Create beyond your skill set

January 30, 2020Leave a comment

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Someone recently came to me for help on an quick design project. I realized while I was helping them with it how much I loved it. I loved that someone had this great big idea that I never would have thought of and instead of dismissing it because they didn’t have the skill set to make it they got help so that it could be created.

Our ideas often overshot our skill set, and that is an amazing thing for multiple reasons, it gives us room to grow and it gives us room to collaborate.

My friend came to me with a collaboration and together we were able to make it a thing. She had no interest in the process just the finished product, which is fine, because the finished product was amazing and important. Sometimes that’s about as much skin as we want in the game, we just want to see the idea realized. I had as much fun making it as she did creating it and in the end we could both be proud of something, but there is also something to say about creating something yourself that you don’t have the skills for yet.

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Five real life truths I’ve learned from writing fiction:

July 30, 2017Leave a comment

The characters are more important than the plot. This one someone might debate with me, but I stand firm on it. If you have a good plot with really terrible characters you have a bad book. You need characters you can relate too or at least somewhat understand. If you have amazing characters with good character development and the stories plot line isn’t that great, you’re book is at least somewhat decent.

Life is a lot like this. Our life stories might not be the most interesting. We can’t all have the one in a million success stories that we hear about on TV. We all have interesting points in our lives, we all do amazing things, but our whole lives aren’t going to be filled with that kind of excitement, and that’s okay, our stories are still great, because we’re the lead characters and who we are is enough. We’re all interesting, we’re all unique, we all have amazing character development. Our lives are all worth reading.

Everything has a lesson. What’s the moral of the story? It’s a question you should have an answer to at the end of every book, if you don’t have one then I don’t know what kind of book you just wrote, but it’s probably not the most valuable piece of literature. Everything that happens in a story should lead to something else, every event should have lessons that we bring to the next plot point, just like everything that happens in our life should be learned from. The world is full of knowledge. Every mistake and every success promises more and more of it, if we ignore the lessons we aren’t ever going to develop our own stories.

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Five Reasons to Journal:

June 5, 2015June 20, 20154 Comments

Sleep Management: Believe it or not, journaling before bed is great for putting you to sleep. It takes a load off your shoulder and it’s not a brain stimulus. You know the scrolling you do on your phone? It’s a huge stimulus- anything with a screen is! White paper on the other hand, is not.
Scheduling: When you start recording what you’re doing everyday along side your hopes and your dreams you’ll find that you realize, not only what you’re wasting time on, but where you can fit in other things. You’ll see more and more relation to the dreams and the things you do everyday!
Creativity: Writing is a form of art if wielded that way! While most people start out with standard journaling, a lot of people find themselves moving into prose and poetry. Still writing about their emotions and days. Not to mention many people put in actual doodling and go into typical art
Memory: It’s always nice to be able to go back to a certain moment of time and day. And even though our brains are beautifully strong and able to remember things we don’t understand, there’s simply to much to remember. The small details are normally the best, and those are often forgot.
Stress Management: This one’s pretty clear, ranting is good for you, ranting into a journal isn’t much different, but it doesn’t leave a bitter aftertaste in the person your talking to’s mouth.