Go slowly.  Love your story.  It will wait for you.

~ Allan G. Hunter

Happy Wednesday, everyone!  This bit of writerly wisdom comes from the blog of fellow writer Rosanna at Writing on the Pages of Life.  I found her site through last week’s Discover Challenge — she submitted a wonderful piece called “Zen and the Art of Writing (A Haibun)” that really takes the reader on a journey, and I highly recommend checking it out.   

Rosanna is a memoirist, which is a type of writing I’ve never tried, but I’ve always wondered if my blogging style would lead me to memoir-writing in the future.  For right now, however, I want to continue focusing on my fiction, even when it gets difficult.

In another recent post, Rosanna talks about her own memoir writing journey and shares the quote from Allan G. Hunter above, which (I believe) comes from his highly-reviewed book Write Your Memoir: The Soul Work of Telling Your Story, published in 2010.

I love it when I come across something that speaks right to the heart of whatever I’ve been musing about lately, and this quote definitely hit home for me.  Even though Hunter is speaking about one’s personal story when writing a memoir, I believe that this is great advice for anyone struggling to write any story.

For me, this so easily applies to my novel Finding Dragons.  I’ve come to the inevitable realization that I won’t be finishing my first draft this year, as was my plan when I started this blogging journey, but you know what?  That’s all right.

No one else can write Azur and Kite’s story.

No one else can help Marziel find the dragons in this fantastic and historically reimagined world that I’ve created.

No one else can bring Azur and Kite, Wren and Pipet, Jadaa-kun, Kohia, Ahohako, Rouchdy, and Namtar together to change that world.

I do love this story, and as Hunter says and I truly believe, it will wait for me while I let it percolate a little while longer.

All right, extras time!  First, I had to look up what a haibun is, once I read Rosanna’s piece, and I really wanted to share.  According to Wikipedia:

Haibun (俳文^?, literally, haikai writings) is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem,^[1] short story and travel journal.

The word prosimetric is another I hadn’t come across, but as it turns out, I’ve actually written in the style before…

A prosimetrum (plural prosimetra) is a poetic composition which exploits a combination of prose (prosa) and verse (metrum); in particular, it is a text composed in alternating segments of prose and verse.

Ah, so all of those songfic fanfictions I’ve written in the past have a fancy name.  Neat!

The next thing I wanted to share was how I personally made that fancy quote picture at the top of the post!  Yeah, go me!  (Hey, sometimes it’s the simple things, amiright?)  It was easy to do using the site Quozio — you just input your text and the author, and then scroll through the choices of all sorts of fonts and backgrounds.  There’s a wide selection, but it’s also thankfully limited to a few pages or else, knowing me, I’d be stuck with analysis paralysis.  You don’t have to register to use it, which speeds up the process — when you find one you like, just right-click to save it to your computer, or even quickly share your creation to Pintrest, Facebook, Twitter, and others with a click.

All right, I’m off.  Stay creative everyone, and if I haven’t said it directly lately, thank you so much for visiting my blog!  🙂

Image credits:
Hunter Quote – created on Quozio
Angelic Pearly White Gold Dust Accented Dragon by the always amazing Lindy Briggs at How Many Dragons?