For all the Thursdays in November, and in celebration of NaBloPoMo, I’m going to pick a Henry David Thoreau quote and post it here, and YOU get to write whatever comes up from that quote.  Start a debate, write a story, agree, disagree, w h a t e v e r.   Post it, comment here, and I promise to come visit you and leave chocolate super-fab, geeky-sexy comment love.

This Thursday’s Thoreau quote is a particularly provocative one.  It made my mind take pause: As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

(I will edit this post later with my response to the quote, but I don’t want to influence anyone else’s thoughts.)

With love,

It’s day 13 of NaBloPoMo, and you’re realizing you don’t have as much to say as you thought you did.  Writing every day can be tough!  If you’re stuck, free-writing is one method to un-stick yourself and break through writer’s block.  Also referred to as stream-of-consciousness writing, a free write can unlock fresh ideas too.  Ideas you might not have known you even had.

This week’s prompt is THE THREE LITTLE PIGS.  Don’t think about it yet.  Set your timer for 15 minutes, and then GO!  Write non-stop for 15 minutes without stopping, no matter where the prompt takes you.  Stop immediately when the timer goes off.  No stopping, and no editing!  Now, if you’re brave, post it to your blog, and leave a comment here so we can find it!

Here’s a treat for you when you’re done.  It’s best not to watch it until after you’ve done your free-write.

Christopher Walken’s Rendition of The Three Little Pigs

With love,

For all the Thursdays in November, I’m going to pick a Henry David Thoreau quote and post it here, and YOU get to write whatever comes up from that quote.  Start a debate, write a story, agree, disagree, w h a t e v e r.   Post it, comment here, and I promise to come visit you and leave chocolate super-fab, geeky-sexy comment love.

This Thursday’s Thoreau quote: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

(I will edit this post later with my response to the quote, but I don’t want to influence anyone else’s thoughts.)

**Updated to reflect my response 11/13/09

This quote begs the question why, and what can be done about it.  Surely not shattering families to run off to Vaudeville.   Perhaps the why is obvious.  Life happens.  We grow up being taught all the wrong things about what’s important in life, or rather, the teaching, while good intentioned, is skewed, incomplete, and unintentionally backwards.  This is because most people who are teaching children how to have a fulfilling life haven’t figured it out themselves yet.  They’re also getting their information from the media, whose job, let’s face it, is to sell us on things, or the government, whose job is to sell us on OTHER things.  Either way, it’s all about money and material things, even though the desired state of mind are at opposite ends of the spectrum.  One wants you to be hedonistic fulfilling every desirous impulse, while the other wants you to work hard and give back.

So we try to live according to these lessons.  We follow a certain path which we have been told over and over we want.  We must want to go to college, not for the sake of learning, but for our career.  We must want to make as much money as we can.  What we do doesn’t matter, only how much we can make at it.  We must want to get married and have children, it’s the natural order.  We must want to buy a house, a car, televisions, etc.  We must want to like volunteering at our children’s school, and so on.  Yet all of these wants have been implanted by the interests of others.

No wonder we get confused about how to live.  Quiet desperation sets in as we feel the pull from every direction.  It seems everyone wants a piece of us.  Products want us to love them, the government wants us to pay our taxes, our parents want us to make them proud, our spouses/partners want us to like them all the time, our children want us to cut off our right arm and hand it to them.  We hardly get a moment to even think about what WE want, what would make us feel fulfilled, or so we think.  The desperation builds as the yearning grows stronger.  Desperate men do desperate things.

What we need to learn, is balance.  As social animals, we do have responsibilities to our families and our community.  This does not need to trump our deepest inner calling though.  Let’s say you feel called to be an actor, but you’re a Dad.  Running off to Hollywood is impractical, but completely suppressing the call is also impractical because it will either lead to you going to your grave with the song still trapped in you, or you’ll just disappear one day, leaving broken hearts behind you.

So, love your family, pay your taxes, and start a local theater.

With love,

Throwing myself headlong into this November write-a-palooza has been rejuvenating and exciting, but more than that, it has introduced me to some new people offline and on, and I’d like you to meet some of them.

Thanks to Twitter, Networked Blogs, and various internet serendipity, there have been some new faces around here.  You’ve already met the newcomers to the 100 Word Challenge, like Gabriel Gadfly, Pattikens (turns out we’re neighbors, sorta), and Niqui.  Poets, aspiring writers, each interesting in their own creative right.

LouCeel, a longstanding 100 Worder, has been up to some new creative endeavors.  He is now helping to man The Inferno, where one of my word portraits was recently featured.   The Inferno is an offshoot of  The Artist Challenge.  You should check them out, especially if you’re looking for more inspiration.

Through a TweetDeck filter following NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo participants (well at least those on Twitter, and those who know to use #hashtags) I found College English.  She caught my eye when she tweeted something about 100 Words, and I found out she and all of her students are participating in NaBloPoMo to raise money for The United Way!  Bravo Debbi and students.  If you’d like to support them, here is the original post.

Finally, through Pattiken, I also found the social networking site, She Writes.  I’m very excited about it, even though I haven’t had time to join groups, introduce myself, or spiff up my profile.   Even though it’s called “She Writes”, it is open to the guys as well.  You know, if you can handle all that estrogen.

ALSO, I’m participating in Citizen of the Month’s Great Interview Experiment.  I’ll do an interview here on my blog of this blogger, and be interviewed by this one.

Whew.  That’s a lot of links.

With love,

Free writing, or “stream-of-consciousness” writing, is an interesting exercise that not only breaks through writer’s block, but often reveals thoughts and feelings on a topic we might not even be aware we had.  The point of a free write session is to not censor yourself.   You start with a prompt, and have no idea where it will end up.

Yesterday’s Thursday Thoreau quote inspired Pattiken to contrast Thoreau’s desire for simplicity with today’s modern technology and all the resulting “noise”.  Those of us in developed countries are merging with our machines and our relationships with them are becoming more dependent.  Have you ever seen the look of panic someone gets when they realize they’ve left their cell phone at home?  Or when their internet goes down for more than 30 seconds?  We are wired and connected, every waking hour of our day.  Is it for better or worse?  It depends on what aspect of our lives technology is affecting, and how.  But let me stop there, lest I defeat the purpose of a free-write.

The prompt is TECHNOLOGY.  Don’t think about it yet.  Set your timer for 15 minutes, and then GO!  Write non-stop for 15 minutes without stopping, no matter where the prompt takes you.  Stop immediately when the timer goes off.  No stopping, and no editing.  Now, if you’re brave, post it to your blog, and leave a comment here so we can find it!

Here’s a treat for you when you’re done, a video trailer of a documentary on the Singularity, what some people believe is next in technology.  It’s best not to watch it until after you’ve done your free-write.

The Singularity Documentary Trailer 

With love,

You know, when I proposed this theme for November, I didn’t have a clue what it would actually be about.  And I still don’t.   I mean, I could have us all go live in the woods for the day and write about how terribly wonderful it was to live without Twitter and Crackbook and Texting, but that seemed a little…ambitious.  Then there’s always civil disobedience.  THAT would have made for some fun stories.  But, no.

By all means, by the way, if you WANT to not pay your taxes, or remove yourself from society as we know it, I won’t stand in your way.  Just be sure to write me a letter from the cabin.  Or jail.  Whichever.

So what’s left?  Why, quotes of course!   So for all the Thursdays in November, I’m going to pick a Henry David Thoreau quote and post it here, and YOU get to write whatever comes up from that quote.  Start a debate, write a story, agree, disagree, w h a t e v e r.   Post it, comment here, and I promise to come visit you and leave chocolate super-fab, geeky-sexy comment love.

This Thursday’s Thoreau quote: Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Because if that doesn’t sum up the insanity of NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo, I don’t know what does.   Happy writing!

With love,

A writing meme in November?  You might wonder if this is just a happy coincidence since it’s day 4 of NabloPoMo and you’re a l r e a d y banging your head against the desk and asking the writing gods WHY, WHY, WHY.  No Internet, this is not a coincidence.  I just can’t help myself from helping a blogger out.  You’re welcome.

Here’s how it works.  Write a short “word portrait” of someone you know (or don’t know), post it on your blog, and leave a comment here.   And don’t forget to say “Walla!” when you’re done.  Because it’s satisfying, that’s why.

These “portraits” are word paintings of a person, a short description, but much more than that.  The way I write mine varies somewhat, and you can see examples here, and here, and here.  Aaaand, there’s more in the sidebar under “Portraits”.

Sometimes they are written about someone close to me, sometimes they are written about someone I know only a little, and sometimes they are written about someone I saw in passing.

Since I don’t have a conscious method, I can’t give you an exact formula to write your own portrait, but for what it’s worth, here are some tips (this is the part where I give away magic secrets):

1. Don’t necessarily “look” for someone to write about.  In other words, don’t try too hard.
2. Don’t try to think of the most interesting person you know, or try to find the most interesting person in the room.  Start with whoever is right in front of you.
3. Take your brain like a Halloween candy bucket, and empty it out  (eeeeewww Mom!  Someone gave us brains in our bucket!).  Now, with your emptified mind, just observe and experience this person.  If they are familiar to you, empty your mind anyway, because trust me, there’s always more to “see”.
4. As you begin to have thoughts, DON’T WRITE THEM DOWN YET!  This is important.  This is like when you’re listening to someone talk, and one and a half sentences in you’re not listening to them anymore because you’re already thinking about what you’re going to say.  Yeah, this is bad, and you’re probably missing a whole lot of stuff.  You need to get out of your own head so that you can “receive”.
5. Spend a good 10 – 15 minutes just quietly observing.  Let the thoughts bubble softly.  You should start to notice that certain sentences or words are starting to re-occur or get “louder”.  These are what you want to write down first.
6. Now you’re ready to write.  Start with those words or sentences that were re-occuring or louder, and then flesh the portrait out from there.
7. Like a portrait, you are not looking to capture every detail of a whole life, but just one moment, one impression.

Wait.  That sort of looked like a conscious method, didn’t it?  Well, take it all with a grain of salt.  Write for you, and do it as it works for you.  Any advice I give is only to help you if you’re stuck…by all means, don’t let it squash your creativity if you suddenly find yourself going in a WHOLE other direction.

I don’t know when I officially started writing  “portraits”, but I’ve always done them in my head.  I think that’s how you know you might be a writer.  When there are chapters and vignettes being written in your head on a more or less constant basis, and at some point, if you don’t start writing it down and getting it out of your head, all those words threaten to clog up the entire workings and land you in a padded room with only crayons for company.

That’s it.  Post by midnight, and remember to comment with a link to your post so we can find it!

P.S. Yes, I re-used an image.  I’m way too tired for Google Images at this hour.  Will fix tomorrow.  Probably.  Not.

P.P.S. Never mind, I fixed that.  I’m not a perfectionist, shut up!  As a bonus for my original sloppiness, here’s a time lapse video of the current art being made.  (Artist Justin Simoni)