An Explosion of Creativity

I'm feeling an overload of creative ideas. It's good in the sense that it gives me lots to work on, which keeps me busy. But it's not so good in that all my projects take time and I just can't do everything all at once.

Let's start with scrapbooking: I haven't really done much other than the memory board for Grandpa since the weekend of Mother's Day. I've done a few more of the Death Valley pages, but not much. But that will change soon. I'll be moving over to mom's house to dog-sit while they are in Alaska (for SIX WEEKS) and so I'll have lots of room to spread out my scrapbooking stuff and get some things finally finished (like the Death Valley book and last year's Best Year Ever book). In an effort to jump start my motivation, I've planned another scrapbooking gathering for this Saturday and I've already gotten several of people telling me they will be there. I'm really excited. Our gatherings are always so much fun and even if I don't get much done that day, I always end up with tons of ideas.

Which all leads to my photography hobby. Since Don will be taking his camera with him to Alaska, I've asked my Grandma if I could practice for a little while on Grandpa's camera. I've been playing with it since the 4th of July and I'm starting to get a feel for the different modes and speeds. The camera is something between my "point-and-shoot" camera and Don's fancy-pants SLR, so it's working out pretty good. I took it to church with me last week and took some pictures of the kids playing in the nursery. Toddlers are great for practicing action shots (so are the dogs, but it was nice to practice somewhere other than mom's yard). I got some really cute pictures, but I'm not going to share them here as I didn't talk to any of the parents and I don't know how they would feel about their kids' pictures being on the Internet.

And speaking of my practice photography, Don talked me into entering some of my pictures into the fair this year. I've got to pick out a couple of pictures and get them developed at the required size and everything and then take them in to be judged by the end of the month. I'm nervous, but excited too. If nothing else, it's thrilling to imagine that this year, when I'm looking through the photography exhibits, I'll eventually seen one I recognize as my own. How cool is that?

And then there is the other area of creativity that I seem to constantly be playing with: writing. I'm taking a Creative Writing class this summer and I'm really enjoying it. I'm not sure how much of the assignments I'm going to post on here, but I don't mind telling you about what I'm doing. It's a Tuesday night class and tomorrow will be my third class. Our second assignment is due tomorrow at the beginning of class. We were supposed to write a poem, and let me tell you, it has not been an easy task for me. I haven't written poetry since I've been back home, so that's several years now.

The funny thing is that when I took Creative Writing at Lee (way back when), I had little trouble with the poetry section and completely blocked when we did short stories. But this time it seems reversed. Last week we were supposed to write a short story that was at least one page long. Mine ended up being four pages. But then when he assigned the poem, I froze up. It's taken me almost a week, but I finally have the skeletal beginnings of a decent poem on paper. As I go through and do the revisions and corrections and changes, my confidence in my ability to write keeps waivering. First I doubt my ability to write poetry:"Does the poem say what I want it to? Does it say anything at all? Did I get enough emotions without making it overly sentimental? Will anyone else be able to identify with the ideas or am I only speaking to me?". Then my worries start to stretch out beyond what I'm working on right now to what I've already done: "What if I get my paper back tomorrow and it's covered in red marks where he tells me how terrible it was? What if he hated what I wrote and informs me that my writing style sucks? What if he tells me to leave his class because he obviously can't teach me anything about writing? What was I thinking, taking a class like this?".

But I suppose if I truly was a terrible writer who was unable to evoke any type of emotion from my readers, I probably wouldn't have very many people following my blog. And once I start reminding myself of that, I start to remember that the papers and poems I've written in the past have always been well-received, so why should this be so supremely different?

So there you go: I have a summer full of creative expressions all planned out. I just hope I don't peak too early.