I Can't Keep Quiet is a singing group formed to vocalize about the deeds of our White House. Whatever your political views, their song is intoxicating. Their story is as well. Turns out, they spent two days rehearsing via internet before meeting at a Peace Rally and performing that day.
After hearing their song on Face Book, I thought about what I do to be boisterous. Singing isn't something you want to hear from me. Just trust me on this one. Instead, I blow it out through writing.
They spent two days, about the same that I spend working on these posts. Okay, that's an exaggeration. What I actually mean is that I will spend the first day writing the rough draft for around an hour. The next day will be to revise, re-view, and polish. If I'm feeling confident, I'll wait a few hours, re-read several times, and finally post.
Which is a huge difference from when I first began the blog gig. Back in the good ole days, I was finished with the entire thing in less than thirty minutes. But as time goes on, I spend more of it haggling away to wrestle out a page and a half of prose. This means that either I am trying harder to make it good, or am losing my quick speed ability to write. I don't know. I would like to believe that it's the first explanation, But that may be writer ego shielding my eyes from the truth.
In my not so incredibly vast, but not too limited, experiences, I've discovered that the more that I know about a subject, the less I know. Know what I mean? I shall give an example.
About two hundred and ninety-seven years ago (never knew I was that old, did you?), I had some schooling in electricity. I went in knowing all that needed to be known: plug in appliances to make them work, and the words behind AC/DC (not the heavy metal band, silly). Soon, I discovered a murky, hidden electrician secret.
We don't really understand electricity. Oh, sure, you can converse about voltages, series and parallels, conduits, all of the usual rigamaroo. But electrons move all over the place. They do not follow a leader. They bing, boing, and ping wherever they fancy. Copper can harness, voltage drops can guide, but no one is truly in charge of individual movements.
In the end, I found that there are a lot more questions to ask than there are answers to meet them.
So here I ping back to writing. The can't quiet group got their sensation done in two days. How did they know it was done? They harmonized, went live, taped, youtube posted, and were done.
How do I know if I'm done, you ask? As my children's book writing teacher told the class, you're done with your story when you are sick of reading it, over and over and over again.
Even then, I'm not done. Once a book, blog, or story is published, it is unwise for me to go back and re-read. There will be a plethora of words attacking me that are not satisfying. Pitchfork, going for the monster type attacks. Scary stuff.
It's become so bad at points, that I've taken off three books from all ready being sold, indie publishing sites. After soothing the beasts of ineffective, glaringly noxious words, phrases, sentences and even chapters, they were put back on the shelves.
In order for me to progress in churning out books, I have come to accept that perfection is not in my writing vocabulary. Which is why I so appreciate the can't quiet group, live theatre, and live music. Those people expose themselves to chances of imperfections--while others are watching them! AND, depend on others to do the right thing. Vulnerability up the yin yang. At least I have a delete button before I hit that publish button.
We've all heard that phrase, Follow Your Bliss. Whatever your--yes, I am talking to you directly Reader-- bliss is, don't suppress it. Let us hear what you can't keep quiet, in all of it's imperfect beauty. If you go for suppression, you will implode. Scientific fact.
Comment below on your bliss. We want to know.
Here is the first book that I took off the ebook shelves and re-wrote. Hope you enjoy this final revision:
Heather Leigh,
Rolling in Imperfections
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