Personal Power – (Part 1)
Hello everyone. It is Sunday afternoon in LA and I am here with Chris waiting for a piano to be delivered. I’m not sure the acoustics in the studio will work out with the piano and the lease does not allow this…but that’s what Sunday afternoons can be like. I am working on my Powerful Person project where I am trying to get my drawings to dominate the top results for searches on images.google.com. They are getting pretty close to the top! But one thing I need to do is create more written content for site. That’s what I am working on while I wait for a piano.
In 2016 I wrote a novel. Well, sort of. I was writing a novel but when I published what I’d done the book was made only of screenshots of my face, taken as I made a live, web cam recording of the process. Every day I would watch a new How To Write a Novel video on YouTube and try to apply that advice into a book I was writing. This was part of my larger HOW TO HOW TO HOW to project I did with Arebyte. But like everything in that project I was doing it because I was curious. I read a lot so the audacity to say I’d like to write a novel is pretty much undoable for me. Instead, I created a project where the journey really could be about the destination.
I bring this up because I am learning that to make a high-quality webpage I need to have a lot of written content. Even though I really only care about the machine, search engine readers of this page those machines, search engine readers care a lot about the human readers. Thus the best way to get the search engine to care is to get people to care. Or to mimic people caring in ways that search engines believe. People is a strong word here because while we are people we, in this context, are users. Users of services. Users of Google. Users of the Internet. And all this has me writing again. In this blog on the Powerful Person website, I will be writing stream of consciousness and using online writing prompts. This also has me wondering what drugs may impact the writing process. When I do my real writing I can’t even begin to consider drinking or drugs. I know writers have the reputation of using both. But when I write generally I need all my focus. Mostly when I write I have something that is very clear to me that I want to share and I need to struggle through how to share it with others. The work is not very creative. The creativity is in the idea, the thing I want to share, the writing is all labor and only fun in the way hard work is satisfying and therefore a certain type of fun. I actually do very thoughtful writing, op eds, academic papers, essays. But right now that writing goes on other sites with other goals. Future projects the two will be more aligned. This project was sort of half down when my new partner told me to rethink the content. This means my writing is a little haphazard. But this writing, being different, maybe I’ll experiment although I did just decide to be Keto until my birthday trip. Ok maybe later. I did a quick Google like, “smoking weed and writing” but I was not willing to go down the Reddit rabbit hole. I’ll just ask some writer friends what they think.
For my first prompt I found a random quick plot generator. It reads:
Your main character is a woman in her early forties, who is very imaginative. The story begins in a psychiatric hospital. A family get-together is arranged. It’s a story about forgiveness. Your character has to resort to underhand methods to achieve results.
When reading this prompt I think, ok! I am a woman. I can relate to the main character is that way. I am closer to my early 40s than I am comfortable with. I am very imaginative. (What does that even mean?) Ah, having or showing creativity or inventiveness. Yeah definitely.
OH the piano movers are here! Chris found this free piano on craigslist and he had it moved here. The piano movers certainly are powerful people. Maybe someday I will learn to play the piano. Or learn to speak Spanish. Maybe both, #settleForBoth.
OK now that piano has been moved and Chris is playing it. I may put on headphones though because it is hard to write even somewhat randomly with any kind of sound for me. There is a YouTube video I like that has hours and hours of white noise.
Back to the brainstorm about the random writing prompt. I have never been in a psychiatric hospital but one of my very good friends, will remain nameless, is there right now. Or was in one recently. I also really loved the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which I hear is also a movie but I have only ready the book. I think The Bell Jar also has major parts in such a place. I think I have something to go on. There is a movie at the edge of my memory that took place it one. It is not Inherent Vice, also a good book, I’m not sure if that really qualifies. There were women. I forget what the main character was in for. One of the others inside had an eating disorder. That’s about all I remember. But there were white rooms and long hallways. And it was definitely about teenage or college age women. Family get-togethers can be stressful and I immediately think of The Corrections. I love this line in the prompt, “It’s a story about forgiveness” which may be the strongest tie back to the theme of Powerful Person. Forgiveness takes real power. I will have to keep thinking on this theme and write more later.
Gretchen Andrew
25 April 2018
