Nine of Birds – Tarot for Writers

Sep 23, 2020 | Events, Tarot for Writers, The Writing Life, Writing Advice

So I pulled a Tarot card today.  This one, for us, in preparation for our virtual convening, The Grove.  Honestly, I was hoping for something inspirational, something like The Star to indicate rebirth and a new beginning.  I know – and I say it all the time – that there are no “good” cards, or “bad” cards, especially in the Shining Tribe deck, but in times like these, times when I feel like I am long past being able to process or accept one more curve ball from the news or my community, I will forgive myself for wanting a little bit of reprieve.

But the Tarot knows what it needs to say.  Today’s card is the Nine of Birds.

Like the Star, this figure emerges from the realm of the dead – in this case, a burial mound.  She stands at the entrance, accompanied by the wisdom of the owl, and equipped with a weapon which both and urn and a scythe.  It’s a barren image, of grief and death and sorrow. 

BUT.  Isn’t that where we are now?  Haven’t we been literally been surrounded by it for longer than we can fathom? One of the key messages of this card is that we are in the doorway, and we have our protections and defenses.  But to move forward we have to process and acknowledge all our feelings.  We have to accept our losses, and empathize with others’ suffering.  

This is a card that calls for rituals of mourning and release.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of shouldering all the burdens, fighting all the battles, and feeling so stuck in the process.  

So the Nine of Birds, of course, is the Star’s shadow self, and a great plug for our intensive, creative, restorative gathering coming up on October 24-25th: The Grove.  Four teachers and ten hours of rituals and techniques to clear away, reach for, and gather what you need.

And for those who aren’t coming, I encourage you to find a ritual for release.  Clear a space where you can feel safe and let out something you have been holding.  For me, these feelings immediately start my creativity swirling.  If you need a more specific exercise for your creative project, imagine (possibly for your character if you have one, and if not, just embody a watcher/voice) the moment when “you” have risen out of the land of the dead, when the effort has been expended and all the emotions have surfaced – the moment that is too full to hold back anymore.  Don’t forget, if you are writing a story, that quite often our characters don’t actually know what they want – they often fight against what they need only to arrive at the place they thought they didn’t want to be in.  So this is a great moment for a narrative.  It’s unstable; it needs to be embraced or emptied or it needs to explode. This might be the emotion right before or right after a major climax.  On the other side is the new world, a new epiphany, a new possibility.  We can’t see it yet, but it’s coming.

Come to The Grove if you can. Sign up for updates from the Two Trees Writers Collaborative if you want to hear more about our upcoming offerings.  Stay safe and happy writing.

Pele’s Fire: Almost here!

Mar 26, 2016 | Events, The Writing Life, Writing Advice

lava heartFrom April 3-9th, I will be leading a retreat on the Big Island called Pele’s Fire.  (For those of you in Hawaii, and therefore on Hawaiian time, if you are interested in joining us for one day only, we have an Aloha Friday intensive that you can still register for here.  As we planned this, one of our participants, Heather Leah Huddleston, asked us some questions, which I share with you now.  I hope all you writers find some inspiration!

“…for me, the word ‘core’ feels like I am in partnership with my work…” ~ Elena Georgiou

Pele’s Fire was birthed from the very core—hearts, minds, passions, and desires—of three women: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Elena Georgiou and Bhanu Kapil.  Joined by Black Belt Nia instructor Susan Tate, who will incorporate daily creative movement classes, including Nia, these mentors make Pele’s Fire the retreat to access, to transmute, to move and write from the core of the body, from the very core of our planet.

One may think: Why Hawaii? Why movement? Why writing? Here’s what the leaders of Pele’s Fire have to say about the importance of accessing your words (and your work) from the core of who you are….

HLH: What is at the core of the offering?

REIKO: The writers are at the core. We have designed the retreat to feed, nurture and inspire them in every possible way. Feeling stuck and need some exercises and brainstorming? Check. Want a small group to read your work, and a one-on-one conversation that dives into the problems, possibilities and strengths of your manuscript? We got you. Want to dance all day, or not at all? Your choice. Looking for a community to immerse yourself in, or intense quiet where you can write the day away? You can have that too. And more.

My point, though, is that everyone writes differently, learns differently; each one of us is coming from a different place, with different needs. So what we are offering is an open hand and a refuge. It’s an approach I learned from Hedgebrook, the retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island. They call it “radical hospitality.” And it is rooted in the belief that every writer’s voice is important, that we are the authors of change. At Pele’s Fire, our “core” is to nurture the writer, nurture the voice, nurture the change.

HLH: Why Hawaii?

REIKO: Hawaii is my home. I was born there and grew up with the rhythms in my blood. I think each of us is imprinted by the sounds and smells, the air, the land and seacape of the place where we were born—so perhaps I am biased—but, for me, there is an energy in Hawaii that offers great peace and inspiration. I wanted to help open a door—not to the touristy “pina coladas on the beach” Hawaii, but to the vital energy of a land that is literally regenerating itself, and to the aloha spirit that I feel our troubled world could use a whole lot more of.

“In the stillness of retreat, we can hear our part, our ability to change the melody, rather than trying to jump in and follow a prescribed lyric. What we write—or do not write—contributes to the symphony that is our culture, our humanity, our future.” ~ Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

HLH: Place definitely has spirit. The earth is always humming. When we connect to the body and the words, that hum is what moves us. What happens when we get stuck—either physically or in the work? Do you think moving one will automatically free the other?

BHANU: The word that comes to mind is from Lauren Berlant: “receptivity.” How can we receive that “hum” up through our legs, into the middle of us? Retreat settings are always, in my experience, about someone—the person who dreamed/built the retreat center, I suppose—having been very thoughtful about the site, and the energy of site. Kalani feels like this kind of place to me. There is something already there that we can connect to. What does it mean to connect with the energy of land that has a strong indigenous history? I know that I am very conscious of this in Himalayan spaces, and so want to make anything I am saying about the earth—a part of the earth I am not from—a way of honoring the invitation to be there at all. This is my precursor, you could say, to receiving the hum. What are the ethics of receiving or opening to earth energy, in a part of the earth—the planet—where we don’t have cultural connections? I live in the Western U.S., and so—walking in the Rockies and the foothills, the places where the surge of the High Plains meets the energy of the mountains—I know this, too. These are immigrant questions, perhaps. I know that part of Kalani’s mission is a deep honoring of native community and local economy, and so I feel that I am stepping into a space that is thoughtful about this. And then, having stepped over the boundary? Into Kalani? My dream is that a rigid way of being might be: interrupted. To see what happens when we begin to move. I know this from my home life—walking, yoga, pilgrimage—and trust that the same thing will happen when we are there, amplified by community, by the ones we are with and the integral “hum” of this incredibly powerful landscape. How might vibration and movement dissolve blocks to writing, but also—open: new corridors and pathways: through the strata: of our imaginations?!! What will it take to break through? Break through, that is, to our capacity to “grieve and dream.” Here I am quoting a former Goddard College student, Sayra Pinto, who I met when she was a student in the MFA program that Elena, Reiko and I teach in in another part of life. Sayra Pinto: “Our ancestors need us to grieve for them, but they need us to dream for them, too. One or the other is not enough. We need to grieve and dream at the same time.” This is what comes to mind when I think of the part of this question that is about freedom. To be free enough: to feel. To feel these things—the grieving and dreaming—in our very cells. Then to write from this cellular: place. This part of us—that reorganizes itself—and is oxygenated, you could say—by movement practices. To open. And thus to receive: the hum.

HLH: Why did you decide to incorporate movement into a writing retreat? How will getting into the body help to get into the body of work?

REIKO: Nia is a movement practice that supports many things: joy, health and balance among them. It is both completely free, inclusive and nonjudgmental, and also quite scientific. Susan Tate, our Nia guide, is the author of four books herself, and has a lot of experience with tapping one’s creative potential through Nia and movement. Dancing with her is joyful and liberating! She’s ideally suited to help us connect the body and mind, and she’ll be leading daily Nia and other offering according to whatever feels right for the writers and the day.

As for why, I think sometimes we writers get too lost in our heads. Carpal tunnel, hunched shoulders, a stiff neck—physical ailments are one type of consequence, but our writing itself can lose its power when we rely on intellect and our mind’s eye. Last year, in Ruth Ozeki’s meditation class at Goddard College, she reminded us how grounding into our bodies and connecting with sensation and emotion can help create surprising and resonant images on the page. Then there is the need for writers to locate trauma and truth in our bodies in order to connect to some of our more difficult stories with authenticity.

But there is the flip side too: not starting with the mind, but with the body. In Nia, there is a concept called “dancing through life.” It’s a way of experiencing everything as dance: laundry, eating, work, and writing. Giving the physical body its space to express, move and align often brings epiphanies into the body of work instinctively and with ease.

“Because this is a setting that is also about healing and movement in another way, I would hope that participants have an opportunity…to discharge or dislodge any blocks to writing, to the creative process or practice as it stands.” ~ Bhanu Kapil

HLH: What can one learn about the body from writing the word?

ELENA: Everything that we write begins from the body, and so I believe it is the body that teaches us to find the words—the image appears in the mind, the pen is taken up by the hand, the keyboard is pressed. All this bodily action to record what the eye has observed and the heart has felt is put to work by what and how we write. But when we talk about the body, we must also talk about the soul because it is the soul that has secreted the body, and we have to pay our respects to the soul for having a body at all. So to answer your question: What can one learn about the body from writing the word? One of the things we can learn is that movement—typing, spinning, writing, leaping—is prayer.

HLH: Music is at the core of Nia, can you speak to the music of writing—what moves it—and also what does the stillness or silence offer the practice?

REIKO: To me writing is voice, and our novels, memoir, poetry, essays are our song. Increasingly, I have been thinking about how important that is in our world: both that we join in and sing melody lines that others have started, so they know they are not alone, and also that we sing into the gaps, because there are so many gaps, so many stories that have been silenced and that need to be heard.

In the stillness of retreat, we can hear our part, our ability to change the melody, rather than trying to jump in and follow a prescribed lyric. What we write or do not write contributes to the symphony that is our culture, our humanity, our future.

On a practical level, the notion of writing as song helps me think in terms of emotion and intention when I am writing. What do I need to say? What needs to be preserved, shared, released? What is that irresistible melody running through my head? It’s beneficial to the process of writing too: bass lines, minor keys, canons, leitmotifs—these help me think about subtext, and structural metaphor, crises and momentum, all very practical tools in the transformation of life into art.

HLH: Can you speak to the volcano, the living core of the earth near the retreat center? It seems to be a place where the earth opens up, like a wound on the body. What happens when we get to the core of our work? And how can we access it?

ELENA: Writers carry their own volcanoes beneath their skin. We each have at least one. We know it’s there. We know it will erupt at some point. In fact, many pray for this eruption to happen frequently. I suppose I can speak to the volcano, but that is not the usual relationship—usually the volcano speaks to me. It often erupts while I’m driving, which is obviously dangerous—trying to drive with lava running over your thighs has proven hazardous on more than one occasion, so I’ve learned to pull over and whip out the paper and pen to put out the fire. Over the years, I’ve learned that the lava that erupts from my core is something to be revered. Not feared. Yes, we can call it a wound—so many have e.g. “we write from the wound” (Jeanette Winterson)—I’m not arguing against this; I’m just saying that, for me, the word “core” feels like I’m in partnership with my work, rather than being led by something called a “wound.” I’m not saying I want to be in charge; I’m just saying I’m a little less injured and a little more intact. When we get to the core of our work, we get to feel whole, even if that feeling is often fleeting. To access the core, we need to sit down and pick up a pen, a pencil, a computer…but sometimes to access our core, the thing to pick up is a book. And read.

HLH: Ultimately, what are you hoping participants take home with them from the retreat?

BHANU: Writing that has moved through a depth or charge process. That something in the work that was not moving, that was somehow dormant: has released a new energy into the text. I want, for each person who attends the retreat, a glimpse of that. But perhaps the glimpse is also a vision. Of what the work could really be. Because this is a setting that is also about healing and movement in another way, I would hope that participants have an opportunity—through the Nia offering (which I am very excited about as someone who is new to Nia this year, or the yoga, or walking itself)—to discharge or dislodge any blocks to writing, to the creative process or practice as it stands. Is it possible to take home the knowledge we have at the end of a pilgrimage? I remember feeling this at the end of a pilgrimage I made in the Himalayas last fall, a pilgrimage that was also about writing. I felt as if I had to command myself to remember! And, indeed, upon my return to the U.S., part of what happened was the work of sustaining and recollecting what felt so clear when I was: in that other place. So, I hope that participants leave with a different time in their bodies, the time of writing, and resources, you could say, for how to unfold that—other kind of time—when they get home. I hope the participants return with full self and an active sense of possibility and joy.

“What can one learn about the body from writing the word? One of the things we can learn is that movement—typing, spinning, writing, leaping—is prayer.” ~ Elena Georgiou

______

 

Guest blogger and Pele’s Fire participant, Heather Leah Huddleston believes in the power of stories, that they are all nestled deep inside each person just waiting to be unleashed. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and is also a certified yoga teacher and Nia white belt. When she’s not writing her own stories, or guiding others to theirs, you can find her staring intently, listening deeply to the rhythm of life, bending and stretching on a yoga mat, dancing through life barefooted, listening to music (mostly heavy metal), or cuddling a furry friend, all in the name of the wonder-filled world of story.

Home As Heart and Hearth

Mar 5, 2016 | Events

Home jpegHOME AS HEART, AND HEARTH: STORIES AND IDEAS was a discussion on what exactly makes a home—how it’s built, how it’s found, and how it’s sustained – which was created and nurtured by BETH KEPHART, this year’s Beltran Teaching Award winner. On March 1, 6 PM, at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Beth led us (that would be, according to the official blurb, “beloved Young Adult novelist A.S. KING, New York Times contributing writer and Young Adult novelist MARGO RABB, and National Book Circle Critics Finalist RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO”) in a conversation about home and writing.  It was an amazing evening, which Beth extended in time and community by creating a commemorative volume of “home”-inspired work made by guests, Penn students, alumni and faculty, as well as a wonderful audio presentation of the work, which can be found here.  It’s 100% worth your 15 minutes of time, and will leave you inspired and refreshed. I invite you to listen.

 

A Tale For All Times and Beings

Feb 25, 2016 | Events, Hedgebrook, The Writing Life

Ruth Ozeki is a critically-acclaimed filmmaker and novelist, and a Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, the Kiriyama Prize winner My Year of Meats and American Book Award winner All Over Creation, have been translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries, and her documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS and at the Sundance Film Festival. I had been waiting for a decade for Ruth’s next book and was thrilled to be able to interview her about her just-released novel, A Tale for the Time Being. Here, Ruth talks about being a writer (and a thinker) in the world first, and how that writer and her preoccupations end up on the page.

In A Tale for the Time Being, you have created a fast-paced and deeply moving story that is also an impressive balancing act: the novel weaves together a Japanese school girl, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese kamikazes of World War II, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch…among other things. Novels about issues are hardly new for you; you took on the meat industry in My Year of Meats and genetically engineered produce in All Over Creation. Do you think of yourself as an activist? How do you thread your concern with environmental and political issues into your work?

Ruth Ozeki: I always start with the voice and the character, and the issues are secondary…no, tertiary…actually, I don’t think about the issues at all, and I’m always surprised when others do. When I wrote My Year of Meats, I remember going into my first marketing meeting and Viking team was really happy because there were so many issues in the book that would generate marketing angles, and I was like…huh? Issues? What issues? I didn’t get it.

To me, the so-called issues are just things that I’m interested in, or thinking about, when I’m writing, which then find their way into the books. I look at writing as a vehicle for working out questions or problems. Writing fiction is my way of thinking. It’s very concrete. What do I think about the meat industry? What do I think about commercially sponsored media? What do I think about genetically modified crops? How do I feel about the bully culture we live in, about suicide bombers, about the 2011 tsunami and meltdown at Fukushima?

The novel provides the excuse and the container for researching and investigating these questions, but this is going on in the background. In the foreground is the character, or characters. Usually I will “hear” them, first. A young girl, who announces herself, “Hi. My name is Nao, and I’m a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.” And then I work from there.

Writing a novel is a way of acting out, on the page, a series of very concrete what if? propositions. What if a TV producer found herself in an ethically compromised position on a feedlot? What if a group of environmental activists decided to make a potato farmer in Idaho a poster child for their cause? What if a diary washed up on my shoreline?

So I’m not an activist. I am not trying to convince anyone to believe anything or to think in certain ways or, god forbid, to teach anyone anything. What do I know? I’m just sharing the way I think about things.

It’s been close to a decade since your last novel was published. Tell me about the vision and re-envisioning process that went into this book.  

Ruth Ozeki: I can date Nao’s voice back to the fall of 2006. That’s when I first heard her, and that’s when I wrote down those first lines. But I can also trace a lot of what wound up in the book to earlier times. I’d been haunted by the diaries of the Japanese kamikaze pilots ever since I first started reading them in 2001. And, too, my interest in human-computer interface design started back in 2005, when I was the Katzenstein Artist-in-Residence at MIT.

This novel emerged very slowly. I knew from the first that one of the protagonists was a young girl, Nao, who is writing a diary. I knew that Nao was speaking across time and that she needed a reader. My first impulse was to put myself in the novel, but then I rejected this idea because it felt too self-conscious, metafictional and annoyingly PoMo, so I set about auditioning other readers for Nao. I went through four or five Readers, each one worse than the next. Some were female, most were male, one was some kind of amorphous, ageless, unformed smear of a character, neither male nor female, who lived in a library.

By end of 2010, I finished a draft I was reasonably happy with, or if not happy, at least I felt I’d gone as far as I could go by myself. I submitted it to my agent and we were getting ready to submit it to my editor when, in March of 2011, the earthquake hit Japan, followed by the tsunami and the meltdown at Fukushima. Day after day I watched this disaster unfold. It was absolutely terrifying and heartbreaking. Over night, everything had changed. Japan had changed. The world was no longer the same, and a byproduct of this seismic upheaval was that the novel I’d written was now utterly irrelevant. So I withdrew it.

That May, I went back to work. The novel is told as a kind of dialogue, with two interleaved voices, Nao and the Reader. I realized that Nao’s voice was still fine. The problem was the Reader I’d written. So I unzipped the manuscript, threw away that Reader and stepped into the role myself, as the character of Ruth. What had felt gratuitous and self-conscious five years earlier, now felt necessary. Stepping into the role myself and responding to it seemed to be the only way of acknowledging the magnitude of the disaster, and once I did this, the writing came very very quickly. I started in May and finished in November.

In the novel, the character of Ruth has writer’s block. She is struggling and failing to write a memoir. She is worried about her mind, that she might be losing it. Is any of this true to life?

Ruth Ozeki: Yes, this part of the book is quite true to life. I’d been trying to write this novel for many years and failing, for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned. At the same time, I thought it might be interesting to write a memoir about taking care of my mother, and about the ways that caretaking had encouraged my spiritual practice and my decision to ordain as a Zen priest.

My mother had Alzheimer’s. For over a decade, I’d been watching the slow deterioration of her mind. I became very conscious of the way the disease works and worried that something similar was happening to me. I was having a terrible time focusing, and there were times when I was afraid I was losing my mind.

You know what it feels like when your arm falls asleep and you try to make a fist but you can’t? That’s how my mind often felt: like a hand that can’t grip. My journals from that time are filled with adjectives like foggy, scattered, distracted, vague, fuzzy, fractured, fragmented. I thought about getting genetic testing, but if I had Alzheimer’s, did I really want to know? Maybe it was menopause, or ADD, or just garden-variety grief and depression.

The loss of mental focus was affecting my writing. I’d write a couple hundred pages and become overwhelmed. I thought I’d lost the capacity to hold complex fictional worlds in my mind. I was pretty sure I’d never finish another novel.

But then, luckily, I went on a writing retreat, where I had limited access to the Internet, and I realized that there was nothing wrong with my mind that three weeks offline and long unscheduled days of writing wouldn’t fix. This was in 2009. I was able to go back to the novel, penetrate the material, and find my way through.

You and I met through Hedgebrook (a writing retreat for women off the coast of Seattle and the hub of a growing community of  “visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come.”). Tell me about what retreat – and community – mean to you as a writer.

Ruth Ozeki: Yes, Hedgebrook was my salvation! I’m pretty sure I would not have finished A Tale for the Time Being had it not been for the serendipitous retreat at Hedgebrook. I’ve never been anyplace where I’ve felt so utterly supported as a writer, and this was part of what helped me find my way back to writing novels. So I think Hedgebrook is a miracle, and the community of writers I’ve found there has been miraculous, too. It’s like in bike racing, when you’re cycling in a pack with other riders. When I’m at Hedgebrook, I feel like I’m drafting the energy and momentum of the other writers. Of course, the writing work itself has to be done alone, but the company of other writers reduces the resistance and pulls you along.

I often teach master classes there, but I also had the great fortune to be invited to attend one given by Karen Joy Fowler. She is an astonishing writer and teacher, and if you ever get a chance to take a class with her, you should. This was in May of 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami, after I’d unzipped my manuscript and thrown half of it away. Karen helped me find the courage I needed to begin again. I will always be grateful to her for that.

You are ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and Buddhist philosophy plays a big role in A Tale for the Time Being. How has becoming a priest influenced your writing? How are your roles as writer and priest related?

Ruth Ozeki: This question is complicated and also very simple. The simple answer is that the two, writer and priest, are the same. I am just one person, just one time being, so how could there be a difference?

My interest in Buddhist philosophy is overtly apparent in A Tale for the Time Being, but I can see the beginning of this inquiry in my first two novels, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation, which are very concerned with the interconnected nature of our lives in the world.

Zen practice has changed the way I write and has helped me continue writing. Part of my struggle was that I’d reached a point as a novelist where I could no longer trust my voice in the world. I felt like my writer’s voice had become wobbly, unreliable and untrustworthy. I suppose it was a crisis of faith. Zen practice provided a philosophical and ethical ground, a trustworthy foundation, for my writing practice. Or to put it another way, it helped me grow a backbone.

So I would say that my Zen practice and my writing practice are the same, but of course, in practical terms, the roles of writer and priest are very different. For one thing, I do not wear Zen robes when I write. I wear a black turtleneck sweater and a pair of overalls. And I sit at a desk in front of a computer, rather than on a cushion in front of a blank wall. And when thoughts arise, I write them down rather than letting them go.

A Tale for the Time Being will be released on March 12th. Ruth will be reading in New York at the NYU Bookstore on March 12th at 6:00 pm and again on April 1 at 7:00 pm at Book Court in Brooklyn. In between she will be reading in sixteen cities, maybe in a bookstore near you! To find her, stop by her website, ozekiland.

Don’t Write?! (Your Best Writing Tip)

Oct 1, 2015 | Events, The Writing Life, Writing Advice

I’ve been thinking a lot about being a writer in this world. Not about the need to raise our diverse voices, or to break down the barriers that keep too many of us silent; not about the role of writers to expand our collective understanding of what it means to be human. I’ve been thinking about the opposite: about how our current culture is strangling art, and how we are letting it.

You’ve been reading, surely, about authors’ declining income, about our paltry sales figures (even for prize winners). You’ve quite likely read suggestions on the Internet for “making a living” as a writer. But when money “makes” our very lives; when money is the measure of our worth, we are living in Opposite Land. And in Opposite Land, where art equals product, equals sales, equals giving some ill-defined readership what “they” are presumed to want, it can sometimes feel impossible to begin to get words onto a page.

How do we write in this climate of efficiency, productivity and bestseller lists? One way is to embrace opposition, and contradiction, in our writing spaces. If you are looking for a new approach, or some inspiration to energize your writing in a corporate world, here are a few suggestions:

Don’t write: At least, don’t start with the blank page on your computer screen. You’ll find yourself counting pages, or words, and disparaging the quality of your delicate first draft. Instead, grab a journal, and start writing by hand. Try out voices, descriptions; rough out a scene. Cross out, draw arrows, and keep going; messiness can be very freeing. Jot down notes and ideas for later. Record your questions without stopping for the answers. If you brainstorm your way into a dead end, let it be. Your brain is pondering the problem in the background; the answer might sneak up on you in time! You are building pressure in that journal, and when it is bursting with ideas, your blank computer screen will be irresistible. Don’t forget: your journal is waiting for you whenever you want to come back to play.

Don’t edit: Once you are writing, let it flow. If one path peters out, jump to something that feels urgent. Be prepared to be surprised, and to follow those surprises, but try to resist the urge to go back to fix what you have. If the writing is going well, it will keep shifting and changing. You won’t know what each element of the story is supposed to do until you get to the end of the first draft. Revising, and especially polishing, parts of your manuscript too early can be detrimental because you run the risk of making something read so well that it’s hard to see that you are supposed to cut it, or move it, or reassign it to a different character. If that urge to revise is coming from the need to have a product and pages to show for your time: resist!

WritingTip_10-2015

Don’t isolate yourself: You know the atmosphere you write best in; maybe it’s a wild, quiet garden, or a room with no windows, or a crowded café. But regardless of what you need to do to empty yourself out onto the page, don’t forget to fill yourself back up. Populate your life with books, movies, music, other people; get outside. Exercise your ability to recognize patterns and see how your concerns echo other people’s stories, and the world around you. Plugging yourself into your community will give you energy, and remind you that your writing is meaningful to others.

Don’t focus on success: Which is, of course, what I have been saying all along. With each book I have written (and I am playing with my fourth), I have had to teach myself how to write all over again. The judgment and expectation that come from having or wanting success are the best ingredients for writer’s block. Creativity requires a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to fail, combined with the courage – stubbornness even – to keep learning and playing and trying something new. In our product-driven world, writing, and living, are both processes. Trust the process, and the product will come.

Want more? I am excited to announce a new week-long writing retreat called Pele’s Fire: Write to the Core on the Big Island of Hawaii next April. Pele’s Fire is a perfect place to embrace your contradiction, get your creativity flowing, find community, and get some targeted feedback on your manuscript. There will also be plenty of opportunities for movement, including yoga and a special series of integrated Nia classes, and a trip to the nearby (currently active) volcano. Take a look at pelesfire.com, but hurry! Admission is rolling, and closes December 31st, or when full.