On Inspiration

By way of disclaimer, may I say that, you really had to be there!

Tonight my friend Tanya and her friend (whose name escapes me) put on a fireside in our Ward. The Bishop has been talking them up for a long time and I have been really, really excited to go. (Imagine my chagrin when I couldn't remember if it started at 6 or 6:30 and missed 15 minutes of it by the time I got there.) It was kind of like a two-woman, very hip version of Music and the Spoken Word. They played and sang original songs intermingled with inspiring essays on Talents and Divine Nature and Creativity. The Spirit was so strong. Tanya and I have this very symbiotic relationship when it comes to creativity. We both sense and recognize it in each other and we both love to encourage the other. Neither of us are big and flashy, which makes her encouragement that much more sincere to me. I know she means what she says and I hope she knows the same about me.

One of the first things that drove me closer to taking bigger strides with my writing was accepting Tanya's invitation to go to a speakers night with the Writing Class here in town. Three (or was it four?) authors told their stories of how they got to be published. It was one of those fire-lighting moments that made me think this could actually work. That I could actually become a published author.

One of my favorite songs from tonight was called Thursday Morning. Before she sang, they talked about how they would meet on Thursday mornings to work on their creative projects; writing songs. They would let their kids have run of the house and just go for it in the music room. Her song talked about how setting aside that time to just create was worth the mess that they had to clean up afterwards. I am always talking myself out of writing because the laundry or dishes or blah blah blah needs doing first. What if I set aside time where I didn't feel guilt for letting those things go for a few hours a week and just wrote instead? What if my boys watched an extra episode of Dinosaur Train once in a while so that I can lose myself in the world I've created? Would it be so bad if my girls came home from school and caught me typing away? I would love it my kids grew up knowing that they can, and should, take time to develop their talents and create something that nobody else can do.

I spent a lot of time this past week being sick. I'm not sure if I got hit by 2 sicknesses or if it was all the same bundle, but I struggled gastrointestinally and had a cough besides. It was pretty miserable. I read a lot. I read Divergent, Cleopatra's Moon, Incarceron and Matched. I won't give you full reviews in this post, the point is that reading other people's writing does two things to me... makes me want to write my own and makes me want to change what they wrote. That doesn't sound fair. It's not that I want to change their creative baby, I just mean that I love getting to know their characters and I imagine them doing things differently, just for fun. At the back of Divergent she has excellent "Special Features" and she has a cool essay where she talks about Utopian worlds versus Dystopian worlds. People like to read and write dystopian novels because they are obviously far more interesting, but also because we want to imagine what it would be like to play out certain situations. I love where my imagination takes me when I read and I love the super charged, exhilarating feeling of writing down what only I can imagine even better.

So, at the risk of this being yet another post of mine that comes across as me whining about how I want to write and never do, I just wanted to share what inspired me tonight. It inspired me that two young moms just like me carved out time to follow their creative dreams. Their end products, the songs and spoken sentiments inspired me in their beauty and the fact that they were done! They finished something! They wrote songs that they could then play and sing. They said words into a microphone that they had no doubt edited and honed to be exactly the words that they wanted to say. How much greater would it be for me to be able to pull a book off the shelf and show my daughters what can be done rather than have them stumble onto a bunch of old blog posts about how I wish I had done more. Unless I take pictures of clean sinks and stacks of folded laundry, they won't remember those things, I'm pretty sure.

Go out and create something! That's where I'm headed off to! May we both be successful and enjoy the ride at the same time! 

I know this isn't the best written post in the world, but I wanted to capture some of the feelings and inspirations I caught today. To read my reviews of the books I read, please visit here.