Pressure...

So where am I? Hmm. It’s hard to admit this but I haven’t worked on the novel. Despite some clever feedback last week and getting excited about a new way to approach the story, I just didn’t/couldn’t write. Lately, it’s difficult to face the page and work on this piece. Good friends keep giving me feedback, advice, book recommendations, blogs, writer’s resources, news sources and that is all well and good but at the end of the day I’ve just hit a roadblock. It’s disconcerting.

I feel PRESSURE!

It's all self-inflicted. Pressure to work on it and finish it in a timely manner. I’ve been working on this novel for the past 9 months. I get the irony…the story is gestating. And the pressure of not being a good enough writer to finish this project. Crazy-making I know but that is where I am with it. How do I let go enough and really believe that if this is the crappiest piece of work I’ve ever written then it’s a good learning experience? I want this story to be excellent but I’m holding on too tight to that expectation and there is no room for the story to breathe. I mean how could it? I have a strangle hold around its puny little neck wanting the words to come out faster but no space for the words to vocalize. Even as I write these words, I can feel my throat constrict and my neck muscles tighten up. Yes, it’s that visceral and physical for me.

* Deep breath *

I have to remember to breathe. I find myself hardly breathing these days. At least, I’m noticing the fact that I’m holding my breath a lot. I’ve started taking yoga classes again and good god, I am so inflexible that I feel like I’m going to pop a limb out of a socket as I try to relax into a spinal twist. Not easy for this round body of mine. Actually, I think it goes deeper than that because I’ve managed yoga classes before at this weight. I think it has more to do with how constricted my mind is. How clamped up/shut tight and unwilling to bend. Hmmm. Interesting… I think a dim light bulb went on in the back of my head somewhere.

So despite the lack of writing on the novel, I’ve started on a short story. I needed a place to write and play with language. A place to remind me that I actually “love” to write and I do. I spent the better part of the day working on it and wrote up about 2,000 words. I felt looser for having done it. My uptight neurotic self let go for an afternoon. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot but it’s a decent work in progress.

Peace,

Lily~

All artwork, photos, and text © Copyright 2008-2011 Liliana Almendarez unless indicated otherwise. All Rights Reserved. Any downloading, copying or use of images on this website is strictly prohibited without express written consent by Liliana Almendarez.

I’m taking a mental break.

Tonight I am off to yoga.
Afterwards home to spend some time working on rebuilding chapter 3.

I’ve also made a decision to let go of the studio in Harlem.

As excited as I was of having a space to work on my art, it just doesn’t make economical sense to have a separate work space right now

I want to focus all of my efforts on this novel. All of my spare time needs to be about writing, writing, and re-writing so I can get it done.

I’m scaling back to make some room for this creative work.

This feels like the right decision for me right now.

If need be, I can always work on my art in the apartment. My work has started shrinking to about a 10”x10” dimension. Part of it has been practicality. Part of it has been smaller pieces have begun to pop for me. Either way, giving up the studio doesn’t mean I’ll stop painting.

One last thing I wanted to share….check out Florence + The Machine’s, Cosmic Love. Her voice is AMAZING!!  I can't stop listening to it. 

All artwork, photos, and text © Copyright 2008-2011 Liliana Almendarez unless indicated otherwise. All Rights Reserved. Any downloading, copying or use of images on this website is strictly prohibited without express written consent by Liliana Almendarez.

And another thing...

Update: So after my fiasco this morning, I came across an article by Rick Gekoski which appropriately enough made me giggle. I recognized myself in the way he struggles with his own writing. The irritability, the abstraction, the wanting to get the phrase down just right, in that moment it became aware again of the kindred spirits out there trying to get down words as fast as one can of the inward voice. And all of a sudden, the frustration I felt this morning didn’t feel so overwhelming or ridiculous. Ahhhh….I am responding to his text in brackets. If you want to read his complete article follow the link here: Writing Is Bad For You by Rick Gekoski from guardian.co.uk.

This portion is only a short excerpt.   

“…I'm certain that writing brings out the worst in me.”
[Me too!! Have you read all the whinging texts that I’ve written in the midst of trying to get my head around a project? Trust me, I still write them, I just don’t post them as frequently as I did in the past. Now they are stuck inside a journal.]

“It has become increasingly clear to me…that the more I write the worse I become. More self-absorbed, less sensitive to the needs of others, less flexible, more determined to say what I have to say, when I want and how I want, if I could only be left alone to figure it out.”
[Lately, more often than not, I just want to be left alone to work and think. I may work a day job but my brain is turning over the next scene, the next chapter, what my characters are going to do next and that’s not easy to do when the phone is ringing. No wonder I feel so out of whack when I’ve been away from the page too long. Being out in OAC taught me that I need a lot more quiet time to let the work/words flow out. And the busy-ness of living in NYC can sometimes make it that much more difficult to quiet down enough to hear what comes next. Eeek!]

“… When I am writing I wander in a fug all day, wake in the middle of the night…and stagger downstairs to record a thought or two. Leave the bed with my mind whirling with gorgeously formed sentences…By the time I get to the keyboard their perfection (as it seems to me in my drowsy creative mode) has dissipated, and though I can catch something of what seemed a sensational formulation it is already…only an imitation of the ideal. I fiddle about, rewrite and reconsider, and go back to bed an hour later thoroughly stimulated, dissatisfied, and unable to sleep. I read for another hour. The next day I complain that I am tired, and show all the signs of it: irritability, abstraction, and a tendency to fall asleep on a sofa at any time…”
[Preach on brother-man, if this ain’t the truth I don’t know what is. I think I laughed the hardest in this section because it felt like he was peeking into my life. And that funky sour mood I’m always in…oh yeah, definitely stems from some of this.]

“It is embarrassing, being thus conquered by an inward voice desperate to formulate, reconsider, construct, deconstruct, seek out the right phrase, amend it, think again. And I am only a writer of bits of non-fiction. You'd think it would be easy. Or easier, certainly, than being a novelist. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be inhabited by many competing voices, ceaselessly reconsidering the flow of a narrative, charting the development of character, juxtaposing one thing with another. It's astonishing that novelists have any social life at all.”
[Well keep on keeping on. For all the creative writers out there…you are NOT ALONE!!]

Peace,

Lily


All artwork, photos, and text © Copyright 2008-2011 Liliana Almendarez unless indicated otherwise. All Rights Reserved. Any downloading, copying or use of images on this website is strictly prohibited without express written consent by Liliana Almendarez.