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astillac

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So. I've been absent the last few weeks because a good friend of mine was in car accident and subsequently died. I have not been doing anything. I stopped exercising, eating well, writing, playing the cello, everything. It was all Andy, all the time.

 

I know writing can be therapeutic, and I feel like I could be doing something useful, but what do you write when your little fantasies seem like pale imitations of life?

 

Any thoughts?

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So. I've been absent the last few weeks because a good friend of mine was in car accident and subsequently died. I have not been doing anything. I stopped exercising, eating well, writing, playing the cello, everything. It was all Andy, all the time.

 

I know writing can be therapeutic, and I feel like I could be doing something useful, but what do you write when your little fantasies seem like pale imitations of life?

 

Any thoughts?

 

First, I'm really sorry to hear about your loss, Callista. That is sad, sad news.

 

To your question: Many writers find comfort in keeping a grief journal. Write down what is in your head and in your heart. Don't worry about showing it to people. At some point, you may feel like sharing some of it with others who were close to Andy, but then again, maybe you won't. You can jot down little remembrances or entire events or things that are (on the surface) completely unrelated to the loss. It doesn't matter. Just write. It will help you honor his memory. And, at some point, maybe it'll hurt a little less.

 

Take care,

 

-Steve

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So. I've been absent the last few weeks because a good friend of mine was in car accident and subsequently died. I have not been doing anything. I stopped exercising, eating well, writing, playing the cello, everything. It was all Andy, all the time.

 

I know writing can be therapeutic, and I feel like I could be doing something useful, but what do you write when your little fantasies seem like pale imitations of life?

 

Any thoughts?

 

When my mother died I wrote about her. In a way it revitalized her in my thoughts, keeping her alive in a special way.

 

A good and dear old friend of mine is currently suffering from cancer. It started as uterine but metastasized to the point where the doctors told her to stop treatment (chemo and radiation). She had only a month or so left to her so she might as well enjoy it, they said. They gave her something to manage the pain so she didn't have to go to hospice. She spent the time writing, just to leave something behind for her friends and family: her thoughts, her memories, her imaginings. She's still writing. It's been more than a years now. This is the power of the written word (and the lack of power in the predictions of doctors).

 

Writing is therapy for the dying as well as those left behind. But so is reading. Perhaps Andy has written something you might want to read. Something that now might give you insight. It needn't be The Diary Of Anne Frank. A old letter would do. An e-mail. Something to steer your thoughts.

 

I'm sure many others have had similar experiences. It's been said that the absence of a loved one leaves a hole in your heart. A hole can be filled. Wounds can be healed. The substance of that treatment is up to you.

 

Be well,

-Thoth.

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So. I've been absent the last few weeks because a good friend of mine was in car accident and subsequently died. I have not been doing anything. I stopped exercising, eating well, writing, playing the cello, everything. It was all Andy, all the time.

 

I know writing can be therapeutic, and I feel like I could be doing something useful, but what do you write when your little fantasies seem like pale imitations of life?

 

Any thoughts?

All my sympathy to you. What a terrible experience! :(

 

Steve's suggestion of keeping a grief journal strikes me as excellent. You could even take a stab at poetry. It needn't be good poetry, since it's for you, not for the world. Poetry is, in some ways, the essence of emotion.

 

But "useful" in this context is whatever helps you to deal with your loss, I think. Be gentle with yourself! It's not the time for page targets or beating yourself up for not doing more.

More friends are here, if you need us.

All the best,

Marguerite

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Thank you for the support and well wishing, lady and gents. I feel like I'm done doing nothing and I really need to just start doing something. I don't know what that is, or how to start it, but that's what I feel.

 

I've had a few weeks to process and grieve, and I think I need some sort of "get back into life" jumpstart. I'm going to try and make a little schedule for myself today. And that's all I'm asking of myself for today. (Yesterday I opened Storyist and stared at my story for 15 minutes.)

 

Love, love, love,

Calli

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Thank you for the support and well wishing, lady and gents. I feel like I'm done doing nothing and I really need to just start doing something. I don't know what that is, or how to start it, but that's what I feel.

 

I've had a few weeks to process and grieve, and I think I need some sort of "get back into life" jumpstart. I'm going to try and make a little schedule for myself today. And that's all I'm asking of myself for today. (Yesterday I opened Storyist and stared at my story for 15 minutes.)

 

Love, love, love,

Calli

Ah, I misunderstood (we all did, I think). So you want to get back to your regular writing but are wondering how to ease back in. I understand: I write best myself when I'm feeling happy. Stress knocks the fun right out of it.

 

Sounds like you have a good handle on how to start, but here are a few additional tips, to use or ignore as you see fit.

 

1) Are there areas you need to research? This might be a good time to focus on answering specific questions and/or reading books, including books on the craft of writing. Perhaps they will jar something loose and get you excited about your project again. One craft book that I'm currently enjoying is Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer. The excerpts from other people's work and her discussion of them are lovely, and they demand no investment from you in terms of feeling that you should write like that, because she loves paragraph-length sentences, which would cause any modern word processor, never mind any modern editor, to start frothing instantly at the mouth. But if you need to know what pirates ate for breakfast or how it felt to walk around in a corset, this could be the week to bury yourself in the library and find out.

 

2) How about your characters? Are they fully developed, with pasts and personalities and problems? This could be the moment for goal/motivation/conflict charts or figuring out, now that you've given your hero, say, an antipathy to dogs, where that comes from and how it would play out in other areas of his life, as well as how you can make the best use of it in your plot to torment the poor guy.

 

3) Do you have a relatively finished project that just needs some work? Rewriting is easier than writing from scratch, and it's a good way to get back into the swing of things after a break (at least for me).

 

4) Do you have a good critique partner (emphasis on the good, not the critique, in this case!)? Someone you could sit down with and hash over ideas? Support is almost always helpful, so long as it is support and not one-upsmanship.

 

5) How about a synopsis? They're the pits (at least I think so), but if you have a clear idea of where your story is going but not much inclination to sit down and send it there, at least you can feel like you accomplished something by drafting the synopsis. If you need suggestions, there are a bunch in a thread under "Writing Resources," where PJL listed several websites that I found quite useful.

 

I'm sure there are other bridging activities that people can suggest, but one of those usually works for me. And the nice part (my mother-in-law died before Christmas, so I speak from experience) of getting started again is that it begins to put the grief in perspective. Not that you want to forget Andy, of course, but you probably want to get to a place where you don't think about him all the time.

 

Best of luck, and don't forget to let us know how it goes. :(

Marguerite

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Oooh, thank you. That's a lot of very good info - let's see if I can process through it. (This will be something akin to me thinking out loud...)

 

1) Yes. Horses, travel on said horses, um, god, there are probably a ton of other things.

2) They are fully developed in my head, but it would probably be good to write it down - I do forget things... hm...

3) The first book is technically finished; I have to type up the last half. Transcribing could be what I do when words aren't coming.

4) Hm. No, not really. I have Erica, but I haven't seen her in at least a month.

5) You know, I've never written a synopsis. :(

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Yes, M is correct. I/we thought you were still processing rather than looking for ways to get back in the saddle.

 

1) Speaking of which, the best research book on horses I've ever read goes by the unlikely name of, "The Everything Horse Book: Buying, Riding, and Caring for Your Equine Companion..So Complete You'll Think a Horse Wrote It" by Cheryl Kimball (who is not a horse). It's an easy read yet remarkably thorough. Available from Amazon for $10.17.

 

2) It might be a good time to flesh out those Character Sheet notes and maybe add some custom fields.

 

3) Finished but you have to type up the last half? You mean you develop on **shudder** paper? You have a computer. I mean, I know you have a computer.

 

4) I wish I had an Erica. I have a critique partner. "Good"? Sometimes. Argumentative? Definitely. But sometimes that helps. It gets my juices flowing. (And no one wants stagnant smelly juices.)

 

5) It has been said, and I can't remember by whom, that the synopsis writer is the antithesis of the novel writer. One is in the business of expanding succinct ideas into a flood of words while the other works to distill the flood down to its essence. Two very different sets of skills. Consequently, I use my Section titles as a kind of Section synopsis. I wouldn't stick it in a query letter but it helps.

 

Just my 2¢ or nickel (whatever),

-Thoth.

 

P.S. I apologize if my previous comments made you feel uncomfortable in any way. I know I always feel uncomfortable when friends fawn over the grieving. Maybe it's a guy thing.

 

Oooh, thank you. That's a lot of very good info - let's see if I can process through it. (This will be something akin to me thinking out loud...)

 

1) Yes. Horses, travel on said horses, um, god, there are probably a ton of other things.

2) They are fully developed in my head, but it would probably be good to write it down - I do forget things... hm...

3) The first book is technically finished; I have to type up the last half. Transcribing could be what I do when words aren't coming.

4) Hm. No, not really. I have Erica, but I haven't seen her in at least a month.

5) You know, I've never written a synopsis. :(

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Haha, not only do I develop, I WRITE on paper. I have a whole plastic bin of stories. Something like 45 pounds.

 

Don't worry about making me uncomfortable. You pretty much have to be three inches from my face before I'm uncomfortable. Which happened when I was meeting my husband's extended family. Very, very embarrassing. :(

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Haha, not only do I develop, I WRITE on paper. I have a whole plastic bin of stories. Something like 45 pounds.

45 pounds of paper? Impressive. BTW: I just found out (from a friend who watches The View) that billionaire author Danielle Steel has written over 100 novels (and more on the way), and all on paper using an old typewriter. She sometimes writes 5 novels this way simultaneously. Imagine.

 

Don't worry about making me uncomfortable. You pretty much have to be three inches from my face before I'm uncomfortable. Which happened when I was meeting my husband's extended family. Very, very embarrassing. :(

Thanks. Been there.

 

-Thoth.

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I just found out (from a friend who watches The View) that billionaire author Danielle Steel has written over 100 novels (and more on the way), and all on paper using an old typewriter. She sometimes writes 5 novels this way simultaneously. Imagine.

Thoth

Yes, well, that explains why the one time I read a book of hers, I swore I'd never make that mistake again. Five novels at once? I guess it's astonishing that the plot and characters weren't even less coherent. And research? Who'd have time? This one was about a ballerina in Russia (the reason I read it), and I think I picked up half a dozen major gaffes in the first 10 pages. And the movie Jewels, which I got from Netflix, was so putrid that I couldn't watch it even though it starred Anthony Andrews, whom I loved in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Sigh.

 

The five books at once remind me of a tale that used to circulate about Barbara Cartland (Princess Di's step-grandma, for you nonromance types). After she hit it big, she supposedly had a stable of assistants who churned out the books at a rate of about one a month, and she went around providing administrative expertise, along the lines of "Give this heroine dark hair and blue eyes." They all read as though they'd had just that much effort put into them--at least I suppose they did; at a certain point they tumbled past Golden Turkey Award status (so bad they're funny) into unadulterated awful, so I stopped even glancing at them.

 

My mother still talks about the time I gave her a Cartland novel when she asked for something light after abdominal surgery. She spent so much time giggling hysterically over the emerald-eyed heroine that it set her healing back three weeks. So she says, anyway. :(

 

Thanks for the comment about synopsis vs. novel writers: true or not, it makes me feel better about all the angst I go through compressing my 500+ pages into three compelling paragraphs. On the critique partner, I sympathize. I love mine dearly as a person, but I cringe inside every time I show her something. The technique of constructive criticism is hard-learned but has much to recommend it. Those little notes all over my cherished prose going "Ugh!" and "Why ever would she?" can depress me for days.

M

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Thanks, ladies, for reminding me that quantity does not imply quality. I suppose I was just impressed by the great volume of books some authors manage to get published despite their general suckiness (now a real word). But just as it is said that many people buy cars for their color, many people buy books because of a recognized name, a clever title, or good cover art. (I wonder if the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" guy gets a cut of all the bad romance novels he has helped sell?)

 

Be fierce writers all,

-Thoth.

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The five books at once remind me of a tale that used to circulate about Barbara Cartland (Princess Di's step-grandma, for you nonromance types). After she hit it big, she supposedly had a stable of assistants who churned out the books at a rate of about one a month, and she went around providing administrative expertise, along the lines of "Give this heroine dark hair and blue eyes." They all read as though they'd had just that much effort put into them--at least I suppose they did; at a certain point they tumbled past Golden Turkey Award status (so bad they're funny) and into unadulterated awful, so I stopped even glancing at them.

 

Then she was a pioneer :(

 

A recent Publisher's Weekly article reported that James Patterson will publish six books between January and June. "He", of course, means "they"--the stable of writers that work from his outlines/back-of-the-napkin notes. I have to say that I don't like the trend of cashing in on an author's "brand" with series installments written by other writers (e.g. Tom Clancy's Op Center, written by Jeff Rovin). Patterson is one thing, but there is something creepy about Robert Ludlum (may he rest in peace) continuing to publish.

 

The other side of the coin, though, is that writing for these series is a good way to establish yourself. I met Gayle Lynds, who wrote three of the Ludlum novels, a few years ago at the the San Francisco Writers Conference as she was just starting to "break". She's a best-seller in her own right now, and hardly needs to mention Ludlum at all these days.

 

-Steve

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Then she was a pioneer ;)

 

A recent Publisher's Weekly article reported that James Patterson will publish six books between January and June. "He", of course, means "they"--the stable of writers that work from his outlines/back-of-the-napkin notes. I have to say that I don't like the trend of cashing in on an author's "brand" with series installments written by other writers (e.g. Tom Clancy's Op Center, written by Jeff Rovin). Patterson is one thing, but there is something creepy about Robert Ludlum (may he rest in peace) continuing to publish.

 

The other side of the coin, though, is that writing for these series is a good way to establish yourself. I met Gayle Lynds, who wrote three of the Ludlum novels, a few years ago at the the San Francisco Writers Conference as she was just starting to "break". She's a best-seller in her own right now, and hardly needs to mention Ludlum at all these days.

 

-Steve

Plus ça change, huh? One of the bizarre features of early printed books (pre-1600, mostly, but up to 1700 in some places) is that you can never assume that the guy (and they were all guys) whose name is on the book even knew of its existence. If you attributed your ideas to, say, Aristotle, you had some street cred. If you wrote them under your own name, people would ask, "So who are you to tell me how to plant my onions?" or whatever. And just as now, selling a lot of books made you an expert, so there are umpteen versions of agricultural/household hint books attributed to the one guy who first got his in print, and so on.

 

So here we are in the 21st century going back to the "great authority," commercial variety. And people wonder why historians walk around with those knowing grins on their faces. :(

 

But actually I think the practice predates Cartland. Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew), the guy who wrote the Hardy boys books, Emilie Loring, and a lot of other authors were actually groups. The publishing house "owned" the names and farmed out the work to whoever was available.

 

That said, I do think dead people should be allowed to rest in peace, not having to worry about what's being issued under their names! It's like the plan to revive Bogey and Bacall through computer graphics: creepy to the max.

 

On which, has anyone read Connie Willis's Remake? Great story, very short and currently out of print (although still available some places), about what happens when computers take over the movies and live actors/dancers are no longer needed. The eerie part is that we're already so close to the technology she describes: just a matter of bandwidth and storage space....

M

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So. I've been absent the last few weeks because a good friend of mine was in car accident and subsequently died. I have not been doing anything. I stopped exercising, eating well, writing, playing the cello, everything. It was all Andy, all the time.

 

I know writing can be therapeutic, and I feel like I could be doing something useful, but what do you write when your little fantasies seem like pale imitations of life?

 

Any thoughts?

 

I'm sorry for your loss. I wish I could say something inspirational or soothing, but I know how hollow it can all sound when you are grieving.

 

When I'm going through a particularly bad spot, I tend to ignore all my normal pursuits and follow after other people's fantasies for a while. Usually this is in the form of books, puzzles, or a video game. It helps me get out of my own head, so to speak. Sometimes a vacation from your own thoughts gives your emotions a little time to rest, and makes life a little easier to deal with when you are ready to come back.

 

Take care,

IF

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... has anyone read Connie Willis's Remake? Great story, very short and currently out of print (although still available some places), about what happens when computers take over the movies and live actors/dancers are no longer needed. The eerie part is that we're already so close to the technology she describes: just a matter of bandwidth and storage space....

Movies like 300 and Beowulf use motion capture technology, but a parts of both movies "recycled" previously captured motions into other scenes. Capture enough motion and voice samples and you don't need the actor anymore.

 

Remember the 1994 film, The Crow, whose star Brandon Lee died before key scenes were shot, so they used computer graphics and clever splicings from previous scenes. The buzz at the time was that stars (or models) with a large enough body of work could stop working and live off the residuals and fees for future movies that could be cobbled together from previous work.

 

And then there's writing. In the 1980's they (I don't remember who) claimed to have a computer program that could write and "authentic" work by Shakespeare. And then there were those awful writing programs based on modular programing, a kind of Mad Lib approach to writing. I've forgotten the names: Autoflow? Novelflow? They produced some truly awful, painfully repetitious stuff.

 

This whole replacing actors/writers thing seems to happen in spurts and then quickly dies down when people see how bad the product can be. The "problem" is that the product is getting better.

 

It may just be a matter of time,

-Thoth.

 

BTW: Isn't it interesting where these threads go? We went from grief to the death of writing. Hmm. Maybe it's not so odd after all.

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So, uh, you know what I did?

 

I just started a new story! Just opened up a new Storyist file and went to town. I've got... 2173 words so far. YAY!

Thank you all, for the support. This is just an awesome community.

 

"Storyist, healing people one word at a time."

- Calli

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So, uh, you know what I did?

 

I just started a new story! Just opened up a new Storyist file and went to town. I've got... 2173 words so far. YAY!

Thank you all, for the support. This is just an awesome community.

 

"Storyist, healing people one word at a time."

- Calli

 

 

That's awesome! You rock.

 

IF

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So, uh, you know what I did?

 

I just started a new story! Just opened up a new Storyist file and went to town. I've got... 2173 words so far. YAY!

Thank you all, for the support. This is just an awesome community.

 

"Storyist, healing people one word at a time."

- Calli

Oh, good for you! I'm delighted to hear it.

 

Keep pounding those keys! :lol:

Marguerite

 

P.S. I posted 1,800 words myself yesterday on Dreamlife Productions, vol. 2. No more outlining--yeah! (Thoth, you can relax now. I won't mention Dramatica again for months. :o )

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