Month: October 2015

Friday Freewrite

By / December 8, 2016 / Creativity, Fiction, Writing
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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Redemption. Salvation. I have begun to write once more1. I’ve emerged from a fitful slumber filled with terrors and anxieties to find the light once more.

I’m reoriented. Recalibrated. The old ways have returned. The folly of my former ways is but a bad dream, a hazy recollection that might never have happened at all.

A bad dream. Then poof. Gone. I have discovered myself once more, amid a hall of mirrors and vain self images, an endless array of mirrors and empty reflections of reflections.

I’ve found the true self, huddled in the dark, despairing of rescue. I’ve saved him for myself. I now hold him close to my bosom, my love, my life, my reason for being. With him I will once more accomplish great things.

Ideas. Tumbling. Spinning. A tempestuous gale of conflicting senses and values and ideas, rocking the foundation, battering the flimsy support beams, already rotting and corroding from the inside out.

The storm intensifies. I huddle beneath a failing foundation, trembling, despairing of the house of convenience and comfort and assumptions that I’ve built up around me. I hear the beams creaking, groaning, sounding their death cries. It won’t be long now.

Collapse. I lose everything. All I had once held as self-evident truths has crumpled to ash2 before my tear-stained eyes.

I gaze about, lost and broken. The storm has lifted, and after a dazed numb silence I begin to pick up the pieces.

I work feverishly, building for myself a foundation that combines the new with the old, though I know there will be another storm, for such folly is my life eternal.

Footnotes

1. As you probably guessed, this came at a time when I hadn’t written for a long time. I was so excited when the words started flowing again that I had to capture my feelings on paper so that I could remember them later.

2. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever find the truth.

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©2015 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

Ex Nihilo, Introduction

By / December 8, 2016 / Art, Creativity, Writing
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Image licensed by Shutterstock.

Out of the unformed ether of the mind erupt peoples, nations, entire worlds of every kind. By unleashing the raw power of creation, we storytellers breath form and life into entire universes ex nihilo. It’s an extraordinary power, but like most practitioners of magic, we prefer to work in seclusion. We barricade ourselves in our ivory towers, huddled over parchments and keyboards in the dark, not because we’re arrogant or because, like magicians, we believe in closely guarded secrets.

Rather, we hide the details of our work because we’re scared.

We’re scared that if we let you in, you’ll discover the awful truth, that the handful of gems we’ve managed to produce after weeks or months or years is invariably preceded by decomposing mountains of dross, the inarticulate by-products of a creative process that reveals our numerous inadequacies in all their shameful glory.

We jealously guard these imperfect scraps and never allow them to see the light of day. We believe only in presenting our most polished work; we’re certain that to do otherwise would be intellectual suicide.

But today, I want to throw the doors open. You’ll notice I’ve already done a little of this in my Friday Freewrite series. I’ve come to realize that perfection is a foolhardy illusion, that if only I swallow my pride and allow others to encounter my flawed and imprecise methods, I can share a much more authentic, much more human story.

To that end, I’ve decided to post my next blog not in its complete and perfected form, but as a weekly four-part series of intermediate steps.

Below are links to each installment in the series:

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©2015 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.