Tag Archives: inner critic

Write Like You’re Running Out of Time

Posted on by • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged , , , , , , , , • 4 Comments

I’ve not been posting much here lately.

It feels like my patch of cyberspace is looking a little desolate: far more like a wonky pavement with weeds spilling from between the cracks than a verdant, carefully tended garden. That said, there is a good reason why I have neglected this space, despite my various attempts to nurture it over the years, and that is I’m trying to finish the first draft of my novel.

Writing is one of my great true loves. I love the feeling of sentences pouring forth from my fingers, pooling themselves paragraphs and flowing into pages of prose. I savour the feeling of selecting precisely the right words and placing them in a specific order to bring a particular scenario, emotion, or plot point to life.

But it takes time.

It takes time to enter the headspace of the character whose perspective you’re writing from, to inhabit their skin and to bring their inner life and backstory to the forefront of your own mind so you can produce a believeable, genuine response to what is happening in the story at any given time. And to achieve that, you need to possess a clear understanding of exactly where the tale you’re telling has come from and where it will end up — because you’ve had to create all that too, not to mention the world in which it takes place.

And sometimes you need time just to sit with an idea.

For the past two days I have been allowing a scene to germinate in my head. I’ve got some writing done, sure, but writing is not always about how many words you’ve got on a page. I’ve needed time to flesh out a new character in my mind, to understand where they fit into the action and how they relate to the other characters who already populate my world. I have needed time to figure out what they look like, how they move, and what makes them unique. And then I have needed time to turn my attention to the first impressions the character whose point of view I am currently writing from might have of them, and what knowledge these characters possess about themselves, each other and the wider plot of the novel as a whole. Only then could I map out how these characters might interact, and to decide what information I needed to hide or reveal to build suspense and drive the story towards its climax.

And that’s just for one small scene at the end of Chapter Thirteen!

Writing is hard, sometimes, no matter how much you love it.

It’s hard to find uninterrupted time to let the story unfurl in your head in the way I have just described.

It’s hard to admit you’re writing a novel in the first place.

It’s hard to answer questions about when your book will be finished, or where you’re up to, or whether it will ever be published.

It’s hard to silence the ever-present and insistent voice of my inner critic, who frequently tells me I am a fool for attempting to write a novel, or I’m arrogant to assume anyone would want to read it, or I’m any number of other negative things. (Then again, I’m yet to meet a writer whose inner critic does not persist in making a multitude of unhelpful comments and suggestions, usually at the most inopportune times).

It’s hard to keep believing in yourself and your story, knowing it might never make it onto the printed page.

But since I have started creating my characters and the world in which they live, I feel a strange sense of duty to make sure I see them through to the end — even if it means my patch of cyberspace suffers from benign neglect in the meantime.

As Glennon Doyle says, we can do hard things.

So I wish you well with whatever hard things you’re doing.

I’m off to write that scene.

Mind yourselves,

BJx

Drinking Gin from the Cat Dish

Posted on by • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Divine Qualities, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , • 1 Comment

You may well ask what drinking gin from the cat dish has to do with the Bhagavad Gita…but in this, my second foray into looking at the Divine Qualities, I’m looking into wholesome purities of mind and heart.

Still lost?

Well, this quote from one of my favourite writers, Anne Lamott, may help:

You see, I think most of us aspire to having pure minds and pure hearts, but there are times when what we think and feel doesn’t always reflect the best version of ourselves. Times when we criticise ourselves or others, or when we catastrophise, or when our thoughts descend into worries or jealousies or biases.

For me, this happens on a daily (if not hourly) basis: no matter how much I attempt to fix my mind on thinking the best of every situation and personal encounter I have, or how much I try to be open hearted and open minded, or how much I actively choose to see and experience life as it is without judging it, I fail.

And sometimes I, too, think thoughts so vile they would have Jesus (or Buddha or any other spiritually enlightened historical figure you care to mention) reaching for a cat dish full of gin.

I suspect, however, that the entire point of embracing wholesome purity of mind and heart as a Divine Quality is to keep aiming for it — after forgiving ourselves when we inevitably, humanly, fall short.

As I write this, I am waiting for a phone call from the hospital to let me know when I can collect my husband, because The Bloke had an altercation with his own surfboard this morning (on his first wave of the day, no less), split his lip and has required surgery. It has been a valuable experience in learning to let go, not knowing all the details of what has happened, how he is going, or when he can come home.

Today’s events have also reminded me how grateful I am that we have easy access to excellent health care. That The Bloke was so unfazed by what happened that he didn’t need painkillers when he got to Accident and Emergency. That he wasn’t injured more seriously. That because hadn’t eaten breakfast he was able be put straight under general anaesthetic. That a plastic surgeon was already at the hospital and made time to operate at short notice. That we are blessed with friends who took him to A & E, stayed with him until he went into theatre, brought his car home, and have checked in to see how he is going.

Writing, as always, has helped me to stay calm. To stop my monkey mind from taking over. To break the information I know down into small chunks so I can quietly process what has happened and realistically predict what is likely to happen next.

I still may end up drinking gin from the cat dish after The Bloke is safely home, but at least I know that will be entirely by choice, rather than because I’ve let unhelpful thoughts and feelings get the better of me.

And, naturally — because I suspect this is how the universe works — as soon as I have finished writing this, The Bloke has called and told me himself that he is OK.

Turn to Face the Strange

Posted on by • Posted in music • Tagged , , • 2 Comments

I woke up this morning with a throwaway comment I made yesterday afternoon when picking up Marvel Girl from school running through my head.  It wasn’t a dreadful thing that I said.  But it was a careless, offhand remark that was completely unrepresentative of what I believe and frequently stand up for (and makes me think less of myself for saying), and it also had the potential to cause undue offence or hurt to those who heard it (and, quite possibly, for them to think less of me too).  The sort of aside that you wish could be unsaid, that you later think of at least two hundred and seventy-three different things you could have said, but it’s what you did say that sticks in your head.  On repeat.

Some days, silencing the insidious voice of the Inner Critic can a be difficult thing to do.  Today, however, I was fortunate that my early morning self-loathing session was interrupted by a phone call from The Bloke’s mother: a serious truck smash had occurred near our house, she said, people were trapped; The Bloke had better take an alternate route on his drive to work.  By the time I’d hung up the phone and he’d shut off the shower, I could hear the news and emergency response helicopters circling.  Nothing shuts the Inner Critic up faster than a dose of reality — particularly the life or death perspective changing kind.

And yet, as I walked down the hallway into the day, that devious, persistent voice was still attempting to sneak back into my consciousness, and I realised that today I would need to pull out the big guns: caffeine (of course), but far more importantly, music.  For me, music is right up there with oxygen on my list of life’s necessities.  It comes in on top of tea and even above sleep.  So as the kettle boiled, I scrolled through the iPod menu searching for the one artist — and I use the word ‘artist’ deliberately here — who could pull me out of my funk and send that Inner Critic packing.  I needed David Bowie.

DB Astronaut

David Bowie Astronaut Print. You can get it on Etsy here.

“Ooh Mummy, are you playing the space music?” asked Miss Malaprop, running in from the play room upon hearing the opening chords of “Space Oddity”.  She was referring, of course, to the much-viewed YouTube clip of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield singing in the International Space Station, but her interest had also been piqued because — weirdly — she and Marvel Girl were in the middle of building spaceships and lunar modules out of my old Lego (yes, you know the set: grey base plate with a couple of craters, mini NASA figures and tiny control panels, all circa 1984).  “Yep,” I replied, “but this is the original version.”

The original, and still the best.

Growing up, our house was filled with nothing but classical music and the occasional blast of blues or jazz.  Commercial radio and pop music were not things I discovered until I was about ten years old, and yet for some reason, David Bowie’s music is familiar to me as…as childhood itself.  And this morning, it really did the trick.  For all of us.  By the time the tea was brewing the girls had abandoned their space Lego and were romping and rollicking to “The Jean Genie” (while I thanked every deity I could think of that Miss Malaprop doesn’t yet know the real words to that one), and I was fixing them porridge for breakfast, complete with a lightning bolt of cinnamon sugar across the top à la Aladdin Sane.

Bowie is rock’s original chameleon, a man out of time.  To someone who grew up on a steady diet of Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt, his compositions are awe-inspiring: I would love — really love — to learn the piano part to “Life on Mars” one day, and play it on a concert grand.  A Steinway, preferably, like the one my first piano teacher owned.  With as much drama and rubato as I dare.

Shut your mouth, Inner Critic: I wish I new who to credit for this artwork, but I believe the original photograph was taken by Gavin Evans.

Shut your mouth, Inner Critic: I wish I knew who to credit for this artwork, but I believe the original photograph was taken by Gavin Evans.

And then there are the lyrics: layered with meaning and richly imaginative, deftly evocative of specific times and places, and yet as relevant today as they were the day they were written.  This morning, packing Miss Marvel’s lunchbox for school, the words that struck me most came from the closing bars of Bowie’s duet with Queen, “Under Pressure”, the part where he’s singing beneath Freddie Mercury’s soaring “Why can’t we give ourselves one more chance? / Why can’t we give love?” vocal line:

‘Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves…

“Last dance,” I told the Inner Critic, daring it to leave.  “Go on, put on your red shoes and dance the blues.”  Daring myself to change my way of caring about myself, to be a hero — just for one day.  And with that, the voice was successfully banished.

I know it will return, no doubt unbidden and relentless as ever, but for now it is gone.

And in the space that remains — all that glorious space that opens up when the Inner Critic has been silenced —  there is room to think, to dream, to forgive myself for the occasional social blunder, and even to wonder: are Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop old enough to watch Labyrinth yet?