Category: creativity

Avoiding the Cliché

~ MumWriteNow ~ 3 Comments

When you’re writing down a well worn path, it’s hard not to stumble upon clichés along the way

I wrote recently about trying to avoid the pitfalls of the same old motherhood jokes. This is because I have been trying to write about the experience of motherhood in an honest and hopefully comic way. And it is hard not to fall into the same patterns of jokes.

I have followed this advice before to find your characters quirks, often a short hand for their personality. I like this on one level, trying to find everyone’s inner Amélie. But writing these also can become little too much to read, if everyone is blushing all the time or always holding a coffee cup, are you going to notice the tension between these two people or just notice how often the writer repeats themselves.

Character development worksheets are a great way to feel your way into more depth. I certainly enjoy the listing process of the background things that only you know about them. Horoscopes, their earliest memory, what car they drive – thinking at least some of these things is helpful way to world-build around the characters so that they start to become real. These lists are particularly useful if you are lacking inspiration or brain gets fogged like mine. Lady Writer on Pinterest has an amazing array of resources. I was using a great one this week about character quirks.

It’s amazing how thinking about their inner life, can spark you into other ideas, for example the character who is obsessed with her horoscope, may become the more susceptible character or she becomes more empathetic to other’s emotions albeit because she knows when mercury is in retrograde. The “perfect” character may have many more quirks than the other women in her life, she just works even harder to hide them.

Ultimate quirkiness. How is Amélie twenty years old?

Once the characters are a little more fleshed out, you begin to write about someone you know. Less drawn from a stock character and more from an understanding of how that person acts. And then, the characters start to tell you what to write. I had a battle with a character who keeps trying to take over my other work-in-progress.

The final thing to avoid clichés may depend on your writing style. I have been trying to write from start to finish in my newest project, usually I have written scenes when I am inspired which has landed me in quite a mess of thousands of words for the aforementioned other project, where the puzzle isn’t quite fitting together. What I would say being a bit stricter writing my story in this more planned out way is that I don’t avoid clichés at all. Just as names are stand-ins for the name I choose in the end, sometimes trying to plod through a first draft means having the confidence that you will go back and flesh out the writing. And brain-fogged, sporadic writers like me need to use clichés to get to the end of the scene whenever they eventually sit down.

Good ideas have to fester

~ MumWriteNow ~ 1 Comment

Creating something doesn’t always mean getting it down on paper…

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about grabbing hold of the tail of an ethereal idea and holding on to it before it flies away. I certainly agree that you have to be open and living a creative life for ideas to develop more easily, but her thoughts that ideas can fly away terrifies me. I wrote before how I was motivated by her book but I also feel a different process happens for me with an idea as it forms.

This month I have focused on my motherhood project, I promised to update on the blog more often how my projects are going and in a way I am ashamed to say I have only written another 900-odd words. That’s less than a day’s worth in NanoWriMo! But it is also a sign that I have an idea developing. I was unsure whether there was much scope for the project when I reviewed my year, but a spark came out of writing my Morning Pages.

One of my favourite posts is my Imperfect Guide to Morning Pages . The truth is, it is not always the serene ideal of morning journalling that the internet sells us, but it is certainly a great practice. Reminding myself to use those pages to work out the niggles often prooves effective and if you haven’t yet used Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way – I think it’s essential developing creativity and unblocking your ideas. So along with writing a gratitude diary at the end of each day, I am back at my pages. Bookending my days with the most important things: writing (and reading of course.)

I sometimes remember to write in cafes, not just eat!

And this is why I feel it is alright for my ideas to fester away in the quagmire of my foggy brain. A stewed on idea often comes out more clearly than trying to grasp at the mere suggested ingredients that come to you at first. It’s a slow way to cook up something new but I feel it was a bit more fully formed when I sat down to write. Knowing that I have managed a writing session as well as journalling feels encouraging too. When I review next month’s work, I will have a bit more to report as the characters and relationships develop and more scenes grow in my head. The hope is more of these ideas will have made it to the page.

How’s your writing month been?

Books that raised me

~ MumWriteNow ~ 1 Comment

Revisiting a book from my childhood has made me reflect on which books stayed with me, in fact shaped me.

I was recently rereading Ballet Shoes, a book that was such a favourite from my childhood that it was a gift from my mother, who knew it would give me great comfort to reread it. I think I was surprised to learn how much I remembered, including what was said and also how it made me feel as a child. These earliest books stuck with me, and affected me deeply as a child.

Ballet Shoes is a book about three adopted girls – the Fossils, – who get the chance to go to stage school, Noel Streatfield wrote many different stories where little girls achieve their dreams, including White Boots which was another favourite book of mine all about an ice skater. Though the story maintains the desire that these little girls: Pauline, Posie and Petrova maintain their ladylike qualities, they must learn certain manners from the inimitable Academy head Madame, for example, it still spoke to me. A product of a different time that valued propriety more highly, it is quite dated on a reread. But it is also empowering. Unsurprisingly for a children’s tale, they overcome their obstacles and achieve what was certainly my dream as a child: to act, to dance.

Another few book series from my childhood, helped my obsession with the theatre including Dream of Sadler’s Wells by Lorna Hill and The Swish of the Curtain and the rest of the series by Pamela Brown. These books shaped my life because I was obsessed with theatre. My aunt had been to ballet school and these books were remnants from her childhood that got passed down to me along with a make-up box with real greasepaints. I went to numerous dance classes growing up, and performed in contemporary dance pieces as a teen. I was part of a theatre group and was in musicals during each summer holiday. These books seemed like my destiny.

As it turns out, I didn’t end up pursuing my dream of drama school. Of course I know a handful of people who did make it to drama school and even made careers from our shared childhood start, but in the most all-singing, all-dancing children don’t all “make it”. Boring reality is that not quite so many doors open in real lives as the children in these books. But even though I didn’t end up a ballerina or a musical theatre star, revisiting these childhood memories help tap into something that can bring me joy.

Rereading these books has opened that part of my heart that dreamed big, even if it was unlikely. That childlike quality to see possibility should never leave us. Being an adult is so uninspiring if we don’t sometimes at least indulge in the dreams of the things that could happen. Now I know that the only way to make dreams a reality is real actionable goals, but I also believe that the creative adult, is the child who survived. These books remind me of that but also prompt me to take action.

Time to dust the dance shoes?

At the back of my wardrobe is a pair of ballet shoes and a pair of tap shoes. I have promised myself as I get better I will reach for them again this year. Reaching for them because your old hobbies are languishing in their hiding place collecting dust is a good enough reason. But really I know that reaching for a part of myself from my childhood sparks for me the creative and expressive person I really am.

It’s Always Possible to Write Something

~ MumWriteNow ~ 6 Comments

If you are feeling uninspired, or held back by life, then you can always do just a little bit on your creative projects

I thought it was time to review what I had managed to achieve in 2021 and whilst I would like to say that I have finished the damn draft (that one has been on the list going back to 2019, you can see here) I can’t. And life has really got in the way. Though the imperative Mum, Write NOW shouts from the title of my blog, the order doesn’t always work. Sometimes, I believe in a wondrous future when I will have all the time and energy I need to write. And other times I remember to just do a little bit of what I love.

So despite at times crippling fatigue, I have spent slivers of time working on the creative works-in-progress this year and got maybe somewhere along the way. I think it is a good idea to review each project. And I hope to keep up these tallies on my work going forward on the blog and Instagram to hold myself more accountable.

The largest project I have worked on is a comic novel that occurred to me last November which I even plotted a bit – a miracle – since November 2020 and September 2021 I managed to write just over 20, 000 words on this project. I got a bit stuck because I reached the beats of the story a bit early and I am wondering whether this could be a short novella or it is worth developing into a larger novel. To find comedy in some of your own foibles and also laugh at the pressures of motherhood has been a light relief and I think suited the brain space I have had available this year.

The unwieldy work-in-progress without any ending still has been languishing in my proverbial bottom drawer. I can see that I tried to write missing link scenes in April and May this year and managed just a few hundred words. But I took the chance to challenge myself to re-read it over the Autumn. It is not as bad as I had remembered, so that seems like a positive. I am just deciding whether it is time to “kill the darlings” and start over the story now. It has been going on so long that a pandemic happened in the mean time. It feels that writing about a woman living all alone and closed off from society was a bit too heavy to face this year, even when I had some energy back.

Trying to get back to that cafe life

The final piece of the puzzle of my writing projects are the pieces I have written by hand, I decided in planning my Autumn refresh that I also needed to get back to notebooks. There is something about slowing the brain enough to write by hand that helps with my creativity. I have done some research notes, some short stories and ideas about my characters. As my strength is building up, I really hope that I can take more trips out, notebook in hand, to enjoy cake in cafés and at least pretend I am being creative.

So, despite living with fatigue for eleven months now, my creativity has still happened. I am taking a resolution into the new year to value the time and energy I have by using at least some of it for these projects. And even if this time next year I am not a published author or a millionaire, I will be able to understand that it is imperative that I write now.

How was your writing year?

Find someone to inspire you

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Comparison online can be quite demoralizing, but it can also be a great place to find your mentors.

With Instagram accounts and other creators online, you can often find a tribe of people with similar tastes without even trying. By the time you have clicked on a few accounts that have insterested you, watched a reel or tiktok for a short time or followed certain youtubers the imperfect but still pretty savvy algorithm finds you a load of people to follow or see in discovery or FYP (for you page) and before you know it you are embroiled in a community you didn’t know that you needed to find.

I have seen this in action because I have a personal account as well as my account attached to this blog. The MumWriteNow instagram links me up to lovely bookstagram accounts, gothic images, nature imagery and other people interested in folklore. It’s a serene and beautiful place though I admit I only play at photography, looking for bright spots that inspire me, as I have shared before. Meanwhile my personal account is a messy place full of Real Housewives content. There is nothing wrong with either, we are all multitudes, but it is interesting how in modern life you can curate yourself into certain communities.

A random sample of my more aesthetic Instagram feed

In discovering these different areas, I have also noticed there are some accounts who are inspiring for me. Whether it is interiors and décor on my own account or book ideas or information about folklore, it is apsirational and inspiring if you are careful to follow those that give you what you are asking for. As long as we remember that this is a higlight reel, I find this open access to other creative people as well as other people with the same interests as me can act almost like a mentor even if you do not know that person.

There is a certain value in understanding what you admire in another person. They could tell you what you want to be doing, Though I do not pretend to have some of the time and patience of bookstagram accounts who feature décor and books placed beautifully, but I love it. I find the reverence for books, the atmosphere it creates is alluring. For me, taking time to appreciate the beauty in the art is important.

In the Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron shares that “Jealousy is a Map”. And I think that these things we are attracted to act in a similar way. Often what attracts us are things we have within ourselves and they can guide us to find more of that in our life. My experience of the Artist’s Way programme was that jealousy was pushing me to explore more in different types of writing, reminding me of my interest in drama as well as novels. I went away and wrote the first scenes of a play that has been whirling around my mind for a while.

In reviewing what inspires me in these accounts, I thought of a real life mentor that I met in my younger years. She was always so careful in the way she would lay out even the simplest thing like a snack, using beautiful crockery. She would have flowers arranged on a tray, her house had an artistic flare that stretched into the garden. When I browse through these curated images now online, it reminds me of that same attention for detail. I was told that she worked really hard at making everything so lovely and you could tell. I know just how much time to it takes to make things clean and tidy, let alone allow your artistic side spill into your everyday living. I can admire this aethetic lifestyle even more as an adult.

When we find these people, a community who cares more about aesthetics and beauty they can be so aspirational but we can also allow them to direct us to what is truly important to us. Making more of an effort, having attention to detail is hard but the rewards reach so much wider than we realise. Sadly the woman who inspired me passed away, but the strong and lasting impression she has left on me will stay with me always.