Field notes: March
What I have been thinking, listening to and reading this past month
Spring is here and finally sun is out in Portugal, after a few months of incessant rain.
I feel like I have been out of the longest winter of my life. As someone who lives very much in tune with the seasons, I feel the pull of sunshine drawing me out of my writing cave and back into the world. It’s an almost physical instinct that I cannot ignore. How to balance this pull and the smell of summer drawing closer with the necessity to be inside and write?
As I am getting ready for redrafting, I have been thinking about this a lot, how to balance creativity with the necessities and demands of everyday life, including generally pleasant things like seeing friends, working out and reigniting some sort of social life. Here are some ideas I have been brainstorming:
Get out and write somewhere else. I think of my house as the most comfortable place in the world, so getting outside always feels counterintuitive to me. Here I have multiple writing stations, music, my books and notebooks and all the material I need. It never occurred to me until now that might be the problem. Very often this world of “plenty” is not the most conducive to successful writing sessions. My house as nice as it is, is also full of distractions so in order to combine this newfound need of getting out and focusing on my project, I am considering to make more use of bookstores of coffeeshops. I have tried in the past with mixed results. I’ll report back on how it goes.
There is a lot of talk of the need of community for writers, but not so much about how much solo time writers need and how can we balance it with the true genuine need for a community. As this space evolves I am also thinking about what themes and directions this little publication is going to take in itself and in the context of a wider Substack Community. More on this soon.
As someone who has done a fair amount of “shadow work” I have been thinking of the concept of shadow in the Jungian sense and how the same concept could be applied to our characters. I have been preparing a post about light, shadow, the things that make us human and how this can help us creating fully fleshed out characters for our stories, characters readers can relate to. Stay tuned.
I am now turning to you, dear readers. I would love to hear your input on any of these topics. Where do you like to write? Do you like to do it solo or together with other people?
I also would love to know more of what you’d like to see on this space moving forward. If you don’t mind responding to this poll it will help me to shape up this place in the coming future.
What I have been listening to lately: I have been drawn to surprisingly different kinds of music lately, like Rufus du sol and Jan Blomqvist. I find them to be the perfect walking soundtrack.
What I have been reading: Currently reading Hamnet , by Maggie O’ Farrel (waiting to watch the movie soon after!) and for non -fiction on the way to finish The Origins of You by Vienna Pharaon.
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