Pages

Translate

Friday, February 11, 2011

Chapter 4 Big Ideas

I had a massive amount of hours accumlate at school early in this week. I am therefor afforded the opportunity to take today off (for the most part, I have a meeting @ 3) and "work" from home.

Today I am being a writer!

After months and months of working through this book I'm on Chapter 4 entitled Big Ideas. I like this chapter because I often think I have great ideas in my head. Then I go to write them down and it's a bit of a garbled, unconnected set of random thoughts. I've often wondered how something that is so clear and precise in my mind can be so incomplete when I go to write it down. This is so true of me that in fact when I write my weekly parenting column I email it to myself before I send it off to the editor. A day or two later I open it up and reread it. 10 times out of 10 I find incomplete thoughts that don't read like I imagined they would in my mind.

The Big Ideas chapter comforted me in knowing that it is like this for most writers. Roorbach writes, "ideas are abstract by nature. Unbidden, ideas arrive in our brains in pieces; a bit of evidence, a blast of emotion, a sentence oglogic, a shot of paranoia ..... The problem is getting what seems whole and vital in our brains onto the pae whole and vital."

YES! I know just what he means! My Blackberry is full of typepad little bits of ideas and fragments of meanings!

Exercise One: Automatic Writing - set a time to just write whatever comes out of your head. No matter what it is just write and expect ideas to begin to appear.

5 minutes: GO! Nothing. nothing. my house is so quiet. i can hear the dog lick herself and thewashing maching running. i miss the sun. it hasn't been warm and bright here for many days. the weather man said snow flurries. why is it that in december snow flurries are magical christmasy and not they are annoying just a few mere 6 weeks later. oh well at least its not another snow storm. we had a heckofa one last week. stuck inside for 3 days. still our sidewalk is unshoveled. I  thought there was a law against that. what! it's only been  a minute! ug! but we got so much snow and then below zero temps that it made it almost impossible to shovel with out a snow blower. aaron says that is what we have our sons for. to shovel and mow and such. the problem is they are eleven and twelve and don't know how to do a job well. that is why moms do so much you know. it is because we don't have the patience to let others do what we can do better. in fact i status updated just the other day that i was so happy to see aaron loading the dishwasher while i sat at the kitchen table we were visiting but in my head i couldn't stop thinking that he was doing it all wrong. later i rearranged the bowls. i mean who really doesn't make sure they fact opposite directions. everyone knows or may be every woman knows that f you set the bowls in the same direction they have the potential to 'nest' and they they come out all dirty. yuck. and who do you think has to rewash them?well not al 11 year old kid. if they unload it they will find it dirty and throw it into the sink where i have to reload it or wash it properly just to get it clean. i wonder if the mailman is mad at us for not shoveling the sidewalk. ow well the neighbors haven't either.
ha! 5 minutes!

now what of that is a good idea to expand????
p.s. it was supposed to be unedited that's why I didn't go back and fix the typos.