Eneh Akpan Writes: Inspirational writing

Showing posts with label Inspirational writing. Show all posts

Friday, March 28, 2014

10 Ray Bradbury Quotes Embedded in Pictures

Here’s about ten Ray Bradbury quotes to get you fired up for the next assignment—something for your muse to chew on for a little bit.

Some of these pictures might have copyright (not the ones w/ the Ray Bradbury close ups) I'm not sure. But just in case, I hope the owners ain't mad I distorted their works w/o written permission. Look on the bright side, at least, I used it for a good cause. Thanks.

Just saying, did any of the quotes/pix get your juice flowing?

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Battlefield

I’ll have my destiny, if you please:

Not an open sesame,

But that unique individuality

Born of Divinity’s ingenuity.

If it leads me thro’ valley dark n’ deep

Or pastures green with peace

Well, that’s just on more detail

Riding hard on my back trail.

Nevertheless, I want my destiny.

I know there’s a race

I was born to finish.

I can almost feel

The glory of the calling I was born to fulfill.

It’s got the irresistible pull

Of a mission yet incomplete.

I will not be satisfied

Until I breach the finish line.

There’s a destiny,

There’s no denying it,

I was created to accomplish.

Without this I won’t be established.

I’m sick n’ tired of running with the pack,

I’m pulling through for something deeper.

I’m reaching for the mystery behind the cloud;

I want a unique destiny.

I’m not settling for no two-bit hypocrisy

And I damn ain’t quitting on me.

If time wraps up eternity

Until I lay hold on the immortal

Then don’t take it personal.

I ain’t afraid of what my future holds

If my fate is really what destiny molds.

Don’t tell me it ain’t all that

If it’s mine

You bet I want it bad.

Fools may sashay the rose-strewn path,

I guess it’s their birthright but I don’t play that.

I got the strength of character

To risk my balls and get my life on point.

I want my destiny,

I want the meanest particle;

I want to write my history,

Pencil the least article.

I want to bust forth from within the shadow

Riding inspiration’s neck as he rushes from bone to marrow;

Quickening the spirit to the soul,

Working the tissues as one complete whole.

I want to sink my roots into the sands of purposefulness

And I gatto reach out with my branches to welcome the fullness.

As I stem the course of my existence on the walls of fame

Driven by a fiery forge of faith.

Let me chart my fate.

Here I stay in this place

Seeking to know as I’m known.

But not likely when my heart is cold.

I want to be obsessed by my destiny

And my destiny possessed by me.

Excuse me, if I sound a bit cut up

It’s the things that define me that’s bottled up

By the codes of etiquette;

And the plugs that make me tick are splayed

As Thomas Copycat’s buffet.

That’s why I want a fiery destiny;

A map for life charted in hell’s basement,

Tested by fire and found unwanting.

I am decided I will be reconciled to my soul mate;

Lock hands with my identity and go out blazing.

This raw feel within, broiling

Rushing intense conviction sick for release

By the touch of destiny.

If I gatto give a life time,

Sooner or later, the blood always hits the wall,

I’ll offer it up with delight.

Who I will be I will be, somehow;

I want my destiny, anyhow.

Akpan

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Back To Life

On June 19 of ’99, Stephen King caught a van. A light blue Dodge van heading South. The resulting impact almost snuffed the life out of him. He survived with a “cataclysmically smashed hip” and the region below his right knee was reduced to “so many marbles in a sock”.

The days that followed were as frightening as the rising actions of a horror movie.

On July 9, three weeks after the impact, Mr. King was released from Central Maine Medical Center and sent home for rehab and PT (that’s short for Physical Therapy). He shuttled between his home and the hospital enduring gruesome surgeries. I wouldn’t want to go into details but he would have chewed a bullet, that’s for sure.

It would be five weeks after the nightmare, before he would consider getting back to work, his work: writing. The task was very near impossible because of his hip. All twisted and in a terrible mess. But for a man who has scrawled his way out of the most unlikely situations, spilling his soul on the pages of his notebook, he was willing to take the chance.

His wife, Tabitha, who is also a novelist, set up a new writing spot for him at the back hall of their house. Complete with a laptop and a printer, because his wheel chair wouldn’t fit into his usual writing space. On his initial day, he wrote for barely more than an hour before his hold on his hip slipped.

That first day, hope bulldozed a way down the tunnel of his life as he left his mark on those pages. He would later recall such triumphs in these words,

“For me, the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair.”

Despair can hardly wreck a life which exudes passion for his art. It is indeed fact that life can be one sweet affair. And we can always find a pathway in the dark night of the soul through writing. As we go on in pursuit of our craft, we’ll chance that place of release and truly grasp the depth of King’s insight and the transformation that his struggles with a broken hip authored. He did the writing world service by putting it in print so that we can find what took him daunting pressure to discover.

And here’s how he summed it all up,

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

Eneh

Saturday, October 16, 2010

It's Electric. Boogie. Wooogie

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.

Maya Angelou.

If we wanted to take some time to study the phenomenon of the electric current before we fed our household gadgets with its magical juices, we just might never get around to using it.

For some of us based in Lagos, Nigeria or any parts of planet earth, where power supply brings you the worst kind of drama-where power's on the other side of erratic, any research in that quarter is absolutely forbidden. Take as example, a fellow trapped in a relative environment takes his chances, he tries to understand the flow of current, the technicality behind the stuff. He works himself to a rust researching and researching.

The odds are 99 to 1.

Several years after our guy is six feet under, he'll still be wishing the lights had stayed on 'just a few moments longer'.

'Just a little longer'. Could regret evoke a richer melancholy streak? I doubt it.

We don't have to go through this guy's traumas to unravel the mystery called talent. We are sure to come off exhausted and burned out. And, we still wouldn't experience the thrills of creativity. It's the worst kind of defeat. Inspiration is an unstable quantity-unpredictable but it is not changeable. It only stays this long and then it fizzles away.

Understanding your talent is grabbing at it every chance you get.

We all got potential. A measure of ability. A capacity to be inventive and so little time to ravel the functionalities. Experience teaches. It’s all in the long haul. A way to be on first name basis with our creativeness is to be constantly creative; we have to keep having a go at it. And soon enough we would have a feel of our habitat.

The zone is where we go to understand the muse. To enter the zone, we strip ourselves of mutual tensions and accept our gifts for what they are: gifts. You know how sickening it feels to have somebody scrutinize your present to them. Guess what? You are doing it to yourself.

The everyday little activities we perform, when we bring our heart to it and make out time to be creative in that, reveals a little bit of our talent. It is the mystery we are within.

The core of the individual’s characteristics is revealed in his talent(s).

Talent trapped exclusively in pods of spectacular art is not pure talent and consequently, unbeneficial to the talented.

Our lives, the daily chores that define us are often the channels for personal and artistic eruptions.

Bleed your soul’s juice. Charge up a world gone to hell in a hand basket.

Akpan

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Odd Things

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The very first time Robert Louis Stevenson handled a telephone was in the spring of 1880 inside a Magnolia Hotel in Napa Valley.

Stevenson would at a later time christen the experience, “odd thing”. You and I would have considered a similar phrase placed in his shoes. Imagine living in a city. And all that time, not even by a twist of fate, you are never offered the luxury of the telephone (which at the period in question was a fairly new invention). Now, here you are, smack down in the middle of man-forsaken-forest and voila! A total stranger presents to you a piece of civilization and suggests you speak with ‘a man several miles off among desolate hills’. To express it Stevenson’s own words. You find yourself chatting on the telephone for the very first time!

This famous author would adopt the occasion into one of his novels. In 1892, in his novel, ‘The Wrecker’, a character, Mr. Pinkerton asks “May I use your telephone?” This line is considered one of the earliest references to the telephone in a work of literature.

A telephone conversation on the edge of civilization was all it took to provoke a scene in a novel!

We all could remember, several instances we had a character in our stories dabble at a not-so-common scenario and the best we could do was fumble over a thousand little things that would feed the suspense and spark the vibes in the reader’s soul. Place those plots side to side with countless out-of-the-way situations we have found ourselves in. Can you recollect the multiple times you waved these off your mind like smoke in your eye? Think it’s time you start filling that personal journal of yours with these odd things?

You bet!

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Beyond The Word

"Some of us - poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes - beyond the word."

The life of a poet is one beleaguered by metaphors.

Someone rightly said about Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' that lots of people had seen that same church cemetry, had been there, tasted the atmosphere, drank in the fragrance of the buds before this great poet came to the place with eyes simple enough to see his surroundings but not one of these saw the unwritten verse hanging, dangling like the ancient apple, tempting anybody who would look close enough to turn 'em into everlasting words.

Wole Soyinka as a young man.

As a poet it is not just about seeing the ideas posing in your face. Remember Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry:

'Emotion recollected in tranquility'

The primary essence of poetry is being able to capture the 'feel' of that moment, the emotion which inspired the verse and to bring that into the words that becomes the 'visible' poem.

If you look closer you'll find that it is not the words that is poetry but the emotion borne in the phrases and breathed into the reader. The words are like symbols, allographs scribbled representative of something deep and more meaningful, almost too sacred to be 'corrupted' by mere alphabets.

Poetry goes beyond the words and even those few times its invention is spontaneous the rush of inspiration takes credit. A good poem, a masterpiece is rarely ever created in one sitting. It undergoes tons and tons of revision and editing. Sometimes, you might have to blog it to know what others think about it before you can add the finishing touches.

Understanding the Professor, Wole Soyinka's words quoted at the beginning of this article you need to know where he has been. His poems echo his life in prison, his days in exile and his years of contending with corrupt military juntas. Poems from Prison (1969) and The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) describe his close to 30 months in a Nigerian prison, and his play, King Baabu is a satire of African dictators.

So the next time you pick up your pen to write poetry remember to paddle a few miles offshore and really live 'beyond the word'.

Akpan