memories
//
where do memories live?
in all the crevices of your long term memory,
where they’re crammed down,
waiting for a prompt from the temporal world,
to rouse them from the depths,
of the storage banks in your brain,
like worms tunneling towards the rain?
//
or perhaps fragments,
reside partially in the places they’re conceived,
where they lie latent,
waiting to be ushered back into the,
realm of conscious thoughts by,
the physical presence of one,
in the spaces where mind meets matter.
Today marks the end of my 14-day writing challenge (though this post might not actually end up making it online until day 15, since it’s currently storming and the internet and things don’t like that too much), and I can honestly say that working through these two weeks of writing definitely was a challenge, but it was also incredibly growing from a creative standpoint as well, which I’m thankful for. I originally decided to start this project because my creative reserves were basically empty, and I had recently had a good conversation revolving around the idea that sometimes simply stoking the fire of whatever you might be struggling with might be exactly what you need. So, instead of taking some time to think and brainstorm for creative purposes, I chose to force myself to write something, anything, for two weeks instead, to see what I could come up with, and it was surprisingly effective. Continue reading “writing challenge reflections”
Sometimes, I think fiction is one of the hardest styles and genres of writing to want to excel at. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the inability to churn out piece after piece of fiction (since I’ve been finding that even short stories are challenging to mass produce, for lack of a better term) makes it seem almost like the loftiest of writing goals. Unlike poetry, nonfiction, or other types of essays, it takes time to develop the voice, style, characters, flow, and all the other elements that go into crafting quality fiction, which I think frequently prevents writers from being able to showcase their fiction ability regularly. It seems to come down to actually publishing a popular novel or getting a short story published in a good literary mag, and that can be discouraging for a lot of writers I feel like.
This has been something that’s run through my head a lot as of late, especially since I’ve mentioned that I’ve been doing a good deal of storyboarding and outlining for fiction the past few days, and it almost feels like all of that work has nothing to show for itself, since I haven’t actually written anything yet, just conceptualized ideas and thought through them.
At any rate, that’s some of my internal process I’ve been going through while trying to write fiction the past couple days. So, today, I’m publishing another piece that I wrote a little while back. Even reading through it now, it sort of seems all over the place, but that makes a little sense since it was originally born out of a sort of literary pep talk I was trying to give myself at the time. Continue reading “inhale, exhale (you’re okay)”
The past couple days and rest of this week have been and are continuing to be pretty busy, which has been an additional struggle on top of the creative one for this 14 day writing challenge I’ve been putting myself through, trying to write something or publish something every day. I purposefully timed out this writing challenge to end just about the same time as I’m leaving for a trip, since I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to continue publishing work while I’m gone, but hopefully this writing challenge will give me the creative boost I need to at least be storyboarding and brainstorming while I’m gone.
In order to keep myself in the fiction mindset, I’ve been outlining and storyboarding a bunch related to an older ongoing project that I’m still hoping to finish at some point in time, but I’ve also been going back to older pieces that I’ve written a while ago when fiction came a little easier to me, looking at the style, voice, and some of the themes I was working with to see what I can continue to channel into my current work and what I’ve grown out of.
The piece below is one I recently went back to as I’ve been trying to rediscover and tap into my fiction energy. Originally published in my university’s literary magazine three years ago, this piece deals with several darker themes, something that I’ve oddly always been drawn to in fiction, which is perhaps why I love dystopian and noir works so much. On top of that, it’s still one of the better pieces I think I’ve written, perhaps because it’s partially inspired by real life, though I do see myself having grown out of some of the more dramatic elements as I skim through it a few years later. If you were wondering what kind of fiction I skewed towards writing three or four years ago, this piece would be a prime example, haha.
Currently doing some storyboarding for some more fiction I’m working on, but I discovered another piece hidden away in the archives that I had never published (seems like this is a semi-frequent occurrence). As I’m transitioning back to writing some fiction, I’ve been finding that it’s taking me a lot longer to figure out how I want to write things and what kinds of ideas I want to use, but maybe that’s more normal than I’m giving myself credit for.
With this piece, the primary idea behind it was conceived through a series of discussions I had at my Bible study where we talked about what it means to actually be a Christian in the 21st century, in 2016 and how we can sometimes read our own biases into the parables and stories we read in the Bible. Oftentimes, this manifests as us, as mostly privileged, American Christians, identifying more closely with the oppressed people groups described in the Bible rather than with the oppressors. However, something that we realized over the course of our discussion and Bible study was that while the Israelites and the entire nation of Israel have typically been the minority ethnic group and minority religion in the majority of eras, that’s not really the case for most Westernized or American Christians. What we decided is that more often than not, our actual lived realities align more with those of the oppressing Pharisees than with those of the oppressed Israelites. Interesting food for thought for sure.
Wow, writing this piece was definitely more of a struggle than any of the others I’ve written recently, but it does mark my return to fiction writing or fiction style writing for the first time in a while. Figuring out transitions and how this piece was going to flow from beginning to end were probably two of the hardest things I had to overcome while writing this one, which sort of threw me for a loop.
At any rate, this piece is based off a passage from Ezekiel 37, and I thought that adapting and reimagining something already in existence would be a good exercise to stretch out my stiff fiction writing muscles. Hopefully this will spur on some more fiction writing and energy in the next few days, but for the moment, I’m just glad I was able to get through this piece.
For this piece, I wanted to take an idea and a theme I’ve already written about quite a bit and start playing around with different literary and poetic devices, so this piece is more an experiment than anything. I fiddled around a little with more explicit repetition and variation in line length, which has always been something I’ve found difficult to do with poetry, but I feel like it lends such a sense of cleanness and simplicity to pieces, which always causes me to think more thematically when I read pieces written in that style.
Also, I’ve been finding that my fiction writing muscles are pretty stiff and out of practice, so I’ve been in a very stop-and-go place when it comes to the short stories I’ve been working on. Perhaps that’s the overly perfectionistic side of myself that’s always said that fiction was my strongest form of prose, but maybe it’s also an element of not allowing myself to be as free with writing fiction as I sometimes feel like I can be with other styles of writing, just because I still feel pretty amateurish with them. Either way, I’ll be working through some of those things and trying to coax something out of mind soon.
As I’ve been working on a couple short stories based on prompts I’ve been given by friends, I think my mind has also been reflecting back on a lot of the posts I’ve written in the past several days. Specifically, I’ve been pondering the effect technology has on our relationships in this day and age, since so many of us (myself included) practically treat our phones as an extension of our bodies at this point.
At the same time, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts and divert more energy to these short stories so I can actually get them done (beside the fact that I haven’t written fiction in quite a while and those creative muscles are still a little stiff), but going through my old archives, I discovered this piece talking about relationships and technology that I had written several months ago but for some reason or another had just never put up anywhere. Its style is a little different and a bit harsher than some of my more recent pieces, but I think it’s still relevant, and I definitely still resonate with the original point behind it as well.
Side note: The next couple days are going to be packed, so I’m really hoping to churn out those short stories in a timely manner, but I suppose we’ll see.
After a couple days of writing almost strictly poetry, it feels a little strange to be writing in more of a prose style again today, but then again, I think my prose has always skewed a little more flowery and poetic anyway. The process of writing this piece was almost the reverse of when I wrote ‘roses,’ trying to originally put this piece through a poetry filter when it ended up emerging as more of a prose piece.
The initial idea for this piece came to me when I accidentally dropped my phone out of my locker while I was at the gym. At first inspection, all seemed to be well, but as I was getting ready to leave, I noticed some light refraction (really no other way to put it, haha) and realized that I had cracked my screen. My heart sank a little, seeing as I had already shattered my screen earlier this year and gotten it replaced, but my fears were quickly assuaged by a closer look that revealed it was only the glass screen protector that had a crack along its width (at least I think…I put it on slightly crooked, so it doesn’t cover the entire right side, and the cracks only extended as far as the border of the glass screen protector, with the actual screen underneath not appearing to have any cracks, fingers crossed).
With a sigh of relief, I hurried home and almost immediately ordered another glass screen protector from Amazon to soothe my OCD, which was when I started to think about how much we worry and think about our phones, because any damage is readily visible and because we look at our phones dozens of times every day, while forgetting about so much of the invisible pain and suffering that people around us have gone through that we might never see, especially if it was in their past and they don’t talk about it anymore, either because they’ve overcome it and it’s truly behind them or because they live under the pressure of our American society which stigmatizes mental illness or any severe emotional trauma that people may have experienced. Out of those reflections, this piece was birthed.
Final thought: I’ve always been fascinated with pieces of writing, whether entire books, poems, essays, etc. that are titled after one single line or scene from its body, so I played with that a little with this piece.
The tides always seem to change at the most inopportune times, or at least that idea has occupied quite a bit of my mental space as of late. When I first started this writing challenge, it was for the purpose of forcing myself to write something, anything, every day because I found myself running out of ideas. I would sit down to write and comb through my brain for anything to latch onto, anything that could possibly become new material, but after only a few days, I think I’ve successfully stoked my literary fire back to life. Ideas are plentiful again, and I’m now having the opposite of problem of trying to focus my energies on just one topic at a time so that I’ll actually complete a piece over the span of a day or few.
Another Anomaly Among Many 