Left-brain-itis

Today I've finally started doing some more rewriting on the manuscript. It seems like ages since I've touched it, though it's really only a bit more than a week.

The problem I'm trying to overcome at the moment is a severe case of left-brain-itis. I've realised that all that research into brain development got my own brain stuck in scientific, logical mode. Not a good place for a creative writer to be.

Last Saturday, on our girl's weekend in Daylesford, Marita, Annalisa & I all had our tarot cards read. The tarot reader told me I should read books by Charles de Lint, who wrote about borderlands, the places that crossed over between this 'real' world and other worlds. I'd never heard of him (though Marita, being a librarian, had) so the next day we went off to the second-hand bookshop & I bought a copy of his book, Memories and Dreams. The title reminded me of Jung's autobiography, so I thought that was a good omen.

To be honest, de Lint isn't the best writer in craft terms. Some of his sentence construction is so amateurish I find it difficult to read. But craft, even in writing terms, is a left-brain activity, and I badly need to get back in touch with my right brain, so I'm perservering.

And he is a good storyteller. I like the way he weaves fantasy into reality; magic into the everday. And I know that, for my own story, I need to move away from a purely scientific explanation of what is happening to Tash to one that incorporates the unseen forces that science can't explain. I need to bring back the magic and mystery - that's how this story started out in the beginning.

Also last weekend we visited the convent gallery, which had some brilliant artworks of all kinds, including some original lithographs by Chagall (if I'd had a spare $10,000 on me I would have bought one then and there...). That made me realise how important art is to my writing, how I need to be looking at beautiful artworks to inspire me and get my creative juices going.

Funnily enough, Memories and Dreams is about an artist who can bring creatures across from another world through her paintings... sounds like synchronicity to me.