Manga Ideas :: Part 1: A poet's take on writing without fear

I love reading about poetry and the people who create it. They often have a unique take on the writen word and a philosophy of writing that is quite intriguing. So an article in our school's newspaper, talking to a local English professor about her feelings on writing, caught my attention today. Her comments on the events that fuel our writing appy very well, I think, to any art form that tries to create stories or excite certain emotions in the audience. I'm not sure just yet how un-anonymous I plan to be, so for now I will leave out names and specific details, if that is all right. The message, not necessarily the person, piqued my interest, and it is that message which I want to convey. I will take a cue from Jane Austen and leave a blank where the names should be.

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When it comes to words, _______ said she likes "the raw, ragged and real. Sometimes when people are writing, they are afraid of what will come out. Afraid that when the story takes on a life of its own … they are not sure of where it will end up and that scares people. But facing what comes out on the page is very important to healing and I think that it is something that should be confronted, not ran away from. Personally, I love it … how language lends itself to the real experience and I can uncover that."

Holding true to the experience is something that ________ said she feels very strongly about and tries to continue that in her writing and in her teaching.

"A person may be writing a story about their dad and a part comes along that the dad would have sworn under his breath, for instance, but they won't include that in their poem, they try to clean it up. Or, they only use it to lend impact, trying not to offend someone. I think that detracts from the story," she said. "Writing that which holds true to the reality it is based on is much more powerful writing than writing that doesn't. I tell my students not be scared of words, but that means not being scared of what family, peers or friends may say about those words. One can't be scared about what another person is going to say."

________ said she gets most of her inspiration for her own poetry from the valley. "_______ is such a beautiful place; I love it. But I also get it from animals, people, the stories I read," she said. ________ said she mostly finds herself reading the works of Ken Brewer, Steven Dunn, Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds, to name a few.

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A great article. I had been thinking just this morning about another manga that has been rolling around in my head for ages, a project totally of my own making that draws from my own background and culture and does so in a way that is more biographical than anything else I think I will ever create. It would be a radical departure from the things I typically dream up and be more real I think and more reflective of my own exeriences. But there is nothing really like what I want to do in either the culture of my local area (small town communities) or my religion (most local literature or religious "modern" novels are a watered-down treatise of life-changing events or are too culture-specific for the themes to appeal to a broader, grander audience). So while I truly want to create this a small part of me hesitates, wondering if anyone I know will even like it or if I would be branded in a certain way if it ever got published. I would do it well after Elicia and I got started on our bigger, more fantastical projects, and it would be a small side project in a completely different style and genre, so I hope not. But ________'s words give me courage. It wouldn't be crude, of course, since I don't really do crude, but it would be real, maybe searingly so, since I can be horribly blunt when I want to be and I find at those times this causes me to alienate the very ones I am trying to reach. But it would be real and revealing and depressingly optimistic, and I hope that in not shying away from being truthful, more people will relate to my story and main character than won't. So now I am mentally greenlighting my project and ideas for it. I think the idea has merit, and it it fails it will only be in the execution of the writing or drawing. We'll see.

Also, sorry for being so vague about project ideas. I'd just rather nor reveal them or talk about them in specifics until they are in a more concrete form, such as published on the web or in a book (if that day ever comes.) Hope you understand.