Category: About Writing

I’ve discovered that Storyworth allows you to substitute story topics that are different from the weekly prompts that they provide. In fact, they have only a total page maximum (and not a number of stories maximum) – which means that I could answer all their prompts, and write another 50 stories/posts, provided my total page count for the year doesn’t exceed their overall page maximum. (I can also reorder the stories.)

Since my stories/answers to the Storyworth prompts are on the short side, this provides me with an opportunity to include some additional meaningful stories about my life – that my family could read someday.

This opportunity is kind of exciting. I’ve been doing some side writing, in addition to the Storyworth prompts, so I need to figure out the mechanics of getting my ‘side writings’ into the overall Storyworth flow – so that these ‘side writings’ will also get physically published into my Storyworth book at the end of the year.

For Christmas, my daughter Kathleen bought me a subscription to Storyworth – which is a site that prompts you each week with a question, has you write up a short answer, and at the end of the year publishes a physical book with all those answers printed. I appreciated the thought behind the gift – but at first, I didn’t see the value. I already write fairly regularly, so Storyworth at first seemed like a burden – something that I would need to do that would actually steal time from other creative activities.

I started getting writing prompts from Storyworth shortly after Christmas, but it took me about a month (plus some prompting from my wife) to invest time in it. After writing up one or two answers to the questions, I actually started seeing the value:

• It forced me to reflect on my life – A lot of the prompts were questions about my childhood. This forced me to stop and think about my childhood, organize/summarize my descriptive information, and form it into something readable.
• I’m sharing with my family – Storyworth allows me to share what I submit with others, so I’ve added my wife and children – who get pinged when I post something. I’m not sure what they think of it – but, long term, there is value in them better knowing/understanding me.
• It made me write – I’ve been investing a lot of time converting my writings from high school and college into digitized form – and posting them on my writing website. Even though I thought that I was writing new stuff, I really wasn’t as much as I should. Essentially, Storyworth did, in fact, force me to write. (I’ve duplicated my Storyworth posts onto this site under the category ‘Reflections’.) This is a kind of ‘kick in the pants’ that I needed to get me regularly writing new stuff again – and not just posting weird stuff that I wrote decades ago.

Since I started a month late, I found myself having to double the pace – answering two prompts a week instead of one, just to keep up. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s funny and interesting how much it is pulling me into actually flexing my creative writing muscle.

As I mentioned above, I initially thought Storyworth was a bad/redundant thing – but I’ve come to appreciate it, and I’m happy that I’m doing it.

Thanks, Kathleen.

I now have more than 150 posts on this site — pretty exciting. During December 2021, across my art and writing sites, I published more than one post a day. That fast pace came from several factors:

• I took two weeks off over the holidays
• I was sick for about a week and a half of those two weeks 🙁 — which gave me low-energy downtime to spend in front of a computer
• I sorted through all of my loose papers, categorized them (art, writing, music, school, work, etc), and grabbed some ready for posting
• We got our printer fixed (replaced), which provides an easy mechanism to scan paper art and writing, and convert them to digital (with the help of Google Keep, which can read handwritten text, including cursive)

The pace will now slow: since I’ve scanned most of my old stuff (and am no longer on vacation), plus I need to start doing more creation of new writing and art.

A couple of interesting notes around the paper that my old writings are on:

• First, most of the paper we used as kids was the backside of old office paper from my dad’s work. So the backside of many of MY writings are FMC logs of chemical shipments, etc.
• Another interesting thing is — now that I’m using google to convert my old writings to digital text, I’ve found that some paper (not the kind mentioned above) is thin enough that the page image shows the text from the page beneath — which I then need to edit out (a bit of a bother). In other words, scanned text shows future paragraphs. I might need to start inserting a blank paper between scanned pages to avoid this bleed through.
• (Also, I’ve previously mentioned how some of my stories are on tractor feed paper…)

The secret to writing well is writing often.

This post is my 120th entry on this site — a nice round number, and a bit of an exciting milestone for several reasons

• The site is now fully functional — which it wasn’t for years
• I’ve dug out my box of old writings, have found a way to scan even hand-written text, and have posted 15 items within the last week
• Within those 15 items are 10 complete stories (all old and silly) which brings my count of old stories to 26 — the same as my number of old poems

I don’t know how many more items are in my box. It could realistically be a hundred, given that there are lots of single paragraph ‘unfinished stories’ in there.

Go, Tom!

I’ve (re)found my box of stuff that I’ve previously written. Most of it as a teenager — I didn’t write much after college (too many distractions and too much fun).

My (modest) goal is to type up and post an average of one item each day — or seven a week. I’ve already posted two this week, and it’s Monday — so I’m on track.

Most of the items are short — stories of a few hundred words, or poems. So the effort to type them up (and clean them up) is maybe 30 minutes each.

We’ll see how I progress.

I did a lot of reading when I was young, and took a fancy to some of the sillier authors and poets like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll — and I have some of their work memorized. 

I myself have been writing for years. Decades. I have written poems, stories, other random things — so much so that I don’t remember all of what I’ve written.

The other day (maybe a month or two ago) one of my poems was knocking around in my head — and I was confused about whether it was something that I had written, or whether it was written by someone else. I found myself googling words from my own poem to find out who the author was. When no results came up, I concluded that it must be mine. I subsequently got my writing site functional and found it (Death of a Student).

Kind of crazy.

When I look at my serious poetry (and yes, there are a few in the mix, especially under New Poems) I find that my wording is sometimes a bit too simplistic when compared to other poems I find online. My subjects are good, the depth of the ideas, the emotion (hopefully) evoked — all ok — but all these could be amplified if I better used the words themselves as another member of ‘the team’. A memorable poem is quotable and, for a poem to be quotable, the wording needs to stick in your head — through unexpected or powerful word choices and combinations. In short, I need to make my poems more… poetic. I will try to evolve things in this direction, but don’t expect an immediate change overnight.