Tag: writing

What a Writer Wants

I saw this quote on Twitter today and I thought, “Wow, I do love Nicole Lyons because she just so eloquently expressed the hopes of most of us writers.” When I think of who I would love to have met in person from the past, Mark Twain always comes to mind and even Oscar Wilde. I so admire clever writers. When I am watching a movie or reading a book or even noticing a fun quote from Twitter, and I see a line that just says exactly how I feel in the most relevant, interesting, “damn, you just captivated that enormous feeling and sensation in one simple, profound sentence”, I am in perfect awe.

I wonder if we would be disappointed by our favorite authors, though. Comedians are often the most depressed people among us. (probably because they are so good at pinpointing all of the absurdities of life that the rest of us so blissfully ignore) They aren’t always “on” and I think that comedians often resent their own humorous talents for the expectations that these innate gifts create. I believe that most of us who love to write are introverts. I, myself, am an extremely friendly introvert. People don’t believe that I am an introvert because I’m friendly and “perky”. But I am a friendly, perky person who likes to spend a lot of her time with her friendly, perky self. I express myself much better when I write. My mind is always on overdrive so that when I speak, I think that what I say, often comes out kind of confusing and jumbled and ditzy and regrettably, many times, too direct. But when I write, I understand myself distinctly. When I write, I discover my most authentic, vulnerable self. So, it is true, as Nicole Lyons states, that when I write, I share my barest soul with you, my beloved readers. Thank you for treating it so kindly and respectfully.

A. A. Milne Quote: A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respec... Quote by Leo. C Rosten - QuotesLyfe

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Your Story/Plot Twist

People have commented to me more than once, that they are amazed that I write consistently, practically every single day, at least one sentence, on this blog. I do like to believe that I am a reliable, loyal, consistent person. I think that to get really good at anything, you must do it consistently. Certainly, I do like the idea of this blog being a comfort to those who come here every single day, to ponder along with me. The thought of our virtual, intimate commune, fills me with a form of deep and grateful contentment.

That being said, as fulfilling it is to have readers and to have others validate my musings, I do this blogging for me. It is not a chore. It is not even a purposeful, daily practice. Writing is one of my greatest joys and pleasures. When I am writing, it is the part of my day that I feel most fully myself. My writing time is probably the most sacred time of my day. I can’t wait to get up and write in the morning. I get giddy thinking about what I am going to write about next. Writing is my passion and I now realize that I let it remain dormant for much too long a time in my life. Throughout the years, my desire to write would try to force itself out, pushing through the doors, in the form in extra long emails to my friends and my family, in flowery work memos at my part-time jobs, in extra-descriptive posts about items that I was selling on eBay, and in half-started journals along the way. But I didn’t really open the door wide open to my passion for writing, until 2018, when I was 48-years-old. I didn’t surrender to my muse despite all of its gentle nudging and subtle hints sent along my way. I didn’t allow my longing to write to become a priority, until I decided that I would have to do it, or bust.

What is lying dormant in you? It is never too late to open the lid, pull it out, dust it off, throw away all of the old crusty criticisms from yourself and from others, and just do it. Just bask in it. Have a reunion with your deepest longings. Feel the joy of reconnecting with that which makes you feel more alive than anything. If you feel a stirring, but you are not sure what that stirring is, look for clues. What makes you curious? What gets your most rapt attention? What did you love to do as a child? What did you love to do that you shut down long ago, because someone else put it down? What is something you liked to do, but you stopped doing it, because you were afraid of stealing the spotlight from someone else with the same interest and talent (i.e. “my brother is the musician in the family”)? Whose talents do you most admire? What do people remark about what is special and unique and interesting about you? What are you quick to volunteer to do? What are things that you do, that when you do them, time stands still? These are the breadcrumbs that will lead you back to your passionate self. And remember, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing or how they are doing it. This world would be an incredibly dull, uninspiring, unstimulating place if we all liked and did the same things, in the same routine way. Start a love affair with your deepest self today. It is never too late. The recommitment ceremony in your heart will be incredibly beautiful, and it will be one of the best feelings you have felt in a long time.

“It’s your story. Feel free to hit ’em with a plot twist at any moment.” – Think Smarter, Twitter

Michael Hyatt Quote: “Consistency is better than perfection. We can all be consistent-perf ection is

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday – Funday

Image
credit: @Daryl_Elliott (Twitter)

I thought that I would help out my fellow writers this morning. This one made me giggle and yet also made me be a little in awe of its cleverness at the same time. Maybe that’s the true mark of excellent writing.

Have a great week!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Tortured Artists

“Putting a creation into the world is asking to be understood and loved. The answer is not always yes.” – Allison Moorer

Allison Moorer is a country singer and song writer, but she is also an amazing memoirist. Shelby Lynne, also a country singer, is her sister. I recently read Allison Moorer’s memoir, Blood, which describes the tragedy of her alcoholic father shooting the girls’ mother, and then himself, in their front yard, when both ladies were still teenagers. It was a hard, emotional read, but Moorer’s writing is so pure and fearless and insightful. I enjoyed the book, immensely, despite its devastating content.

In an interview, Moorer claims that she would have been an artist, even if she hadn’t come from such a dysfunctional background, but the art would have been different. She says this: “I don’t think my art would have had as many teeth as it does. I don’t think you have to necessarily suffer to make great art, but the truth is that most great art is born of it.”

It is Aldous Huxley, the author of A Brave New World, who is credited with the idea that all great art is born of suffering. And there are so many examples to support that idea. When I was in college, I took an Art History class. The professor kept us enticed, by promising the class, that if we first paid attention to the artists’ various styles, techniques and designs, she promised to give us the dish on their crazy, dramatic, and often depressing life stories. The stories which she told us, about the various artists’ lives were much more interesting, than any soap opera that we were hoping to hurry home to watch. As Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

I have given this idea of great art being tied to suffering, a lot of thought. There is no one whom I know, who has never suffered any heartache. There might be degrees of heartache, different levels of heaviness which we could put up for debate, but in the end, pain is pain. And pain is a part of living a life. It seems to me, that many artists, whether fearless or compulsive, have a drive to explore their pain, in order to make something beautiful and meaningful, come out of it. I don’t think that the great artists, and singers, and writers and other creatives necessarily suffer more than anyone else does. It’s just that they aren’t afraid to explore that suffering. When we open ourselves up to reach in and to pull out our deepest creativity, we also offer up to the world, our most profound vulnerability. And that is terrifying. What is more naked than the total baring of your soul?

I have painful experiences which have occurred in my life that I don’t choose to write about. They’re too hot to the touch. I may never write about certain elements of my life and that’s okay. But I’d be incredibly naive to think that my writing, my expressing, and my overall “being” doesn’t have any sparks and tears and echoes of all of my own life’s experiences, even the heaviest, heartbreaking ones.

I don’t think that all great artists can be lumped in as hypersensitive, addiction-riddled depressives, with wrecked up lives. I honestly think that our greatest artists are among the bravest people in the world. They aren’t afraid of the truth. They have nothing to prove to anyone. Oftentimes, great artists are alchemists who go full into their pain, with a strong desire to make something beautiful, enduring, and universally understood, out of their own deepest, inner turmoil. And we all benefit greatly from their courageous attempt to transform their pain into love, as a gift from themselves that they generously and boldly share with the world. We have museums, and libraries, and record charts, and theaters filled with people’s deepest expressions of their fullest selves, and we treasure these gifts. These treasures are reminders of the force of creativity, that is the true essence of all that is.

255 DUTCH ARTISTS ideas | dutch artists, art, dutch painters

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

Good morning, friends. I think that I will call you “soulmates” on Sundays. Good morning, soulmates. Sundays are usually the most popular day here on the blog. I love that you all are open to poetry. I love that you have helped me to rediscover the poet in me. I hope that you have also discovered (or rediscovered) the poet, in you, as well. Sundays are devoted to the emotional, sometimes non-sensical, mysterious spillage of words called poetry. Please explore the poem which I have written for today, and please also, feel comfortable and safe to share your poems in my Comments section. It has been wonderful sharing this moment with you on this lovely, tranquil day, my beloved soulmates. I look forward to many more connecting moments with you. Peace.

Keeper of the Words

Sometimes the words spill out of me and I can’t contain them.

Depending on how forceful and projectile the emotion is behind them,

The words scramble desperately to find their way on to the screen,

quicker than I can type them into visual form.

Sometimes the words slide out of me and surprise me,

I had no inner rumination of their simmering pot in my conscience.

The words leave me, before I even knew that they were with me.

Sometimes I have no words. I have nothing to write.

Nothing. My inner cache is empty. And that is okay.

When I have nothing to write, it clears the space,

Until the words accumulate again, to fill the void,

As they always do.

The words don’t require my participation,

They only ask for the keys to release them.

When the pressure mounts and the time is ripe,

I generously allow the words to flow out.

I am not the jailer of the words,

I am only their keeper.

Jailers suffocate and diminish and intimidate,

Keepers nurture and protect and trust in growth,

And further, keepers innately know when it is time,

to let their beloved charges fly free.

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

MP

I am in the middle of reading The Listening Path. Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, reiterates her insistence, in her latest book, that the quickest path to yourself, and to your creativity, is in writing “Morning Pages.” Writing Morning Pages is the practice of writing three pages, in your own handwriting, a stream of consciousness, before you even get out of bed, every single morning. I think that I tried this once, decades ago, and I only lasted a few days. Back then I had a house full of young children, who all had the uncanny ability to hear the hinges of my eyelids open, every morning, and to bound into my room, ready to start their/our day. I have restarted the process of writing Morning Pages. I have three days in, so far, and I am hoping to make it last. Cameron calls writing the Morning Pages part of your “Believing Mirrors” because they can get you in touch with your deepest dreams, and they can help you to believe that you can attain these dreams. She says that writing the Morning Pages (which are for your eyes only) helps to heighten your intuition, and writing them helps you to hone in your attention, as to what really matters to you.

“Morning Pages are simple but dramatic. They turn us into who we want to be. What could be better than that?” – Julia Cameron

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Peace, Today

My writing ideas haven’t been flowing to me these past few days. Sometimes I get a surge of so many ideas that I have to run to my computer, or to at least to a scrap of paper, so that I can copy my inspirations down to keep up with my racing mind and my surging passion for what lays on my heart. But this week, I’ve been distractible and I’ve been trying to make sense of things that I am probably never going to completely understand during my lifetime on Earth. So this morning, in my perusing of different writers whose work I like to read, I came across this excellent thought by C. Joybell C. The way she describes her mothering is what I have always strived to do, as a mother, sometimes more successfully than at other times. Still, the way that she describes it, is so beautifully put, and it is probably incredibly comforting to her son:

“Kids go out into this world and try to escape everything they know, try to escape the strings they’re tied to, try to escape the pedestals they’re put on, try to escape the spoons shoved into their mouths: why? Why do their souls flee their nests? Because their nests are cages. My son is never trying to flee because his nest is me and I am the sky: a vast blue space that he can fly around in! His nest is me, his nest is the sky. Let me tell you, when the sky is your home, you never want to escape that.”

I reached out to C. Joybell C. once. We share a love of writing (and of perfume), so we had a really nice interaction. Writers love to hear from their readers (this I know). I’ve had some really nice correspondence with authors over the years. If a writer’s words really make a difference in your life, make the point of reaching out to them. I can almost guarantee you, that they will write back to you. Writers love to write, in all forms.

Peace, friends. Give yourself a long, cool glass of tranquility today. When the fear thoughts, or the worry vibes start to take over, stop yourself. Say, “Not today, self. Today, I give myself peace.”

Open, Honest and Real

Image result for quotes in recovery circles about being unique"

In this day and age, the above principle is a tough ship to navigate. I feel like I know three camps of people: people who epitomize the acronym “TMI” and let it all hang out, to just about everyone they see, meet or greet in real life and on-line, and then they are utterly shattered when they are used or taken advantage of; then there are the people who are so private, so completely protected by a wafting sense of mystery and secrecy, leaving everyone who meets them totally frustrated, always yearning to find the hole to scratch and find the actual beating heart and true, open, flowing emotions, under the veneer of steely, calculated collectedness; and finally, there are a vast amount of people who work desperately to keep up and preserve a cheerful, carefree image for everyone, online and offline to see, but in person, seem to be staving off a loneliness and a yearning for connection, underneath the flimsy, cardboard, surface-y, semblance of it all. I think that I have vacillated in between all three of these camps, for most of my life.

People who read my blog often comment on the fact that I don’t mention my family members’ names. People who know some of the major crises I have experienced in my life (by this middle time in life, we all have gone through at least one or two “major biggies”), are sometimes curious why I don’t choose to write about these events. The reality is, I’m still navigating my ship of disclosure, trying to find the waters that are comfortable to me. At the same time, I am not a pirate. I respect the other ships on the sea, and I steer clear of their own private, personal journeys. Their journeys are not mine, and their ships are made to sail along different waters, than where I am headed. Even if we do find ourselves in the same pool of calm or stormy seas, I can only speak for my part of the adventure. How I am experiencing the waves and the turbulence, and even the calm, still waters, may be different than the other ships, because they are built differently that I am, and they carry different cargo and baggage than I do.

In the end, as important as authenticity is to me, and as much as I value real, heartfelt connection, I value the relationships at the sacrosanct table of my life, far more than anything. It’s a fine line to cross and to navigate, especially as a writer. Recently, I was telling my husband how frustrated I am by the fact that my life feels so full of little, aggravating interruptions and I often wish that I could disappear for vast amounts of time, to just focus on writing. But then the “aha moment” came to me, that all of my writing comes from my day-to-day experiences and my interactions with the people at “my table” and even the people standing around the table or even with the people, in the far corners of the rooms of my life. These experiences are priceless to my understanding of myself and thus the extension of myself, my sacred practice of writing, which helps me make sense of that deeper understanding of myself.

Today, with this honest, candid inside view of my thought/writing experience, I have invited you, my faithful friends and readers, to some very special seats, at my table. Thank you for taking the seat, and allowing me to share. I hope that you will sit and stay awhile, and I promise to keep your seat empty for you, when you return again. It is then that I will give you the same warm smile that I wear on my face right now, thankful for your place settings, in my life, making me feel worthy, understood and connected and open and honest and real.

What She Said

One of my favorite authors has always been Anna Quindlen. When I was young, I would eagerly await our family’s subscription to Newsweek and flip to the last page, to her column. It never failed to delight me and to provoke me to ponder. When I was in my twenties, I read her novel Black and Blue, which is one of the first books to really show the terror of stalking and the deadly reality of domestic violence. Another of one of her books, One True Thing, which was made into a movie with Meryl Streep and Renee Zewelleger, is one of those book/movies that has stuck in my memory for years. I think Anna Quindlen is a master with the pen. So, when I was at the library the other day, I checked out another one of her books called Being Perfect. It is a small, short, tome that reads more like an essay. I believe that I may have read it before, but somehow the Universe knew that I needed to read it again.

The premise of the book is that a lot of us start out in life, trying to live and to be, a formula of perfection. She claims that we morph ourselves into various forms of that formula, depending on what stage of life we are in – our early school days, our college years, being a parent, in our marriages, our various careers, etc. She claims that by being in what she calls a “lockstep” of trying to be perfect, we are cheating ourselves, and all of those who are having experiences with us, out of a true, authentic, in-depth experience that can only be unique to us. Computers are perfect. We are so much more imperfectly, deliciously complex.

When you first start taking your writing seriously, I think all writers fall into that “it’s all, already been said” mentality. I recently read about an author who was dying of cancer and claimed that she didn’t want to be that “cliche of another writer, writing about dying.” I love Anna Quindlen’s take on that in Being Perfect. This is what she said:

“Sometimes I meet young writers, and I like to share with them the overwhelming feeling I have about our work, the feeling that every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time ever has. That is her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Fitzgerald imitations, she can stay home. If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop trying.

But if her books reflects her character, the authentic shape of her life and her mind, then she may well be giving readers a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too. And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine.”

She also applies this philosophy to parenting. This is what she says:

“You will convince yourself that you will be a better parent that your parents and their parents have been. But being a good parent is not generational, it is deeply personal, and it all comes down to this: If you can bring your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will be able to teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, or a scribble of crayon, would be much more satisfying.”

My daughter, a budding artist, brought home a paper mache project the other day, in which she had decorated with words and ideas that inspired her. One quote on the project was from Salvador Dali. It said:

“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”

I asked her why that particular quote struck her. She said, “Well, if a great artist like Salvador Dali knew that he wouldn’t reach perfection, why should I worry about it? It makes me feel freer.”

I think that I can only end this day’s post with a smile.

Three Steps to Nowhere

Well, this is the earliest that I have been awake in a while. My husband headed back to work today. Break over. This is going to take some “easing into.” Probably like a lot of us, in the last few days, I’ve been reflecting a lot about what I want to do in 2019. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my blog and what direction I should take it.

I read recently that people love to read blogs that offer numbered steps to perfection or numbered tips to achieving your goals. So, if I wrote a blog entitled “Three Steps to Your Perfect Life” or “Five Guaranteed Ways to Lose All of the Extra Holiday Pounds”, they would most likely be my best looked-at and most read blogposts. Unfortunately, I don’t have all of the answers to make bullet lists to cover all (or any, for that matter) of life’s predicaments. In fact, the older that I get, the less I feel certain about any of my “sureties”. I’m not a disingenuous person. I can’t pretend to be an expert on something that I’m not.

I read once that maybe life’s journey isn’t about becoming anything, but it’s more about “unbecoming” everything that we take on that really isn’t “a fit”; undoing everything that isn’t really authentically ourselves. I’ve heard and experienced, that people who live to be elderly, often revert back to child-like states in their last years – becoming more open, alive in the moment, and pure in their emotions. I’m not sure what steps to take to get back to that state of purity. Maybe that just happens in the natural progression of life. Maybe that clean simplicity is a great gift of aging. Sorry, but I just don’t have the answers. I don’t have the steps or the bullet points. But I do have the curiosity to observe it all, in this second stage of adulting, and I enjoy blogging about my experiences and observations. So, until those magic simple steps and perfect bullet lists appear in my head, this questioning and observing and discovering and the laughing at the absurdity of some of it, is the format that this particular blog is going to stay in, at least until my perfect answers arrive.

There is a scene, which takes place some time in the 1950s, in the excellent movie, The Wife, in which an older, very talented but unread female author tries to persuade the young, talented, aspiring heroine of The Wife, to quit writing. The older writer claims that all of the decisions about what makes good writing is decided by men and therefore, writing will be a hopeless and pointless career, for the young female aspiring author.

The young, and some would say “naive” writer firmly states to her older friend, “A writer has to write.”

The cynical, experienced woman retorts back, “A writer HAS to be read, honey.”

I agree with both of them. Thanks for staying with me. I look forward to our future connection, epiphanies, and awakenings, in the upcoming year!

“Any product that needs a manual to work, is broken.” – Elon Musk