Opportunities

So, figured out this one itty bitty little thing, this tiny doodad in my story, an OPPORTUNITY for more depth in my story, this book and following into the next, and I feel like I’ve got an extra rocket boost of creativity surging through me! Funny how that one tiny thing, something that seems to obvious to me now, can provide such impetus. Guess it was what I was needing all along. Was the writing universe telling me “Hey, stupid! You forgot something!” or Did I just not catch the idea when it drifted by in the creative aether until now?

 

I think we get what we need when we need it, mostly. It’s like what we heard when we were younger, our parents saying, “99% of your life is showing up!” The rest is easy peasy do your job, but if you’re not there, physically, mentally, you won’t catch that OPPORTUNITY that passes by.

 

(I was a hard person to get out of bed in the morning. I mean really difficult when I was a teen. I not only had a lot going on at school, then after school with marching band, then homework (back when being in college prep courses meant your classes were harder than any college class you would ever ever ever take, honestly! and the homework was a pain in the butt hard,) so by tenish pm if I was lucky, I was done with that and then sometimes not till midnight, then I’d read, my one really lavish addiction (and still is) and so me and books slept together. You could say I slept with a lot of characters when I was young LOL.)

 

So to continue with the word of the day, I’ve been taking Dean Wesley Smith‘s online classes. I started with Writing in Depth. I wanted to skip on to the structure/plotting, my real weakness but no, Dean advised against it, so here I am doing at least one little video every morning and taking notes. I was pleased that he didn’t come back with anything specific to work on in my first submitted sample, other than don’t do crit groups, and don’t let anyone see your writing, just write! I’m down with that! I was concerned that I had too much narraction–worldbuilding, introspection, blah blah–and not enough dialogue. Well, I got set straight on that one! LOL. Now I feel I can relax more into my own writing style and let my own natural style take over as it develops.

 

Y’all know I’m reading “Ordinary Monsters” and I’m telling ya, I’m really loving it. The sentence structure is so beautifuly Faulkeran and I am so raptured by it. Honestly. You don’t notice that the sentence might be 4 or 5 lines long, or longer. How wonderful to read REAL writing for a change. That’s what I call real writing, because I guess it sounds kinda, well, kinda Southern. He has this sort of drawl going on in it, not like an accent, but in that he is actually speaking to me, describing these things in great detail, putting me there, poking me, prodding me, making me experience these things, word by word and sentence by sentence. This is what I call a true addiction to writing. And it’s gorgeous and how I hope someday to be able to flow, not copy his style, but develop my own flow like it just comes out of my fingers like I’m talking to you from Texas, only you’ll understand me better ’cause it’s spelled out LOL.

 

At thebigthrill.com, Alison McNight interviewed J M Miro back in 2022 and said, “Then there is “Ordinary Monsters,” a book that does not believe in poorly placed phrases or terribly constructed sentences, a book whose characters you aren’t allowed to forget. A book I do not have the writerly skill to convey the depths of. But here we are.” https://www.thebigthrill.org/2022/05/up-close-j-m-miro/

 

And just to refer back to what I was saying earlier, about that little tidbit of info that I had to discover before getting this huge impetus of entropy to help me through this middle of the novel, Miro says,

 

“But I’m a great believer that stories are generally smarter than their authors; my task, often, is to listen closely and try to hear what the novel wants to do, where it sees its own connections. And so, almost immediately, I’ll begin straying.”

 

I think the story is certainly smarter than the author and we are just vessels to present the story to the world. In some form or another, we are just vessels anyway, right? Well, that’s more ethereal than I want to get here, but you get me.

 

Oh, and it’s time for more coffee, some toast, and a class video.