First big milestone

I just finished the first complete draft of my manuscript. After many hours of scribbling in my writing journals, followed by several months of shaping the plot, getting to know the characters, and revising the first few chapters over and over, I have a pile of paper that resembles a novel.

 

The Church

Front view of church

Everyone’s heard that we should write what we know. Well, a lot of what I’ve been writing about is stuff I don’t know, or didn’t know until I did some research. Even most of my characters are fictional, rather than consciously based on people I know.

But the setting for my novel is a very real place, a community set between Turtle Lake and Brightsand Lake, Saskatchewan. And the home of two key characters is based on an abandoned church near my house.

 

Creativity and the divine

I just re-watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ted Talk on nurturing creativity. Gilbert brings up the link between creativity and suffering in our culture, and talks about alternative ways to view creativity. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed creativity as a gift from some sort of divine entity. These entities would help artists shape the work, and help the artists keep some psychological distance from their work. In other words, if your work sucked, it was partly the entity’s fault. If it was brilliant, the artist couldn’t take all the credit. By viewing such brilliance as a loan from the divine, artists were free to do their work without worrying (as much) about tapping into the zeitgeist.

 

The dreams my subconscious burps up

Last week I was in Saskatoon for business, and fit in a visit with a friend who happens to be a visual artist. We started talking about dreams, and using dreams as inspiration for art. Both of us liked the idea of keeping a bedside journal to write down our dreams, but neither of us has actually gotten around to it. But a recent vivid, disturbing dream has me considering starting one.