creativity – Kathy Waller

W Is for the W-Words: #atozchallenge

Posted on April 25, 2019April 25, 2019 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

Buyer’s remorse. And not even five hours have elapsed since the purchase. It happens every time. Why do I do this to myself? (W-Word: Why)

News of the Writers‘ League of Texas’ annual summer retreat arrived via email this afternoon, and I pounced–checked the calendar to confirm it doesn’t fall on an infusion week, asked my husband to confirm what I’d already confirmed, filled out the online form, and clicked Register. [W-Word: Writers’]

Some people think it over before clicking Register, especially when clicking Register requires an outpouring of funds.

If I made a list, it would look like this:

Don’t Go to the WLT Summer Retreat in Kerrville – Reasons

Time away from home – six days
The retreat is in July and I already miss David
Indulgence-induced guilt
I shouldn’t have to drive 100 miles to write what I could write staying at home
Can write at home without paying registration fees plus gasoline and wear-and-tear on the car
More guilt
I miss David

Go to the WLT Summer Retreat in Kerrville – Reasons

I want to [W-Word: Want]

And then there’s the year I came home with a two-hundred-word timed writing that three years later turned into a 4,000-word short story, and a year after that appeared in a crime fiction anthology–the Murder on Wheels pictured in the sidebar to the right.

Plus the new Summer Writing Retreat–Write Away, where all you do is write

Plus the creative energy generated by people writing together

Plus memories of retreats in Alpine in 2011 and 2014.

Regarding buyer’s remorse: it doesn’t last.

Creativity and Imagination

Posted on September 10, 2017 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

Creativity and imagination, unlike faith,
is constantly replenished
by our need to question the universe,
to give it form and purpose…
That’s why it is so dangerous
to marry the power of the church to that of government.
Only corruption can result.
~ Meredith Lee, Shrouded

Doodle 1. Don’t Judge, Mrs. Pollock

Posted on May 29, 2016September 9, 2016 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

Doodle 1.
Doodle something abstract, using shapes and only one color.

Words & Wine Wednesday at Austin’s Writing Barn featured Carin Channing discussing her book 365 Days of Doodling: Discovering the Joys of Being Creative Every Day.

wb DSCF1069 — Seated, L-R: Poets Sean Petrie and David Fruchter of Typewriter Rodeo, and author/doodler Carin Channing

Ms. Channing didn’t know she was a doodler until she was forty, when she accepted an online 30-day Doodle Challenge. When the month was up, she began doodling with friends… and with strangers… and then she started teaching doodling.

Why? Because doodling is–I’m pulling from her long list of adjectives–“fun… liberating… fun… energizing… youthfulizing… clarifying… fun…”

I’ve never been a doodler. I have a heavy touch and a tight grip. My pencil doesn’t sweep lightly, freely, and steadily across the page. The pictures on my paper don’t look like the pictures in my head. Frustration guaranteed.

But at Words & Wine, Ms. Channing made doodling sound as much fun as her book claims it is. She handed out paper and markers and invited us to draw.

I used the prompt “Draw how your day started.”

DSCN1708 — Doodle @ the Writing Barn. Kathy Waller, May 25, 2016. © MKW

The picture wasn’t worth a thousand words, so I added some. The zigzaggy lumps that look like armadillos are cats.

David is a word person, too, but he employs more subtlety:

DSCN1714 — Doodle @ the Writing Barn. David Davis, May 25, 2016. © MKW

Ms. Channing’s books were, like Mt. Everest, there, so I bought one.

Today I did my first official doodle, displayed at the top of the post.

Of course, I dithered first. Abstract? My doodle shouldn’t be anything? How can I draw without knowing what I’m drawing?

Didn’t Jackson Pollock’s wife say to him, “But you have to abstract from something. What are you abstracting from?” (If Mrs. Pollock didn’t really say that, Marcia Gay Harden said something similar in the movie, which is close enough.)

I quashed the dither by turning my pencil on its side and making a blurry square, and another one, and then a couple of ovals, and another blurry square, and another oval… and the ovals began to look like eyes and a mouth. An oval blur in one of the eye-ovals looked like an iris, so I added a blur to the other eye-oval. That made the eyes focus. I restrained myself from putting a ladybug on the shoulder.

So much for abstraction. Some of us, I guess, abstract to rather than from.*

Where creativity is the goal–and this is oh, so important–judgment must be silent. As Mr. Pollock no doubt said to his wife.

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*I write that way, too.

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Typewriter Rodeo, who create “custom, on-the-spot poems for event guests, using vintage typewriters,” was also featured at Words & Wine Wednesday. The typewriters are beautiful. More about that in a later post.

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Murder on Wheels: 11 Tales of Crime on the Move

Posted on April 21, 2015May 14, 2015 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

MURDER ON WHEELS, Austin Mystery Writers’ first crime fiction anthology, has been released by Wildside Press.

Since it appeared, the Writers have been difficult to live with. We’ll get over it, but only after a decent interval of frolicking.

The cover copy reads–

“The eleven stories in MURDER ON WHEELS put the pedal to the floor and never let up! Whether by bus, car, tractor, or bike, you’ll be carried along at a breakneck pace by the talented Austin Mystery Writers. These eight authors transport you from an eighteenth-century sailing ship to the open roads of modern Texas, from Alice’s Wonderland to a schoolbus yard in the suburbs of Dallas.”

For a sample of what’s between the covers, see below.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION, by Kaye George

A NICE SET OF WHEELS, by Kathy Waller

FAMILY BUSINESS, by Reavis Wortham

ROTA FORTUNA, by Valerie Chandler

MOME RATH, MY SWEET, by Gale Albright

THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND, by Kaye George

BUON VIAGGIO, by Laura Oles

APORKALYPSE NOW, by Gale Albright

HAVE A NICE TRIP, by Kaye George

DEAD MAN ON A SCHOOL BUS, by Earl Staggs

HELL ON WHEELS, by Kathy Waller

RED’S WHITE F-150 BLUES, by Scott Montgomery

Reavis Wortham and Earl Staggs aren’t Austin Mystery Writers–they’re Texas authors who kindly contributed stories to the anthology. We’re pleased they joined us.

Kaye George, a former member, now lives in Tennessee, but she hasn’t managed to escape the AMW. Before she left, we named her Grand Pooh-Bah Emerita. Now we email every day. (See Kaye’s certificate, here.)

When Austin Mystery Writers was formed twelve years, members had no intention of publishing anything together. They (and we) simply wanted to improve their writing.

The idea for MURDER ON WHEELS came from banter via email late one night.

In the midst of our silliness, we began naming as many vehicles as we could think of. Then we switched to using them in titles for mystery novels:

Crime in a Convertible; Victim on a Velocipede; Garrotted in a Gas Guzzler; Whopped in a Wheelbarrow, Bumped Off in a Barouche-Landau…

Then Kaye said, “Let’s put together an anthology.”

So we did.

Ramona DeFelice Long edited the manuscript. Wildside Press published it.

Modified rapture! And now we frolic.

The moral–must be a moral!–of the story is this: Creativity begins in play.

This morning another group email arrived: When will we begin the next anthology?

Well, one thing does lead to another. . .

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Vacation

Posted on July 28, 2011July 28, 2011 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

Last night’s homework:

One page: Writer’s Diary.

One page: Clustering exercise

Five one-paragraph character sketches

Four one-paragraph novel beginnings (from photos taken this week)

One one-page novel beginning (from photos taken this week)

Optional but encouraged: Choose one short piece of writing to present at tomorrow night’s reading

And seventeen people call this a vacation.

P.S. I suspect this mammoth task has been assigned so we won’t have time to revise and polish. Beginnings are supposed to be bad. We have permission to write badly. But no one wants to turn in bad writing. So the instructor resorts to subterfuge.

Tuesday Teaser 6

Posted on March 29, 2011 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

Grab your current read.
Open to a random page.
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title and author too, so other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers.

My teasers:

Cover of "The Midnight Disease: The Drive... — Cover via Amazon

“As Eyler Coates puts it, ‘We’ve always heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually produce a masterpiece. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.'”

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“It turns out that problems such as procrastination are usually better treated by putting the writer in the appropriate limbic or motivational state than by cognitive strategies such as making To Do lists. Most procrastinators are very aware of exactly what they are not doing.” ~ Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain

Humility check

Posted on June 4, 2010 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

In the previous post, I wrote a paean to myself in honor of receiving a positive critique in a recent manuscript contest. I was shameless. Because the judge wrote Fannie Flagg twice on the score sheet, I used the name five times in my anthem.

I was moved to lavish self-aggrandizement by memory of my mother, who often quoted Damon Runyon: “He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.”

Today I do a bit of un-tooting. Below is a list of things the song of myself didn’t include.

1. My entry did not advance to the finals.

2. The judge read only the first ten pages of the potential novel.

3. When the judge said that to get an agent I’ll have to find one who “gets” Texas and the South, she meant she “gets” Texas and the South and, as a result, my small-town setting and my dialogue. If she’d been unfamiliar with the vernacular, I wouldn’t have fared so well.

4. The selection process is subjective. I once wrote an entire post on this topic, but the story bears repeating: Five years ago an entry I submitted received a score of 80. The next year, in the same contest, the very same (unrevised) entry garnered 18 points. Judge #1 said the entry was funny. Judge #2 said that I should take a lot of workshops, read more books, and use MS Word to identify my egregious grammatical errors. And that my pre-teen protagonist’s parents were guilty of child abuse.

Oh dear. I thought I’d made peace with that. My point: if I’d drawn another judge this year, I might have come out with a much lower score, and my paean would be different in both tone and content.

5. In a sentence beginning, “My concern,” the judge says she “would have liked” something that last year’s judge, who read version #1 of the ten pages, would have liked as well. I’ll have to fix that–change the material without sacrificing the current dialogue, pacing, tone…

6. The novel isn’t a novel. It’s potential. It’s a WIP.

7. There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.

To summarize–Opening that envelope and finding compliments inside encouraged me. It lifted my spirits. It showed me a glimmer of hope.

But it didn’t complete the manuscript, get me an agent, offer me a contract, hand me an advance, put me on the best-seller list, fill my coffers to overflowing, or ensure me a spot on Letterman.

In short, I have work to do. Continued self-aggrandizement will only get in the way.

After all, I’m already fighting background noise. Radio station KFKD plays continuously in my right ear, reciting my virtues. The constant yammering makes it hard to focus.

On the other hand, the “rap songs of self-loathing” pouring into my left ear don’t exactly speed me on my way either.

So I’ll take the critique sheet from the envelope, and with a loving hand smooth it flat, and place it in a spot where it will be visible as I write.

Fannie Flagg has been in the back of my mind for years. It’s time to move her right up front.

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Thanks to Ann Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, for exposing radio station KFKD for what it is.

Letting the miracle happen

Posted on March 22, 2010 by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized

I ended an earlier post with the sentence, “There’s a hole I have to write myself out of.”

Parse that and you’ll find it equal parts wish, bravado, pretense, and humbug.

I had no idea how to write myself out of that hole. I thought I’d have to scrap “A Day in the Life of a Rancher’s Wife” and replace it with “A Day in the Life of a One-Room Schoolteacher.” Or anything else I could both start and finish.

But I gave it a shot, opened the document, and began revising. For the Rancher’s Wife, that meant squeezing 700 words into under 500, just in case I came up with a conclusion.

And in the middle of all that deleting, adding, shuffling, it happened. I knew how to end the story.

By the time the epiphany occurred, it was after midnight. I tacked on a couple of sentences to hold the thought and the next day continued reworking the piece. The result is a story I’m satisfied with. Almost. There’s still time for tweaking.

When I was teaching English in the late ’70s, the latest fashion was to teach the writing process: brainstorming, prewriting, writing, revising, editing, polishing, proofreading. Sometimes prewriting was put before brainstorming. Sometimes editing and polishing were rolled into one. It was neat and tidy and linear.

But there was no step to describe that epiphany.

If there’s frustration here–and there is–it’s that I can’t explain that missing step. I had given up. I wasn’t trying think of a solution. I was playing with words. And then I knew.

Maybe that’s the heart of the process: relax, play, stay in the now, allow ideas to come. Maybe the process isn’t a process at all.

I’ve read that creativity has something to do with the frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the temporal lobe, the limbic brain, alpha brain rhythms, gamma brain rhythms, warm showers, long walks, and happiness. When scientists have it all observed and assimilated and indexed, I’ll try to understand.

For the present, however, I like to think that extra step is Gertrude Stein’s miracle.

Not knowing. Knowing.

And the process is letting the miracle happen.