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.