Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Give them something to repeat to others.
That is what is being called forward with you and your work or art. Whether it’s a story about how you have gotten to where you are at or how your creation makes people feel, there has to be something that people can repeat to others.
After all, your rate of success is based on the number of times someone repeats something positive about you to another.
Stay Positive & Remember, No One Made It Big Without Being Talked About
Garth E. Beyer
It’s time to clean up: your mind, your home, your hallways.
What junk do you have? The answer to that is your starting place.
Now think of what you could create out of that junk that has a realistic purpose, that you could possibly sell or market?
If you thought deeply about these questions. You will realize that the list of items you thought were junk in the first question got longer when you thought about the second question. Suddenly the metal figurine you have has become “junk” because you could combine it with the putty you have in your drawer.
This takes recycling to an entirely new level.
New ideas, I would argue, are just the result of reorganized or modified junk ideas. It’s incredible what happens when you consider more items or thoughts to be junk status. Being handed a box of 6 odd objects (junk) and told to create something worthy out of them is much more difficult to do if you were handed a box of 60 odd objects (more junk) and told to create something worthy from them.
Maybe it’s not junk, but no one tweaks with treasure, do they? Keep in mind, believing that something is a treasure limits what you have to work with in your box of junk.
Stay Positive & One Person’s Treasure Is Another Person’s Junk
Garth E. Beyer
Freedom gives us too many possibilities. We seize up when confronted with what feels like infinite possibility, and fear comes after you as soon as you manage to write your first lead.
What to do
1. You have to be you. Neil Gaiman has said,
“Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Because [as a] starting writer, you always start out with other people’s voices — you’ve been reading other people for years… But, as quickly as you can, start telling the stories that only you can tell — because there will always be better writers than you, there will always be smarter writers than you … but you are the only you.”
2. Don’t go back to figure out what is most important in the story, so you can use it with your lead. If you don’t remember the most interesting parts of the story after reading all of your notes once, then it’s not that important.
As long as you are considering the audience when writing your lead, what you thought was important is what is important. You didn’t miss anything.
3. Freak out and critique your lead into oblivion. Because that always helps.
Yea, that last one was a joke. The point of one and two is not to do three.
Stay Positive & Joking Is Fun In Leads Too
I’m stressed right now and I wish I had a stressball to squeeze.
Of course, just thinking about a stressball makes me laugh because all I really think about is a poem I wrote four years ago about a stressball.
The stressball helps. It is good. The poem, though, makes it even better.
The simple fact is that stories make good things better.
As for my poem, maybe I’ll share it another time…
Stay Positive & Go Wave Your Story-Making Wand Around
Garth E. Beyer
When it comes to my writing, I write when I don’t want to. I do so not with hopes that I will work toward inspiration, but with acknowledgement that in the end, words on paper are only words on paper.
Neil Gaiman backs me up,
“And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you’re going to look back and you’re not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written.”
After writing, though, what you do with those words is an entirely different situation.
Stay Positive & There’s No Bad Time To Write
I’m all for staying positive (duh!), but you need to recognize that there are times that being positive blinds you. No, this isn’t about being a positive realist. It’s more about being an active idealist.
I recently sat in on a class filled with first year students. During class, each student expressed how great it was that the teacher’s lecture mimicked exactly what is in the book they had to read. Being positivists, they noted how it really sets the information in their memory. I laughed.
I’ve been in the lecture and I’ve read the book. Not only is the lecture a copy of the book, but the professor goes through the slides so quickly that it’s hard to keep up anyway. Oh, I also need to mention the slides are posted online for the students to view at their leisure.
Bravo to the students for turning a negative into a positive by saying that the repetition of material is beneficial. But shame on them for not changing the professors ideals, not challenging the method of teaching, not suggesting improvements.
Repetition is valuable, but the students can repeat all the information by looking at the slides or rereading the book. When it comes to the lecture, that’s two and a half hours of wasted time.
By all means, stay positive, but be skeptical.
Not all things that are positive should go unchallenged.
Stay Positive & Make Things Right, To Your Heart, Not Your Mind
Garth E. Beyer
What’s the thing that if the only reward for doing it was that you could keep doing it?
Obviously, for me, it’s writing.
What’s your thing?
Stay Positive & Don’t Know It? Go Find It.
Garth E. Beyer
