June 22, 1999
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...
Writing exercise. I always picture that as taking a broom and stirring up the dust and cobwebs in an attic. The dust doesn't necessarily GO anywhere, although I think the idea is to sweep it away. I'd rather not, though. Sometimes with dust you have to sweep it all together into a pile and start sifting through it. Sometimes you can find some valuable things down there. I love Stephen King's explanation for why he writes the things he does. He describes a writer's subconscious mind as a series of filters. Everybody's got filters, to get rid of the junk and keep what's worth keeping. Each writer's filters catch different things. There are as many types of filters as there are genres and subgenres and... well, you get the idea. He further says that a writer's job is to learn to go through those subconscious filters, and bring what he or she finds back to the light.
I feel like that's where I am, right now. Learning where and what my filters are, and poking through the sludge that's down there. For me, that's the toughest part. That's where ideas come from, after all, and I've always had a hard time coming up with ideas. Or so I think. Maybe I just need to learn to recognize different kinds of ideas. Another writer friend of mine (amazing how many friends I have that are writers!) was talking to me about getting ideas. I told her I was having a tough time coming up with anything, but that I just had a few vague ideas running around my head. Her response (via ICQ): "So lay a trap for them. I grab one word at a time and nail it down. Once you grab one word, the other words want to help it get free and they rush forward. The problem is making sense of those words."
Words as herd animals. Protective herd animals even. I like this visual image.
I think a lot in visual images, especially when learning. I found that out back when I was still taking voice lessons regularly, in college. Hope would explain and explain and explain that I needed to lift my upper palate when I sang, but it wasn't until she gave me the 'biting an apple' visual that I actually got it. Anything physical, get me to the point where I feel what the 'right thing' is supposed to feel like, even once, and I can usually duplicate it.
I find myself wondering if mental processes are the same way. Come to think of it, I think they are. A lot of therapy to beat depression lies in learning to feel happy. Learning what happiness feels like, what feeling good feels like, so you can duplicate it yourself. This is not about faking feelings, it's about recognizing what feels right, even in the faintest amounts, and encouraging that.
Right. So. I learn to pay attention to what getting an idea feels like. That makes sense to me. And I learn to act as a ranch hand to my subconscious. Yippie-ki-yi-ay.
Metaphor of the day. I was describing my long-time therapist, a wonderful person. I said, "She's very Ann Arbor, but practical. Her feet are on the ground, but those feet are in Birkenstocks."
