Writing From the White-Hot Center

Writing From the White-Hot Center

This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.”  I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”

She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”

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Want to Consider Collaboration?

Ever think about collaborating with another writer or artist on a creative project? Wonder how it works? Bryan Collins, host of the “Become a Writer Today” Podcast recently interviewed Becky and me about our collaboration on our two books, Writing in Community and The Fire Inside. We had an intriguing conversation which provided an opportunity for us to think more about collaboration, how it worked successfully for us, and how a collaborative partner can help you to accomplish more–and better!

You may want to know:
How does the collaborative process work?
What are the advantages?
How do you find a collaborative partner?

You can listen to the interview (or view the transcript of it) here.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase our latest book, The Fire Inside.

The Writing Life: Keeping the Faith

Are you a writer? A visual artist or musician? As my writing partner, Becky Breed, and I write in  The Fire Inside, we are all creative, an inner fire aflame in us, urging us on. But it is not always easy—sticking to our writing or our art–we need to keep the faith.

I believe that the longer we live the creative life, creating poems or paintings, making music, loving our work, sometimes struggling in our work, the more we realize that our art is a calling, our birthright to create. And we are in it for the long haul.

We may come to the realization gradually, or it may be that after two or three years of writing, it suddenly dawns on us that this obsession of ours is not going away. This is not the fad of the moment we pick up for a while, and then drop as interest wanes. It’s more like embarking on a marriage, building a relationship that will last a lifetime.

There will be hard times: days when it’s difficult to get to your easel, when the words for your poem won’t come, or if they do, limp onto the page and fall flat. Nothing worthwhile comes easy, the old saying goes, and that is certainly true of our passions, our art. Still, it is our passion, our deep love, and we want to keep at it, knowing that our lives would not be as rich or as full without it. So you find a way to keep the faith, to keep on going. How do we do that? Here are some tips:

  Keeping the Faith 
  1. Look for the joy in the “every-day” of work. Relish those moments when the words flow from the tips of your fingers, when the brushstrokes come free and fluid.
  2. Read books like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. These and other writers provide gentle encouragement and help keep you going.
  3. Set goals for yourself—such as writing a certain number of pages per month, or sending out a certain number of submissions—and ask a friend to hold you accountable.
  4. Celebrate your accomplishments—even the small ones. When you find the right color for your painting, the right word for your poem. Give yourself a pat on the back when you send out a story to a potential publisher.
  5. Develop a work schedule and stick to it as much as you can. Include in your schedule some down time, time to go “off-line” and free your mind.
  6. Don’t beat yourself up when you stray from your writing schedule or fall short of your goals. Give yourself a break. Be kind. Then get back on track.
  7. Become a part of your local artist community. A good writing group or artists’ group can provide a lifetime of support and encouragement, and is probably the very best thing you can do to nurture and sustain your creative life.

Elbert Hubbard said that “Art is not a thing, it is a way.” It is not the finished painting that matters, the completed novel (though these accomplishments are wonderful!) It is the everyday of work—the violinist practicing, the writer writing, the many happinesses found in doing what we love. This is why we wrote The Fire Inside—the joy in creating. We hope you pick up a copy and explore its pages. We hope you get in touch with your inner fire—and keep it blazing.

For more ideas to help you along the creative path, see our book, The Fire Inside. We think you’ll be inspired!

The Power Within

The Power Within

Feeling powerless in your writing life? You don’t need to!

Let’s say you’ve been on the creative path for some time, but are feeling depressed, thinking you are not as far down the road as you envisioned. You write and you write but the essence of what you want to express remains elusive. Or perhaps you feel that you have acquired the chops it takes to be a writer. But your publications remain few and far between. The series of books you dreamed of remains just that—a dream you fear will never be realized.

Many writers, good and talented, dream the same dreams you do, and want validation in the form of a book. The same is true in other areas of creative endeavor–people who are pursuing their aspirations in the visual arts, in photography and acting and design. The competition for public recognition is fierce. The reality is that in some areas of the artistic life, we have little control. We cannot make the publisher publish our book. We have no control over whether the director will choose us for the part in the play. That power lies in other hands.

There is, however, much over which we do have control. We can do our work—complete our paintings, learn the new dance routine, write new stories and poems. This is great and joy-filled power. And if publication is your goal, know that every poem you write makes the possibility more likely. Every submission you make makes it likelier still. Rejection has been and will always be a part of the submission process. Perhaps because the piece you submit isn’t quite “there” yet. Or because the editor had a bad day and couldn’t see it for what it was. We can’t control the latter, but we can continue to hone our abilities—take classes and workshops, strive always for excellence, and keep submitting. We can also take an active part in the artistic community. So that when possibilities come along, we will be aware of them. These things we can do.

And whether or not we are recognized by the gatekeepers of the art world, our greatest power lies in believing in ourselves and what we are doing. We were born knowing there was magnificence around us; it was magnificence we were created from, and we are capable of greatness we cannot imagine.

We are like birds, the ability to sing in our own unique ways embedded within our DNA, the facility of flying in the ways we were meant to fly. We yearn to find the notes to the song, to take wing in flying. And while sometimes we try to suppress that yearning, it is there inside us, waiting like a phone we know is about to ring. And when it does, it will be our destiny on the other end of the line, the call we have been waiting for.

All we need to do is answer the phone. Pick up the pen or the paintbrush and do what we were meant to do  And take joy in that, even if the book remains unpublished. “…Publication is not all it’s cracked up to be, “ Anne LaMott said. “But writing is.” It is the creative act itself which matters—the intense focus, the feeling of reaching beyond yourself to connect with the magnificence of the universe and bring into being some new sort of beauty. There is satisfaction in that, and great joy, and therein lies true power. You have it within yourself.

For more ideas to help you along the creative path, see our book, The Fire Inside. We think you’ll be inspired!

“Signposts” in the Writing Life

One March, driving west for a skiing weekend, my husband and I found ourselves in an interesting situation. It was a cold, cloudy day, snow on the ground but the roads were clear, and we were doing fine. That is, until we crossed the Nebraska border into Wyoming. Then the wind began to blow. Fiercely, hard out of the north, and as it blew, it brought snow with it, scudding across our line of vision. The farther west we drove, the more the wind howled, the blowing snow creating a ground blizzard. Visibility extended only a short distance ahead. Luckily, the highway had roadside reflectors about a hundred yards apart, and we spent the rest of the trip, our hearts in our throats, driving past one reflector and waiting the few anxious seconds before the next one came into view.

Sometimes it can feel that way in our creative lives. We start out pursuing our dreams—committing to creative time, finding ways to deepen our abilities. And now and then putting ourselves and our work “out there” for scrutiny. But though we keep doing our jobs as artists, we’re not sure we’re getting anywhere.

That’s when we need to keep our eyes open for the “reflectors,” those little glimmers that provide hope, that let us know we’re still on the road to where we want to go. What are these reflectors? Signposts that tell us we’re on the right path? They can be something as simple as an appreciative nod from a mentor or fellow artist, or an invitation to display your photographs in a coffee shop. The occasional acceptance of your poem to a literary journal, or an encouraging note in a rejection letter.

Even better than these outward forms of acknowledgment are the times of inner knowing, arriving sometimes mysteriously. When a small voice inside whispers you’re getting better, you’re getting the hang of it. That aha moment when you realize you know what to do to make a particular chapter of your novel come alive. These are small moments in a long artistic life, but each is a sign of progress taking us to the next moment and then the next.

E. L. Doctorow said that “writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” That’s how we live our lives, our artistic lives as well. Driving blind, or nearly blind, depending on the occasional guidepost along the way.

For more ideas to help you along the creative path, see our book, The Fire Inside. We think you’ll be inspired!

Writing Exercise:

  1. Imagine you are planning to write a memoir.  Don’t panic, this is not the exercise, this is just “playing pretend,” imagining. So in outlining of your imaginary memoir, jot down certain facts of your life that will need to be write about.  I might include:
    –I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere
    –I grew up poor
    –I married Tom (or Mary Ann or whoever)
    –I fell in love with flowers
  2. Next, read the poem “Why I’m Here” by Jacqueline Berger.
  3. Now, select an item from your list and put the word “why” in front of it.  This will become the working title of the piece you write.  You will be digging deeper. For instance, the title of my poem might be “Why I Grew Up Poor.”
  4. Write, using the title as above, and beginning the body of your poem or essay with “Because,” and repeat as needed.

 

 

The Fire Inside

The Fire Inside

Chapter One: The Fire Inside

We all have deep within us a yearning, a passion, a desire to make and to do, to create something out of our hearts and imaginations that did not exist before. To bring forth something new upon the earth. It is innate in us, this intense wanting, and when we are engaged in the specific type of creativity we were meant to do—whether it be painting, writing, making music or designing a new way to educate our children—we experience what Martha Graham calls “a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening.” It’s what puts the spark in our eyes, the skip in our steps. It is the fire inside.

Do you know that fire? Sometimes it manifests itself as restlessness, a vague dissatisfaction, a feeling that there is something important you must do, you have to do, to be true to yourself. It is the little ache you feel when you read a story that is heartbreakingly true and think I want to do that, or when you see a painting that stuns you with its power, and your fingers itch to pick up a paintbrush.

Maybe it isn’t exactly clear what is burning inside, what you want and are put on earth to do. Or perhaps you know in your bones that you must write poetry, you must dance or die, you must create gardens of incredible beauty, but maybe you’re afraid that if you try you will fall flat on your face. You doubt yourself and your abilities.

This is the way we humans are, having an intense wanting on one hand, fear and doubt on the other. But let us accept as an essential truth that we are all creative, wildly creative, each and every one of us—that we have vast reserves of untapped talents and abilities—songs only we can write, sculptures waiting to be born from the unique spirit that is us; and when we accept that belief and act on it, oh, then! We wake each day with a new animation, a vibrancy and passion. We feel like children let out of a stuffy classroom into a blue-sky spring day, and we can’t wait to see what we can do with it.

The fire inside is the “something” that fascinates you, intrigues you, so that you go to sleep and wake up thinking about it. You want to study it from all its interesting angles and make it central to your life, keep working at it, falling short in your aspirations at times, but trying and trying again. And if you are not currently involved with something that brings with it such zeal, if you’ve kept your fire tamped down, unable to act on your passion for whatever reason, know that it is still there— the beginning of days filled with intense purpose and meaning, waiting for you.

You can take a closer look at (and pre-order) The Fire Inside here. For more about the writing and creative life, you can visit our home page.

“The Fire Inside” Creative Exercise:

Each of us was put on this earth with certain innate talents and abilities, things we were meant to do. Some of us can identify almost immediately what these might be, what is “calling” to us. For others of us, it may take a little time. The best way to do so is to follow the love trail.

What do you love?  What puts the shine in your eyes? (And there will be more than one thing.) Find some meditation time, some time alone, and consider what you love, what might be calling to you. Maybe it is spending time messing with watercolors, or taking pictures and arranging them in a scrapbook to tell a story. Maybe you love figuring out the plots in mystery novels. Jot these down in your notebook. Try this exercise several times a week, several times a month. You’ll begin to see patterns and themes and it may become clearer what you love to do.

 

Announcing…our Book Trailer!

Hello Friends,

As you may know, our new book, The Fire Inside: A Companion for the Creative Life will be released June 1. It is the second of our “Essential Writing and Creative Series,” and we are excited! To announce our book, we’ve ventured into new territory, and began working with an excellent designer to create our book trailer.  Check it out!

What Can Cranes Teach You?

“Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”—Mary Oliver

Photo by Jeanne Dill.

The cranes’ visit.
Last week, on a side road off Nebraska Interstate 80, I heard them first, the “music of an angelic avian chorus” as naturalist Paul A. Johnsgard describes the strains of the sandhill cranes. For more than a thousand years, five hundred thousand cranes have come to Nebraska and refuel in the harvested cornfields along the Platte River Valley consuming corn and other grains.

The cranes’ thin, pointed black bills move up and down like pistons and, while their heads blink red, they pick clean the harvested fields. When you see them from a distance—all those legs and elbows—they look like the moving parts of a great overheated threshing machine.

What can cranes teach you?

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Why “Sense of Place” Matters: In Writing and in Life

Sense of Place in Writing

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a connection with the landscape, and believe that a sense of place matters a great deal—both in life and in writing. We live out our lives against a backdrop of mountains or deserts, the prairie, city streets, or the ocean, often in various combinations of these settings.

And this affects us. It has an important impact in developing our character–how we perceive the world, how we perceive ourselves. So it is that, coming from our particular backgrounds as we do, when we write, we do so out of that background--whether our story takes place on the plains of Nebraska in the 1950’s or the Russian steppes of Tolstoy’s time.

In addition, of course, writing with a strong sense of a story’s setting provides the potential for readers to experience a place they may not have been before. Reading Wuthering Heights, we find ourselves in the Yorkshire moors of the 1700’s. Melville lets us experience the “sweet mystery” of the sea, and its “gentle awful stirrings.” We, too, can offer this experience to our readers, whether we write of life in the small town we came from, or the rocky coast of Oregon which we’ve only read about.

Most importantly, a powerful sense of place makes our writing come alive. Our characters fall into and out of love, make terrible mistakes, suffer, and find joy again—in a particular place. This is enormously significant in good writing. Place helps to make our characters who they are, just as it makes us who we are.

Sense of Place for Me

I grew up in rural Nebraska, and lived on four different farms our family rented until buying our “home place” when I was fifteen. And I attended three different country schools. Going to school meant walking down gravel roads with my sister, the two of us walking a straight road from north to south, then from east to west, hills and fields stretching out endlessly on either side, the sky enormous above.

It meant living in a place with few trees and few people, walking past deserted farmhouses and wondering who might have once lived there. What does it mean to grow up in a place like this? To live out your life? Does the enormity of the landscape foster feelings of insignificance? Or does it do the opposite? And when you can look out over the sweep of prairie, able to see long distances, what does this do to your view of the world? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I believe it does have an effect, most likely in different ways for different people.

It might mean basking in the place you live, enchanted with its particularities and its delights. It might mean railing against them. Often it is a complicated combination of the two. Whatever it means for you, a sense of place is vitally important. Important to you and to your art.

“The sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind;” Eudora Welty wrote, “surely they are somewhat related. It is by knowing where you stand that you are able to judge where you are.”
–Lucy Adkins

Writing Exercise:

When we first meet and start to get to know other people, one of the first questions we ask is where are you from. Where are you from? Read the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon.

Think about the landscape you are from—is it plains and big sky? A small town nearly hidden in a forest of oak and pine? Maybe you are from sidewalks and buildings that tower, maybe from sultry afternoons and leaf peepers crying at night.

Now consider what your parents did for a living. Maybe they are from Clorox and clothespins like George Ella Lyon’s people. Maybe from pocket protectors and lines of numbers without end. Think about the smells you smelled as a child, the food you ate. The fears that occupied your thoughts at night .

Now, write, beginning “I’m from….” And see where your writing goes.

For more information about the writing and creative life, and our book, Writing in Community, see thewritingandcreativelife.com 

 

Lookin’ for Love: In All the Wrong Places

 [Love] is art’s most powerful and enduring muse, fuel for the creative process, more potent than anything the world has known. –Maria Popova

 

Priming the pump.
Songwriter Johnny Lee and I have something in common– I [am] lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. For if love is the most powerful muse, why is a blank page staring back at me? So, where is the love? Then I remember, and the exhilarating joy of looking, unfolding, breathing in begins… Which image or stunning poetic lines are going to inspire me, lead me down the tortuously sweet path of flowing blue on my pages, into the mad scramble of fingers on the keyboard? In to love?

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