IMG_5329As mentioned all over this blog, I consider myself a novelist. Over the course of this blog’s long life, I’ve written three.

Writing a novel requires PATIENCE, FOCUS, STUBBORNNESS and, lets face it, a fair bit of something….let’s call it TOM FOOLERY.

A person does not take that long-novel-writing journey without a certain, er, foolish resolve.

Like being a kid, looking over a broad canyon, planning to jump it with your bike.

I THINK I CAN MAKE IT. 

And then you do. (!)

That’s novel writing.

Lately, I’ve been trying out other genres. It’s been fun!

Poetry has been especially freeing.

It’s like dream interpretation, word association, puzzle solving, and sudden catharsis all in one.

Or, as I put it an email to someone:

you get to cut through all meandering BS and dive right into the heart of the matter. 

It’s very freeing for a novelist, who usually spends quite a lot of time wallowing in ‘meandering BS’.
It’s like pure playtime. 
You can just start making stuff up. All of it. You can spin it out of thin air. 
If the novel writer is the kid planning to jump the canyon with their bike, then the poet is…
the canyon? The bike? The plan? The kid’s scrapped elbow? A fly passing by? The air?
You could write a poem about all of those things and each of those things. (In fact, I dare you to).
Because I have been writing a lot of poems lately, I have a fair bit of RAW material on hand.
I thought I’d share some of this writerly ‘behind the scenes’ to give you a glimpse.
Maybe you’ve wondered:
  • what does a writer do?
  • how do they do it?
  • is it a glamorous occupation?
Or, if you are a writer, maybe you’ve wondered:
  • is it just me?
  • how do other writer’s do it?
Here’s the exclusive BEHIND THE SCENES peek.
Are you ready?
Warning: it’s not pretty. Or glamorous. 
As you can see, I have a ‘long hand scribble’ type of writing, and then a ‘digital scribble’ type of writing.
Essentially, I have ideas…and I just start laying them out, working away at them, chipping away until they get to where I like them best.
Then I take those revised scribbles and I ‘type them up’ into a google or word doc, edit them a little bit more, give them a title…and, if I feel so inclined, send them out into the world (more on that in another post).
(My novels were created in a similar fashion.)
Writers, is this similar to your own process? Non writers, is this how you hoped it would be?
PS. The My Brain poem was inspired by yet another writing prompt from Writers Write 
I share it here for a variety of reasons:
  • to prove that you can write about anything
  • to show that writing doesn’t always have to have DEEP MEANING or be SUPER SERIOUS…it can just be about FUN and EXPLORATION
  • just in case you started reading it in the picture, and wondered how the heck it ends (I know such things would bother me, perhaps they also bother you) — I will end the suspense, just read on!
PPS. I KNOW THIS IS MY SECOND POETRY EXAMPLE. I PROMISE YOU I WILL NOT MAKE YOU READ MY POETRY EVERY DAY HERE AT THIS BLOG

 

MY BRAIN

By Julie Johnson

 

my brain

slurps up

these serotonin pills

like a dog stranded ten

days in the desert

realizing

hey, this ain’t no mirage…

lapping it up

like a swimmer

training for a ten k

my brain is

a blue raspberry 

slurried ice machine 

humming ahhhhh

in hot summer

reminding me

‘I am your goldfish

In a bowl’