Unmooring ourselves….

Ok,… sounds wanky.  But I was thinking this morning about just this.

A couple of months ago I left a writers group I had been in for a few years.  It was a good classroom for learning many things about writing.  It was good.

I want to reemphasis this.  I sucked at the communal teat of this group and it formed so much in me as a writer.  I was pretty raw, didn’t know top from bottom, and things could stink in the writing.  I was clumsy.

Still am…and this blog shows it. But the blog is just a pure release and a joy because I don’t have to prove myself here.  It’s just a vehicle for thoughts and communication.

This group, over the years, helped tremendously.  It’s just that I didn’t think in straight erotica terms.  Not like so many of them.

And there are some incredibly fine writers there.  I am proud to have read their work.  The best haunt me still.

It was also addictive.  I realized  all my writing there …well, most of it…was to fit in the mold of erotica.  Fine for a while, but there is more to writing than just this genre.

I have changed in my style and taste.  Erotica is a spice now, not the full monty for me.  Perhaps it never was.  I did teeter on the issue of what was porn and what was erotica.   I found many arguments on both sides and some that said there was no difference.

I didn’t buy it. I read some pretty horrific stuff, mostly in the extreme bdsm nature…that squashed any erotic in the writing.  I read some  work that was pornographic in my estimation.  And in a many cases, I read some good erotica.

I was restless there, and thought  I was way too addicted to the approval of others about my writing.  I knew  I didn’t fit, was writing work that wasn’t of interest there, and I felt I was limiting myself in some unknown way.  So I left months ago.

Recently I went back.  Now I wonder why.   Sometimes we are better leaving and staying gone.   I think what happened is that I changed, even in a few months.  When I went  back, I realized the a lot of things had not been resolved for me.  I was right back into the mix where I didn’t really fit.  It’s not that I couldn’t learn more, it’s just that my writing had taken  some sharp turns away from erotica.  I didn’t consider myself a writer of erotica anymore, and that was what they wanted.

 

Further, I didn’t have the blocks, the writer’s blocks, the issues of  depression that seem to grab  many writers, I didn’t have the quirks of some writers, the rituals, the superstitions, whatever keeps writers from writing.  I was writing with no issues really.

I was just writing.  I was writing stories….novels….poems.  It seemed just the natural thing to do given the stimuli around me. It was no angst y thing really, it was just the response with pen and paper to the wonderment of life around.  Everything sparked either a blog entry (LOL!…and people who read the blog know all about that!)….or something else.  Mostly the novels I have been writing.

Ok….I will admit in some departments  my writing has fallen off…like tanka production which for three years was something I loved.  I was now writing ‘long’….and tanka has a very different state of mind for me, and it just wasn’t appearing.

I would walk last year and just that constant movement would bring tanka flooding to mind.  I had to place a pad and pen on a dog house, or chicken coop (I walk in my back yard) to write down those verses that came to me.  Nature seemed to flood my senses, and if it wasn’t tanka, it was freeverse.  (which ain’t free by the way, there were rules to freeverse, but another entry for that).

Like the lithe bowing

Of a red maple sapling

My heart turns to you,

Yearns for those nights long ago

When pale skin challenged the moon.

I write tanka in the 5/7/5/7/7 form.  That’s Japanese and I stick to it.  There are other forms, 3/2/something…but I’ve rarely seen it, and frankly, I’m not interested in it.  I find a balance and a comfort in this 5/7/etc. form.  I also find comfort and inspiration in some older Japanese themes, like the moon, nature, etc.  Works for me.

We can get lost in a crowd.  We can go along with others who are fellow travelers for a while and scratch itches we think we have.  But at some time along this journey, we have to look at what we are and what we are doing with some  company.  Not bad company, but hindering in some important ways.

Maybe some hidden ways, unknown until you have been away for a while.  Perhaps you have broken a mold of a particular time.

It’s a privilege to write.  It’s a wonderful thing to create through the cobbling of words. But we have to know our influences and whether they are progressive or hinder us in some way.  We have to be loose and goosey.  We have to honor the imagination  that is the generator of our creativity.

We have to unmoor ourselves in that sea of imagination and push out alone into the water.  We have to unhinder ourselves and in that stillness and silence, we can hear our voice.

That goes a long way to being a writer. Perhaps drawing on this leads us to the bedrock of our  originality.

Lady Nyo

With apologies for all the errors in this entry.  I wrote it too fast and didn’t proof!

Tags: creativity and imagination, erotica, unmooring ourselves, writer groups, Writing fiction