On Walking and Artist Dates - IWSG November 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to November co-hosts: Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard , Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose. To find links to all contributors, click here.

November optional question: What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing?

Years ago I worked through the twelve-week lessons from The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. One of the requirements was to take a weekly “artist date,” which could be any activity designed to inspire creativity. Unemployed at the time and not keen on spending money, an artist date for me meant a walk with my camera.

Having worked indoors for more than half of my life by then, walking outside any time I wanted introduced me to a world I'd missed. Everything I encountered felt nuanced and layered. Two dories reflecting on still water at dawn. A paint-peeling house emerging from a thick fog at the edge of a salt marsh. Egrets stick-legging through the eelgrass. A golden retriever balancing on the gunnel of a lobster boat as it trundled into the harbor. Each time I took a walk, I found myself savoring these vignettes, taking them into my heart, if you will. It was during this time I learned to look east during sunset to find a more subtle beauty, and that winter light offers something ethereal so it's worth bundling up to catch it. Even now I think that spell of unemployment was one of the best things that's ever happened to me. After each outing I downloaded my photos and more often than not, wrote a blog post about something I’d witnessed.

These days, my writing is pretty much at a standstill. A reader/proofreader I trust is going through my last project, so I can’t fuss with that right now. I have no will or desire to start anything new but I don’t want to stop the practice of writing. For the past month I’ve been forcing myself to journal during my early morning writing hour. Truth be told, it feels like homework and I give myself weekends off for good behavior. Thankfully, I woke up last Saturday with an artist date in mind. Before I could talk myself into chores, I hopped into the car.

It helps when things seem fresh and new, so I took myself to a park one town over that I've rarely been to and not for a very long time. The land was purchased by the navy in 1906 and served as an ammunition depot until the early '70's when the government declared it surplus. Paved roads remain from its former incarnation. Rambling dirt paths skirt the river. The location is popular with dog walkers and joggers and it was busy enough that I felt the company, but peaceful enough for me to reflect on my own thoughts. I have a new phone and since the upgrade from an iPhone 8 to a 16, improvements to the camera are notable.

So there I was, walking amid the skitter of falling leaves, watching kids trying to skim rocks on the river while imagining gunmetal ships docked at old wharfs. The sun is low in the sky these days and my phone could actually capture the sparkles on the water. A cormorant circled and I waited, hoping it would land on an old piling and lift its wings to dry them. When it did, relief floated through me. 

I may not have a writing project to work on, but at least I came up with an IWSG post.

What creative activity inspires you?

How it is Now - IWSG November 2022.

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing and generous  Alex Cavanaugh. To find links to other monthly contributors, click here.  Thank you to November co-hosts: Diedre Knight, Douglas Thomas Greening, Nick Wilford, and Diane Burton!

The writing hasn’t been kind to me lately. Back in the day when I felt stuck, I took an artist’s date which I learned to do while completing the lessons in The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. The writer suggests taking regular time-outs from your "art" to pursue an activity that might spur creativity. For me, that usually involved going on a walk with a camera. I’d click images of scenes around the area I love so much, then go home and write about something I'd photographed. Once I wrote a vignette about a house blurred by fog and it ended up inspiring my third novel.

But because of life (and cell phones), I haven’t taken a walk with my actual camera in a long time. When I took it out of the cupboard recently, the last photo on the memory card was from 2019.

A few days later, I took a ride down to the harbor with the camera in the passenger seat, just to see how it felt. In truth, it felt weird. Who uses an actual camera now, anyway? But really the issue was something bigger. I didn’t grow up near the ocean. After almost 40 years of living by the sea, I’m still in awe of  my surroundings but as in every other realm of my life these days, there's something missing. 

Before two years ago, my walking habit was to keep my eyes open and frame picture after picture trying to capture the essence of what made me feel so joyful. These days though, what used to feel fun is hard work. Nevertheless, as flat as I felt that afternoon at the harbor, I was there. The egrets were, too. My heart wasn't in it much, but it gave me a little peace when I got home and downloaded the pictures to find my eyes still work.

Lighting it Up

I had comp time coming, and since my normal Friday workday ends at noon, I extended the long weekend and took the morning off.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had a day to myself with nothing on the schedule, and I woke up feeling odd—conflicted as to what to do with the time.  But, I got where I needed to in the end.  The remains of a firewood delivery lay piled in our driveway, and after lugging wheelbarrows full of it to the back yard, I decided I’d earned an “Artist’s Date,” a practice I learned while working through TheArtist’s Way, by Julia Campbell.

Consider an “Artist's Date an indulgence in creativity, something to spur inspiration, and I could use a little help in that department.  To that end, I headed to Fort Revere, a historic park up high on a peninsula, with expansive views of Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay.  I brought the camera and the tripod, with one goal in mind.  To get a nice picture of Boston and Graves Lights, seemingly parallel to each other, at the mouth of Boston Harbor. 

I’ve taken enough pictures now to know that light is more intriguing in the early in the day and pre-sunset.  I, however, arrived mid-morning, and with a postcard clear day, there wasn’t much going on in the sky.  But still, I took it all in, the boats plying back and forth across the water, the airplanes circling low on their approach to Logan Airport, and of course, the lighthouses.  Boston Light, located on Little Brewster Island was the first lighthouse to be built in what is now the United States.  It’s celebrating its 300^th anniversary this year.  Grave’s Light, built in 1905, is a newbie by those  standards.  But when you stand on the mounds of an old fort and look across the bay to the two sentinels, it’s as if they’ve been there always, as if back in some ancient time, they thrust up from the sea.

The pictures came out pretty, but the visit itself was more important to me.  "Just what the Doctor ordered," as my father used to say.  I drove home and finished a draft of my current project.

IWSG October 2014. The Truth of it

This is my October post for Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group and guess what?  Amazing Alex and his minion of helpers will be publishing a free eBook to benefit all writers - The IWSG Guide to Publishing and Beyond and it will include posts from this month.  The eBook will be free and available for all eReaders by early December.

Five years ago, corporate America and family occupied most of my time.  When the grind of the day job got to me, like millions of people, I’d muse, Gee, wouldn’t it be cool to write a novel?  I imagined myself working in a café part-time, so I had time to write the book, which was kind of like thinking it would be cool to win the lottery. And, well,  I don’t play the lottery.

Then, in a workforce-reduction, expense management strategy, corporate-downsizing or whatever buzz-phrase suits your mood, my employer dropped-kicked me across the parking lot, and within twenty-four hours of that pink-slip event, I started writing.  Not a novel. Nothing like a little layoff to call that bluff. No, I wrote personal essays–unemployment therapy I suppose, but so much more.  I wrote blog post after blog post having recognized within hours of my job elimination whatever I did next in life had to involve writing and the only way to get better at writing was to write.

It wasn’t fiction though.

Curiously, during those first butt-in-chair years, I did stumble into a part-time job in a café.  Well, not a café, but pretty close.  A gourmet food and cheese shop selling prepared items and made-to-order sandwiches.  And on the days I wasn't standing on a cement floor preparing panini's, serving up carrot hummus, or lugging cast iron pans to the sink, I planted myself in front of my computer and wrote.

 

But still.  The idea of fiction drifted out there, mist at dawn—until an acquaintance recommended Julia Cameron’s THE ARTIST’S WAY, a book of twelve week-long lessons subtitled A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.  Don’t worry.  “Spirit” is subjective, and if mine happened to be the ceramic vase sitting on my window shelf, it would have worked in context of this book.

  

As I plowed through the program, each chapter forced me to confront my creative future, to challenge myself to make my dreams happen.  THE ARTIST'S WAY works for anyone, but in my case, each lesson said, you want to write fiction?  You are the only one stopping yourself.  Before I’d finished the exercises in THE ARTIST’S WAY, I began writing a novel, to see if I could get to the end, which happened, though the result was so awful it was impossible to fix. So, more butt-in-chair.  Plus, I read writers on writing.  I gave myself timed writing exercises and scene-stormed.  I wrote a second book and submitted it to agents and received a request for one full manuscript that went nowhere, form rejections and lots of cold silence. I took a Grub Street novel-in- progress course.  And then another.

  

I know.  We’re well into this piece and you expect to read I’ve got a novel coming out. Nope. Not yet.  Lovely word, “yet.” We needed better insurance, so I’m back working in an office, almost full time.  I get up early every morning to write.  If I can, I write after work too.  I’m getting ready to submit my third novel to agents with this perspective. There’s no winning the lottery to it. Standing up in a café all day is brutal work, and writing a good novel is even more difficult.  But thanks to Julia Cameron, I get it.  The only person who can give up on me, is me. 

So, butt-in-chair.