I was interviewed by CHARLENE JONES of Whistle Radio Stouffville for the OFF THE TOP segment! Today, I’m going to share part one of the show.
We talked about my novel writing process, the Muskoka Novel Marathon, Driftwood Theatre and Trafalgar24…
You can find CHARLENE’S WEBSITE HERE.
She is also on TWITTER.
Much gratitude to Charlene for interviewing me.
I can’t decide!
In grade school it was SO simple. You took a sheet of construction paper. You glued macaroni to it. You poked holes in it and threaded pipe cleaners into it. You painted a bit in one corner by blowing through a straw to move a blob of paint around on the page. You glued a feather to another corner. You shot the whole thing up with glitter before sticking a cut-out of your latest Wish item from the Sears catalogue into the centre. You didn’t care. You used all materials available to you. And it looked…well, bloody fantastic. It looked amazing. Art at its finest.
Why can’t we do this as adults? Why can’t we whim our lives? Madly off in all directions!
Because four-letter words are attempting to stop us, to staunch the flow of our creativity. Words like FOCUS. Okay, it’s five letters…but when you try to live within its parameters, it’s four-letter words that come up out of the frustration.
I still want to collage things. I still want to dip into whatever it is I want to do that day. I lack focus. I am easily distracted. As a writer, that’s such an incredible curse. When you don’t even know what genre you want to hang around in, it becomes an issue. Do I want to write contemporary? Do I want to write horror? Do I want to write romance? Do I want to write comedy/humour? The answer is YES. And then there are markets. Do I want to write for kids? Or teens? Or adults? The answer is YES. Heck, I can’t even pick a medium. I want to write for the stage. I want to write for the page.
After my recent Crisis of Happiness, I’m currently struggling over what it is I want to write. At first, I thought I might be struggling with whether or not I wanted to continue being a writer. But I think I have narrowed down my problem to being that I don’t know what I want to write. I don’t know what genre. I don’t know what market. I need to find a way to narrow my focus. I need a crystal ball to tell me what to do next. I have multiple projects halted and in the air. It all stems to trying to funnel myself into one distinct category when my mind wants to go off madly off in all directions.
I need to write despite the fact that I don’t know what to write. Because I’m discovering that if you don’t use it, you lose it.
But I want feathers and pipe cleaners in my paintings, dammit. Nobody puts baby in the corner. Sometimes, I feel like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial. I’m walking down the street with my contemporary Young Adult manuscript in hand and this horror genre comes skateboarding madly toward me and crashes into me. After the accident, I look up at my manuscript and notice it’s covered and dripping with horror. I turn to the genre with the now broken skateboard and I yell, “HEY! You got your genre in my peanut butter!”
This is not my writing life!
KEVIN CRAIG 