Grumpa Joe's Place

Shhh, Listen To the Hummn

Today I watched a TED video by Shonda Rhimes. I have linked it to this post. As most TED talks do this one amazed me. Shonda spoke for fifteen minutes non-stop, barely taking a nano-second to breath and made rational sense the whole time. Her talk is inspiring.

After she finished I hesitated for a second before leaving the TED website looking for her name, and the next thing I knew I was watching another woman giving a TED talk on creativity. She also spoke non-stop and made great sense the entire time. Both of them are writers. Yet, they spoke about the work of writing rather than the creativity involved in it.

I am doomed from the start, I cannot speak as fast as, nor as articulately as either of these successful authors. So what is the point of me slugging through a writing project as huge as writing a novel? I will do it because I want to, and because I want to be able to craft a story that people will read and like. That is my goal.

I don’t profess to be a writer, my friends keep telling me that I like to write, and then assign me the task of drafting something for our Lions Club. My futile attempts to write blog posts have turned me into a writer. NOT! Even though I am striving to get something published I have not been very successful. I even had to self-publish my children’s stories, but it forced me to learn how to bind books, and to make professional looking covers that give the stories an air of professionalism. I didn’t make any money, but I had a lot of fun writing, illustrating with my hand drawn cartoons, and making books. All on a desk top with non-professional computers, printers, and software programs. I spent too much time making my printer work the way I visualized the book. I also spent way too much time learning how to get page sequences correct when printing on two sides.

What does any of this have to do with COVID-19, nothing, but COVID-19 guidelines have driven me to look for productive projects to spend my time on. I picked up the manuscript of a novel I began writing in 2013, and read all one hundred pages of it and decided it is best if I begin all over again, if at all. I made a resolution after binge watching eight seasons of a documentary-drama called Homeland, a story about a young woman CIA agent and her attempts to save the USA. All told the eight seasons have a total of ninety-six episodes each between 47 to 57 minutes without commercials. I spent eighty-three hours over a time span of six weeks watching very stress laden stories which wound up giving me nightmares. I pledged not to spend any more time watching another series. Instead, I will spend evenings re-writing my novel. Thank you COVID-19. If I succeed, and I will, you will have done something positive, and if I don’t you will have one more death to add to your record, i.e. that of my novel.

Filed under: Aging, family, Writer | Tagged: ALternatives, Covid-19, Creativity, goals, Goals setting | Leave a comment »