Saturday, November 5, 2011

Turn That Frown Into Words

Yesterday I was given a piece of bad news that brought my day completely down. Most of the time I'm a fairly happy person, but when something like that happens, I get all frustrated, and suddenly any motivation that I may have had (say, a friend who tells me that they're going to beat me this year) disappears.

When I got home yesterday I stared at my computer for a half hour before I realized that writing wasn't going to happen, as least not right away. Because, I knew that if the words started to flow, the frustration would go into it. Meaning that one of my characters (important characters that still have a lot of storyline to finish) would probably end up getting the brunt of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were killed. As that wasn't something I wanted to do, I thought maybe I needed a bit of a pick me up.

I'm rather ahead in my nanoing attempts this year, so I thought it would be alright to watch an episode of one of my favorite shows. The first episode, actually. And as hoped, it pulled me out of my dark mood and got me laughing. By the time it was over, I was starting to fell more like myself, and less like that scary person in the corner who looks like their about to explode if you so much as look at them.

Before I got started on writing, however, I decided to get some food, only to discover that the one thing I was looking forward to was out of the one item they should never be out of. While normally I might brush this off and move on with my day, that dark mood from earlier seemed to find this weakness encouraging and it quickly took hold again.

How did I pull myself out of it? I did the very thing I should have done right from the beginning. I launched myself into a word war. (And not just any word war. An hour long word war!) Pretty soon my mind had cleared, and I had managed to bury that dark mood.

No matter how we look at it, as writers, our sanctuary is the page. We may complain bitterly about our characters, and sometimes even have a block that we just can't seem to get over, but at the end of the day, if we need to have it out, it's in words. We let our emotions play out on the page.

Now I know better, of course. The next time a dark mood descends (though I'm hoping it's not for a while) I'm going to pull out the old laptop and let the words fly. I might get a few strange looks, but hey, it's who I am. And I've learned recently that we can't be happy unless we are true to ourselves.

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