Artist Dates

In one of those books that most writers have picked up at some point, The Right to Write, Julia Cameron suggests that writers need to repeatedly "fill the well." She recommends going to one -- for lack of a better term -- "cultural" event , by one's self, a week. A museum, a lecture, a symphony, an art class, whatever. This doesn't have to be -- and perhaps shouldn't be -- something that is connected to a subject you have written or want to write about. It also shouldn't be an acitivity where you spend the entire time thinking about how you could weave this experience into a story. Instead, the idea is just to make sure your head is crammed chock-full of information, experiences, knowledge, sensory input, so you can draw on it at some point later when you least expect you're going to need it.

I keep pretending that I'm going to do this once a week. I keep not doing it.

I went to a lecture today on the narwhal -- that whale-ish creature with a unicorn's horn. That horn, it turns out, is a tooth, that protrudes out its upper lip, on the left side only, and extends for like 10 feet. Evolution has played some weird weird jokes out there, people. But the real issue here is that, as one always knows will happen, going to a lecture like that just energized me. I have a handful of story ideas I want to follow up on -- some directly related, some not. And I am more motivated in general on the stuff I'm already working on, since I got connected again to modern science and was reminded how fun and thrilling it can be.

So, artist dates. You heard it here -- I hereby solemnly swear to go on one a week for REAL.