Clusterheadaches.com Message Board


    
      
        Clusterheadaches.com Message Board
        (http://www.clusterheadaches.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi)
      

        New Message Board Archives >> 2005 General Board Posts >> A Writer's Life
        
(Message started by: sandie99 on Mar 18^th, 2005, 10:46am)

Title: A Writer's Life
Post by sandie99 on Mar 18^th, 2005, 10:46am

I have heard many times that if one wants to become a writer, one needs to live a writer's life first.

What do you think it means?

Is being bullied in school, ch, living abroad, eating disorder, depression and losing dad at 17 enough...? [smiley=huh.gif]

Anyways, I want to be able to go to a bookshop to admire a novel written by me one day...

Best wishes,
Sandie

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by seasonalboomer on Mar 18^th, 2005, 11:47am

I suppose it depends on if you've gone through all those things and have only "bruises" to show for it, or whether you've collected any wisdom along the way. Have you found a place where the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of all those experiences can be separated from the pain you experienced? It, in the end, isn't the experiences you've had to survive, it is instead what you survive with that allows you to have something worth writing about.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by vig on Mar 18^th, 2005, 12:36pm

on 03/18/05 at 10:46:13, sandie99 wrote:

I have heard many times that if one wants to become a writer, one needs to live a writer's life first.

What do you think it means?

[smiley=huh.gif]

Sandie

Ultimately it means you need some life experiences to be of interest to most people. Book learnin' isn't enough to make someone a good writer.

Sandie, you have the makings....
write on!

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Frank_W on Mar 18^th, 2005, 12:49pm

COMA

Beep wave wheeze of electronic lung
Quiet visitors come and go through a gray haze of pain
Intercom pages physicians in a cool distant voice
I am out of that shattered body
Inside
Outside
Within
Without...
In clattering Tokyo rain under a
shop awning watching a sea of bobbing umbrellas
Alone in an indoor botanical garden's smothering heat with
a thousand cloying scents suffusing and drowning me like a drug.
In a ferocious thunderstorm over a stark arctic wasteland with
triumphant lightning striking in cobalt blue on the blank horizon.
Inside of a fiberoptic line carrying
ten billion frenzied pulses of light.
On a transcontinental train speeding through
the deep Russian night with a wailing baby in the
next compartment, my head against the cool windowpane, eyes feeling
gritty from three days without sleep.
Flashing through the body of a butterfly; impression of a yellow lily
burning brighter than the sun.
A squalid half-lit Bangkok hotel room.
The mind of a housewife plotting the poisoning of her husband.
Image after image
Place after place
Body after body
Panning back at furious speed and impossible distance
Universe winking and closing like a hundred camera shutters and
falling into the blazing eye of God that snaps shut
to plummet back to Earth as a single raindrop that
impacts with an electronic
"BLIP!"
And I'm crying and crying and crying
for pain
for that other world
for somewhere...
anywhere but here...
as my consciousness spreads like knives once more
through this body and I'm being
held by my mother who sobs,
"You're awake! You're back! Oh, you're back!"

-Frank H. Weeden
3-18-05

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Frank_W on Mar 18^th, 2005, 1:33pm

A good book on the craft of writing is Natalie Goldberg's, "Writing Down The Bones." Good luck, Sandie. If you can dream it, you can do it.
[smiley=thumb.gif]

Title: Re: A righter's Life
Post by rumplestiltskin on Mar 18^th, 2005, 4:44pm

to be a GOOD nose picker...one must
be able to describe what it's like to be around the world in a truck.

anyone can be a MEDIOCRE nose picker

love
den

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Kevin_M on Mar 18^th, 2005, 6:18pm

One of the best ways to reach as many people as possible is by getting them to experience what you are trying to convey, and one of the best ways to do this is to give them images they can hang on to. Specificity instead of abstract details.

...layout the questions and answers, and when appropriate, the processes in between as clearly and interestingly as possible.

educe: lead forth seduce: lead away

"Walking on Water", reading, writing, and revolution.
Derrick Johnson 371.102 J

Kevin M

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by jokrs2 on Mar 18^th, 2005, 6:32pm

Write on, Sandie
Remeber the book, Think & Grow Rich? It hardly sold at all until the writer changed the title. Dream it Do it. In Him all things are possible. Good luck, Joe

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by don on Mar 18^th, 2005, 6:40pm

Anyone can string together a lot of words and even make some ryhme.

Conveying the thought without a mass of scrambled words is where many fail at poetry.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Charlie on Mar 18^th, 2005, 7:58pm

For some of the greatest writers, Port wine and drugs did the trick.

The Sex and The City idea certainly appeals too 8)

Charlie

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Frank_W on Mar 19^th, 2005, 10:51am

"Those who can, create. Those who can't, become critics."

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by don on Mar 19^th, 2005, 10:54am

Minored in American Lit. and Poetry.

Been published.

I guess I'm in the "I can" category.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Frank_W on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:03am

That's nice, Don. Some of us didn't have the luxury of going to college. Maybe once I get the chance to attend college, I can feel justified in being snotty to other writers too. ;;D

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by don on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:20am

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/hsc0100l.jpg

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Frank_W on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:28am

::) [smiley=laugh.gif]

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by pattik on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:34am

Now, now children....let's all try to get along here [smiley=argue.gif] ;;D

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by Kevin_M on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:35am

Quote:

A Writer's Life

Rejection and constructive critisism wind in and out of "a writer's life". Message boards are a good way to maintain a charming reflection, sometimes.

Charlie's exposed the "other" view though.

Quote:

For some of the greatest writers, Port wine and drugs did the trick

;;D

Kevin M

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by don on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:39am

Quote:

Now, now children....let's all try to get along here

Shut up Pattik.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by john_d on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:42am

on 03/18/05 at 10:46:13, sandie99 wrote:

there is a movie called Requiem for a Dream on DVD, same director as did Pi. It's a very depressing movie but the author of the book does an interview on the DVD. It's excellent, he is an amazing character and a internationaly acclaimed author, he talks about how he became a writer and what it means to him. It's very good.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by pattik on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:48am

on 03/19/05 at 11:39:05, don wrote:

Shut up Pattik.

Not very articulate or poetic for someone with a minor in American lit and poetry ;) ;)

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by don on Mar 19^th, 2005, 11:57am

I never said I graduated.

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by BarbaraD on Mar 19^th, 2005, 1:09pm

You want the great american novel? Look in my trash can... I dumped it after attending a "critique" group meeting. They trashed it (after years of hard work on my part). Now I just stick to current events.... How 'bout them Red Socks?

Seriously, if you want to write - you will and nothing will stop you. But first you have to find your own gendre (misspelled of course). I can't write fiction worth a whit, but I can sure stir up a stink with an editorial. Find your niche and then go get 'em....

Hugs BD

Title: Re: A Writer's Life
Post by sandie99 on Mar 20^th, 2005, 2:27am

Good tips, everybody. :)

I have lots of ideas to work on. Once I finish one of them, you'll be the first to know!

I actually know my genre, which always helps... ;)

When my laptop crashed during a computer store was fixing it, I lost all my stories, plans and chapter drafts, so I have to start from the scratch. :(

I have always wanted to write a novel which can be meaningful, entertaining, true and educating at once. Don't know how possible that is, but I can always try. :)

I own two books about wrinting, one is by Julia Cameron and other, whose author I don't recall, is titled How to Write a Million.