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Saturday, January 1, 2011

Bring It

Margaritas on the table, supper a few hours away and the snow is beginning to slowly drain away.  What more can someone ask for?

In the lull between cocktails and supper - Chinese if anyone cared, my two fave cooks, hubbie and a good friend, are scouring a new online site on herbs.  I, having been relegated to the kitchen out of necessity, is relieved to finally release those duties to someone with a talent for culinary pursuits.  And listening to the exchange revolving around Vietnamese cinnamon and black sesame,  I can hear the passion in the possibilities.

Rourke's passion - stuffed animals - and apparently, eyeshadow - insert shrug here. 
Passion.  That gut wrenching, must do emotion that drives one forward and perseveres even through every obstacle, major or minor.  It's the reason you'll steal time anywhere you can even if five o'clock a.m. becomes a regular visual on the bedside alarm.  It's similar in every endeavor.  Passion is what drives us.

For me it's words.  But sometimes through the long hours of getting that first draft onto paper, something gets lost in the translation.  Whether you lose direction or suffer from verbiage - the result is a story needing an overhaul. 

An overwritten first draft is rather like an over-spiced dish.  Except, according to my resident chefs, maybe a tad easier to fix.  At least with a story you can scale back and strip it down to the bones to find the guts that first drove the idea into life.

The reality is that passion easily settles into the day to day mundane and ideas get lost in word counts and line edits.  But you would never have begun it in the first place if there hadn't been special in those first words.  There have been many words written in the history of mankind and many words to come.  Only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet and still the possibilities are endless.

As Randy says on American Idol - Bring It!  Be your best - show the exceptional that only you can bring.  And always that's what you have to do whether it takes one draft of twenty.  Remember the passion and the excitement that was the inception of the idea?  What made it special?  Go there even if you, and you probably will, have to edit your way back to that wonderful beginning.

Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony is playing in the background.  Now there was a master at passion - he brings it with every note.  Listening to that provides a whole lot of inspiration.

How are you planning to bring it this week?
 
Ryshia
www.ryshiakennie

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