Techniques to get creatively unstuck when you know you want to write but are struggling with motivation and follow-through.
Category: The Imaginary
I suck at plot. I suck at pacing. I have trouble knowing where things fit with each other, if I’m rushing or going too slow within different moments in a story. I’m not great at dialogue either. I’m probably good at half-baked ideas, strange characters, a sense of place, and mood. I’ve read quite a […]
A couple of weeks ago, on my way to work to co-facilitate a group, while I was walking to the El and talking on the phone, a little fruit fly circumvented the shield provided by my glasses and flew straight into my eye. I was feeling a bit emotional before the fly thing happened. As […]
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Surviving Intact
In periods of difficulty, when I achieve a little distance from that difficulty, I start thinking in more hopeful terms. I start thinking about joy and humor and hope, and how they are magnificent stars that can keep me oriented towards the things I wish for in life. So I’ve been thinking about moving towards, […]
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The Silence the Pope Brings
The pope came to Philadelphia. A full assortment of feelings were expressed by the Philadelphians I spoke with–a few were delighted, most were inconvenienced. A friend of mine, closer to the gathering on the Parkway, said her block socialized the whole weekend, taking advantage of the car-less streets. In my neck of the woods, across […]
I met someone unbearably cool on Thursday night. She had dyed silver hair with purple streaks framing her lovely face. She was middle aged, perfect smile wrinkles around her eyes. She had a bass guitar strapped to her back. She oversaw a software development team and she knew my friend because she also plays ice […]
I went back to Fallingwater, as I had promised myself, but this time I took my sweetie. I had the same reaction as the first time, I was moved by all of its beauty–a feeling of profound wellbeing settled in. Fallingwater feels like home. Home. Looking through Merriam Webster’s definitions, the snippets that resonate with […]
In keeping with my new-found passion (to visit as many Frank Lloyd Wright [FLW] buildings as I can), I went to Oak Park a week ago to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s first home and studio. I found the experience both anticlimactic and bracing. As an artist preoccupied with words, languages, and story telling, I often […]
It’s been an exquisite banquet of stress in graduate student land of late, as I wrap up the eighth and final consecutive semester of my part-time MSW program. (Starting in September 2011, I’ve had classes in Fall, Spring, Summer, Fall, Spring, Summer, Fall and now Spring. The experience, drawn out, exhausting, was chosen by me, […]
Even though it was six months ago, I still get asked “How was India?” The question is so huge, it leaves me either rambling or wordless. The scope of the question might be, “What are your thoughts on being a woman?” Or perhaps, “Tell me about your childhood?” (Childhood I could tackle, that’s a narrative […]
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Re-Entry
Everybody talks about the culture shock of going to India, but no one I spoke to did justice to the psychic shock of returning home to the United States. Everything is simultaneously familiar and alien. Right now, when a CVS invisibly opens the door as I approach it, I feel like I’m entering a magical […]
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Awake, Dreaming the Taj Mahal
The Taj is a waking dream. It is a building on the shores of a river, in a specific town, but I think it functions better as an apparition and a dream. I couldn’t really enter the Taj (technically, yes, I visited its obscure heart, but it didn’t help me make sense of the experience), […]
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The Taj Mahal Quest
I have spent six weeks in India over two visits. I have never seen the Taj Mahal. In November 2011, I came to New Delhi and spent a week. The only day I had off from the conference I was running was a Friday. The only day of the week the Taj Mahal is closed […]
My written french is abysmal, so when I wrote to my french grandma that Kolkata was pretty interesting, she chided me that I needed to try harder to convey the experience. The fact is that it’s very hard to explain what makes the city so captivating, so exhausting, so worthwhile, so magical, so frustrating, and […]
Here’s one of my theories about travel: For every major city known around the world (think London, Hong Kong, New York, Cape Town, Kolkata), there is a dream version of the city which lives in our minds–a dream composed of impressions, movie clips, song lyrics, images, fleeting conversations and travel fantasies. Equally, certain (sub)continents are […]
It’s been an intense period of “what next?” I’m trying to figure out what would be nice to see happen in 2013 and 2014. It’s requiring spreadsheets, some dreaming, some internal negotiations, conversations with multiple parties, overcoming fears, and letting some of my hopes run free (which tends to make me antsy). Plus, this rummaging […]
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A Peculiar Displacement
I love Sumerian guardian figures–curly hair, bushy beards, wings, and I’m sure what used to be colorful frocks. The world they come from is heavy with scents I will never know. I feel for and respond to them how I might if I met a living fairy. I am especially fond of the giant winged […]
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Dream Cities
I have been to London. But I have spent far more time in the London of my mind, which has been richly fed by many-faced narratives. That London was nourished by children’s tales where bears roam train stations, children fly out the window, and there are suburbs named Narnia and the Shire. I am simultaneously […]
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Gifts
I have some singular gifts, for example, my ability to do very little, for several consecutive days, during vacations. I really luxuriate in stillness. I seem to have two main modes–running around and inert. Being unchained from my to-do list gives rise to the inner dreamer. The contrast is interesting, I feel most philosophical at […]
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Happy Potato Chip
Two weeks ago, I was waiting for the trolley on the way to work when I saw a man walking on the tracks, holding a soiled roll of toilet paper. He had clearly thoughtfully placed a crap in the full privacy of the tracks. He was coming back, muttering to himself, and as soon as […]