Writing from the Boat

Article By Lizzie

Provision for creative writing befalls from a variety of situations. For me, it often comes from my journey with a mental illness. The voice I hear in my writing changes with the suffrage of the illness. Learning to embrace the person within cultivates my creativity while providing the inner recovery from a dread of self.

In the 1975 movie Jaws, Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) discuss the dilemma with the shark and their response to it. The scene plays out with Brody declaring “You’re going to be needing a bigger boat.” My monster is bipolar. While my psychiatrist, therapist, and pharmacist together have a plan for keeping it from killing me, there are many times the plan wobbles. My psychiatrist and I discussed this one day:

“So how are things?” she asks.

“I am going to need a bigger boat” I say.

Pause. Then, “Come again?” she returns.

I sigh. “I need a bigger boat.” I retort.

“Okay, a bigger boat . . .” she repeats looking puzzled.

She knows my tendency to use metaphors to skirt around my condition. You can see her head trying to drum up which movie I am referring to this time and then says . . .

“Your current treatment is not working as well as you would like.”

“Yes” (finally) I reply. Then ramble on, “It is not so much that I feel bad, or that the panic attacks are killing me, or that I am depressed and unable to get out of bed, it is the fact that I know what this illness can do to me. The monster comes creeping out of the water and the next thing I know it has attacked me once again.”

I have to accept the boat I have been given and embrace its familiar comfort. As I take care of my boat, enjoy its character, and make my way through the unknown waters ahead of me, I find relief and healing in expression through writing. Whatever boat you find yourself in, it is yours. Providence has given it to you. Don’t trade it for a bigger or smaller one. Keep the one that you were given and do battle with the monsters coming your way. Yes, Sharks are swimming furiously out there. They are just waiting to devour not just your work, but the creative ignition that waits to fire off future products. Protect yourself, while taking risks. Stay in your boat, be still, watchful, and wait. Creativity will come.

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About Lizzie:

I am a professional currently working on a master’s degree in my field. Recovering my sanity has led to recovery of my creativity. I express this through writing. As I make my passage through life dragging a diagnosis of bipolar along, I hope my journey gives others the belief they too can live with and find a voice in whatever condition attempts to diminish their creativity. One of my vocalizations is my Blog: http://bipolarjourney.com.

Six Suggestions for Sustainable Writing: Inspiration from Frank Herbert’s Dune

Article By Morgan O’Donnell

Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in your surroundings, your environment. Frank Herbert’s Dune-a classic science fiction novel-offers some important ideas to apply to your own writing environment.

Build Community

Although the so-called, romantic idea of the solitary writer has been around for ages, the truth is that good writing, like many other things, needs the support of family and community to flourish. Whether it is the Fremen tribes, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, or the Atreides clan, the support and knowledge of others play a large role in Dune. Even the evil Baron supports his own family, albeit in limited and twisted ways. By building your own writing community, you can find others to commiserate with, seek feedback on your projects, receive positive support, and discover new ideas. Join a writer’s group or an online discussion board and make new writing friends.

Overcome Your Fears

Writing is magical. By putting words on paper, you are shaping reality. Additionally, writing often causes you to reflect on yourself, your life, or even the world. Self-reflection and shaping reality can be scary at times. In Dune, Paul uses the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear (a kind of meditation) taught to him by his mother to help him face his fears while being tested by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. Figure out what helps you face your fears then use those tactics. Maybe journaling about that new writing project helps you recognize areas that worry you. Maybe talking with someone from your writing community will allow you to discover the fears holding you back. Try the power of positive thinking. Write or say to yourself that you will accomplish your task.

Recycle

All good writers recycle. Frank Herbert certainly recycled in Dune, pulling ideas from a variety of sources: Native American tribal practices, Arabic words, mythology, and religion. He even used what he had learned reporting on the growth of sand Dunes in Oregon. The Fremen were master recyclers, reclaiming the water of their bodies through their ingenious stillsuits. Read. Read a lot. Read the masters in your genres. Find new ways to use old ideas. Find new connections.

Listen to the Land and Yourself

In Dune, the Reverend Mother tells Paul that a good ruler must learn his world’s language, “the language of the rocks and growing things.” The Fremen also pay attention to the environment in Dune from the feel of the wind to the sounds of the desert animals. Furthermore, both the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit acknowledge that there is much to be learned by listening to yourself such as through meditation or examining dreams. Writing ideas are all around you. What is happening in the news? What are the hot topics in the field? Keep a dream journal. Use ideas from your journal to kick start your articles, poems, or stories.

Train, Practice, Learn

Dune is filled with examples of the importance of training, practicing, and learning. Paul trains and learns from early childhood how to be a duke, a leader, and a warrior. His mother has trained her entire life in the Bene Gesserit way. In order to increase your writing skills you need to exercise and practice them. Do some mental stretches. For example, if you are writing an article about solar panels, try writing it as a poem first. If you are writing a poem about the beauty of a blue jay, try using the blue jay as a character in a short story. Take a class or even earn a degree. There are a variety of options from a bachelor’s in English to a Ph.D. in technical communication. Try a local Artist’s Way class. Most important of all, write. Write something everyday.

Live Your Life and Replenish Yourself

There will be nothing to write about and no one to write it if you don’t actually live your life and take time to replenish. Even amidst all the politics, deaths, training, and battles, Paul still finds time to fall in love with Chani and start a family. Although the Fremen battle daily for survival in the desert they still find time to “share the Water,” as well as celebrate tribal births and honor those who have died. Take time to watch a movie, go swimming, or spend time with your loved ones. And, don’t forget to eat healthy and exercise.

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Morgan O’Donnell muses on nature, poetry, writing, and the search for a sustainable life at Red Raven Circling. A longtime Dune fan, she continues to recycle Frank Herbert’s novel in her pursuit of a sustainable graduate career.

5 Ways Writers Can Get Their Lives Back

Article by Cesar Torres

I’ve been a writer all my life. By the time I was twelve, I was already finger typing on my family’s Olivetti, emulating my favorite novelists. I went on to journalism, and have worked in an editorial capacity since then. In my twenties I wrote short stories, but I could never seem to tackle my biggest goal: a novel. I had an unfinished novel (or three) glowing with uncompleted shame in a drawer. In 2004, I decided to get serious about my latest idea for a novel. I reprioritized my job, schedule, sleeping hours, workouts and social engagements so I could complete it. In late 2007 I finished my first full manuscript, 145,000 words long, and I promptly set to work on a second one just a few weeks after. I had made a huge dream come true.

All this accomplishment was not without drawbacks. As I increased my discipline and productivity, I felt more disconnected from people around me, like I had swum deep into the ocean of my thoughts and could no longer find my way back to shore. I was now holed up at home or sequestered in a cafe on a regular basis, shunning social interaction just so I could write and rewrite manuscripts that may not be picked up by a publisher for a long time, if at all. As I put in more hours writing, I found joy, but my feelings of distance from real life widened. And yet, all I knew was that writing was right for me. I needed to do it. How could I recapture the life I had before I learned how to get disciplined? Is it possible to have both?

By now you’ve probably seen myriad articles on how to get organized and disciplined about your writing. My advice comes from the other end of the spectrum. This is how to make sure you still feel like you have a life while writing.

Use time effectively

Assuming you are already setting time aside for your writing, you also need to create time for the other things that matter: taking a walk with your extremely attractive partner, catching up with family on the phone, cooking a good dinner without distractions, finishing that Danielle Steel novel you hide as a guilty pleasure. These are activities that help you feel centered and more importantly, rewarded, for all the work you put into your writing and/or day job.

Unglue yourself from the cell phone

Yes, you can do this. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. You can definitely keep that phone in your pocket on vibrate for an evening, perhaps even powered down. I’ve tried this, and though at first it was tough, I found it liberating. I now have special times when I check texts and emails or return phone calls. I think as a result I may have even lowered my blood pressure.

Limit your time on the Internet

You must sometimes keep yourself from visiting all the rooms of Time Suck Mansion. These include Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, YouTube, Ebay and more. Don’t worry, I’m addicted to these sites much as you. You are not alone, brothers and sisters. I too have found myself baggy-eyed, and hunched over, hands hooked into claws like a Skeksis creature from “The Dark Crystal” after hours of staring at a screen while clicking my mouse. I feel your pain. I now make it a habit to keep my computer turned off as much as possible. I have specific times to do fun Web surfing so I don’t feel like I’m depriving myself. I stay away from email on the weekends.

Be present with people

Real human interaction is essential to a good writing life. If you find yourself talking to another person, refrain from seeing yourself in the future, with all the chores you have to run, all the gas tanks you have to fill, the bills you have to write. Clear your mind and engage. Enjoy the experience of being with the other person, in the present. This also means don’t dwell on the past. Have a grudge with another person? Did they tap dance on your last nerve last week? Put those thoughts aside, stay in the now. The world needs you here. And by the way, neither IM, nor SMS, count as being in the present. Those tools may let you communicate in real time, but they often change or omit the nuance and context of a person’s body language, humor, spontaneity in person.

Live!

This may sound like counterproductive advice, but here goes. Live. Booze it up a little, stay out way too long on a bike ride, eat that high-fat content glob of blue cheese, go see that movie with that friend who always asks and whom you always turn down. Stick around that party for an extra hour. Force yourself to go to the new event where you know absolutely no one. Grit your teeth, and force yourself to meet new people. Try new foods. Make your own personal time feel separate from your work time. Live!

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Cesar Torres is a Chicago-based fiction writer, specializing in speculative and literary fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Journalism and has worked in online publishing as producer and editor for more than 10 years. He’s a company member of Barrel of Monkeys. He covers fiction and writing at his blog, Urraca (www.cesartorres.net).

Afraid to Call Yourself a Writer? (Me Too)

Article by Jane

My younger brother is in medical school. In a few years, after he memorizes the circulatory system and passes all his boards and completes a rotation or two, he will be a doctor. People will call him doctor as they tell him about their phlegm and their bowels and their pain that only OxyContin can manage. One day he will be a student, and the next day he will be a doctor.

Becoming a writer is harder and easier. You can go to writing school, take out huge loans and pay professors to assign depressing modern classics for you to discuss at length. And when you graduate, you can add initials to your name, just like a doctor, only instead of M.D. it’s MFA or PhD or BS. No one will call you Master, but no one should tell you about their bowels either. If they do, you can move discreetly away with a clear conscience.

One hopes that you have started writing long before you get that degree. Or if you have demurred, preferring instead the smug-comfortable confidence that if only you were to write it would certainly be fantastic, then, at some point, you must begin writing. Writing is surely the least requirement of becoming a writer. You should probably even start writing on a regular basis – maybe even daily. Or weekly; whatever works.

The next step is to find an audience. You might enclose your poems in your regular correspondence, as Emily Dickinson did, or you might start a blog, though that is a drastic step. Getting paid for your work is always good. And writing is work, whatever anyone tries to tell you. Your favorite author might, rather disingenuously, claim to “simply enjoy writing,” but we both know that dance lessons for the kids and a trip to Disneyworld would go a long way.

Your audience will provide feedback, and it is not until you have been both paid for your writing and criticized for how inept, shallow, foolish, and nearsighted your opinions and prose are that you will realize that somehow you have become a writer. A bad writer, perhaps. A writer-in-progress, certainly. But, above all else, a writer. Not a “someday I will write a novel” dreamer or an “if only I had the time” lounger, but a writer.

When you have written enough to feel truly frustrated at your words’ demonic refusal to say what you mean, rejoice. If you were a medical student, here’s where someone would ask you for drugs, and you would realize that you have the power to write a prescription. Or not. Only you know what should be written.

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Jane writes the What About Mom? blog. She’s got eight years of experience mommy-ing and about two-and-a half months of considering herself a bad writer. Progress, indeed. It should also be noted that it was Jane’s husband who wracked up substantial loans at graduate school. Jane just paid attention at the dinner table.

Blogger TMI

Article by Marie Ann Bailey

To overshare or not to overshare! That is the blogger’s question. Whether ’tis noble to suffer the slings and arrows from TMI . . .

The new buzz word is overshare, but a quick Google search will show that it’s just a new handle for TMI, or “too much information.” MySpace and Facebook members have been warned that prospective employers may troll their pages, uncovering indiscretions that could blacklist prospective job applicants. If you are a professional writer and hope to generate interest and income from your blog, take heed. Cautions against oversharing are not just for the under-thirty crowd: Us of the pre-internet generation can be seduced into sharing a bit more information than even our best friend might want to know.

Popular blogging website such as Blogger and Wordpress provide profiles or pages (e.g., “About Me”) where you can tell the world all about yourself, and then some. You can share your favorite books, movies, and music. You can offer your astrological sign, your marital status, your age, your occupations. I am surprised that you cannot yet offer your social security number, although I suppose you could put paste that somewhere on your blog if you really wanted to. You are encouraged to make yourself three-dimensional. You are seduced into thinking that anyone would want to know everything about you.

How much is too much? At what point does sharing tip over from the realm of “things you may talk about during a job interview” to “things that you should keep under lock and key and forever hidden from prying eyes”? Where and how do we set boundaries?

I may be guilty of sharing more on my blog profile than I would if I were in a job interview. Still, I try to follow these five precepts for my writing blog:

Do not post anything about your spouse, friends, or family, unless you have their permission.
Respect their privacy as you would want them to respect yours.

Do share your work history.
You can provide your resume as a downloaded file or link to your profile on a network such as LinkedIn. Remember: this blog is supposed to help you further your writing career.

Do not share your personal health information.
If you want to talk about your current health issues, then join an existing group. If you really want to have your own blog on this issue, go ahead and create one but keep it separate from your professional blog. Use a different persona and/or password-protect your blog. Protect yourself.

Do not deviate from the general purpose of your blog.
OK, if your blog is all about you, then I guess you can go ahead and share the sordid details of your life. But if you advertise your blog as being about writing, then keep it focused on writing. Don’t suddenly throw in a rant about how the neighbor’s dog keeps pooping in your yard (OK, that could be a very entertaining read, so then considered Precept # 5.)

Do write your posts in a word processor first and then post to your blog after you given it a good review.
Always ask yourself, is this how I want to be remembered? If this were my last post, would I want it to be about my latest bout of gout, or about how I use reading out loud to edit my fiction?

Remember, my fellow bloggers, do as I say, not as I do!

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Marie Ann Bailey
www.marieannbailey.com
www.1writeway.wordpress.com

Freelance Writing Organization – Intl
www.fwointl.com

A Newbie’s Advice

Article by Sebastian Keller

Walk some meters in his shoes

What’s the best that could happen to a writer? Probably that someone is going on vacation to write a whole lot of poems and asks you to walk some meters in his shoes. Meters? Well yes, sorry, I’m from Germany. It’s still meters here and I’ll get to the point why that is of some importance later. (And just for reasons of “delectare et prodesse”: No, we don’t have that book-burning dictator here any longer and yes, there’s electricity countrywide even outside the Oktoberfest…)

So, I’m from Germany and a newbie in writing. What could I probably have to tell you seasoned veterans? Come, walk with me just a few meters and find out. Because there is always something to learn, something to gain even from the most improbable sources. That’s not only the difference between good art and bad art, but also between a good artist and a bad one.

Good art inspires

Good art inspires. If you see, hear, smell, taste and feel it, you want to start creating and in your brain all those little lights you never noticed before, are starting to blink.

And a good artist is inspired. Not only by art, but by virtually everything. That’s because her or his perception evolved to a point where inspiration is omnipresent. It’s a small step to complete madness from there, but it’s a long way to that kind of evolved perception. Peter S. Beagle (yes, he’s still alive and writing!) worked with the painter and sculptor Lisa Snellings-Clark, or to be precise, with her artworks. He was forced to sit in front of some pieces of art for hours staring at it, until a story emerged. Thus he created “Strange Roads”. Out of the blue, so to say.

Start with a blank screen

If you want to try a method more pure, start with a blank screen or paper and your own thoughts. You did that already, you say? No, you didn’t. You tried to fill that blank space, smash it with words and cover up the abyss that lies beyond as quickly as possible. “He who stares into the abyss for too long…” Nietzsche said and he was right. But he didn’t tell you that one can choose the abyss to stare into.

Read a good book about magic or ask a practitioner of the occult and he will tell you, that the first step in the journey is to develop that magical perception. Everything is meaningful, everything is inspiring. I’m not talking about black candles or voodoo here, but if you trick your brain into seeing inspiration everywhere, it will be inspired.

Writer’s block begone? Hopefully so, but don’t count on it. There are always pitfalls.

The more uncommon, the better

And at this point art comes to the rescue. The more uncommon, the better. William S. Burroughs once said that the state of writing is at least 40 years behind painting. I don’t know if he was right, but I admire that he dared to compare writing and painting. It’s like comparing architecture and medicine. If you dare to compare such things you also dare to question the so called rules of your craft. It’s easier when you are still a newbie without experience. Experience is like a bunch of bodyguards, who keep many troubles in a save distance, but they tend to go easy on the friend-or-foe-thing after a while and try to keep you on the beaten path. Which isn’t the worst of things to happen, but only if you’re the guy with the map who knows, what’s the best path.

Recently Michel Thaler wrote a 233-page novel called “Le train de nulle part” – without using verbs. And there is Ernest Vincent Wright who gave us “Gadsby” a novel of 50100 words and not a single letter “e”.

Try to omit a vowel or a group of words in your writing, too, and you will know that one has to be truly inspired to make it through such pains. But it can be done.

Open Your Eyes

Even if you don’t write for artistic reasons you can open your eyes to see walls, seemingly empty but engraved with “Mene mene tekel u-pharsin – the days of your kingdom are counted and ended by God.” A bad thing to happen for bullheaded Nebuchadnezzar, but a free source of inspiration for you. Rules are a good thing, but only as a tool like all the other tools.

So, the best thing is you continue to be a newbie and walk a few meters in the shoes of others from time to time. Just for fun. Just for the inspiration.

Oh! There’s one thing that’s even better: Go on a vacation and write a lot of poems…

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Sebastian Keller
www.schriftstellerwerden.blogspot.com

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