Have You Lost It? Reinvent
Post #203
Walking by Inner Vision Blog
Sunday Morning Musing
Have you Lost it?
Reinvent.
I have a story from yesterday morning to share with YINZ.
(FYI: Western PA people say YINZ, instead of “you” or “you all,” when speaking with each other. I feel like we are friends, so I’ll relax and call yinz, YINZ.)
Saturday Mornings usually begin around 3 a.m. when I get up to finalize the
Saturday is for Sharing – feature.
This is my weekly Guest Author post on my blog, SCAN BLOG – Read it here!
Typically, I have the feature outlined and photos with it and just about ready to publish. I go over the story for typos (I am super great at missing typos!). Yep, everything looked perfect yesterday morning. That first hour, I completed one blog article for “Walking by Inner Vision” – published it and was now working on article #2 for SCAN. Rolling right along. Feeling good. I’d be done working when the sun comes up, I thought. Optimistic. That’s me. Always looking UP.
I hit the PUBLISH button.
Next, I pressed the VIEW POST button.
Title? Looks good. Check!
But, WHOA, there is no STORY here!.
Instead of PUBLISH I must have hit DELETE.
Yep. NOTHING but empty space instead of the nice story for Mike Bayles, a Minnesota poet and author. It was now 5 a.m. when I made this discovery. I was not smiling now! Optimistic me was feeling a bit scattered. Confused. Now what?
NOT only was the blog post EMPTY – OMG – I soon discovered I had LOST all of the text from my interviews with him. Mike and I had worked back and forth several times for about 2 months.
Now, it was gone.
A quick check into Mike’s file revealed I had not saved the texts there. What???
All that was in his file were some scans from his book. After a frantic search through other files and folders, I realized I had nothing more on Mike.
What to do? Today was the scheduled day for Mike’s article to appear on SCAN.
I mean, it must have gone to the depths of hell, or, on the other side, into outer space –
It was that sort of GONE. Vanished!
I had NO BACKUP.
I know. I know. I know.
How STUPID that is, eh?
I have 2 Options:
#1_ sit down and cry
#2_ reinvent the story
Crying is not my style. I don’t have time for crying. I’m a tough cookie, I’ve been told.
I remembered that Mike and I had exchanged a number of e-mails because I was asking him questions about his writing life. Fortunately, I found a couple of letters and began to work from them in developing an entirely new story for Mike.
Because Mike discusses his writing method
as akin to creating
– a COLLAGE –
I decided to make Mike’s Story
a Literary Work of Art
I created his feature article as a
Literary Collage
That means, I used fragments and slivers, little pieces of a variety of texts, links, and scans.
How can YOU do this?
Shift them about into various places in the story.
Do NOT think about creating a LINEAR timeline or telling the story in a step-by-step way.
Past – Present-Future – You can move them around and intertwine them into a beautiful new picture.
Try to be more CREATIVE with your story.
Turn YOUR STORY into a LITERARY WORK OF ART.
The SECRET IS: There are no rules.
Give it a try? I think you will be delighted with the “breath of life” you can bring to a story by working in this way.
I am a Visual Artist – CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING comes NATURAL for me!
It WORKS like MAGIC.
Mike’s Guest Author feature turned out great and he was happy. He remarked that he really liked the way I worked his “words” around in and out of information about his book. I even included a scan from the Amazon dot com advertisement for his book. And, I used his stunning book cover for the Featured Photo for the article.
The story turned out fascinating because of Mike’s unique writing and his thoughts, but it has a really nice VISUAL dimension to it as well. It reads well, and it looks interesting on the page. I like it much better than what I originally wrote. This was a wake-up call for me – don’t settle for “ordinary.”
What more could we want?
Have you ever lost a piece you worked on and had to begin all over again?
It does not feel good when this happens but we can turn that train wreck into a “HAPPY ACCIDENT” by changing how we THINK the second time around.
REINVENT your STORY
Read Mike’s Guest Author Story
This article is the property of Pennsylvania author, Lynda McKinney Lambert. Copyright September 23, 2018. All rights reserved.
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I LOVE you for that!
E-mail: llambert@zoominternet.net
Blog and website at: www.lyndalambert.com
Author’s Page: http://www.dldbookslcom/lyndalaambert
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Our truest life is when we are in our dreams – awake. Henry David Thoreau
