Brandymore Castle

This reminds me of the advice to songwriters and musicians to support the song. The song is everything and everything, every element of the music, the words, the accompaniment is in service to the song. A song is not about you, it's not a showcase for your ability on the guitar or drums, it's not a place to showcase you, but to submerge yourself to the song. Beginning songwriters are often admonished they must "generalize the particular," which means that although the seed of every song is you, that it must be constructed or expressed in such a way that it touches others. No one is interested in your particular situation, but if you find those aspects of your life that are resonant with theres or universally with humanity, then you have a work of art, a song. I find this advice useful to nearly every creative activity possible, since genuine creativity always starts with the characteristics of the individual and their experience, creativity must start with what is uni...

Abandoning ideas is one of the most difficult things a creative person can do. It is also one of the most important. I struggle to give up on ideas, since they are like my children. Zen teaches us to avoid clinging to our desires. It's like being fired, you can't move on to greater success or another project unless you leave the present one behind. Getting fired can be the best thing that happens. Killing the lesser idea, killing the lesser job, allows you to move on to the greater one. I rarely throw away an idea. That is one habit creative writers exhibit, especially songwriters, they keep every scrap of an idea they write down and use them years later in other works. An abandoned idea is not always abandoned, just sleeping or waiting to find the right fit with another idea. Songwriters usually keep notebooks filled with scraps from overheard conversations or ideas that come late at night, at breakfast, in the shower, on the train. Hitchcock, who said "Drama is life with...

This is a very real phenomena where you know you have artistic intuition or what Ira calls taste, but you lack the experience or ability to realize that taste. He says "do a huge volume of work" which goes against the grain of most rational advice. Why would you want to continue to repeatedly crank out poor quality work, work that does not live up to you vision, your taste? Isn't it a failure to create works that do not live up to your taste? You didn't become a creative person to make bad stuff you became one to make good stuff. I fell into this trap and am still struggling to get out of it. I always felt that I should only do good work otherwise I must be wasting my time. It always bothered me when I couldn't get through a song on the guitar without flubbing a note. I know musicians, even great ones, do this all the time and no one in the audience knows the difference or cares, but I know and I do. This is a kind of perfectionism, which stifles creativity, becau...

I found this series of talks by Ira Glass very helpful. My high school English class also emphasized the essay paragraph and really never taught story telling. I somehow absorbed by osmosis that anecdotes were something to be avoided, but I agree with him that anecdote is the seed of the story. It's not a story yet. As Ira says, next must come an explanation of why you're spending time reading this anecdote, which he calls the "moment of reflection." In this example, he takes advantage of the dual meaning possible in the events of the anecdote. Waking up to a quiet house might mean a pleasant Sunday morning or might mean the house is too quiet, abnormally quiet, with ensuing consequences. The example is setup well for a suspense story...it remains to be seen whether this anecdote followed by reflection is applicable to other types of stories. I suspect it is. It's always been an obstacle to my writing, that I find material I know is compelling, but get stuck attem...

Maple seeds and songbirds-- ready to fly. -sek, Apr 2008

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes. This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the r...

Blowing on the spark inflames-- a haiku. -sek, Mar 2008

Hybrid rose-- blue sky without rain. -sek, Feb 2008

I don't need a tomato that rides well, a transcontinental traveler. I just need a tomato grown from grandmother's seeds. I don't need a tomato perfectly round, a spherical aberration. I just need a tomato grown from grandmother's seeds. I don't need a tomato blessed by the grower's association. I just need a tomato grown from grandmother's seeds. -sek, Mar 2008