Room to Think

I have a confession: I've been putting off writing. Over the past 5 years, writing has become less and less a part of my life, and I'm realizing more and more that it's something I need.  I used to be an extremely reflective person. I prided myself on my introspection and as a result, I was more intellectual, patient, empathetic, open, and relaxed. I think I was a better person because of it. Now I'm impatient, with little time for wasted minutes, and feeling like I'm pressed for all the time. You know how people recommend meditation for health? To slow down in a sped-up world? That's what writing is to me. Mental yoga. And I do it about as often as I do yoga. Not often enough. There was a simple question in my  Spark Notebook  yesterday, and it made me think--as it should. That's what I paid for. It asked: What have you been putting off lately? Inexplicably, it made me sad. And, I had a rare amount of time that I had time to reflect on why.  ...

Fun Fact: The ancient Greeks used to have spoken word poetry a sport in their Olympic games. As an English major, I never took the chance to really study spoken word poetry...sometimes known as slam poetry, or performance poetry. But even that's not quite right. Spoken word poetry really means that you're breathing life into the words on a page. I always appreciated spoken word--I loved watching poetry slams. But since I never considered myself "good at poetry", I tended to steer away from the classes I had a hunch I wouldn't do well in. That means I missed out on some pretty badass classes. Those poets know how to express themselves. They know how to connect.  They know how to make their listeners feel. "If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom", she's gonna call me "Point B." Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint the solar system on...

Not an actual video.  They haven't posted it on youtube yet. Click  here  to watch it on TED.com This guy. His name is Andrew Stanton, and even though sometimes he sounds like he's reading off of a script, he's a storyteller from Pixar, and he uses this TEDtalk to share what the essential parts of a good story are. Since most of you in the class are creative writers, I feel like this is a good one for all of you.  Mr. Stanton here outlined some of the techniques we've learned in the last couple years and condensed them into a way that's easy to remember.  I'm not saying that I learned much more from him than I have from 4 years of learning to write, but I am saying that he connected some dots that gave me a nice "aha!" moment this morning as I watched this over my breakfast. I don't have much time to go into detail, but the title of the TEDtalk is "The Clues to a Great Story", and he uses a swear word in the first 3 minut...

12:34am I've decided that's it's not best or most productive for me to write later than about this time of the night.  Tuesday night got a little crazy--definitely a little out of hand.  And though when I read through those posts, my only thoughts were: "Wow, I can still write cohesively at 3 in the morning!" and "Wow, I can get incredibly carried away" especially when my fingers can manage to keep up with the strings of thoughts as they pass through the ticker in my head that is in charge of motor control. A wordle of Tedtalk Tuesday--Happiness vs. Satisfaction I apologize. I love words. I love having things to say, and multiple ways of saying them.  But sometimes I feel like I should revel more in the beauty of being succinct. Last quarter I took a workshop class where I was required to write critiques for my classmates' work, and in return, they would critique mine.  It was  Kate Trueblood's senior seminar for fiction writing, s...