Day: July 6, 2012

Tree Down

Published on by mbcoudal1 Comment

I stood at the bus stop. I waited for the Riverside Drive M5 bus around 6:30 pm. I was later than usual coming home from work. It was still a sunny, hot evening.

I heard a crash like thunder: a gut-wrenching, tearing sound.

I looked at the road. Nothing. The sky? Not a cloud. Then I looked at the park, there it was, 20 feet from me — a huge limb of an old tree crashed to the ground, leaves still shaking.

No one was down but the tree. Just today in the New York Times, Lisa Foderaro reported that the city is allocating more money for trees. This money for pruning cannot come soon enough. Like most New Yorkers, I live in the New York City parks. I don’t want to be scared of (or killed by) falling limbs.

I’m a tree hugger. And I don’t like the crash of a huge fallen branch.

(Just as I went to investigate, my bus pulled up so I snapped this pic as I rolled away.)

20120706-183957.jpg

Revising

Published on by mbcoudal3 Comments
pages from my art journal

I love the creative process. I love the brilliant idea as bright as a candle flame. The revision process? Not so sexy.

I wish I could fall in love with rewriting. These tips for writers as they revise at Necessary Fiction really got me thinking. Here are a few useful ideas from the post:

  • write the plot on sticky notes then organize in columns
  • retype the whole thing
  • change fonts
  • make sure what your character wants is an impediment to what others want
  • raise the stakes
  • get rid of introductory clauses

I am in love with the short form. I love blogging. I sit down. Write for 20 minutes. Add a photo or two. Hit publish. Done! Go about life.

For me revising is endless. There’s no Done!

Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I now have two half-baked novels written during the months of November (2011 and 2009). Due to their unwieldy length, slightly more than 50,000 words, I can’t bear to open the first chapter. Just maybe if I set out the plot on colorful sticky notes or cut up my scenes with scissors, the story could emerge more like a work of art, a collage, than a mess of incomplete plot points.

collage – perhaps upside-down?

I have been crazy making collages lately. I get into a Zen mode and throw paint and color and images down on paper or on discarded library books.

Done! I love the haphazard process and the chaotic result. Maybe I could see the process of revising my writing as a visual art project.

As the blogger Matthew Salesses says, “a lot of these thoughts are about seeing. Remember: re-vision.”

I, too, can repurpose, rewrite, rethink, rewind, rework, and revise. Re-vision.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta