I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, energetic striving, but it comes into me slowly and quietly and all the time, though I must regularly, and every day, give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
I learned how I should feel when writing, not like Gandalf on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead on after another.
My writing is not a waste of time – no creative work where feelings, imagination, and intelligence can just be work. With every sentence I write, I have learned something. It has done so much.
I’ve heard that writers write to make sense of the world. That’s certainly been true for me. And yet, the world seems to have become even less understandable over my lifetime. Aren’t we supposed to become wiser with age? What is the reason for the interpersonal division in our country? We seem to be on ever more opposing wavelengths. We can’t even talk to people we disagree with without insulting them, in person or online, so we mostly just give up.
I believe we are all between stories.
Who knows what the next story will be? I am hoping for one called “We Are All In This Together.”
Many of us have rejected the old duality of this or that, one or the other, Republican or Democrat, us, or them, liberal or conservative, male, or female, East or West, cat people or dog people….okay, just kidding. But really, haven’t you noticed the breakdown of the old story? The old roles bind us no more. Women are now empowered in fiction and movies, men in the programs we watch are stay-at-home dads with real feelings, and even gender can be fluid. Voters give up, feeling alienated from our leaders. Young people are calling BS. We’re all restless, looking for a new story to explain our place in the world. Many stories in the hearts of many people.
I rarely go into this soul-searching writing here on my blog, but I have not written for a while(here anyway) and wanted to reach out to all my readers.
I am steadily writing many things. This includes 2 books in the 2 series I have published, working on a picture book, adult fiction, and a memoir. Busy fingers. Also keeping busy with my side gigs of editing and Beta Reading.
Looking for signs of a new story comforts me. Maybe this is the time I was meant to be alive.
What about you? Have you ever felt “in the space between stories?”
Another note; Book 2 of Pull of the Sister Moon, Purpose is now on Audible! So all three books in the last year can be listened to.
Here is the link:
You can also email me for a promo code!
“We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.” — Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Cheers!
Lynda
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