Making All Things New, Part II: Writing with Heart

Look at what’s happening in this world. Every day there’s something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that going on, how could I stop?

  

~ Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I’m often asked how I can spend so much time writing or attending to the business end of writing. I could call myself a workaholic, but I think the answer is more complex. I feel a passion for writing and everything related to the pastime. I’m also fortunate to be able to integrate my passion with making a living. I even enjoy the marketing and PR aspects of a writing career that many authors loathe.

In other words, I am committed with a capital C and engaged with a capital E, and can barely pull myself away from my laptop at the end of the day. Sometimes I don’t pull myself away from my laptop at the end of the day . . . I fall asleep with it near my side.

The act of writing itself, especially from the heart, is a state of grace made manifest when we live in the moment with our senses wide open. This creative state is meditative, perhaps even meditation in motion. This makes writing sound easy enough – as poet Gwendolyn Brooks suggests, there’s an endless flow of inspiration all around us. We can explore anything from the flavor of the day’s weather to the flavor of the day’s politics and never, ever run out of topics to write about.

Brooks, the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to hold the position of Poetry Consultant to the U.S. Library of Congress, also suggests in her work and her observations about life that because we exist is reason enough to write. The English word exist is derived from the Latin term existere, which means “to emerge” or “to stand forth” – and the prefix ex- equals element,  meaning “out of” or “from,”  as well as “appear” or “be.” 

We exist, and the meaning of our existence manifests from that which appears around us, therefore we write!

So, when we writers sit and tap our pencils over a blank page or sit and stare at a blank page on our screens wondering what to write, it’s simply a matter of tapping into the heart, that impassioned space from which we must extract our freshest and most sincere work. Ultimately, we scribes write what begs to be written, what our psyches must either define or celebrate.

We live in interesting times, an era of great social and political ferment marked by increasing disruption in our social fabric, a time of transition, but at great peril. Of course, these divisions and flaws have always been present, even though illusory in the bigger cosmic picture. There really is no separation between races, religions, fair weather or foul, disappearing or thriving species, or anything else – we are all part and parcel of this ever-changing, impermanent, kaleidoscopic production we call reality. But the illusion of all these divisions and categories is what gives us a plethora of contrasts and conflicts to explore in our prose and poetry.

Lately – for the past couple of years, really, I’ve been  more captivated by the dramas unfolding around me in real life than in reading fiction. I find myself reading scores of articles and essays relating to the great issues of our day and find that my conversations (and sometimes arguments) with others, writers and non-writers alike, are mostly about these issues. I am astounded by the recent reappearance of virulent racist and misogynist rhetoric that seems to have festered underground, and emerged in more subtle, devious, and pervasive ways in the U.S. since our Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s addressed these blights upon our common humanity.

We can maybe take comfort in the idea that these attitudes are surfacing as they are cleansed away forever. But what astounds me most is that these negative attitudes are not only expressed by older generations whom you might expect would cling to old ways, but are instead embraced and repeated by younger people who have not directly experienced our nation’s historical struggles with constitutional, civil rights, and yet should have learned these lessons from their elders and through their reading, and know better than to embrace poisonous rhetoric.

Ah, but that may be the problem – many are not reading – they, no, we  live in the bubble world of mainstream media and social media. Many are not engaging with the great novelists and journalists of the past or the present, preferring instead to socialize only with peers who have similar views, emulating the memes and tropes of the group. Limited engagement with the arts equals limited engagement with the real world, and vice versa. More and more, people live in these bubbles of selective understanding. Even Google gauges what we want to see and gives us an incomplete overview of any search.

My fascination with these disturbing political and social trends (and many others) has apparently driven me to delve more deeply into creative nonfiction and to blog, something uncharacteristic for me as a long-time poet and fiction writer. I preferred up until lately to explore my life and my interests through the lens of make-believe, which is no less powerful and sometimes even more so. What reader hasn't been challenged and transformed by a powerful novel? Fiction also allows authors the safe haven of anonymity, since readers has no idea what part of a story is derived from personal life experience or what is fabricated. Revealing events and feelings as nonfiction requires taking the risk of condemnation by revealing oneself.

The writing process in  dissimilar genres is still the same, though. We can lure the realities of life into our art, and lure our art back into real life. What we offer to readers completes a cycle, this circumnabulation of mirroring back and forth the meaning of life that we explore by writing and our audience by reading.

Whether we transform current issues into compelling fiction and poetry or creative nonfiction or straight journalism, we have a responsibility to do this in a moving way. Literature of all sorts must engage the reader fully in the author’s mental journey, or why bother to write about these journeys?

Whether we choose to reflect upon the pressing issues that face a small planet with seven billion people, or choose instead to explore profound pleasantries about the two sun-yellow African daisies that just bloomed in a chipped clay pot on our front patio, it’s the heart stuff that makes our writing come alive. It’s the passion we channel into our writing that matters.

When we become confused about what to write, we need only to look into our hearts to find the passion that cries out to be shared. When we don’t know what to read, the same thing applies – what cries out for comprehension?

What do we really want to understand, to “stand under?” These are the things worth reading and writing about!

Engaged Concentration: Holyhead, Wales

Kate Robinson ©2010

STRIKE AGAINST the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)

Many websites are blacked out today to protest proposed U.S. legislation that threatens internet freedom: the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). From personal blogs to giants like WordPress and Wikipedia, sites all over the web — including this one — are asking you to help stop this dangerous legislation from being passed.

I didn't get the process figured out in time to black my website and blog out because I'm a writing fool, and worked the day and night away . . . but I do support this action and hope you will too!

If you're in the USA, there are many links available online to sign petitions or to help you contact your Congresscritters and Representatives. If you are outside the USA. you can petition the US State Department at American Censorship.org 

Making All Things New

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

                                  

                                                ~ Jean Cocteau, author and painter (1889-1963)

Turning a calendar page to the New Year is often a relief. Crossing this artificial boundary allows us the psychological space to put the past behind us, to let go of old, tired, unpleasant jellyfish stuff and embrace the happy, forward-looking, inspiring sundog stuff.

On that note, my personal emergence into 2012 feels much different than in 2011. Humanity seems less mired down in the phantasmagoria of the rabbit hole, having grappled greatly over the past year with the complexities and paradoxes of life in a Wonderland filled with political snarls and crises. People everywhere seem to agree that the Red Queen, the churlish and capricious authority who keeps us under her political and economic thumb, is just someone impressive but inept that we’ve given our power away to. Now we’re taking our power back, discovering or negotiating our role as creators, as grassroots decision makers in our individual and collective lives.

This psychological fresh start at the New Year also allows us breathing room to make things new again, to polish and illuminate our writing with originality and spontaneity, as Cocteau suggests.

I don’t mean to imply that I have anything in common with the brilliant chameleon Cocteau . . . I’m just pointing out that he’s inspiring and seems pretty right on, in my limited experience. It doesn’t hurt that he was a major nonconformist, born a rich kid who got expelled from school and ran away to live in a red-light district in Marseilles, and who eventually rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s greatest writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers and artists of his time. He intuited at a young age that the stuffy status quo wasn’t going to get him anywhere he wanted to be.

I think we have to grab at our chance to run away from conformity and any old, tired patterns in our writing  every time we sit down to paper or keyboard. We have to take chances with our work or be condemned to producing possibly competent but conventional work that may be publishable, entertaining, or informative, but is ultimately forgettable. And perhaps soul draining, in the long run.

There is certainly a market for competent and not particularly illuminating work –

E-bookstores and brick and mortar stores everywhere are full of such books. If you make your living through this endeavor, I’m not maligning you – my hat’s off to you because you’ve mastered the key elements of writing and revision, plus have the great pleasure of making your living engaged in a craft you enjoy. That’s heads above toiling at non-creative jobs that we often come to loathe.

I’m intuiting and suggesting that if you have already mastered these basics of character, plot, dialogue, story arc, and all the toolish details of grammar and syntax, then it’s high time to take a step forward – or a plunge – into the creative fire of story that emanates from the artistic heart and soul.

Whether you write fiction or non, poetry or prose, feature stories, catalog copy, or press releases, there is a level of competence, and then there is stellar work. Depending upon the level of that creative fire burning within, writing at the break-out level may flow from you like magic, if you’re lucky, or take even more blood, sweat, and tears than usual, or more likely, some combination of the two if my experience means anything in a typical evolution of a creative writer.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Experimentation leads to failure at times, of course, but it also produces brilliant work that changes the hearts and minds of readers, that leaves an imprint on the world. This is the stuff of the Newberry Awards, of the Nobel Prize, or of an Oscar for screenwriting. That implausible plot that an editor wants you to change for the sake of her vision of the story, to also meld perhaps the mission statement of a particular publishing house, just may be the plot that fires up the next award-winner under an editor or publisher willing to take more risks.

The universe sometimes tests us, tempts us with a “sure thing” versus the risk of a masterpiece. Sometimes creativity equals risk.

I’m not saying that you should rebel unnecessarily and never listen to agents or publishing house editors. They have important guidance to share with writers about what works and what doesn’t, what sells and what doesn’t. But at the bottom line, opinions are opinions. Art is subjective, and writers and artists of all types have the ability to plumb the depths of their hearts and know when their guides are no longer guiding them where they want to go.

It’s a matter of faith – trusting your own abilities, trusting the muse that led you to write what you did in the first place. Sometimes it just makes sense to turn away from an “expert” and go with your own heart.

I’ve backed out of some publishing deals because the editors’ vision for my work conflicted with my own. I’ve ignored critique partners’ opinions when those opinions didn’t feel right.  This is sometimes painful and made me feel temporarily foolish. But in all cases, I listened to my heart, which spoke true about my original vision. I may not have satisfied a particular audience, but I did satisfy MY audience by remaining true to the path I’d forged into uncharted creative territory. I’d had a creative journey that no one really understood until I’d traveled the length of it.

Finding a niche for your work is sort of like applying for a job. Most of us are in no position to turn a job offer down, and we really, really want that publication contract (with conditions) dangling in front of us. We feel foolish if we turn down either, even when we can see that the shoe clearly doesn’t fit. I’m sure anyone with a couple of decades of career experience can attest to a nightmare position they took of necessity that didn’t work out. Or one that they stuck with that made them miserable for years until they either retired or found a way to extricate themselves.

Many writers can speak to the regret of having published something perhaps tweaked too much by a well-meaning editor who didn’t really understand or see into the heart of their work. Sometimes this is just a given and part of the job, as in news journalism; sometimes outside that field it’s  more of a liability and yet a  temporary pain, because if we hold the rights to the work, we may go on and publish it in yet another, more satisfying form. There are times to acquiesce to the editor’s blue pencil for many different reasons –  the practicality of gaining an important publication credit, getting work of a time-sensitive nature out, being included in a special anthology, lucking onto a first book publication, and so forth.

I think we writers just have to weigh all these considerations, and use our wisdom and discernment, as they say in Buddhist philosophy, to shape and publish our work. Yes, we all have this innate wisdom! It’s acting upon it that is sometimes as difficult as the initial creation . . .

I suppose, in another vein, you could say that the approach of accepting the status quo of some sure market is somewhat more ego-driven and practical; the other path of heart and risk, a more authentic expression. While writers can certainly engage in a lot of attention-getting, egomaniacal blather to satisfy a desire for attention (Cocteau was sometimes guilty of this), there is a deep authenticity implicit in forging work within the fire of true creative passion. There is something that rings true, that captivates readers, and that changes lives when work is allowed to flow from the heart and is not forced into a particular mold to satisfy a particular market.

We’ve all heard the stories about the fifty rejections of some best-selling, award-winning novels or nonfiction narratives that catapulted an unknown author to fame and sometimes even riches. It’s not that we should aim at the material benefits as our final goal – the fame and riches are dubious, transitory, and a side effect of the creative work.

Creative expression in itself is truly magnificent. We feel satisfaction deep down in the heart and soul when we craft a manuscript, or a poem or essay that has the potential for greatness because it is fresh with power, truth, wisdom, a unique character or viewpoint, and a truly compelling narrative.

I think the ability to write from one’s heart is aided by being a bit of a renegade or a rugged individualist like Cocteau. It’s also enhanced by casting aside the fear of the unknown, taking our own skills and potential seriously, and revealing our true selves, however flawed.

What comes from the heart, satisfies the heart.

So turn over your new leaf –  take a deep breath, kick up your heels, and go write where no other writer has gone before . . .  you’ll be glad you did!



Green Man

Kate Robinson  ©2010



Loss and More Loss

Needless to say, another month has passed without my whipping up a blog post.

My loss, really, because blogging is a great way to prod my mind into gear and practice the craft of creative nonfiction writing.

Otherwise, this is not a loss for you, dear reader, because November has only just today metamorphosed into December. Plus, unless you’ve been unconscious the past decade, you’re already drowning in tree books and e-books, online and print magazines, email and that other type that seems to keep mysteriously filling my USPS mailbox no matter how hard I try to get it to stop.

So if you're one of my regular readers, then you’re probably just as happy I messed up. You have enough to read and one thing less is no great loss!

Loss is kind of like time. It never stops arriving. Have you noticed how life seems to be not just a process of accumulating knowledge, experience, and wisdom, but also a process of stripping away everything else?

Birth, old age, sickness and death. Now there’s a jellyfish progression if I ever saw one.

There are Buddhist teaching stories about how living is rather like peeling away the layers of an onion until there’s nothing left. But the nothing that remains isn’t a nothing nothing.

Nope, not at all. It’s more of an emptiness nothing. Emptiness of the “not empty” category is actually the realization that, in the most famous Buddhist paradox of all, that “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.”

Meaning that this loss of everything we live for isn’t exactly what it seems. Emptiness in this sense refers to the condition of giving up all sensory conditions and awakening to enlightenment. In one sense, this is like saying – in the words of songwriter Kris Kristofferson and memorably expressed by the immortal Janis Joplin – that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose . . .”

Well, naturally the world’s greatest Buddhist masters can expound for hours on the complexity of this unempty emptiness. I’m just giving you a quick nutshell, layman-impaired version.

Why? Well, to make myself feel better about all my losses.

How come? Because I like to vent about the unpleasantries of my life. All this philosophical stuff about writing is an acceptable outlet for my complaints and lets me blog about why I missed my blog appointment again. In the process, I can obfuscate my laziness and procrastination!

Still, I can blame birtholdagesicknessandeath.Without getting into sordid detail, let’s just say I had a long-term problem with my ears that seemed to crop up about the time I had five immunizations one day before my trip to Kenya last December. It might have actually started when I lived for a year in Wales and brought home something from that water-blessed climate that my immune system couldn’t handle after the immunizations weeks later. I did spend some hours scrubbing away some black mold that appeared on a wall during the infamous floods of November 2009. Annoying, but this itchy-itch didn’t keep me from my work despite the fact that I stuck my fingers in my ears to scratch so often that I wished I had four hands like many Asian deities. This problem eventually affected my calves as well, a sort of dermatitis.

About the time that this problem calmed down considerably and I thanked the universe, I had a for-reals bacterial / fungal ear infection in one ear, perhaps brought on by all that scratching, even though the itching had abated due to the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals. I don’t recall ever having a childhood earache of this explosive caliber, but as experienced by many kids, my  right eardrum ruptured and I spent lots of time in an ENT doctor’s office getting my ear suctioned. And lots of time going to the pharmacy to pick up various concoctions that didn’t vanquish the infection because the ENT was perhaps overconfident of what type of infections were brewing beyond my broken eardrum and didn’t culture them from the get-go.

Okay, so that slowed me down a bit more. About the time the blasted ear infection cleared up (only because I went online in desperation and made a home-made concoction that cleared in three days what the pharmaceutical companies couldn’t clear up in weeks). But this was okay too. Ya gotta keep moving, after all.

But thennnnn . . . an antibiotic-resistant skin infection suddenly reared its ugly head. It didn’t help that my ENT had me indiscriminately taking some antibiotics before the aforementioned culture from my ear determined what was in it. He twice had me on an antibiotic once thought not very long ago to be the king of all antibiotics and is now famous for spawning monster bacteria. But this was okay, because although I’d spent many days in bed with high fevers and chills and many better days exhausted and in pain, this condition passed too. I’d just recovered when went away to spend Halloween week with my grandsons.

You know how kids catch every known cold / flu virus in the universe. No problema. I’d worked for years as a K-12 substitute teacher and probably have had or been exposed to every known cold / flu virus in the universe, nyah-nyah. Besides, they’d had it a few days the week before and . . .

Boom. My daughter came down with the crud and was out of commission for the remainder of my visit. By the time I went home, that achey, creeping, doomster feeling had a grip on me. The worst cold /flu /bronchial infection I’ve ever had in my life (and maybe several past lives) kept me in bed for a week and coughing up my lungs for a second week. I’m lucky I didn’t go into p-neu-mon-i-a.

What does any of this have to do with writing? Well, the advantage of freelancing and telecommuting  is that you can take your laptop to bed. Although I lost a significant amount of writing time, circumstance allowed me to press forward. I didn’t miss my most important paid hours and still received full paychecks – I  would have run out of sick pay in most conventional jobs or drug myself to work and exposed my co-workers to my nasty ailments.

Plus, I managed to do some fun unpaid, speculative writing tasks such starting a story, polishing old pieces and submitting them to publishers, as well as tooting my horn about recent publications on social media sites and in e-mails. I also managed to do a few of the not-fun tasks like the dreaded nosing around and sending out CVs for new freelance writing jobs. Not to mention gaining some forced but necessary time off. Despite my resistance, downtime allows the subconscious mind the creative vacation we discussed a few blog posts back.

In spite of all my losses and frustrations (there are others, too many to write about without boring you to tears and making me sound like a perpetual victim), 2011 has been a pretty darn good year for writing and editing. I’ve had more publications and churned out more edits for clients this year than any other single year since I began to embrace the full-time writing life.

I hope I’ve managed to disguise my rant as another post about perseverance. Everything changes. Handle loss and change like any other writerly delay / rejection / failure. Embrace it. Own it. Shift gears and go around it, over it, or under it. Let this emptying out, this letting go of acquisitions and desires become another step toward enlightenment, that is to say, wisdom, acceptance, emotional equanimity, and transformation.

Turn those jellyfish into sundogs. After all, isn’t transformation everything?

"Transformation"
Illuminated Tibetan Iconographic Calligraphy by Tashi Mannox http://www.tashimannox.com

Horrified!

Well, not really, simply occupied.

I’m disappointed that I haven’t blogged since late August. When we writers start blogs, we generally have a posting schedule in mind. I set my bar low, planning to do at least one post a month. I had lots to say early on and surpassed that goal, then fell into my projected monthly rhythm. Well, except the gaps between posts became larger as time went on, running six weeks rather than thirty days.

Then I missed an entire month and almost a second, oh my.

So much for goals. Not that I don’t support goal setting or always miss the mark. I do think it’s useful to aim for writing a certain amount of time or number of words each day/week/month. After all, consistency is what moves us forward and makes us better writers. You can’t achieve much with wishes, hopes, or dreams. In this business, we have to apply butt to chair and write. Or at least unleash our imaginations and let ‘er rip until our thoughts spill into our fingertips.

There’s great value in flexibility and spontaneity. All work and no imaginative play makes any writer dull. So look at the bigger picture and don’t always try to micromanage your writing life if your odd schedule or renegade methods work for you.

But if your writing life isn’t in the right gear, examine your writing habits. Are you meeting your goals? If not, why? Are you setting the bar too high? Too low? Are you not motivated enough? Do you get bogged down in a rut? Waylaid by distractions? Or do you just think you’re not working when you’re really doing some essential living?

Distractions are a major obstacle for most writers and artists. The internet is clearly our greatest blessing and curse. Hours can pass like minutes when we get online for a little research or break for some fun with e-mail or social media. If you have a telecommute job or freelance at home, then the blessings and curses multiply. It helps to write from a computer with no internet connection or by pretending the connection is down. We imaginative types can convince ourselves of almost any reality! You can also try implementing a schedule of online rewards for writing and editing time well spent.

Apparently, there is  software for incorrigibles that will prevent logging on to the internet at specified times and I suspect that’s the answer for info junkies like me. *Cough*

Anything in the immediate environment can distract, from telephone to doorbell, to that big pile of laundry you didn’t wash last night. Maybe you need to move around with a laptop or go to a coffee shop once in awhile to stay fresh. Or maybe you have kids / pets / spouses / outside day jobs / infinite responsibilities and you MUST write at particular times or not at all. Then establishing clear priorities and schedules and sticking to them is a must.

Ruts are one of my greatest pitfalls. Rather than forge ahead in a playful manner, I tend to hunker down over old work and revise, revise, revise, which sometimes pays off with an unexpected publication. But I have an overblown sense of responsibility and often ignore my sense of playfulness. I could have some fun noodling around with imaginative writing prompts to get some new stories and projects started, but my ingrained sense of responsibility kicks in and I’ll tend to old, worn-out pieces instead. Don’t let anyone call me a quitter!

There’s always a time and a place for revision and the dull nuts and bolts of writing, of course, but there’s also no need to swim with the jellyfish all the time when you could be soaring with sundogs. Writing is SUPPOSED to be FUN, dagnabit!

If you’re anything like me, not only do you deal with ruts and distractions, you must either write or die! The rest of my life seems to work better when I’m creative, as if creativity is the soil from which everything else grows. Some distractions aren’t always separate from our writing or our lives. Sometimes we have to pull away from our craft and let our lives unfold now so that we have writing fodder later. In managing our time and occupying our lives, we must decide what makes our efforts worthwhile.

Occupy Wall Street has been one of my favorite distractions lately. There’s nothing like a major world movement to snag your attention, if you’re as much interested in the state of humanity as you are in your craft. In my world, the two interests go hand-in-hand. After all, no matter whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry or some combination of genres, then you’re working to affect your readers’ minds and emotions, to provide them with an experience that makes them see something in a different light. So whether you agree or not with OWS politics, you’ll have to concede that there’s a big change in consciousness afoot, a movement manifesting in different political spheres around the globe as people reclaim their own power.

Life really is stranger than fiction and you never know whether catching errant dust bunnies, earning a Nobel prize in literature, or marching down Main Street will constitute a life well-lived. Like anything else, this is a matter of personal choice and inclination. So whether you occupy that dust mop, occupy that desk, or Occupy Wall Street, do it with gusto, complete concentration, and a mischievous sense of fun!

WRITE OR DIE!