It is that time of year again...tax season. Time to think of numbers and finances and planning for the future. Most of my time is taken with words and letters and not numbers but I did go and prepare all my tax forms for filing this past weekend.
My taxes are actually very easy since I live like a single mother who is still a twenty year old. I rent, don't own and I don't itemize anything but just take whatever is said as standard. Of course, the grown up in me has had one job and instead of three or four throughout the year and I have a son who does make a create addition to my taxes and any refund. Yet, I may have forgot to mention that I still have to go to my mother's house just to do my taxes. I say it is a good excuse for Joe to see his grandma but really it is so that I can mooch off of her tax program and get any questions answered, you know, like a teenager filing taxes.
Of course it involves a lot less panic when you see you owe the state $3,000 if you actually entered your state data correctly. Don't worry though, I got that all corrected. While I was at home though it was mentioned that I had not posted a blog recently. This was not the first mention of a lack of a posting unfortunately or the first person to say anything. I have had a few mentions. I love writing and try to do it everyday and I have been progressing in my book so that I am now on Chapter Fourteen. If I could I would write, write, write for eight hours a day. There is just one thing that gets in the way...WORK! Okay, well really work and life itself often intrude on those grand dreams. My job is almost always busy throughout the year but there are times it gets busier than normal and now is one of those times. So though I did writing in my journal and on my novel my blog has been ignored up until now.
There are several things I try to do to be able to keep writing even when I am busy. I sneak away for a few minutes to sit in the sun and watch the people and jot down a few things. I go to bed just a little earlier than normal and spend the extra minutes writing or I simply just hide away to do some writing. This past Friday I took a retro day to do just that. It is a day to return to myself a little bit. Some people call them personal days but for me it was a retro day. I have been so busy and stressed lately that I needed a day to find myself again.
In many respects finding the meaning of ourselves can be done in our writing. When you re-read portions of your writing there will be certain qualities given to a character that seem similar just as there may even be certain events being recalled that meant something to the writer and are now attributed to a character. We as writers put a lot of ourselves in our writing, which is why when a writer decides to take on the task of writing a novel it becomes a very personal task. We dream the characters and their lives and feel as if they are real because to us they are, they are a part of who we really are inside.
Of course there are also those characters who are vastly different than we are or who are more like a neighbor, friend or co-worker because of their extravagance. So as I sat and did my taxes I realized that sometimes we are words and letters and sometimes we are numbers. The story and plot is about the motion and action and feelings and ideas that are being given to you in words and images. There are no boundaries because it is the words that are being painted into our imaginations. So how do we get to the numbers you may wonder? Numbers are very concrete. When you were in first grade you probably learned that 1+1=2. I can almost guarantee you today that 1+1 still equals two and that your own child is learning it that way. We may derive different ideas or see different things when we re-read a story but the structure and boundaries often remain the same.
Are you confused yet? Well, let me try to explain. I once dated a guy who was an engineer who said that the world is all 1s and 0s and that a colorful person like myself tries to change it but that the only truth is the 1 and the 0. I then surprised him when I finally agreed but saw the artistic element of the 1 and the 0. All numbers are just artistic expressions for the one and the zero. The number 4 is just a combination of ones placed in a different way and 8 is two zeros living on top of each other. He was impressed by the idea but books have the same combination of creative and structure. There still needs to be meaning behind the creative idea and that is where structure and numbers come into play. We have page numbers and chapter numbers to give our stories a boundary. The book still has a beginning and an ending and when we describe anything it has definite shape and form put into words. Shape and form are the math and the actual picture is the art.
Of course, it could just be that I was doing my taxes and couldn't understand the numbers and so my mind wandered into the creative....It is number season time once again.
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