Help! I need somebody!

Readers, bloggeroos, lovers. Whatever it is you’re called… I need your help.

not just anybody...

You may have noticed (you probably haven’t, I’m probably being paranoid) that my blog has been coming to you later and later every week. Sometimes it doesn’t reach you until Mondays. Also, and I know I probably am just being paranoid now, but you may have noticed the quality is getting shittier too. The truth is, my friends, that blogging is getting harder and harder for me. It’s not that I don’t have the time, it’s not even that I don’t like it (I love it), it’s that it feels like there is some inspiration box of ideas in my head, and at the moment we’re down to a paperclip, two bits of fluff and the last bit of scrunched up paper that says, “write a blog about how you’ve run out of ideas”.

I know, in my heart, that this isn’t true. Inspiration doesn’t work like that, there aren’t a finite number of ideas and I haven’t used all mine up already. If I had, I’d probably be dead. But I do think that writing once a week means that good ideas, great blog posts seem to be few and far between. They swim in a sea of posts about my own, little life. My most popular posts are ones that aren’t about me. You guys love reading about Disney, Translink, Harry Potter and growing up. Obviously, I always write from my own perspective, and my own experience, but I understand why the more relatable posts aren’t ones exclusively about my life. My life just isn’t that interesting. On the other hand, I’m sure you guys can understand why I do often write about myself. When casting around for inspiration, it’s much easier to stop in my own living room, or in my own head.

I am a big believer in quantity. Obviously, quality is very important (and it’s why I’m having this freak out), but I really do believe that making myself write a blog every week has made me a better writer. If I were to just write whenever the fancy took me, I would never write at all. You can’t just sit around waiting for inspiration to hit, because it won’t. That’s a fallacy. For me, anyway, there’s no creativity phone and you can’t just sit around waiting for it to ring. You’ve got to pick it up, punch in numbers randomly until you find something worth talking to. Maybe inspiration just comes for some people, but I have to push for it, and more often than not I write without it. And making myself write regularly has made me *find* inspiration, and that’s great. But even still, I feel like I’ve been pushing too hard lately, like I’ve damaged the part of my brain that comes up with ideas.

So I’m completely conflicted. A part of me wants to stop blogging for a while. Give my brain a rest and try to let ideas come to me later. Another part of me thinks that’s stupid; I should keep at it, because keeping at it for the last year or so is what has made me better. I think maybe the answer is that I need to switch it up. I need to get a new style, a new project, maybe even a new blog. My big idea at the moment is to pursue an “overanalysing” theme. I really enjoy doing those kinds of blogs, and people seem to like them. So I’m wondering if I should just throw myself in to *only* doing those kinds of things for a while. You know, watching and ripping apart Disney films, other kids movies, TV shows, stuff I haven’t seen before… etc.

And this is where you come in. I write for you guys, so I want to know what you think. I’ve made up a very quick survey and it would be amazing if you could do it. I estimate it will take you no more than a couple of minutes, and it just covers a few questions about who you are, why you read this blog and what you’d like to see in the future. If you could please take a few moments to do this for me, I will love you all 5eva. 

This is the link to the survey, please help!

Epipha-map

Self Portrait - Lizzy King, 2013

Sometimes we change our minds slowly; we learn gently, and subconsciously, we may never even realise that our opinions have grown. Other times, realisation comes like a clap of thunder. We might be reading something, or sleeping, or talking with someone, and then suddenly, BAM – the light bulb cliché, the explosion of knowledge. I like to think that those moments are a good way to map our development as humans. So here’s my epipha-map.

Epiphany Number 1: not all families are the same.

In grade 1 or 2 I went to my first sleep over at a friend’s house. I remember my mum telling me I had to wear knickers to bed. I never wore knickers with my pyjamas (secretly, I probably didn’t start doing so till I was a teenager) and I remember being quite weirded out by this change in my sleeping attire. But that wasn’t the epiphany. Sitting at the dinner table with this nuclear family of four, it occurred to my small brain that it was actually probably a bit weird that I called my dad Tony and that he did most of the cooking. And I remember not liking my friend’s dad because he had a moustache and liked his lawn more than he seemed to like his family. My mum did all the garden work, and I actually sort of had it in my head that mums were outside people in my world and dads were really good at making cheesy cauliflower. And in that moment I realised that not everyone was like us (awesome).

Epiphany Number 2: Fractions and decimals are the same thing.

I was quite a clever kid. I was good at most subjects at school without even really trying. I was a very good reader, I liked writing and science things the best, but I also was pretty good at maths too. Until I was about 10. And then suddenly, maths got hard. I struggled intensely with anything that combined letters and numbers: 3 + x = 7?! How can an x be in there?! Xs are for words, not maths. The whole thing baffled and upset me. In particular, I could not cope with fractions. I got my head around decimals ok, but spent hours freaking out about fractions. And then my mum spent a day baking with me. We measured things out with measuring cups, and she patiently explained how 1/4 + 1/4 could equal 1/2. And I got it. I was happy. The next day at school we were working on some maths problems and I had a little “oh!” moment as I realised that 0.25 + 0.25 = 0.5 as well. They were the same thing. All this time, they were the same bloody thing. I felt like a genius idiot.

Epiphany Number 3: Belief isn’t fact.

On school camp, some of the girls were reading out horoscopes from a magazine and asked me what mine was. I went on a small rant about the ridiculousness of the belief that somehow rocks in space could tell us anything about our little mundane lives. Basically, I killed the fun. My atheist friend looked up from the magazine and said, “you know Lizzy, the way you feel about horoscopes, that’s the way I feel about Christianity”. I was pretty pissed and stomped off, I guess not because she’d said it, but because she’d called me out. I was religious at the time, but that moment was one of the first times I deigned to consider other people’s beliefs as in any way legitimate. Not that I suddenly thought horoscopes made any sense (they make none, to be clear), but in that one sentence, my friend had made me realise that all belief is kind of ridiculous, and it doesn’t hurt to be a little bit respectful. (If you’re reading this, Hilde, I give you permission to gloat).

Epiphany Number 4: I’m not a Catholic.

On the subject of religion, I started doubting and questioning my faith around the age of 16. At the end of the school year I went overseas with my choir, and we sang in amazing places across Europe. We sang a church service in a Catholic cathedral and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. We were told that only those who were Catholic were allowed to leave the singing to take Communion. So I dramatically stepped out from my 75 fellow singers, along with 3 or so other students and walked the length of the cathedral to get my bread and wine in the fanciest setting possible. And swallowing it was like swallowing chalk and acid. As I walked back to place I realised I’d done it to be different, to be interesting, for fun and I vowed never to take Communion again unless I was sure it was what I wanted. I’ve not touched it to this day.

Epiphany Number 5: Pride and Prejudice.

The themes are in the fucking title. Right there, on the goddamn cover.

Epiphany Number 6: It’s not them it’s me.

In 2009 I got quite sad. And anxious. And stressed. I was depressed at the end of high school too, but this was a whole new ball game. I sort of felt like I wasn’t allowed to call myself depressed because I knew people who’d battled depression for years, and mine came on quite suddenly. In the space of a few weeks I went from being pretty happy and ok to locking myself in my room, not eating, hurting myself, being in a constant state of panic. I probably would not have sort help had it not been for the paranoia. I had an overwhelming sensation that people, all people, everywhere, were looking at me. I knew, logically, that they couldn’t be, but empirically, evidence that I was seeing with my own eyes was that they were. So I went to a psychologist. It was three or so weeks before I got the courage to tell her people were looking at me and she said, “have you considered, Lizzy, it’s that you are looking at them?” No I had not considered this, I admitted. She told me to practise not making eye contact for a whole day, and see if this fixed the problem. I walked out of her office and up the street and instantly realised I was making eye contact with people. So I stopped. It was excessively difficult, I had been the one freaking other people out all along. I genuinely skipped home with happiness. While the battle for my happiness took a lot more than a quick fix realisation, this epiphany helped me so much, that I honestly don’t know how I would have survived without it.

Epiphany Number 7: I can’t run out of inspiration.

Almost every time I sit down to write a blog, I don’t know what I’m going to write about. And it’s becoming a problematic fear. I won’t go near my computer for hours, I’ll dawdle and procrastinate and ask people what I should say and read a book and hope it’ll go away. And then every time, without fail, I’ll open a word document with a blank mind and suddenly find something to write about. Like just now, when I had an epiphany about epiphanies, and started telling you about it. There’s always going to be stuff in my brain and as long as people keep reading (and even if they don’t), I’m going to keep writing it down.

Ever had an epiphany? Tell me about it via comment, facebook, twitter, carrier pigeon.

33 Week Challenge Week 19: Write Something Every Day for a Week

There is something fairly amazing about having the inspiration to write. I think perhaps I spend 98% of my life in a permanent state of writer’s block and the other 2% in a state where I think of so many things it’s hard to get it all down. I have ideas while I’m sleeping, I have ideas at work… I get most of my ideas in the shower actually. I like to think that it’s 98% writer’s block and not 98% unimaginative, but I suppose it’s a possibility.

So, I’m pretty sure it’s not in my original list but I have been thinking for some weeks now that I should make one of my challenges “write something every day for a week”. And when sudden inspiration hit last week, I made myself do this, and I couldn’t be happier. 3 characters had already fallen, not fully formed but I would say, fully loved into my mind a few weeks' prior. One character in particular makes me so happy. Firstly, I never write lead female characters for some reason, and here she is, a wonderful, excellent girlperson all ready for me to send off on adventures. Secondly, she is from the future. I was worried that I had started to write some sort of River Song fanfiction at first, but no, she is her own self, her own person, and also she has smiley faces on her shoelaces.

When I was younger I started a couple of “novels”, and they would always inevitably turn out horribly. I am quite good at coming up with snappy, opening moments, I am the queen of first chapters… and then I would just flounder. I’d know about 5 major plot points I would want to happen but I had this bizarre belief I had to start at the start and plow through to the end. I’d dawdle by trying to write character descriptions of characters I hadn’t even written yet and plot arcs that I had no control of. Disaster.

Then I turned to poetry. NEVER read the poetry of your youth, if you wrote it. You will come to hate your teenage self with a passion. My teenage self was obsessed with long, rambling lines of poetry sandwiched between bad rhyming couplets. I don’t know what she was doing, but it was rarely good. It got a little better, but I never really enjoyed writing poetry anyway, so I’m not really sure why I tried.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered the joy and wonder that is comedy. WHY had I been trying to write deep, emotional things when I could be writing puns and hilarious gag characters? (For those playing at home, please see Grumpy, the friendly dwarf). And yes, I turned to play writing. WHY would I write tens of thousands of words when I could write ten minutes of frivolity? Especially when Underground Productions so kindly accepted not one but two of my scripts into it’s short play festival?

And yet, when this idea fell into my head, I knew instantly that it was a novel, and I also knew that some bad things were going to happen, and some things might be sad or unfair. But I also knew that it would have moments of comedy, and also that the tone wasn’t going to be sad and dark and gloomy. I have placed my main character out of her time, and this leads to some pretty amusing encounters with people, objects and things that my readers, but not my character, are completely familiar with. Also, my other two characters are kind of an amusing pair of petty criminals, and I enjoy their banter greatly.

I recently posted this excerpt on my tumblr, it’s one of the first things that came to me. Yes, I had the idea in a Laundromat.

***

Terry opened his eyes. His forehead lay on the filthy tiles of the Laundromat, a piece of lint playing gently in a breeze near his left eye. His right felt puffy and sore – she’d punched him. Oh God, the knitting needle. He looked down. It was still embedded in his leg.

“So. You be taking all the shinies from the washing boxes?”

Her boots came into view, the laces had little smiling faces on them at regular intervals. They looked at him. He found it difficult to match their gaze.

“You be taking the shinies no? Those shinies not for you to be keeping.”

Her accent sounded normal, but she spoke all wrong. It irritated him.

“Why are you talking like that? Stop it.”

She kicked him. “Why you be talking like that… like you be from the moves”.

“The moves?”

“The moves! The movies.” After a pause she added,  “the films,” but the word seemed to sit strangely in her voice, as though it had never been there before.

Terry stared up at her. She glared at him fiercely from within a pile of scraggly, blonde hair. Dirty blonde his mother would have called it - sort of a dull colour.  But it framed her young face like a lion’s mane, and gave her a presence he found intimidating. Or perhaps it was the knitting needle she’d imbedded in his thigh, he suddenly thought – one of those.

***

In fact, quite a few things came to my mind in that Laundromat. It was the week I was knitting, which is quite an amazing way to have ideas can I just say. You turn a lot of your brain off, but you also leave a lot of it on… and some of that is the creative part. It’s kind of genius, really, which is why it’s so tragic that the first line that popped into my head was:

“There’s a girl sitting in this laundromat and she’s knitting!”

Genius, Lizzy, really inspired. I can’t imagine where that idea came from, can you? But really though, what was important was the voice that came with it, the man’s face that appeared, the backstory that started to form.

What was also important was that I knew that while I had dreamed up a fairly exciting and interesting scene, it didn’t have to be the first chapter, and I didn’t have to follow linearly, or know what was going to happen next. I started this week with nothing, and I’ve come out of it with 4000 words. I did this by sitting at a blank page and writing headers like, The Girl doesn’t like Coles and The Girl finds herself somewhere strange. Then I would look at that header, and ideas would start to flow, and I would write punchy, opening-esque scenes to go with each one. One day perhaps I’ll have 100s of scenes like this, and I’ll start putting them in order, and there’ll be joining up scenes and auxiliary characters and you know, a proper plot and it will all look lovely. Or maybe I’ll continue to write disjointedly and all over the place, and that will be a narrative feature I shall use to tell this tale. Who knows? The point is, I feel like I could go on doing this till the 2% runs out, and maybe even increase it up to 3%, or 4. It’s been a great week.

I take way too many of these photos in my pj's.

Just quickly, I’m going to TiNA (This is Not Art) in Newcastle in just over a week and I’m pretty smegging excited. Alex and I are going to meet with our faces and I’m going to volunteer in some capacity and I’m going to go to a million events while I’m not volunteering and I’m going to stay in a youth hostel in a city I’ve never been to before and it’s all going to be amazing. I can tell you with honesty that I would not have done this before this year, before these challenge blogs.

Also, a shout out to Eloise Kemish and Kath Chown who are both ladies I don’t really know all that well but who have recently told my face that they read and enjoy my blog. It really means a lot to hear that from people, and I thank you both, and every one else who secretly lurks on this page for lurking, and for reading and for validating my existence. You guys are all the best.

Also to Alex, who wrote the best blog today. It made me smile while processing timesheets at work, which is an unthinkable thing.