Writers and non-writers alike......

Aristotle wrote, "It is impossible that anything should be produced if there were nothing existing before." Everything written has come from someone's experience and reflection of that experience. From memories and remembered feelings life is replicated in short stories, poems, novellas and novels. The planets align, jungles flourish, gardens bloom, farms produce and the seas overflow with life. People are reading your work and you are in every word.

Each person has a story to tell. A story of possibilities some fulfilled and some decaying within us. Everything we do comes from within. We interpret the world as we feel it. If the world is aligning to hurt us we feel life circumstances from a position of pain. If the world has lined up to make us laugh then we feel the wealth of those in our life with joy. All of us, writers and non-writers alike, feel the greatness of our lives and the lives of those around us. Whether or not we allow ourselves the capacity to feel the great goodness or the despair of selfishness or the darkness of hurting another soul unnecessarily we all have the same capacity to make choices.

Ingrid Bengis wrote ". . . the absence of love in our lives is what makes them seem raw and unfinished." "Them" in Bengis' quote is feelings without feelings in our lives we go unfinished as writers. The writer writes to finish, play out, fulfill feelings. The writer cannot endure raw and unfinished love, despair, fear, anger, joy, happiness or loneliness. We can only mull over feelings for so long before they have to come out. We write what is naturally bothering us in the day.  

Every time we feel the urge to write we have choices. The choice is always ours whether or not to write in our day. The choice of what we write about is also a choice we have. As we live and collect experience from days of mundane happy and painful living we create a formidable repertoire of circumstances, experiences and feelings to use as material for our writing day. 

Every writer has a pattern of responses that keep them away from the laptop or bring them to it day after day. We are comfortable in our patterns, we wallow in our ability to commit or not commit to writing those feelings and experiences hidden deep within us we are afraid to share. Whatever the habitual pattern is we have developed it saves us from the fear of sharing ourselves with total strangers. The discomfort of opening ourselves up and sharing our feelings is a risk we may or may not make, but the choice is ours.

Orinda said, ". . . my grief was too deeply rooted to be cured with words." As writers what do we get back from taking the risk of sharing our feelings and our lives with strangers; especially those strangers who call us son, daughter, aunt and friend.  When we give up comfort to write how we feel we give up the distraction of spontaneity in our lives. We become disciplined in our actions, our routines, our thoughts of what to write consume us until we become so filled with the feeling of an experience we have to empty ourselves of it in order to move on to the next feeling and experience.

Our habits of how we write has no room for spontaneity our life becomes planned. If I do this today then I have to make up for it tomorrow. What the world considers usual behavior is far removed from a writer's life. Writers navigate their writing moments to fit into the world of others. There is no automatic pilot for us we dictate our whole life either by avoiding writing or writing all the time.

Writing requires forgiveness....

John Stevens wrote, "When I trust and respect myself enough to be myself honestly, others respond with trust and respect." To be the writer I want to be is to honestly accept the person I truly am. I must greet my writing with ease and have a commitment to write founded in integrity: Integrity because I honor my own promise to myself to write. When I began this blog I made a commitment to myself to be honest about how I feel. I made a commitment to write my feelings in hopes of creating a place where other writers identify with my struggles of fighting off distractions, having patience to develop the habit of sitting still and writing and in overcoming the fear that has prevented me in the past from clicking publish.

When I write with honesty I eliminate the uncertainty of how others will respond to what I have written. What others think after I click publish means nothing to me because I have been honest about what I think and how I feel. My motives are not clouded when I am honest in my writing. I am not confused by the inconsistencies of my story. If I am writing honestly there are no inconsistencies.

In my writing the more honest I am about my feelings the more I am inviting the reader to identify with me and the experiences of my life. A writer who writes honestly has self-respect after they click publish. They can go about their day or crawl into bed with a clear conscious knowing they were honest in their expression of themselves and that is the only requirement of this writer in this writing life.

When I have self-respect as a writer I encourage respectful commentary from my readers. Honesty is like a boomerang it returns what has been thrown out. When I write I am always teaching. I am teaching my readers a possible way to resolve a conflict, I am teaching that it is ok to be afraid and what really is important is what you do with your fear not that you have it and I teach how to take the risk to be honest and build your own self-respect by having the courage to click publish.

When I write I am teaching others how to treat me. I teach them to identify and not compare. With every word I write I take an action in speaking to others about my personhood. My personhood is what makes me human it is what my readers identify with. I set the tone for what I want my reader's experience to be. The underlying foundation of all my writing is my honest behavior of expressing self. It is in my expression of self honestly that I become all-powerful in my writing. With every click of publish I gain self-respect which is empowering.

Jane Jacobs wrote, "Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems." I write of what it feels like to be human. I write of the experiences in my life that connect me to others who forgive themselves for being human and some who never find forgiveness. When I write I must step back from the feeling so I can express the feeling. I cannot write of despair in the throes of despair. The vocabulary doesn't come because there are no words to express the deep anguish of despair. The language we use is limited, but it is all we have to communicate with each other at the highest level possible.

The conflicts I write come about because it is forgotten how difficult it is to be human. In my stories I write of life where we have impossibly high standards of behavior for each other and for ourselves. Writing conflict is simply writing how a character, a person, has failed in living up to the perfect standard of behavior we have set for them. As marvelous a creature as humans are we thwart our own happiness by never being satisfied and accepting who we are or who others are. The writing experience of this writer's life is that acceptance of self, the development of honest appraisal and a true foundation of self-respect where approval from another person is no longer sought has provided courage, freedom, trust that there is a plan and by doing the action of writing the plan is unfolding.

Being human is difficult, but writing of being human is even more difficult. In order to write of being human I must detach myself from a human experience and the feelings about the experience allowing myself the space in my mind to reflect. If I am all consumed then there is no space in my mind for anything else to exist. Walking is a way for me to make room in my mind for reflection to exist.

In reflection I can write of feelings that cover me like a pall. I have learned to live with these feelings and accept them because they don't ever leave me for long. Pat Conroy in his writing about his abusive father said, "The scene upset me badly. I had created a boy named Ben Meecham and had given him my story. His loneliness, his unbearable solitude, almost killed me as I wrote about him." Writing non-fiction is an easier calling for writers it is tactical and pragmatic. Fiction writing is psychologically soul wrenching, heart ripping, yet fiction is what most writers want to write. Those of us who dare to write manuscript after manuscript about our feelings overcome, accept and forgive ourselves for being human. Forgiveness separates the writer from the non-writer.

A writer's inner consciousness.......

Albert Einstein wrote, "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why." How many times have I discovered the answer to a writing problem in my sleep, on a walk or sitting by the ocean? The answer to every problem always lies within me. There is a consciousness that lives in each of use that if we tap into will bring us to a place where we can be more than we ever dreamed we could be. That consciousness is what I tap into every time I sit at the laptop to write.

Yesterday I started a new blog: http://uncherishedastory.blogspot.com/

In this blog I am going to write my book. I am going to write of feelings and post my work because I find this blog keeps me honest about my self-made commitment to be a writer who writes. I have tapped into my consciousness that Einstein talks about. I did not discover this inner consciousness alone, but once discovered I am alone to tap into it each day to write.

I've experienced the full spectrum of emotions over the past few months and I am raw with feeling. That rawness with feeling has given me freedom and a wealth of material in the moment to write. I can reflect on the experiences of my life and use them to write the feelings of a woman in our American history. I have been trying to write the feelings of this woman for 15 years and I didn't have the courage to feel what I needed to feel to write her. I am free today. I have been inspired and motivated. I have been given the opportunity to feel the full spectrum of emotions that we all have as humans, but that we pick and choose to actually feel on any given day.

Pablo Picasso said, "It takes a long time to become young." And young is how I feel. I am reborn with a renewed opportunity to be the person I was always meant to be, but was too hurt and afraid to become. There is within each of us the person we were meant to become. Writers tap into the consciousness that lost person on a daily bases. As writers we ready our lives for a creative experience by putting on a business suit like John Cheever, going to a room in the basement to do his daily work of writing and taking off his suit, hanging it up and writing for the day in his underwear. I get up, make my coffee and go to my living room and work in my pajamas without a shower until my mind becomes distracted by thoughts I am not showered or dressed. I finish up the project I am working on then go take care of myself and ready myself for the world if I want to go out and then I start a new writing project.

What we do as writers to tap into our consciousness and try to fend off the ". . . ten thousand things that need doing . . ." according to Jessamyn West is anything and everything. Distraction is a writer’s worst enemy. The mind is the writer's best friend or worst enemy and we never know which mind we are going to wake up to on any given day. It is for these reasons that discipline provides the only reprieve from non-writing for any writer. I must create for myself a foundation in bedrock that allows me without fail to sit down at the laptop and begin typing words. My mind can be filled with so many loud voices I can't hear myself think, but I must sit still anyway. The key to any writer's success is their ability to sit still in the midst of unwanted voices and chaos.

To sit still is the hardest task for any writer and the very task separating non-writers from writers. We can't write if we can't sit still long enough to write. It doesn't matter what we wear or what we don't wear. What matters is the rationale that gets to the physical position of sitting still. Sitting still takes nerve. When I sit still at the laptop I am staring at nothingness with the expectation I will replace nothingness with something of worth. Filling a page with words is more about fear than intellect.

Kingsley Amis wrote of his work day, "I linger over breakfast reading papers, telling myself hypocritically that I've got to keep up with what's going on, but really staving off that dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter." Amis struggled with the fear of sitting still and writing. In order to be the writer I want and meant to be I must overcome the person I am. I must learn to accept myself for being human and I can only do so if I identify with other people like me. If I compare Cheever and his business suit to me in my pajamas I will not feel connected, but if I identify with Amis' procrastination and his struggle with his feelings of not wanting to sit still to write then I become a part of something greater than myself within myself. Connection with our inner consciousness comes from identifying not comparing ourselves to other writers.

As children we are taught to be independent, to go it alone, to be a self-made man, yet for writers who write in isolation we find the pathway to our inner consciousness through identifying with other writers. We are taught that to be successful is to be independent, but true success comes from being identified with and identifying with others like ourselves which develops interdependence not independence. Since I have tapped into my inner consciousness I find I am more interdependent with people in my life, less independent and no longer dependent. I have found a freedom in writing. I have found a freedom in writing respectfully of my fears. I have found freedom having the courage to start writing and to click publish when I am finished. 

If I have learned anything over the past few months of tapping my inner consciousness I have learned like Alberto Moravia who was so in love he wondered the streets of Rome wishing a car would strike him down that, "That was in the afternoon, of course, in the morning I work." I must always write no matter what chaos, drama or pain goes on around me. If I am to be the writer I really want to be I must accept the person I truly am. I am a writer first and then I am whatever others want me to be.

Writing dreams are more than whims.......

Sue Atchley Ebaugh said, "Within our dreams and aspirations we find our opportunities." As a writer I have to be careful to not live solely in my dreams. How easy it would be to go through life being a permanent guest of my own dreams. Dreams and aspirations do serve a purpose in life, but to spend too much time in the reality I create in my head versus the reality of life with others is a dangerous place to live. Such a place lives beyond any realistic goals I might set for myself as a writer and as a responsible person involved in the lives of others. 

Dreams are more than whims they are fancies. Dreams call to me in my sleep, in my day dreaming, in my conversations with others. My dreams call me to search for opportunities to have them fulfilled. My dreams require me to tap into my talent, my gifts, freely and have them honed and ready when the opportunity arises to use them. Dreams encourage me and tempt me with new aspirations and adventures.

When I write I invite the present into my dreams. I join the past, present and future into a mosaic of dreams I then capture to the best of my ability in words. The trick is to understand as I write the dream I am losing the dream state.

No writer can write the dream they have imagined. The language we use is limited as is our memories of experiences and our ability to relay feelings in a language that falls short of true self-expressed emotion. The depth of my writing on any given day is linked to the richness of my dreams. To have my dreams fulfilled is a different writing day then to have my dreams unfulfilled.

Dr. George Weinberg wrote, "Every outlook, desirable or undesirable, remains possible for anyone, no matter what his present outlook is." I rarely write of joy and excitement, but I feel joy and excitement when I write. Writing for this writer is about getting the hurt out. The pain of living has to be extracted so I might go out and live my life with friends and loved ones.

It is far easier to laugh and to write of laughing then it is too sit still and feel fear, sorrow and the pain of not having your dreams fulfilled. With writing joy and excitement we easily write with anticipation. When we write of grief, abandonment and loss we dredge and pound spikes into our being to pick at the wounds of who we are as people.

It is writing the pain of living readers like. To read someone else's feelings allows me to feel better about my feelings. The goal of attracting readers is to have them identify and feel empathy for the character. The reader wants to push the bar and feel those locked away feelings, but not feel too much. If the reader could feel the full impact of their emotions then they would write them and not read about someone else's. This simple difference is what separates the writer from the non-writer.

There are also physical things that separate the writer from the non-writer. Hope Dahke Jordan wrote in her blue bathrobe with the ends of the belt tied around each arm of her chair, "That is the only way to get a book finished. For as long as I stay in my blue bathrobe I stay at my typewriter." The attitude to commit to writing that novel, that poem or short story is a physical commitment of forcing yourself to sit still long enough for the fear and anxiety to leave and if not leave then lessen enough so you can hear your own voice. Writers must get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Many writers write in the morning when their head is clear from a fresh night's sleep. I like to write in the morning. The mind is clear in the morning because the chatter of the world has been turned off for a substantial amount of time. Sleep for this writer is essential. Power naps are this writer's best friend. I have learned how to sit still at the laptop. I no longer need to tie myself into the chair to sit still. I am free to get up from the laptop, set the alarm on my cell phone for 30 minutes, close my eyes on the couch and free my brain from the clutter that has collected from thinking of other people and conversing with people up to that point in the day.

Quieting then mind though is a whole other self-discipline. Attitude can only take a writer so far. Approaching the mind like it was no different than any other muscle in the body has helped my writing immensely. There are times when the body is fine, but the mind is cluttered. A nap doesn't help my mind clear in this situation. I am a walker and exercise clears my mind allowing me to start my writing day over again at any moment. I walk 6 miles when I need to clear my head from the clutter which is almost daily. It takes 3 miles for me to figure out which thoughts I need to let go so I can write for the day and then another 3 miles back to allow my head to clear. The faster my walking pace the easier it is to clear my head.

Today I am free because I have discovered ways to overcome my worst enemy. I am my own worst enemy. Today, because I have learned how to take care of myself physically, emotionally and spiritually as a person I can also practice self-care in my writing life. I am free to choose today whether or not I stare out the window. Two Sundays ago I was still staring out the window unable to overcome my own demons. Today I am free to respond to my writing self. I can choose a response that builds me up instead of tears me down. Writing this writer’s life has given me choices, purpose and self-understanding.

To those of you who comment I identify thank you. For those of you comparing yourself to my experience thank you. And for the person who inspires me to keep on writing I thank you.

  

A writer's crazy week.......

Albert Schweitzer said, "The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve." Exhausted at the end of this week from helping myself shift some emotional, physical and spiritual spaces and exhausted from helping others--I didn't forget--haven't broken the habit just am tired from serving others and myself this anniversary week. With all that said I chose the quote from Schweitzer because I have been relatively happy all week--it's been so long I am exhausted from the high!!! It's a good tired--tomorrow is another day. Thank God. Good night.

To write is to live.....

Elie Wiesel wrote, "Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word." Writing life is to live life. As we write we live and as we live we write. Wallace Stevens use to write poetry as he walked to work at an insurance company. Stephen King shut himself in the furnace room of his trailer and wrote in notebooks throughout the night grabbing only a few hours’ sleep before he got up to go to work the next day. If we want to find time to write we will.

To have patience with ourselves as writers we must develop patience with ourselves as people. It isn’t every day I can be prolific enough to write thousands of words. Some days to write a page is all I can handle. There have been days when I stare out the window and to write at all is a chore.

I write because it isn't work. Like teaching writing is who I am. I use to describe teaching as breathing. I knew the material, the lessons and the tone I wanted to set in class because they were all me. I am the same in my writing. I know what I want to say, have always known what I want to say. The difference is now I am not afraid to say it. I am free to be me. I am free to breathe, to click publish, free to write another day. People only own me if I give them myself to own. All writers come to an understanding with themself that when they approach the blank page they approach freely.

The isolation I work in I wouldn't have any other way. The silence has sound. People who don't work alone don't hear the sound of silence. At the end of the day, not every day, but most days I leave the house just to hear a voice. Not because I miss voices, but because I know I need them. If I completely isolate myself in the hours I am not writing I am not living my life. I cannot discover experiences or feel feelings to write unless I live a life outside of my head.

What of living outside of my head? What routines and self-discipline tactics do I employee. The purpose of any tactic is to reduce my anxiety enough so I can write a word, a sentence, a story. If I cannot overcome my anxiety then there will be no writing that day. That is what I discovered staring out the window.

The anxiety owned me because I didn't know anymore how not to let it own me. Hour after hour, day after day I sat disciplined at the laptop staring out the window unable to write a word that wasn't about my loss. I sat for hours from daylight to dark staring out the window afraid to leave the desk, the window, afraid if I got up and walked away I might never come back to the part of me I love the most. I love the writer in me.

William Gass believed that "Writers have certain compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make its writing possible." And that is exactly why I couldn't stop staring out the window. I was in a psychological/emotional crisis and I needed to play the game of "who is the writer now" with myself. If I didn't sit disciplined at the desk I would be a non-writer that day. I would have filled my day with television, walking, sleeping, the hours would have dwindled away without a single word or thought of a word written. But by sitting at the laptop staring out the window I kept my writing composure; I kept my discipline intact.

I have a ritual in place for every morning I get up to write. My behavior is automatic and always the same. Writing in my mind is dangerous work. How much more dangerous can work be then to write your inner most feelings, thoughts and let other people read them. John Edgar Wideman wrote that ". . . each writer knows his or her version of the preparatory ritual must be exactly duplicated if writing is to begin, prosper." Derek Walcott wrote that "Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

Sitting down to write is like crossing over a threshold into the parts of yourself other's feel and think is too dangerous to tread within themselves. For years in order to write a single word I had to have a whole package of freshly sharpened pencils, the whitest paper I could find and a clean desk. In those years I readied all my ritualistic totems and then couldn't sit down at the desk to write. I was intimidated by the freshness, the smell of the shaved wood, the clean scent of the pristine white paper, my desk was too clean to sit and think at. Now I don't care about any of that stuff. I can write anywhere, on anything, in any environment. I live to write because I finally realized to write for me is to live......

Good night everyone--thank you for listening to me today. God Bless....

I write for me.........

Dory Previn wrote, "What most of us want is to be heard, to communicate." As writers we have a deep need to know we count, what we say matters, how we view life is intriguing. As a writer and person I need to know my presence is noticed, I matter, I count.

My connectedness to others has come over time. Learning to live with people has been a process, but learning to live with myself has been a challenge. My writing life is a series of failures and fumbles that pretty much mirror my real life. What is wonderful about a writing life is I don't have to hold all that experience in, cling to the unworthiness I sometimes feel.

I can write until I understand the meaning of my failures and fumbles. I can write until I find acceptance of myself and of others. From my writing I grow into something unconditional, without expectations, without rules or fears of failure and fumbles. As long as I write I grow toward instead of away from.

People have come into my life that make me want to be more than I think I am or can be. They make me feel all in life is possible. One person even made me feel cherished. Some people make me feel like I won't be abandoned my greatest fear of all. When I write I must use fear of abandonment to produce a story, a character, a conflict. I must always use what I fear as a means of getting to a place I want to go.

As I write this blog I gain greater awareness each day that others feel as I do, live as I do, need to be acknowledged as I do. I am becoming more aware that others share similar experiences in their day. The more I write the less I use the term "those people." The more I write the less I believe no one feels, thinks or acts like I do. The more I write the more I am finding people just like me with the same needs and insecurities.

As a writer I write because I want to be heard; as a person I communicate because I need to feel I am not alone. Every person has a life filled with bumps where they have bruises, cuts and scrapes. It is not how you get beaten up by life that is important it is how you heal that is important. I have learned that I heal faster and healthier when I communicate, when I share, when I let others identify with my pain.

I write to provide a comfort to others that they are not alone. I write because I need acknowledgement that I am not alone. It is only when I am abandoned by others that I feel I can't handle the healing of the bumps in my life. In the company of others with whom I am not referring to or talking about as "those people" I am able to heal, I am able to handle the discomfort of my greatest fear abandonment.

Today my writing has a purpose. I must always remember that in writing I demonstrate willingness, I provide comfort, I am listened to, I listen and respond to the needs and willingness of others to step into the world of us rather than remain isolated in the world of "those people."

As soon as I make the judgment I am not like someone I separate myself from my purpose. I separate myself from all humanity simply by separating myself from just one single person. We are all the same feeling creatures. Our experiences are different in terms of how we get to and arrive at our feelings, but the feelings are all the same.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." How cruel the human condition is if Shaw is right. What is desire? What are my desires? Have I ever gotten my heart's desire? How long does desire last?

In my younger years my heart's desire was focused on material things. If everything looked pretty and prosperous on the outside then it was that way on the inside. As I have grown and become comfortable with myself material things have little value to me, my desire has changed.

Today I desire intangibles. I desire to be acknowledged; to feel safe amongst people, to feel cherished which is deeper than loved. Today I can write of glimpses of each of my desires. I have had them in fleeting moments and I know more moments will come. With different people, but they will still come.

As I write of my experiences and the feelings I have attached to my circumstances I somehow find peace in having my desires unfulfilled. There comes a time when writing brings clarity. Clarity comes from being able to detach from the outcome of my desires. To live and write peacefully of my unfulfilled heart's desires I must detach from myself with love rather than anger.

The direction of my desire is directly linked to how my readers will identify with my feelings of the experience. Right now I am writing a woman who very much like me continually fails to have her desires fulfilled. As the writer of this woman I must try and figure out why her desires remain unfulfilled. I must examine her, be honest about who she is and accept her fumbling so I can guide her in a direction that will allow her to have some understanding of where she fails in getting her desires fulfilled.

As a writer of her what I am doing is examining me. That is the fear, the anxiety that the blank screen on the laptop has waiting for me every day. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down." The questions in this writer's life use to be: Can I pull this off? Am I any good? The question today is: Will my writing be laugh at as my pathetic effort to understand myself and the world a little bit more? And before I hear myself ask the question completely I answer: It doesn't matter what they think you are writing for you and no one else. Just you!

The writer I become........

Dorothy McCall said, "One cannot have wisdom without living life." McCall seems to have summed up this writer's writing life. In order to write what I know I must understand the circumstances that make up my life. In order to put my reflection into words I must have willingness to learn the lessons each moment of my life provides.

As a writer I must be willing to participate in my own life to the fullest. I must give each person in my life my full participation and my full attendance as well. It is only through suiting up and showing up willingly in my life I am able to do so in other people’s lives. It is in participating fully and attending fully when requested and even when not requested in another person's life I find any clarity as to what my purpose in life really is. I must immerse myself in the moments I share with people, but balance those moments with quiet alone time to reflect on the meaning and the purpose of those experiences. I must always reflect on how I felt during the experience and after.

My writing life is all about my attitude just like in my other lives. Happiness, wisdom, understanding, acceptance, tolerance all hinge upon my attitude. My writing life is easier as are my other lives when my attitude is to help not to take. In my writing if I write with purpose then I am giving not taking; in that simple sentence lays the wisdom of knowing why I just started writing daily this year. I never had a purpose before other than fame, fortune and notoriety. Superficial purposes like those are not sustainable, but last year a sustainable purpose entered my life. Life became simple, I began to hear my inner voice, I stopped being afraid to feel, to experience and to share. I became able to write.

I found wisdom through reflection. I stopped being afraid. As I reflect on my life not a single second has been wasted, not a single minute lost. Always there was the willingness to live, to experience, to learn. Always there was the patience for the right moment to come when I would find the wisdom to tell the truth of why I didn't write.

Today I reflect on my patience to just keep living, putting one foot in front of the other, until the wisdom came. All that is left is to reap the benefits as I continue to write. The benefits have changed though; they are no longer fame, fortune and notoriety, The rewards are looking at myself in the mirror eye to eye, looking at others with my head up comfortable in my own skin and not caring what anyone thinks about me or what I write when I click publish.

My true authentic self is the writer person I am no longer ashamed to be. I am becoming the writer who receives enough rejection letters to wallpaper a room; a writer who can put her feelings into a character and bringing them to life. A writer who can sit at the laptop shaking so deep within she believes her anxieties are causing a nervous breakdown. John Steinbeck wrote of himself, "I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one." The terrors didn't stop Steinbeck or a thousand other writers like him.

Terror only stops non-writers. I am no longer a non-writer. Non-writers become paralyzed with fear, they crawl back into bed after being up for a while, they drink, they smoke, they take prescription drugs. They do whatever they can not to feel the terror. They are non-writers because they are unwilling to feel. If we don’t feel then we can't live life. We can go through the actions of doing what life has in store, but living is feeling connected, identifying with other people’s emotions. Living is being free to be yourself, to write yourself as you live your life. Writers don't care what other's think!! Non-writers do care!!

Margaret Atwood wrote, “Blank pages inspire me with terror.” Each day I wake up I have to make a decision. Am I going to be a writer or a non-writer today? Am I going to crawl back in bed or go lie on the couch and sleep away my creative hours? Am I going to be so selfish I block myself off from the feelings of those who love me? Am I going to be an Atwood, a White or a Steinbeck and identify with their feelings? Or am I going to compare and wallow in my fear of having nothing to say, nothing to offer, no discipline, no confidence because I am clinging to what I know.

I know how to be afraid and how not to write. I’m learning how to get my fear to work with me and for me instead of against me. The more I write the farther away I am from being a non-writer. The more I feel the farther away I am from being a non-writer. The more I laugh, the more I live, the more I experience the farther away I am from being a non-writer. The more I write the more of a writer I become…..

Writer's write.......

William L. O'Neill wrote, "All great reforms require one to dare a lot to win a little." There is no second chance, no guarantee in life. Life is simply a series of moments; what we do with those moments defines our value as people in this life. Writer's write what they want, use their best energies to write an outcome they can live with and all this living is done without a guarantee of ever getting what they started out wanting, an audience.

Some of the happiest times in this writer's life have been at the beginning of a project. At the moment of committing, of completely devoting, of embracing the feelings of an experience whatever they may be. I am the happiest in my writing life when I concede to the courageous event of committing with absolute belief I can produce, I can write, I can bring to life the person I was meant to be. When I can write me on paper and accept the idea of me, the dream of me I write is not the me who sits down at the laptop to write I am my happiest. No one is as we dream ourselves to be.

What if my efforts are limited? What if I fail? What if the outcome isn't all I want it to be? What if I never put a word on paper? “What if” never makes me feel alive. “What if” never makes me happy. In order to write as my gift to write demands I must let go of the outcome of what will happen to my writing. I must always write for me and no one else. My cause must be to gain a deeper relationship with self through my writing. Writing my life experience is the final stage of accepting my life as just that, my life no one else’s.

Writing is a process of self-discovery. The joy is in the process, the struggle; the quicker I embrace the struggle the quicker I begin to embrace me as the writer of my own life. In order to be me I must let go of the outcome of me. The more I let go and write the more my life falls into place.

Living life is risky business. If living was easy there wouldn't be an escalation of illnesses brought on by stress, there wouldn't be addiction, there wouldn't be abandonment, there wouldn't be struggle. But life isn't easy. Living life is hard; writing life is even harder. The value of my achievement today as a writer is in my dedication to write the feelings that own me. The more revealing I am of my feelings during an experience the more liberated as a writer and person I become.

Arthur Miller, brilliant playwright that he is wrote, “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” The most compelling topics for me to write about are the feelings that bring me to my knees, the feelings others find mortifying to share, the feelings that challenge me, that make readers quiver with identification.

I am a wealth of rich material just waiting to be tapped. When I am looking outside myself for material to write I am taking the easier way. I am cheating myself and my reader. I am being a coward. To risk sharing how I feel is to share the poignancy of my being. My honest authentic self is what I must always write. I must seek courage not cowardice in everything I think, everything I do and in everything I write. I must always write this writer’s life.
  

Writing is reflection.......

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus said, "Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear." Writing is a reflection. We write of our successes and failures in living. We write of our inability and ability to cope with life. We write of our strengths while focusing on our weaknesses.

From a young age we are taught to doubt, to be afraid, to be on guard, we are taught how to be anxious. Calmness is an adult struggle. What child have you ever heard say "I am so calm today" or “I need to calm down.” We are filled with living when we are children. We embrace risk, chance, excitement, anxiousness; we seek situations that make us feel alive. We test the waters to see how far we can go, we are constantly moving forward innocently as children.

Somewhere in adulthood we begin to seek calm. We focus intently on changing our excitement for life into something that is quiet, without risk, doesn't make us anxious or even excited to wake up in the morning. As I share myself and write a deeper side of me I am heightened by my perceptions of self. I turn tragedies into stories, tears into scenes, laughter into settings, feelings into characters.

Writing is like the grieving process. We reflect on an experience that triggers a pain. As we write the experience we feel and share our perceptions and ultimately we strive for acceptance of the experience and how it has changed us. With every character, every story we relive our experiences attempting to heighten our perceptions of who we are. Through writing we teach ourselves that conflict is the problem and writing is the solution.

As I sit at the laptop and imagine the day ahead I have choices. There isn’t an experience that can’t be dealt with or a feeling that can't be handled. As a writer I cannot become paralyzed by reflection. I have a fellowship to share my anxieties. I have places to go to quiet my mind. I have a life I am able to live. This all sounds wonderful, rational and easily doable until the day comes when I am staring out the window with voices screaming in my head. What do I do then?

I have to do what I always do. I have to be the person I am. I have to get up in the morning, turn the water on for coffee, go to the bathroom and walk to the laptop just like any other day. If I break my routine I am not me. I can have moments in the day I escape. I can go to the store, go for a walk, talk on the phone or make myself lunch. But after all that it is just me, the laptop and the world outside the window.

I must have learned how to sit still and feel. I must have learned how to relive, replay, rethink conversations, events, thoughts, moments, feelings in my life that are forcing me to stare out the window because the voices are so loud I cannot hear my own voice. If I have not learned how to sit still I will heighten my distraction. I will pick up a distraction. I will not sit still until I can write again. And I must sit still until I can write again. The only way to get rid of the voices is to write them away. I write and write and edit and reword and write. I cry, pull my hair, bow my head and go back to staring out the window, but in between I write. The only way to empty my head is to write. The only way to remain me is to write.

I was blessed with the opportunity to talk to Jane Hamilton when she was on tour for her first novel The Book of Ruth. Two things I never forgot from our conversation. First she asked me what my passion was and of course I told her writing. She said that was nice, but don't stop what I was doing to write most people don't make it. I felt she was discouraging me and I didn't understand why, but I do now. It is far easier to talk about the life we want to have, the things we want to do and the books we want to write than it is to actually live, venture out and write. She was right not many people make it. The courage it takes to write yourself every day few people have. Writers are unique, we go to any lengths, we never give up and we are constantly disappointed. And most important non-writers can’t sit still.

The second part of our conversation was about her fear of only having one book in her. With the advance from her first book she added a kitchen to her farm house, did some other practical spending and here she sat afraid like me. I didn’t get the value of fellowship for a writer. I didn’t get the importance of fellowship in this writer’s life. I do now.

I have followed Jane Hamilton's career and I watch the pace in which she turns out her novels. There are years between manuscripts, between publishings, between book tours. The only pressure a writer has is the pressure we put on ourselves. We are our harshest critics. We beat ourselves up so we can write ourselves out of the pain. We turn our lives into stories to share and be picked apart by our readers. Writers, we are the most sensitive people I know, yet somehow we deal, we cope, we live with rejection every day.

In a community of writers I belong to a young woman asked "How many rejection letters are enough before I begin to question my writing path?" Only non-writers allow themselves to ask such questions. Only non-writers who wallow in the conflict, who think rather than write, who talk about writing rather than sitting still and writing.

Only non-writers can afford such luxuries as asking “when do I begin to question my writing path.” I have no questions about my writing path I never have. Writing is how I think, how I look at the world. Writing is breathing, it is laughing, it is crying, writing is being. Jane Hamilton when wondering if she had a second book wasn’t asking if she should continue on her writing path. Jane Hamilton was living her path talking about her anxiety. Hamilton turned her fear into something productive and wrote her second novel The Short History of a Prince.

I have no questions about who I am. I have no far-fetched ideations of what my life is. I have no reason to ever stop being me. I have gotten distracted and still do from time to time. At time feelings block my mind from being free of the many voices that keep me from hearing and listening to my writing voice.

I have come to accept the intensity in which I live. I would not be me if I was not intense. In writing this writer's life I am turning my anxieties into something workable and manageable. I must always be productive and never destructive. I must never take pleasure in the questions non-writers ask. I must shun self-doubt and fear as if it were the plague. If I can’t sit still with myself how can I ever write the reflections of my experiences and how they made me feel?

Exercise #9

Not tonight it’s time for ice cream!!

Writers need to make changes........

Galway Kinnell wrote, "Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness . . . until it flowers again from within . . ." As I write I need to make changes in myself. I must change my attitudes. I must change my thinking. I must change my faith. The biggest change for me comes in the form of reaching out and developing fellowship. The more I reach out the deeper I go within to write. I find this paradoxical. The more I talk about how I feel the deeper the level of my writing.

To not be surrounded by people I aspire to be like is to not aspire to be anything myself. I must always be reaching and moving forward. I read a blog from a fellow writer this morning about writing reviews. She bluntly stated reviews aren't for her the writer they are for the reader.

As writers our strong driven personalities serve a purpose when it comes to our work, but in the world others can be critical of our seriousness, our melancholy, our confidence when we know a puzzle piece just fits. As we write we live. I am one in the same. I can’t and don’t want to be anyone else.  

A beautiful woman in my life from years ago wrote to me that to become the woman I really want to be is to accept the woman I truly am. I didn't understand what she was saying at the time, but today I do. In always thinking I can write it so I create anxiety and fear where there need be none. My mind has collected voices for weeks because I am focusing on why I can't write instead of why I can.

Sitting in a car with a friend last night I learned I intuitively know what to do about things these days. I learned I am accepting of myself as long as reviewers are accepting of me. In thinking this way I have created anxiety within myself where there needs be none. In order to write my mind must be free. In order for my mind to be free I must be at peace within me. If I am focusing on the negative review I am not at peace within me. I am at peace when I surrounded by people I aspire to be like, who aspire to be more like me. I am free when I am moving through the solution not wallowing in the conflict.

Today I woke up finished with being attracted to the negative review of me. Today I woke up with wanting to be surrounded by love, acceptance, tolerance and people living in the solution. I want to be drawn to the positive reviews. But I must be careful because all reviews are not for me. If I focus too much attention on the positive reviews I can easily dwell on the opposite of wallowing, pride. I can become too great creating another set of anxieties that stop me from being free and being me. I must always remember reviews, all reviews, are not for me the writer; reviews are for the reader.

It is time to let go and move on from the negative review and I must never pick it up again. I got an email in the middle of the night a friend's father who had been ill passed away. Whenever I am in the muck, at my lowest, death comes to remind me I only have one shot at this writer's life.

I have wasted so much time, but not really I just took a different path. My agendas were different: education, career, raising a family, helping others. A friend reminded me last week to not take the ability to accomplish those agendas for granted; not everyone is able to fulfill those accomplishments. And so my point is my time wasn't wasted I just chose a different path.  I have gained different experiences.

My father use to tell me people without children have no concept of real, true, unconditional love. I never understood what he meant, but now I do. People without children experience love differently than those of us with children. I look for a different type of love, a deeper, accepting, unconditional love that I have experienced as a parent and I won’t settle for less. And there it is the answer to every conflict I have. I won’t settle for less! Some days I think I can, but settling isn’t in this writer’s life. To settle is to not be me it is to be you and I can’t do that. I can’t write that, I can’t live that.

Writers aren’t followers they are achievers. Writers forge their way. If they don’t like their writing life they don’t accept it they go down another path. There is no settling for less. There is no settling at all. This is not to say we don’t try to settle because we do.

Those writers who could not live with settling and could not continue to develop courage day after day to keep trudging the road not taken die. They tell us they are dead and we keep reading them as if we can will them to remain alive. But we can’t will anyone to feel alive. If a writer believes they are dead then they are. Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway, Hart Crane, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath the list can go on and on were all dead before they died and they told us so in their writing, but they finally made us believe it with their actions.

Robert Frost influenced the type of life I would have when I read his poem Road Not Taken in middle school. The poem has been the driving force of my life since. I have always chosen the road less taken. Sometimes it is the harder path, sometimes it is the easier softer road. But neither matters because in this writer's life I must always take the road less traveled by. That is who I am. I must always go that extra mile. I must always push a little harder than everyone else. I must accept that I feel a little deeper because I am willing to go a little farther. I must never stop knowing what I know. I must never stop figuring my life out in affirmation. No matter how much I am attracted to degradation I must step over those reviews. I must not pick up anxiety that isn’t mine. 

Today I will leave you with my favorite poem. Frost reminds me I have no other choice, but to not seek out reviews of me. A writer’s life is just to forge ahead on the path other’s fear to take.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

...Robert Frost

Exercise #8

The past exercises have been excerpts from a manuscript I pulled from a drawer about a female spy in 1945. Each exercise was a step on the path less traveled by. Many non-writers proclaim their desire to write. Writers make know claim they just write. The hours in my day have gotten longer as I have added writing to them. My work, my blog, my book every day that’s the exercise for today….