For Inspiration

Top Ten Tips for the Writing Life

1. Write.  If you write regularly, you can call yourself a writer, whether or not you’re published.
2. Read.  Non-fiction, fiction, essays, poetry.  Pay attention to what you especially like to read, as that is the genre in which you will probably most like to write.  Don’t restrict yourself to a certain type of reading, though.  Read everything.
3. Prioritize writing and reading.  Keep a routine.  If not every day, then every other day.  If not every other day, then at least once a week.  Writers sometimes have to squeeze writing in.  Find the time, even when at your busiest.
4. Read books about writing.  Some of my favorites are:
   1. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Approach to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron
   2. Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg
   3. On Becoming a Writer, by Dorthea Brande
   4. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Annie Lamott
   5. The Dynamics of Creation, by Anthony Storr (Storr’s book isn’t about writing, per se, but it is a good exploration of the psychology behind writing and other forms of creativity)
5. Remember that writing is an apprenticeship. Bill Roorback poses this idea in “On Apprenticeship,” an essay published in Poet’s and Writer’s Magazine, May/June 1995.  Unless you are gifted from birth, you can not expect to be a good writer immediately.  You have to write, and write, and write.  You are an apprentice to a craft that takes a long time to perfect.  Don’t expect to make a living by writing for a long time, if ever.  Write in the cracks for years and years—maybe then you can quit your day job, although there’s something to be said for writing for the love of it, not because you have to.
6. Submit your writing to newspapers, magazines, agents, and book publishers.  It’s most likely to be returned with rejection letters (I have my own thick file of such), but revise your work (or not) and send it out again.  And again.  It may take years to get published, but keep trying.  Get acquainted with The Writer’s Market, a resource book that gives detailed information about how and where to submit your writing.  You can usually find the WM in the reference sections of libraries.
7. Read writing magazines.  The Writer’s Digest and Poets and Writers Magazine are my favorites.  The WD is a very practical, how-to magazine, while P&W is more literary.
8. Read A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf, who argued that a writer needs a space of his/his own in which to write.  Space to write, both mental and physical, is very important; figure out how to create it for yourself.
9. Realize that requiring solitude for writing can feel selfish, especially if you have other people interested in spending time with you.  I believe, along with Anthony Storr, that some of us have a “divine discontent” that makes us want to create something, whether it’s writing, or art, or music.  If you don’t have that discontent, you don’t have to wrestle with making time for creating.  But if you do experience a restless need to write, it’s important to honor that part of yourself.
10. Keep a journal. Even if you feel what you write in the journal is awful, little gems will appear that you can use for other writing—poems, essays, short stories, books…who knows what?  And keep your journals—don’t throw them away.  As your life progresses, you will enjoy going back and reading what you wrote years ago.  Your journals can also help you remember important things, like when your first-grader thought his favorite pants were so comfortable that they must be made out of skin, or when your three-year-old gazed at the sky and said, “Look at that fingernail moon.”

Writing for the Soul-- a Writing Exercise

One of the most important functions of writing can be for personal insight.  Writing can help center us or clarify something for ourselves.  Sometimes we don’t know what we think until we see what we say, to paraphrase another writer.

Following are a set of directions designed to help you get in touch with your center and write about what’s on your mind.  These questions can help you work through your thoughts about virtually anything: an essay or story you’re trying to write, a personal or interpersonal conflict, a feeling you haven’t yet defined.  I come back to these directions repeatedly in my journal entries.  Each time, something different comes out.

Allow yourself about fifty minutes to do this “Writing for the Soul.”  I’ve borrowed the directions from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s book, A Community of Writers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989).

1. Find a way to get comfortable.  Shake out your hands, take a deep breath, settle into your chair.  Close your eyes if you’d like to.  Relax.  Find a way to be quietly and comfortably aware of your inner state.
2. Ask yourself, “What’s going on with me right now?  Is there anything in the way of what’s at hand today?”  When you hear yourself answering, take a minute to jot down a list of any distractions or impediments that come to mind.
3. Now ask yourself, “What’s on my mind?  Of all the things I know about, what might I like to write about?  When you hear yourself answering, jot down what comes.  Maybe you get one thing, maybe a list.  If you feel totally blocked, you may write down “Nothing.”  Even this can be taken further by asking yourself, “What is this `Nothing’ all about?”
4. Ask yourself, “Now that I have a list—long or short—is there anything else I’ve left out, any other piece I’m overlooking, maybe even a word I like, something else I might want to write about that I can add to this list?”  Add anything that comes to mind.
5. Whether you have one definite idea or a whole list of things, look over what you have and ask, “What here draws my attention right now?  What could I begin to explore as a possible answer to the questions above, even if I’m not certain where it will lead?”  Take the idea, word, or item and put it at the top of a new page.
6. Now—taking a deep breath and settling comfortably into your chair—ask yourself, “What are all the associations and parts I know about this idea/word/item?  What can I say about it now?”  Spend as long as you need writing down these responses.  Perhaps it will be a sustained piece of freewriting or stream of consciousness, or perhaps separate bits, a long list, or notes to yourself.
7. Now, having written for awhile, interrupt yourself, set aside all the writing you’ve done, and take a fresh look at the questions I’ve asked above.  Grab hold of the whole topic—not the bits and pieces—and ask yourself, “What makes this topic interesting to me?  What’s important about this that I haven’t said yet?  What’s the heart of this issue?  Wait quietly for a word, image, or phrase to arise from your “felt sense” of the topic.  Write whatever comes.
8. Take this word or image and use it.  Ask yourself, “What’s this all about?  Describe the image, feeling, or word.  As you write, let the “felt sense” deepen.  Where do you feel that “felt sense”?  In your head, stomach, forearms?  Where in your body does it seem centered?  Continue to ask yourself, “Is this right?  Am I getting closer?  Am I saying it?”  See if you can feel when you’re on the right track.  See if you can feel the shift or click inside when you get close:  “Oh yes, this says it.”
9. If you’re at a dead end, you can ask yourself, “What makes this question so hard for me?” or “What’s so difficult about this?”  Again pause and see if a word, image, or phrase comes to you that captures this difficulty in a fresh way—and if it will lead you to some more writing.
10. When you find yourself stopping, ask, “What’s missing?  What hasn’t yet gotten down on paper?” and again look to your “felt sense” for a word or an image.  Write what comes to mind.
11. When again you find yourself stopping, ask yourself, “Where is this leading?  What’s the point I’m trying to make?”  Again write down whatever comes to mind.
12. Once you feel you’re near or at the end, ask yourself, “Does this feel complete?”  Look to your “felt sense,” your reaction in your stomach or elsewhere in your body, for the answer.  Again write down whatever answer comes to you.  If the answer is “No,” pause and ask yourself, “What’s missing?” and continue writing.

Follow Your Bliss

Most people know that Joseph Campbell, the late mythologist, coined the phrase, “Follow your bliss.”  Though it has become somewhat of a cliché, the phrase inspired me to focus on my bliss: the writing life.  Following is an excerpt from Campbell’s discussion with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988).  I hope it inspires you, as it did me upon first reading about fifteen years ago.

Campbell:  Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt?

Moyers:  Not in a long time.

Campbell:  Remember the last line?  “I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.”  That is a man who never followed his bliss.  Well, I actually heard that line when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence.  Before I was married, I used to eat out in the restaurants of town for my lunch and dinners.  Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxville, so that many of the families were out in restaurants.  One fine evening I was in my favorite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about twelve years old. The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.”

            And the boy said, “I don’t want to.”

            Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.”

            And the mother said, “Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”

            The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do.  If he does only what he wants to do, he’ll be dead.  Look at me.  I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”

            And I thought, “My God, there’s Babbitt incarnate!”

            That’s the man who never followed his bliss.  You may have a success in life, but then just think of it—what kind of life was it?  What good was it—you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life.  I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go.  When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

Moyers:  What happens when you follow your bliss?

Campbell:  You come to bliss.  In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune.  There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel.  For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up.  But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time….That is following your bliss.

Moyers:  How would you advise somebody to tap that spring of eternal life, that bliss that is right there?

Campbell:  We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is.  Grab it.  No one can tell you what it is going to be.  You have to learn to recognize your own depth….

I came back from Europe as a student in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, so I didn’t have a job for five years.  There just wasn’t a job.  That was a great time for me.

Moyers:  A great time?  The depth of the Depression?  What was wonderful about it?

Campbell:  I didn’t feel poor, I just felt that I didn’t have any money.  People were so good to each other at that time.  For example, I discovered Frobenius.  Suddenly he hit me, and I had to read everything Frobenius had written.  So I simply wrote to a bookselling firm that I had known in New York City, and they sent me these books and told me I didn’t have to pay for them until I got a job—four years later.

            There was a wonderful old man up in Woodstock, New York, who had a piece of property with these little chicken coop places he would rent out for twenty dollars a year or so to any young person he thought might have a future in the arts.  There was no running water, only here and there a well and a pump.  He declared he wouldn’t install running water because he didn’t like the class of people it attracted.  That is where I did most of my basic reading and work.  It was great.  I was following my bliss….

            The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven.  But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.

Moyers:  Bliss is now.

Campbell:  In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won’t get your own experience at all.  That is not the place to have the experience—here is the place to have it.

Moyers:  Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?

Campbell:  All the time.  It is miraculous.  I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.  When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.  I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Moyers:  Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?

Campbell:  Who has no invisible means?  Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap.  To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one’s pity.

< p>Moyers:  The waters of eternal life are right there?  Where?

Campbell:  Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

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Links

Writers’ Residencies and Conferences

I was the lucky recipient, summer 2004, of a three-week writing residency at Norcroft, in the Northwoods of Minnesota.  Writer Joan Drury has given room and board to over 600 women in the last fourteen years—thank you, Joan!  Unfortunately, 2005 will be the last year of Norcroft’s operation, but there are other retreats out there, and I encourage you to consider applying.  There’s nothing like being able to completely focus on your writing project while in the company of other writers.  Writers’ conferences and festivals are invaluable, as well.

 

For information about writers’ residencies and conferences, check out these web sites or do a search on “writers residencies,” “writers retreats,” “writing retreats,” “writers conferences,” or “writers festivals.”

http://www.pw.org/mag/0503/conferencesandresidencies.htm - conferences and residencies listed by Poets and Writers Magazine.   (The hard copy of the magazine also lists upcoming conferences and residencies at the back of each issue.)

http://www.placesforwriters.com/archives/retreats/  - another place to look for conferences and residencies.

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/ - information on the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival – weekend and week-long writing workshops for writers age eighteen and older—no requirements beyond the desire to write.  This festival is one of the best in the country for writers of all genres and ability levels.

 

Writing Centers

Many colleges and universities have online writing centers with useful resources for writing.  Check out the following:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~writingc/links.html - link to resources recommended by the University of Iowa Writing Center

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/internet/resources/index.html - online writing lab, Purdue University

http://www.wisc.edu/writing/ - University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center