to many and very few do I follow in what could be called a regular fashion. But during the course of a writing 'course' I have been taking online the author listed some interesting resources. One of these was the podcast of Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Big Magic. You can find a link to the podcast here Magic Lessons . I read Big Magic a few years ago and was struck by the way she promoted creativity and encouraged everyone to get on and live a creative life. Naturally, being me, I promptly did nothing about it and had almost forgotten about it until I found her podcast. As I tend to flit around and pick things at random without really following any pattern I decided to start at the beginning of the podcast and listen to episode one. What an eye opener. And let me tell you why.

In this episode Elizabeth Gilbert was talking to a young mother who wanted to write a non fiction book about living creatively when you have children and a home to take care of. She had done lots of research, taken lots of classes and planned in detail what she wanted to say. But she was stuck about how to get started. Elizabeth Gilbert then gave her the best advice I have heard in ages. She told her that all her work up until this point was taxiing on the runway! She had been preparing and building up to writing her book and now was the time to take-off, the time to fly, to write the book she wanted to write.

It made total sense to me and my situation. I am always looking for another book on writing, another course to take and I never get round to doing the writing. I am always preparing but never doing! And that's why the fragments I have are all on the laptop and not out in the world. And that's why I usually fail to finish anything. Not because I am lazy or blocked or procrastinating. Because I am taxiing and not taking off. I think that I need more preparation, more getting ready when the truth is I'll never 'be ready' unless I take off. I have to let the words go, let them fly.

It's scary, isn't it? Letting go of your babies, taking your hand off the wheel and seeing what happens. But it can be exciting too. I'm excited to see if I can finally stop taxiing and take-off, fly free as the writer I really want to be. So I'm going to try taking off, flying out there with my words and stories. And because I can't wait to see what happens I'm going to dip my toe into the self publishing world. Don't know how or where yet but I'll find a way.

Because I really want to fly now. Wind beneath my wings anyone?

Reset. And About Time Too!

 Logging on this morning I noticed that I haven't posted anything here since May.

Which is ironic considering that I've come here to explore why I've not been writing very much lately!

So, this writing lark has proved very hard recently. I don't seem able to marshal my thoughts. Everything is muddled and mixed up and unformed somehow. I had an idea for a novel, I had good characters, I had a vague idea of where the story would go. But I couldn't write it. I've managed a few scenes but nothing of any substance. I feel like I've lost my writing mojo.

There's no obvious reason for this apart from all the usual suspects - crippling self doubt, laziness, procrastination of Olympic proportions. None of which helps when I'm trying to work out whether all this is temporary or if it's the Universe telling me to stop kidding myself and give up for good. The defeated writer has left the building ...

However, it's nearly November, NaNoWriMo is here soon so I've resolved to have a reset this weekend and see how I go with a NaNo project. I hope to oil the writing cogs and get this old machine whirring again. 

Bring on the dancing horses!

My Five P's of Writing

Ever since I was small I remember telling stories. Before I could write I was skipping up and down, telling stories to anyone, everyone or even no one. It seems to be part of what make s me 'me' and I can't imagine not doing it. Sometimes the stories exist only in my imagination, never getting written down and they exist for as long as I continue to muse on them. More often they are scribbled in a notebook or typed up somewhere to be discovered half-formed at a later date. These stories all came about by 'pantsing', flying by the seat of my pants. I think this is my default way of making stories. I begin to tell myself a tale and see where it takes me. There is no structure and I have no idea what will happen. This is how I 'won' at NaNoWriMo many years ago. I sat at my laptop with a vague idea and typed away letting it flow from me. No structure, no narrative arc, no sense of an ending. P Number One.

As soon as I started to get more 'serious' about writing I was 'advised' that I needed to plan my work. It was important that I sorted out my narrative arc, wrote character summaries, knew how each scene played out before I typed a single word. So I tried every planning method I could, scribbled stuff down and promptly forgot about most of it once I started writing. Hands were thrown up in horror and I was again 'advised' to keep my planning tight, to prioritise it, to spend almost as much time planning as I did writing. And I stopped writing as much or as often because my plans were never quite right. P Number Two.

Naturally, the third P is Procrastination. All the stressing about planning stopped me writing and I found more and more reasons why I couldn't do it at the moment, today, tomorrow, who knows when. I dithered and played about with ideas but my heart sank at the thought of planning the perfect story. And here comes P Number Four - Perfection. I became obsessed with making the perfect, most detailed plan that I was paralysed - no, that's not Number Five! If my plan wasn't perfect then there was no way I could write my story. Because 'real' writers have a brilliant, perfect plan. Don't they? So I soon gave up on all my ideas and the writing almost stopped. The stories would still pop into my head and entertain my imagination but I found myself telling them that I was sorry but they'd never get written. They were just too fluid, too unformed and refused to conform to a plan. Jelly stories flooding all over the place with no mould to flop into.

P Number Five is Publication. If I was to be a 'real' writer, a 'proper' writer then I had to get stuff published. Didn't I? And to get stuff published I had to plan and make it perfect and bloody well get it written. But I was procrastinating because nothing was planned or perfect and round and round I went, getting nowhere. 

Here I am, contemplating the terror of the Five P's.

Stuck and blocked and with an idea that I thought was great but had a terrible ending. So I started to unpick another plan, changing the ending and the darn thing morphed into a different story. Which needs planning, of course. So I'll make some tea, stare out of the window and try to be a good girl and plan out the new idea. If I can stop procrastinating about perfection in planning that is!