reframing

It helps me to watch some characteristic I want while I develop it through a character in one of my novels. I then let it evolve scene by scene. Optimism is something I've watched in one of my recent characters. Sort of a Pollyanna I guess, but not with the negative associations. I've always had a practical mind that searches for all the possible failures or bad outcomes as a way of preventing them before they happen. I think that was a young childhood survival mechanism in a troubled home.

Now as an adult, my characters come to me on the wind of the Muse, and teach me things that I need to learn to keep evolving in life. I am not good at a lot of things, and my characters in books often are good at one thing in particular that makes them stand out. When I watch them and record what they do, I feel like I grow a little bit.

I often feel that the stories in my head come to teach me life lessons, rather than stories that need me to somehow give them on to others. I think this is an important distinction as an evolving Fili, or Bard. In reframing the objective of my stories in this way, instead of obsessing over publishing them, I spend a lot of time writing for my health and for my loved ones. It's almost like watching TV at night except the broadcast comes out of my head. I am learning lessons this way, bit by bit, every night in front of the fire, with every page that unfolds and every story asking to be told.

Julia Cameron once said that writing is not about thinking something up, it's about getting something down. She likens writing to listening to a radio frequency that you can tune into every day. I feel that my stories come to me, and through me, with their own goals in mind. It is an animistic thought, that a story, a seemingly inanimate object, has its own goals. But I do believe this is the case.

It might be considered insane, if not for hundreds of documented examples of composers, writers and artists all saying the same thing. Cameron has listed several examples of people who have heard the Divine dictation (my phrase), so I won't get into that here. It is not my objective to defend this point of view but rather to build upon it. If we are listening to something coming to us for a reason, our view of why we tell stories suddenly changes. It becomes much larger.