Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts

Friday, April 6, 2012

Realizing Connectedness



In this cyber age, connectedness means something different than it did a decade or more ago. Definitions change to fit the culture, times, and influences of the day. I've lived long enough to have multiple definitions for the word that means having part/elements logically linked together.

One definition also relates family members as connected by blood or adoption. I have always lived by that definition. Connectedness within chemical compounds or atomic distribution is also applicable. 

Links through philosophical beliefs or theories could apply. Today we also have connectedness within the cyber world.

How connected are you? How many social networks do you belong to? How many do you believe you need to belong to as a writer for a successful brand/platform/name? Or, do you think you have to be connected at all?

The rule of thumb in the business world, whether on Wall Street, in Washington D.C., or in Hollywood, declares; you’re only as important/influential as those whom you know, whom you’re connected to. All things being equal, who do you know?

Writers are told each day that platform matters to our career paths and futures. We’re advised to join networks, make connections, so that the circle of our influence continues to move ever-outward with new contacts and their networks. (I wonder if there will come a time when everyone in the world will be connected directly to every other person on the planet, if only in name.

If that were the case, would there be any influence at all for anyone? Each person would have as much backing as everyone else. Where would that leave us?

You’re probably wondering why I began this thought path. In doing Robert Brewer’s Author Platform Challenge this month, I realized this morning how much of the process I’ve already gone through and completed.

I have my networks in place, my Facebook, and Twitter accounts active and gaining members. I have my blogs, obviously. The thing I’m waiting to learn is how I can get these networks to work for me with positive changes which continue to build each week. I’d also like to know how to use the blogs for creating my own  readership, which continues to grow. Along with growing blogs, I’d like to know how to make them as enjoyable as possible and how to get them to pay me.

I’m not thinking of huge amounts of money here. I am talking about payoffs in book sales, etc. I’m hoping the appropriate tasks come along soon. I suppose the most useful piece of info for me is how to do all I need to do without using massive amounts of time in the process. Right now, time is something in short supply around here.

While I get myself all squared away here with the platform development challenge, tell me how you handle your own platform. Do you have one? If so, what is it and how long have you been building it? What are your goals for your career and do you think your platform will help you achieve those goals?

Leave me a comment. Tell about how you’re working all of this modern writing business connectedness aspect. I’m interested in knowing what others are doing with their work and how their efforts are paying off for them.

Until later,

Claudsy

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Review What You Know



Lately writers have gotten two bits of advice on what to write about: write what you know—the old literary standard, and the new, write about those things that you’ve always wanted to know.

 Either piece of advice will put words on a page, but the question is: what kind of words are sticking to that page?

During the February Blog Challenge on my Wordpress blog, Claudy’s Blog, I’ve talked about my family. I haven’t given away the store, by any means. I’ve dived into those strong personal memories that surged to the surface of the memory pool. They were strong in personal meaning, not necessarily in perfect imagery. They were things I’ve known from the past.

Since beginning, I’ve spoken to a couple of family members who remember additional info about specific aspects of those I’ve written about. I learned things that were previously hidden from me. In doing this challenge, I started a process of looking at family about which some was known to me, as well as the people who carry those additional memories.

How to Learn About Memory Carriers?

People store memories in odd ways that even the experts haven’t unraveled completely. Associations made up of emotion, sensory triggers, and/or trauma link aspects of memories within the brain and the mind. Ever wonder why the scent of a favorite baked goodie makes you feel good and think of mom or grandma? What about that sharp pain in your shin? Didn’t that leg get whacked during a Little League game?

Those associate olfactory and pain triggers have kicked in to bring emotion and their accompanying memories to the surface. In fact, many believe the sense of smell triggers the strongest and most accurate memory links.

My theory is that people reveal themselves through what they remember and the sensory triggers that call up those memories as much as through how they behave.
Many writers use this knowledge to build characters that are believable, rounded out, and belong in anyone’s family or town. This ability to reveal a person’s internal truth shows a character’s motivations, personal history, aspirations, what-have-you.

When I talked of my Dad’s lessons in field and forest, I was standing beside him, listening to what I remembered of his words, his tone; watched his gestures and facial expressions. The memory movie ran until I stopped it to move on to another lesson memory.

Like most people, hearing a song on the radio puts me immediately back into the time and place where I heard the song for the first time or into the most personally important event of my life up to that point. Flip the record and I do a similar bit of time travel.

The sound of a particular word or phrase—especially if it’s in dialect—and my world will shift to that place and those whom I’ve known who use that word or phrase in the same manner.

Collecting and Using the Knowledge

Think back to people you know within the family. What do you know about their lives? Isn’t it true that you think you know only what they’ve told you about their earlier lives?

You can broaden your view of them by sifting through your own memories; sort out the conversation or trigger that brought about the telling of your family member’s recollections. When you talked to you grandmother, for instance, as she helped you make your first cookies, didn’t she reminisce about baking like this with one of her loved ones?

Body language exhibits unconscious cues to internal feelings and can’t be totally controlled. Do you recall what her face showed during that retelling of a past event? Was her tone lovingly gentle, filled with suppressed laughter, or tight-lipped with suppressed emotion? Did her eyes sparkle and her hands pause as she stared off into space for a moment, lost to that memory?

All of those tiny cues hold keys to a life lived before you existed. They speak of that person as you’ve never known them. You have only to take note of them and add the information and supposition to your working knowledge of this person who belongs in your family.

Watch a speaker’s body language as carefully as you listen to her words. Together, speech and physical cues can fill out your mental photo of that person. Use that information in ways that help your relationship, create a believable character, and expand family history and your understanding of it.

You can now write about something you know. You can also dive deeper into things unknown for the sake of knowledge about someone in your life. These are examples of what writers do, some of what this writer does, and why all writers need to use what they know and be able dig into what they don’t know.

Until later,

Claudsy

Monday, February 6, 2012

Winter’s Day Reflections



I often wonder if the overcast gloom of a wintry day is the mental trigger for reflections centered on personal failures, mistakes in relationships, and speculations about doing better in the future.

Scientists call extended periods of this mental depressive condition SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and link it to a person’s mental response to the quality of sunlight present within the season pertinent to the individual.

This condition came to my attention back in the eighties when studies in Sweden indicated that higher winter suicide rates were linked to the reduction in overall sunlight. At that time specific light therapies were developed to deal with the thousands of cases of this condition. Later, deficiencies in Vitamin D were suspected to exacerbate the depression.

You may be wondering why this comes up now. It’s because of the blogging challenge that I’m doing over on my Wordpress site. Diving into continual thoughts of family members, happenings, situations, etc. brings plenty of baggage with it. Reliving emotionally charged memories isn’t easy at the best of times.

Memoir writers probably suffer this roller-coaster ride every hour of the day while organizing, drafting, and writing a complete manuscript. When a writer opens that door to the past, she might as well brace herself for the tsunami of all those things tagged with highly conflicted emotions.

Psych therapists call this process “cathartic.” So far, I haven’t found it to be particularly therapeutic.

Certain images continue to bring tears, rage, sadness, or what-have-you. There’s no sense of closure about the event. There’s no feeling of resolution or healing surrounding this mulling over of people in one’s personal history.

Perhaps my problem stems from a fear that if any of that emotion is released to float away on the breeze, nothing will be left behind and all memory of those people, places, experiences will be lost forever, leaving behind only a gaping hole needing to be refilled with something else. Could that be it?

Or, could it be that I’m just too stubborn to give up those bits of myself that taught me, soothed me, made me into who I am today. Do you think that might be it?

Let me ask you. When it’s bright and sunny outside, regardless of season, do you feel more cheerful, perkier, more alive? Do gloomy skies put you in “reflection mode” and if so, would you let go of all those memories irrevocably so that you didn’t have to relive them periodically?

Leave your reply, comment, perspective here. Tell me how you deal with winter blues. Until later,

Claudsy

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Saving Purpose for Later



For those who don’t belong to BlogHer with its millions of women bloggers and writers, take the time to investigate the network, or risk always wondering what you’ve missed.

Me? I’m taking the NaBloPoMo challenge for the month of February. Facebook followers probably already know that. This month’s challenge is themed “Relative,” encouraging all of us to blog each day about some member of our families. It’s an opportunity to blog about those well-loved, others dismissed, those who confuse, or whatever family member that strikes the writer’s fancy on that day.

Considering my perverse nature, I began at the end of my definition of family and am working my way forward to those who comprise my nuclear family.

This challenge is allowing me to take a good look at people that I’ve not brought to the foreground in a long time. It’s also giving me all sorts of ideas for stories, articles, and poems.

Through this exercise I realized not just how energizing memory fishing with such a purpose can be for me, but also how well it generates its own kind of creativity. Bits and pieces of long-buried memory float to the surface: nothing major, sometimes only a face, a voice, or an image of someone’s hands. Still, that’s enough to trigger another idea, a vision to be fleshed out later.

This exercise--this blog challenge--has become a creative tool for me, to serve up a purpose for later as a kind of dessert at my writer’s dining table.

First, I get to review all of those I’ve considered members of my family. I get to observe, at a distance, who these people were when I first knew them. I’m encouraged by my inner voice to compare that to who they are now in my life. I get to remember those who’ve left this world and how they were connected to me during their lives.

And, secondly, this mental review of people and animals creates a gallery of characters in a kind of mix and match way to provide all that I need for the rest of my years of writing, whether poetry or stories, if I so choose.

Do you realize how much power that is, how much material? Does any writer know this until the day arrives when the family memories are sifted for a purpose outside the writer’s own daydreams? I wonder.

As in so many other ways, we take our families for granted, I think, regarding how much writing material they provide simply by hanging out inside our heads. Now that I realize the extent of their contribution, I’m going to keep visiting that gallery to find more portraits to bring out into the light and show others.

Have you visited your family gallery lately? Have you done character studies on all of them for those masterpieces of prose and verse that wait to be penned? It’s never too late to start. Just look at how long I took. Don’t put it off. There’s a prize winner in there somewhere. 

If you don’t believe, ask the writers of memoir. They know.

Until later,

Claudsy