Tag: writer

Nostalgia Is Wrong

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

The good old days are not a phase in life in which things magically are perfect. It’s something you’re actively doing and creating as you live each day.  Last week could have been the good old days if you lived them to the fullest. This last weekend even. Your life can be comprised of thousands upon thousands of “good ol’ days” but not if you continue to spend your life reminiscing of a time you thought things were perfect. The Good ol Days are now. The sooner you learn that nostalgia is a dirty rotten liar who insists things were better than they actually were, the better off you’ll be.

Recycling Emotionally

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Learn to recycle emotionally. 

Turn the energy that you use towards disliking yourself to building yourself up. 

The energy you use to envy others, use it to be thankful  

The energy you use to hate your enemies could turn into love towards those closest to you. 

Regret of the past can turn into the hope of the future. 

All emotions take energy. Make sure you’re putting yours into the right ones. 

Where to leave your perfectionism

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

When I was younger, I wasn’t worried. Not In the least.

I would wake in the morning with a light feeling in my chest and a carefree air about me. I would set out armed with a stick and go play in the woods and in the mud in search for adventure. 

I would crawl through culvert pipes and pretend they were entrances to magical worlds, rabbit holes to far off places. 

I would climb up to the highest part of a tree, and where the branches would meet at the center was a throne that I imagined was made for me. I would sit there and overlook my kingdom and pretend I could talk to the birds as the flitted past, giving me news of the worlds beyond. 

Then I would return home and write of my adventures in a notebook and draw maps of the new kingdoms I had conquered and discovered. Page after page I would fill with drawings and notes, describing the magic that I had found that particular day. 

But that’s not the way things are anymore. Now I’m worried, scared even, bogged down by fear and perfectionism. The stories don’t come as easy as they used to and the feeling of lightness and the glow of curiosity no longer radiates in my chest. 

Many times I have rested my pen on a blank page only to be met with a emptiness of mind and spirit. And on the rare occasions that I would actually write something, I would return to it, and rip its pages away because it was not perfect. 

I still relished the feeling of pages beneath my finger tips and the smell of new notebooks but I could never bring myself to fill them with the same colorful stories that I used to create so many years ago. 

But there came A Day I was tired of it. Tired of being perfectionistic. For my fear of creating something substandard drove me to create nothing at all. 

So I took with me a journal, perfect and empty, on a walk. More times than I’d like to admit, I had wanted to fill this book with a great many number of ideas and drawings but I could never bring myself to mark up it’s crisp, empty pages. 

So I walked to a pond’s edge and looked out upon its reflective surface, unblemished and smooth like a mirror. At its shore, I tied a string around the book and left a long tail that I could hold onto. And then I cast it as far as I could into the water. 

I reeled it in, the journal now a soggy pulp of pages. So I took it home and dried it. 

It was not longer perfect. The pages were wrinkled and the cover was beginning to peel. But that was alright. 

So I set it on my desk and opened it and began to write. 

The Sufferings of a Writer

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

1. Staying up til two thirty in the morning on a school night because you’re in the middle of a really exciting chapter.

2. Carrying a notebook and pencils/pens everywhere you go.

3. Getting a really good plot idea out of nowhere and having to drop everything to jot it down.

4. Eavesdropping on people’s conversations for dialogue ideas.

5. Getting a new computer and being thrilled at the prospect of all that free file space, and then having half of it filled up with Word documents within a month.

6. Having so many Word documents that you don’t even remember what some of them are..

7. Becoming stunned whenever someone asks you what your book is about (as if you could sum it up in a sentence, right?).

8. Being given an assignment to write a two-page short story and turning in a twenty-page one instead.

9. Envisioning a cute/funny scene in your head during a boring class and suddenly someone asks “What are you smiling about?” and you have to stammer something dumb.

10. When someone tells you your sad scene made them cry and being like “YES! VICTORY!”.

11. When you’re confused about something, putting two characters together and having them fight about it.

12. Being able to turn everything that happens to you into a scene for your story.

13. Getting inspiration not just from English class, but also from History, Biology, Foreign Language, Art and Math.

14. It annoys you when people use the wrong form of ‘you’re’ and ‘their’.

15. You correct people’s grammar in your head.

16. You know every little thing about a character… except their name.

17. It makes you slightly concerned when people look in your Google history that they will question your mental health.

18. You question your own mental health fairly often.

19. When someone walks in and you’re in the middle of writing you’re like:

GoawayI’mnotdoinganythingsuspiciouswhileIminusmyworddocumentveryquickly

20. You want to get (or already have) a sign on your door that says ‘For Your Safety, Do Not Disturb the Writer While She is Inspired.’

21. When someone suggests you edit out a part of your story that part instantly becomes your favorite part.

22. All your favorite songs either remind you of a scene or a character in your story (or perhaps inspired them).

23. Complimenting your looks, skills and personality are all right, but when someone compliments your writing without knowing it’s yours, your day is made.

24. You want desperately someone to critique your writing and at the same time you don’t.

25. You have that one character (maybe more than one) that you know better than your own family members, sometimes better than yourself, that one that you love so dearly and you can see them in your head and hear their voice like they’re actually there and they’re so real to you.

26. You feel guilty when you have to do something mean to a character you like.

27. You love all your characters, even the ones that readers aren’t supposed to like, even the ones that you know you’d hate if they existed, because you understand them.

28. Putting your character in a tense situation makes your heart speed up.

29. You have conversations with your characters in your head (and sometimes outside ).

30. You have a quirky thing you do that gets your creative juices flowing and inspires you, and if anyone else knew about it they’d think your insane.

31. You cry when you have to kill your favorite character.

32. You critique other people’s books while you’re reading them.

33. Everything inspires you some days, other days you can’t get a good idea for the life of you.

34. You get all excited to write before you do it, but when you actually sit down and open the Word document, you get about one sentence done in an hour.

35. You join rpg’s for ‘writing practice’ because partly you can make up characters that don’t have to be super complex, partly you don’t know what’s going to happen so it’s a challenge there, and partly they’re just fun.

36. You’re that person who writes paragraph-long texts with perfect grammar.

37. Your characters show up in your dreams from time to time.

38. You get inspiration from your dreams.

39. You have a Word document open at this moment.

40. You’ve smiled and said ‘That’s so true!’ to most of these.