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Vacation thinking
Aug. 14th, 2007 12:40 pmI'm on vacation! 9 glorious, relaxing days at the beach. 4 days to go after today.
I've never been one to enjoy exercise, have never been an athletic type, but I've learned to enjoy walking and working out with the weight machines at the gym. And yoga. I *really* enjoy yoga, the stretching, relaxing into the moves, breathing through the moves. I want to do it daily, but with the time constraints babysitting puts on me, that's one thing I simply haven't found time for yet.
I hit a rhythym today on our walk and it felt so good. I hit a stride, settled in, my conscious mind absorbed in the physical aspects of movement, the stride, the swing of my arms, stretching each muscle to its fullness, relaxing through my joints, settling in to my breath, down to the diaphragm, up through the lungs, employing the fullness of breath and using each inch of my lungs.
And then my subconscious could just float into streams of will-less thought. It's a perfect mind-set for thinking on writing. Phrases and thoughts can flow, appear fully formed. (The only problem is trying to remember those perfect phrases by the time I get home.) So here's what occurred to me today about the writing process.
I've lost my voice. I think I started out with one. My writing itself was amateur, but I think I knew more of what I wanted to do with my stories before I tried to analyze the process too much. It can be a hard task, when receiving critiques, to weed out what will work for your story and what won't. It's the nature of a critique group that for every critique you receive telling you a certain phrase is *PERFECT*, you'll more than likely get another saying that certain phrase is awful and doesn't work at all. So picking through the conflicting advice is something I struggle with. I started to over-analyze things, tried to write what I thought might sell rather than the story I wanted to tell. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but the end result is the same. Over-thinking for me leads to paralysis. I need to just stop and write and not think so much. Enjoy the process, the joy of words.
Guilty pleasure of the day: Bravo is re-running Season 1 of Project Runway. I didn't watch Season 1, although I've really enjoyed the other seasons. So I get to finally see it. YAY.
I've never been one to enjoy exercise, have never been an athletic type, but I've learned to enjoy walking and working out with the weight machines at the gym. And yoga. I *really* enjoy yoga, the stretching, relaxing into the moves, breathing through the moves. I want to do it daily, but with the time constraints babysitting puts on me, that's one thing I simply haven't found time for yet.
I hit a rhythym today on our walk and it felt so good. I hit a stride, settled in, my conscious mind absorbed in the physical aspects of movement, the stride, the swing of my arms, stretching each muscle to its fullness, relaxing through my joints, settling in to my breath, down to the diaphragm, up through the lungs, employing the fullness of breath and using each inch of my lungs.
And then my subconscious could just float into streams of will-less thought. It's a perfect mind-set for thinking on writing. Phrases and thoughts can flow, appear fully formed. (The only problem is trying to remember those perfect phrases by the time I get home.) So here's what occurred to me today about the writing process.
I've lost my voice. I think I started out with one. My writing itself was amateur, but I think I knew more of what I wanted to do with my stories before I tried to analyze the process too much. It can be a hard task, when receiving critiques, to weed out what will work for your story and what won't. It's the nature of a critique group that for every critique you receive telling you a certain phrase is *PERFECT*, you'll more than likely get another saying that certain phrase is awful and doesn't work at all. So picking through the conflicting advice is something I struggle with. I started to over-analyze things, tried to write what I thought might sell rather than the story I wanted to tell. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but the end result is the same. Over-thinking for me leads to paralysis. I need to just stop and write and not think so much. Enjoy the process, the joy of words.
Guilty pleasure of the day: Bravo is re-running Season 1 of Project Runway. I didn't watch Season 1, although I've really enjoyed the other seasons. So I get to finally see it. YAY.
