During my dearth of content, Josh commented with
Stuck creatively? Write about creativity!! It’s a topic I love to hear about…what inspires you? How do you like to express your creativity most? What are the biggest obstacles to your creative expression?
It’s taken a while to figure out how to write about what inspires me… where my ideas come from. How do I find the content for my stories?
Life.
Simple as that. As soon as I start thinking about how ridiculous a situation is, and the words, phrases and gestures I’d use as I describe them to a friend, I start translating that to text in my brain, and at the end of it all we get a blog post.
Of course, the old adage comes out at this point that if you have a great experience, you’ll probably tell 2 or 3 people about it, but if you have a horrible experience, you’ll gripe about it to everyone you possibly can. And boy oh boy did dating provide some great fodder for that! As did the roommate and car troubles and taking transit, etc. etc.
Eliminate those, eliminate the easy content. Finding a soapbox and ranting about something is easy. Finding humour in my own or others’ misfortune is equally so. Finding stories in living the good life though, bringing the love and passion and zeal for family and friends and life in general into a story and making that compelling and entertaining to the reader is a whole other beastie. One that writers such as dooce & Julie Leung have managed to excel at. One that I am just getting used to.
Choosing to write personal stories that way makes it doubly hard. It requires not only writing well, but approaching life from a whole other angle. It requires living and capturing the golden moments, instead of taking them for granted and glossing over them. It requires opening up and revealing personal emotions that are far more sensitive than generic annoyance and fits of impotent rage.
So while I soak up all the shiny happy, I’m doing my damndest to figure out a way to bring it all to you, gentle readers, in a way that doesn’t make you want to throw up in your mouth a little.
Of course if you’re getting impatient with all that, you could do something like wear leggings with a mini-skirt and kitten heeled plastic flip-flops in my presence and watch my head explode.
