Tag Archives: creative writing

Fitness, Writing

Grinding Gears

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This morning I forced myself out of bed to honor a commitment.

My swollen Frankenstein foot is healing. I’m attending physical therapy sessions to strengthen it. But my whole body needs exercise. My speed has to improve, and my waistline must shrink so I can pass a fitness test.

Time to move.

The first hundred feet powerwalking feel like running a motor with no oil. Like trying to get my tires out of mud or gravel, and they’re spinning with no traction.

It’s like my old 10-speed after a long winter. I’d pull it out of the garage once the snow melted, and spray WD-40 over the chain and gears. But it still took a few minutes of pedaling to shake everything loose. Grinding metal. Sudden jolts as the chain stuck and snapped loose. Frequent rattling. Then finally, it became reliable.

Even then, when I shifted speeds, the chain would sometimes slip off. I’d have to stop, put it back together, get the chain back on track, and start up again.

Effort is the oil in the engine of greatness.

The Chinese understand this. Their word for “to add oil; lubricate” ( 加油 / jia you, pronouced “jah yo”) has the figurative meaning of increasing effort, pushing harder, stepping on the gas.

With this foot, I’m never going to be a marathon runner. I’ll probably never sprint very fast. I won’t be an awesome basketball player.

But I will regain and surpass the speed I once could achieve on this foot. And I will be able to shoot hoops with my daughter again. And who knows, maybe even I’ll go back to running a fitness test instead of merely walking.

Because I will wake up on cold mornings, spray some “oil” on that ankle, suck it up, and start walking. I will get on the bike, strap my feet in, and turn up the resistance. And when it gets easy, I’ll add another level or two.

What matters isn’t where you’re at now. Where you were before doesn’t matter either. What matters is where you’re headed, and what you’re willing to do to get there.

Writing–really, any creative effort–is similar. I used to say writing was a hobby. But I’ve put in effort and study to improve my craft. I keep doing so. I call myself a writer, because writing is what I do, what I will continue to do.

In fact, I call myself author, because I’ve written numerous short stories and devotionals. I’ve put over a hundred thousand words into a manuscript and I have composed over 150 songs. Maybe soon I will self-publish. With some hope, maybe I will one day have work printed in a publication or published by a professional company.

All I know is that today I will sit down at the keyboard and turn words into sentences, phrases into paragraphs, passages into chapters. Then I’ll edit and revise until it’s the strongest work I can produce today.

And I won’t be content with that, so I’ll make myself do better tomorrow.

I’m not saying I’m great. I’m saying I’m not satisfied.

What commitment to yourself are you going to honor today?

Poetry, Writing

Artful Inspiration: Trying Out Storybird

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My writers’ group recently posted a link to Storybird and asked if anyone had tried the service.

I hadn’t, but I volunteered to be the creative guinea pig.

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Storybird is a site full of artwork meant to inspire creative writing, both poems and prose. The idea is that you find a piece or series of art that spurs your imagination, and then you write or “unlock” the story contained within the pictures.

It’s meant to reverse the usual process, where a writer has a story to tell and then scrounges around for the right picture to match it.

I tried to do all this on my iPad since my laptop hard drive perished. That decision led to some frustration.

First I explored the site a bit. They have some highlighted submissions from their users, akin to WordPress with the Freshly Pressed. Everything is broken up into genres and categories, and almost everything is tagged for searching.

When you pick a story, you get a flipbook on iPad with pages that turn with a swipe of the finger. On my wife’s PC, she got arrows to turn pages.

When you pick a piece of art, you can learn about the artist and see the rest of their portfolio on the site. This becomes useful when looking for a consistent style of art for a project.

I admit, the grammar nazi in me rose up at the spelling errors and bad grammar in some of the “new and noted” highlighted pieces. But I realize the point is creativity and free expression, not necessarily perfection.

I also found it interesting that everything is moderated. When you publish a story or poem, it gets reviewed before being submitted into the public library. This helps ensure a certain level of propriety and minimizes mean content. Or at least that’s the stated reason behind it.

Signing up is easy and free. There are various accounts based on how you’d like to use the site. Teachers and students can use it for assignments. There are options for professional writers and artists. There’s a “parent” option as well, though I didn’t search to find out exactly what that does.

I chose “regular” as a safe starting point.

I was quickly hit with prompts to upgrade to a premium membership. If you want options for themes and layouts, if you want faster moderation, if you want varied options for responding to people’s projects, then you’ll need an upgrade. It’s $3.99 a month, or $2.99 a month if you pay for a full year.

I held firm to my free membership, and started searching through art. Once I found a picture I wanted, I hit the “Use This Art” button, selected story instead of poem, and found myself at the creative desktop.

I got the picture I wanted, and a set of other pictures by the same artist in the same theme. Then it got difficult.

I had an idea for where I wanted to go, but I was limited by the pictures I started with. Once you choose a set of art, you can’t go back and search for more. The stated reason is this will help you focus on writing the story you unlocked in the picture, instead of looking for just-right pictures to match your already-written story.

Well that didn’t work for me!

I backed up and searched for art in some themes, but it took a while to find a set that had all the pieces I wanted. I ended up with a set of 302 pictures to wade through in order to find perhaps 20 that matched my intent.

They warn users that if you do it the way I did, you will probably be frustrated. They were right.

Now I had the set I wanted… all 300+ pictures loaded into the workspace. I shifted some around, sorted through all of them, and set aside the ones I planned to use.

Then I had to hit refresh, and I lost all that sorting effort.

I had to refresh because my browser became another source of frustration. I used Safari on the iPad at first… but the menu in the workspace kept disappearing. I would have to update a bit, then refresh after waiting around long enough for the project to autosave.

Unsatisfied with that, I tried Chrome. Same result at first, but then I saw the option under Chrome’s menu to “request desktop site.” That made the workspace function properly, and I was able to complete my project.

With all the lost effort due to browser issues and the process of figuring out how to get a selection of artwork that I wanted, not to mention the actual writing, it took me about three or four hours to produce my first effort.

It’s called Not In a Nice Way and it’s a love story of sorts.

Was it worth the effort? Sure. Storybird seems like an interesting way to get creative, something nice to take a break from my usual projects. For someone who writes children’s books, it might be very useful. And it seems like a fun community of people, although I think they’re a little too flattering with their comments on silly or sub-standard work.

At the free price, it’s worth a try.

But a monthly subscription? That remains to be seen.

Give it a shot. If you create a project, post it in a comment. I’d love to see how others use the site. And let me know what you think of “Not In A Nice Way” too.

Writing

Story Excerpts

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Dear readers,

I greatly appreciate the attention you’ve given the various rants and ramblings on my page.

We all have dreams that drive us to do something more. I think there’s a wide range of intensity to those drives, from

Gee, it would be nice to…  to I really want to… to the “Bucket List” style I will do this before I die.

For example, I started playing piano when I was five years old. I took eight years of lessons, and then stopped because I wouldn’t practice anything unless I wanted to learn the song. “Bach? No. Guns ‘n’ Roses November Rain? Sure!”

In 1998, a friend urged me to start writing songs for church. “Not me,” I protested. “I can’t do that.”  I barely believed I could even sing in public.

“Be it unto you according to your faith,” he challenged, referring to Scripture. “Little faith, you reap little. Big faith, you reap big.”

That afternoon, I went to church early, before the worship team practice, and sat down at the piano. Okay, God, I prayed. If this is really something for me, then fine. I want to do it. Whatever You have for me to do with this ability, I want to do it.

Essentially, it was a Gee, it would be nice.

I wrote four songs that afternoon.

Nothing tremendous or breath-taking or #1 hit on the Billboard charts or anything. But it was something new for me, and a confirmation that there was something more worth pursuing.

Since then, I’ve written over 100 songs. Many of them have been for use in whichever local church my wife and I were attending at the time, related to the messages the pastors preached. Again, no chart-toppers or big concerts or anything. But there’s a gift there, and I know the purpose for it.

Now I come to writing. I love writing, but never would have presumed I had something that would interest a wide audience. And yet I have ideas bouncing around in my head, story lines that beg to be told. They started out as campaign ideas for a tabletop role-playing game group, and have grown and evolved over the last five years.

I’d like to start sharing them with you all.

If you like what you see, tell me so. If parts seem unclear or poorly structured, let me know. I can only get better with feedback.

I hope to make this a weekly post for a little while, to see how it goes. I’ll be presenting three story lines for now.

Worldmender – In a land broken and scarred by ages of war and misused magic, a slave and a runaway aristocrat try to repair the damage, one twisted site at a time. Their unique gifts grant them ever-increasing favor and fame, until they meet the legendary King whose bold plan might set everything right again… or destroy all they have worked to achieve.

Walking Death – During the last days of the greatest empire in history, a remorseless assassin is filled with unexpected doubts. Forced to question all she knows about herself, her powers, and her masters, she searches for answers and does not like what she finds. On the run from former targets, employers, the organized rebellion, the whispers of Deceit, and the full resources of the Emperor, even the shadows she calls home are no refuge.

Prophecy of Cora – Five reluctant but competent adventurers accept the call of the Lord Mayor of Aulivar to form a swift-strike special tactics unit. When their first real mission proves far more challenging than expected, they must determine which is the greater danger: their external foes, or their internal struggles. The truth has a way of rising to the surface, even the secret sins of the distant past.

I look forward to sharing these worlds with you.