Word Therapy for Time-Crunched Writers

If writing life is a garden, mine is in winter.

I love this glorious season;

but with twins in kindergarten, a babe in arms

and a toddler in everything else

- including water and bags of pancake mix simultaneously -

available writing hours are slim to none.

Why fight it?

I'm a writer; I don't want to be a frustrated writer,

so I'm turning my daily adventures into word therapy.

It's a lot like writing, only without the pen or computer.

Some might call it "thinking,"

only it's more purposeful than that.

How do you feed your hungry inner writer and artist?

Lunch!

Read.

Read to kids, read to your partner, read to yourself. Reading is research.

Compare books, outline favorite plots, take notes on what works and doesn't work.

Play word games.

Play with rhyme, rhythm, pacing, pig latin, word patterns, alliterations, Cockney rhyming slang.

Observe. Question. Listen.

Be Sherlock Holmes, focusing on minute details in speech, expression, landscape, emotion.

Play- at kid level.

Celebrate word and art in the commonplace.

This one is so fun for me that I'll visit it in later posts.

Box City

Box Castle

Here's to getting our brain-dirt nice and loamy so that when we plunk down our story seeds, they'll shoot up into brilliant oaks of word!

Lullaby

Sleep

sings to me in the night

croons of why

old as stones

the lullaby

lilts
of lost dreams

of treasured things

of unhindered oblivion

with

moon and milk my company

this small fist, tiny sigh

sweet breath

brings

less sleep, yes,

but waking bliss

Nesting

I've discovered a similarity between

Bowerbirds,

those fascinatingly compulsive artists of the bird world

and

pregnant women.

Or, at least,

obsessively-creative-and-due-in-a-week

pregnant women.

Here are pictures of my nest:

Art includes a few of my watercolors

and an original from my brother Jesse Joshua Watson on the far wall.

I found the crib second-hand and "aged" it

with crayons to blend in the scratches.

Ribbon scrap mobiles for "Sugar Snack"

and his newly arriving sister

Baby booties fashioned from old clothes

Bulletin boards for "Sugar Snack" and his new roommate

The nest is feathered,

my blog fingers are at low tide

as I wait

to meet

baby Pray...

First Drafts

Sugar Snack finally made it through an art session

without eating crayons.

His sheer delight at his first masterpiece

reminds me

of how joyful it is to create.

Take a first draft, for example:

it's buoyed with hope,

unencumbered by revision slogging,

a fresh treasure chest of untapped potential.

I often find myself smiling

while scribbling at new sketches

or a new project.

We are made for this,

to leave a sparkling trail of creation behind us,

jewels of ourselves,

beauty for the world.

What accomplishments give you joy?

a beautiful meal, new sketches,

a clever light bulb moment,

seeds planted

... ?

Great Books!

After enjoying a delicious read in Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor,

I feasted on her second novel, Dreamdark: Silksinger.

Brilliant!

No wonder she's getting kudos all over the place for her work.

Lips Touch, Laini's latest book was a National Book award finalist.

It's a collections of three richly woven stories which

all hinge on a kiss.

Laini Taylor's books are clever jewels

set off with gorgeous illustrations

by her husband Jim Di Bartolo.

I promised to share notes from Laini's talk on plotting

at the SCBWI Western Washington conference this spring.

Better yet - she's posted it on her blog

(in three parts: 1, 2 and 3).

What are you reading lately?

The Book of Names, Part I

I wanted to be a color-namer.

I mean, it's all in the packaging, isn't it?

Who wants to paint "off-white" walls when they could paint "frothy cappuccino" ?

When you're looking for the right crayon, doesn't

"moldy hay" speak to you more than "yellow"?

I started a notebook of names when I was fifteen.

It's scribbled with

gushy names I liked as an adolescent

and progressed to

names in various languages,

pages of name meanings

and

words to remember

(garish, torrent, celerity, behoove, hoopla, congeal).

I still use it.

When struck with a great color name, I jot it down in the Book of Names.

When on a name hunt for characters, I crack open the Book of Names.

And when a new storkling is on the way,

I frantically circle and cross out and make notes and panic over choosing the perfect name. Thankfully there are nine months in that process.

I'm horribly relieved I didn't have a child at fifteen when I was convinced "Opal Starlet" was the most fantastically romantic name ever (multiple underlinings and several exclamation points here).

How do you name your characters?

And since we haven't played word games for awhile,

why don't we throw out some

original color names?

My favorite color names today: Yellow teeth. Slaughterhouse. Rusty nail. Gangrene.

Rain!

It's been raining all week.

"Pip" declared she hated rain.

Hate rain?

This is the Northwest!

We're supposed to get rain - great drenchings of it.

That's why I live here. That's why it's green here.

Rain is practically my secret superhero power.

I think I was born under a storm cloud. I glow when it's gloomy out.

Being fully convinced that it's never too early to brainwash, I ordered everyone into boots and slickers, called for umbrellas, and marched the gang outside.

Nothing like a good splashy rain party

topped off by hot baths and cocoa

to foster a love for all things wet and soppy.

"Any child loves rain if it's allowed to go out and paddle about in it."

- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength