It was one of those fall evenings where the light starts to fade earlier and everything feels much later than it should be: the night, the projects due, the dinner that no one’s gotten to yet. The symposium had gone well…what little I could understand of it. Sometimes I wondered how I even got into college and even now I felt like an infiltrator, sitting in the back of the classroom, pretending I could actually be a part of this world where people defended their papers to their peers.
I’ve been reading through Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and with Others, which has been a super helpful resource in getting me over writer’s block and back on track in seeking publication. She has a lot of different exercises at the end of each chapter and one of them was “write about a time your writing got rejected.” So I decided to give it a shot…bear with me as I recount the tales of a woe-begotten nine-year-old. Continue reading
Writers typically fall into two camps when it comes to creating by imitation. One side proclaims, “You can’t ever learn anything if you only imitate, you must be original. You must create your own voice.” The other side of the camp says, “Art is imitation. It is only by imitating others first that we can be original.”
I recently discovered the musical, Hamilton. For those of you who are like me and want to dismiss it out of hand just because it is popular…please don’t. It really is just as amazing as people claim and well-worth listening to, even if you don’t like rap/hip-hop. The album gave me a new perspective on several situations in my life, but one song in particular resonated with me: “Wait for It.”
(Photo credit:http://www.photl.com/images/photos/2010/05/11/2056/wm260474tt.jpg)
Start a blog, they said.
Writers need exposure, they said.
You have to engage in social media, they said.
I’ve tried, I said.
Try again, they said.
And here we are.
ali oleary 
