Friday 29 June 2012

Writer’s block.


This is something every writer has to contend with at some point.  It’s not a lack of ideas, but struggling at how to put them on a page.
It’s like when you imagine the awesome cake you are going to bake, and then find out you have no icing sugar and the shop is closed.  Now what are you going to do?
Well you could give up on the cake.  Or you could look up how to make icing sugar on the net, throw caster sugar and cornflour into a food processor and walla! Improvised icing sugar. 
Ok so it turned out a bit floury and gritty, but hey, at least I tried.
Oh yeah, this post was about writing wasn’t it?
Well, I find one of the best ways to get over writer’s block is to just write.  Grab a pad and stream of consciousness write down anything and everything.  Eventually something will click.
Another exercise I read about was to go away and describe something.  Anything.  Like eating a nut.  What does it smell like?  What is it like as you bite into it?  How does it feel on your tongue?  What about when you chew it?
Sometimes it gets those words flowing again.  Sometimes you just get to eat a nut, which is a nice anyway.  (Unless you have a nut allergy, in which case, don’t do that.)

So this week I got another story for the sci fi collection first drafted.  I am both looking forward to, and dreading reading them back.  Sometimes things that made perfect sense when you were typing them become complete gibberish when you read them a week later.  Fingers crossed there won’t be too much of that!  I guess we’ll see how that goes next week!  

In the meantime, I’ve added a new link to the resources page, from those masters of storytelling, Pixar.  Enjoy!  

Friday 8 June 2012

There’s a moral to this story somewhere.


When I was at school, I had some keyboard lessons.  You know the kind – where you are excused from class to sit in a tiny room for ten minutes trying to speed learn how to play a tune from an “easy” book. 
It was in one of these lessons I got into a discussion (argument) with my teacher about how “Rock Around the Clock” should be played. 
You see, I wasn’t playing what was written on the page. 
“Those notes are all crotchets!”  She would point out with exasperation.  “They are all the same length.”
“But the song doesn’t sound like that!”  I thought that if I was going to play Rock around the Clock, it should sound like the record did.  But this was a simplified version for doing keyboard grades – and the teacher pointed out that if I played it like it sounded instead of how it was written in the book, I wouldn’t pass the exam.
Who made up that rule?  To me, it seemed the ultimate silliness that you should fail at playing music by playing it to sound better. 
As it was, I never took the exam.  But whenever I played Rock Around the Clock, people didn’t seem to mind that not all those notes were crotchets.

Friday 1 June 2012

Inspiration


Some days it’s good to just get out and see stuff.  If you sit indoors at a computer all day, eventually your imagination will get a bit worn out.  Even going for a walk will help, to refresh you memory on the texture of stone, the feel of the wind and the colour of the sky.

I got out to visit a local wildlife park this week; here are some of the words I brought back in the form of pictures!













All images copyright Sarah Cosgrove © 2012