The Year of the Bear

"Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission." Carolyn Chute. Um. Okay.

"I can't write five words but that I change seven." Dorothy Parker. The theme of this day is editing, revising, rewriting...but what caught my eye the most was Amy Peters' comment on perhaps why people dislike editing so much. She said: "Perhaps, they flash back to childhood days when having to rewrite a paper at school was taken as bad news. ...As Parker describes it rewriting and editing is an opportunity to improve and express your ideas." [Emphasis mine.]

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted." Jules Renard. This may seem like a very self-important thing to say - that we, as writers, should not be interrupted and you common folk  don't know your place well enough to sit quietly and listen. But sometimes, I've spent so long thinking through an idea that, when I'm done, I just want to get it out. Interrupt me, and the idea is off the rails chasing down the various rabbit trails conversation invariably builds. And that's with ideas that will take maybe five minutes to disclose. A novel? Yeah, might need to let me just go with that one.

"Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review, it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? Was he ever arrested for burglary?" Jean Kerr. We all have little ways of consoling ourselves when things don't go exactly as planned. Sometimes we convince ourselves that whatever happened is actually better. Other times, we externalize so that the bad result is someone else's (or some other thing's) fault. Sometimes we live on the hope that we'll try again and succeed, or the failure was not as dismal as it first appears. Sometimes, though, we retaliate, shut down, give up, walk away. Very rarely are these good responses.

"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott. This devotional focused on a study showing that people "who read fiction were better able to relate to their peers and to engage in social interaction." Most of us can probably realize why. So for this wandering, I want to focus on how fantasy in particular might live up to this quote from Ms. Lamott.

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say." Anaïs Nin. I had two main thoughts along this quote from Anaïs Nin - one ran along the train the rest of the devotional did, thinking about oppressed people who don't have a voice in the contemporary culture. One example Amy Peters gave was Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin.  The other thought ran along the track of dealing with themes that for any number of social or psychological reasons we find ourselves unable to articulate.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Year of the Bear! 2018 Bear is going to be much more focused, a bit more fun, and probably more faithfully maintained as a result. This year the object is writing, and taking specific steps toward becoming an author - I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about it!