Back to the beginning; the beginning of the artistic process; new beginning for the website
This is a short episode crammed into a really heavy schedule for me. More, better episodes coming soon.
You can subscribe to the Hog’s Head PubCast through iTunes, and VOTE for The Hog’s Head for the month of February at Podcast Alley.
Pub Menu
- Joseph Pearce: Tolkien: Man and Myth
- Richard L. Purtill: J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion
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Red Rocker on 
Arabella Figg on 
korg20000bc on 
Travis Prinzi on 
PotterMom05 on 
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Travis,
My creative process is quite similar to yours. Write something down when the inspiration hits me. I do this with haiku poetry. I don’t sit down & practice writing it. I just wait until something strikes me & then I work on trying to fit it into the 5-7-5 pattern.
As for my biggest creative process, writing sermons, well, since I just started a new parish I’m using a lot of old sermons that they haven’t heard before, updated & revised a bit. Otherwise I base my sermons off of the three year series of readings. My church body uses a modified form of this lectionary that came out of Vatican II. Some churches in my church body also use the old one year series of readings from one of our older hymnals. Depending on the time of year, I’ll use sermon series to focus on a primary theme. Times like Advent & Lent are the most common times to use serial sermons for the mid-week services.
My problem too is discipline. I multi task too much & so have too many projects going on at once.
Just listened to the PubCast. Have a couple of thoughts.
For me, the creative process is triggered by a sense of place and time. Fall is the season I find the most evocative – the angle of the sun shifts, changing the quality of the light, from the bright, blazing light of summer to a softer, gentler light. The air is cooler, crisper; it holds different scents: is there anything as evocative as the smell of woodsmoke in the air? The colours of the leaves dazzle, the blue of the sky is deeper, the blue of the lake is darker. There is a sense of evanescent, almost doomed beauty. Every fall, I feel the urge to start writing, to pick up old stories, start new stories.
There are also places that trigger the urge. The battlements of the castle at Alhambra, overlooking the plains, with their sense of history and war and a dooomed empire. A ski resort in the Rockies, with its sense of tiny completeness and perfection: the whole world contained in a small space. Any city in Europe – London, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Copengahen – with its incredibly dense texture and the sense of people having walked the same streets for hundreds and hundreds of years. A marsh, miles and miles of grass pressed down by the wind, the sense of space and beauty and desolation. I am always looking for places to set a murder mystery. I’ve never written one, but I’d like to, one day, when I’ve finished what I’m doing now. I was at a training facility yesterday – miles and miles of corridors and classrooms and courtyards and galleries that ached to become a setting for a murder story.
I am also sometimes struck by newspaper articles: man with amnesia washes up on a beach in Ireland; part of a body found in a bog; missing man, missing woman, missing child. Real crime is very depressing: mean and mundane and incredibly petty; real criminals are uninteresting people – JKR got that right. But the imagination can take off from a single detail and make a more vivid world.
That’s what I’d like to do one day, for real, rather than playing with it like I do now.