yeah, i was making a masturbation joke there at the end. but you took it and went somewhere real with it, so thank you.
there's so much to experience in life and the creative process really should be more like a "put on that costume, learn a few steps of this dance, kneed up some new incense, try a different meditation technique, see if it lights you on fire and go with it from there" thing than a "committing to your graduate thesis while in the third grade" deal. so, fuck, yes. write single chapters of books that only have single chapters. there are a lot of those floating around in the ethers. have a coffee shop art show. write one-act plays, dance behind a waterfall for two friends and your kid. if you never dip your toes in, you aren't going to find the waters that are right for you.
even within writing, there are so many directions you could take. i wrote novels, three of them, before the 11th grade. i finished some crappy teen romance from troll books and thought, hell, i could do better than that, and wrote the first section of my first book over the course of the next week. the next one was my freshman year and very loudly sublimated my being assaulted a year earlier. by sophomore year i'd come to see it as a tradition, what book will i be writing this year, right? so that was the longest one, a supernatural romance. i needed something deeper than that, by the end, i needed a style of writing outside my current vocabulary, and the next project i got overwhelmed me - i started writing it over that summer, got a lot of cool scenes, but never anything that stuck together or built up on itself. since, everything has been more fragmented. much more skilled, but fragmented. sort of my kore-getting-dragged-into-the-underworld deal with writing. it was a trip, i long for the security i felt in that process when i was fifteen, but it's not how i work anymore.
judithanese is definitely an acquired skill. i tried offering a class once but not nearly enough people registered. the course description may have escaped them. :-(
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there's so much to experience in life and the creative process really should be more like a "put on that costume, learn a few steps of this dance, kneed up some new incense, try a different meditation technique, see if it lights you on fire and go with it from there" thing than a "committing to your graduate thesis while in the third grade" deal. so, fuck, yes. write single chapters of books that only have single chapters. there are a lot of those floating around in the ethers. have a coffee shop art show. write one-act plays, dance behind a waterfall for two friends and your kid. if you never dip your toes in, you aren't going to find the waters that are right for you.
even within writing, there are so many directions you could take. i wrote novels, three of them, before the 11th grade. i finished some crappy teen romance from troll books and thought, hell, i could do better than that, and wrote the first section of my first book over the course of the next week. the next one was my freshman year and very loudly sublimated my being assaulted a year earlier. by sophomore year i'd come to see it as a tradition, what book will i be writing this year, right? so that was the longest one, a supernatural romance. i needed something deeper than that, by the end, i needed a style of writing outside my current vocabulary, and the next project i got overwhelmed me - i started writing it over that summer, got a lot of cool scenes, but never anything that stuck together or built up on itself. since, everything has been more fragmented. much more skilled, but fragmented. sort of my kore-getting-dragged-into-the-underworld deal with writing. it was a trip, i long for the security i felt in that process when i was fifteen, but it's not how i work anymore.
judithanese is definitely an acquired skill. i tried offering a class once but not nearly enough people registered. the course description may have escaped them. :-(