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Tag Archives: creative non-fiction
wise + woman
Well, we’ve blushed again. Read it here . . .because you can.
please don’t save me
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coup de grace
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100 things
Journal THAT
a guide to writing
Cynthia Gregory
Every once in a while I get the feeling that I’ll crawl right out of my skin unless I clean out a closet. Nothing makes me happier than to fill bags and bags of unused stuff to haul off to the Goodwill store, where they always ask me if I want a receipt and I always say no. I have a theory is that everything ends up where it needs to be and if I don’t need it, it doesn’t belong to me, and how could I possibly take a receipt for someone else’s stuff?
Closet cleaning. It’s a useful skill. Some people like a clean stovetop or a clean floor; I like a tidy closet. This isn’t just me being obsessive – well maybe, but I like to think that I am not so much a collector as an experiencer. I am not so much interested in getting stuff as I am in having insights and impressions wash over me like high tide on a blue moon.
Once, when I lived in Pennsylvania, I tried to temp my Amish neighbor into letting me take photographs of her beautiful young sons with their straw hats and wide blue trusting eyes. “For later, when they grow up, to remember them by,” I said, and she turned me down flat. “It’s not our way,” was all she would say. And I got it. She didn’t need to take measure of the moment to save it for later. She wasn’t keeping a piece of now to reminisce; she was fully present. I liked that. I wanted to emulate that.
So, I like to throw/give stuff away. Make no mistake, I don’t exactly shun materialism, indeed, I find that a certain measure of pretty things make me happy and content. However, truth to tell, I find that I can’t quite think as clearly or creatively when things all around me are jumbled up and drowning in clutter and I can’t find my car keys.
Writing is like that, which is why I think I’s so important to write. A lot. If not every day, then several times a week, at least. It’s not because all that practice makes you a better writer, even though it does. It’s not because all the best writers do it and you’ll become a best seller by osmosis, because that’s just silly. No, writing every day is important because it gets all the clutter out of your head so that when you have something really important or profound or dazzlingly brilliant to say, it will be seen as diamonds sparkling on the sand, instead of dull objects half obscured beneath a verb-dump.
Timed writing exercises or list making exercises are great ways to purge the shrunken tee shirts and torn jeans of your brain. Oh sure, you think you’ll wear them again, but you’re just kidding yourself. They’re hanging out reminder you that the time is passing you by and those jeans will still be waiting there for you. Some day.
I used to think that I need to save my creative stuff up, like there was a limited supply of juicy ideas. You laugh, but it’s true. I thought, “well, I’ll just save that good idea for later, because then I’ll really have time to develop it and it will so rock.” It seems strange to think that now, but why else would I want to withhold my creative spark? Because, I thought, maybe that creative sliver of divine creative spark might be too good or not good enough to share with the world.
Let me just make one thing perfectly clear: there is no shortage of good ideas. If you use up one good idea, three will appear in its place. It’s when you stuff a good idea or ignore a good idea, that they stop flowing in through the open window of your mind. So use them up! Fast! And then use them some more!
And you know what else? When you use up all your good ideas, when you pour them onto the page like good maple syrup on homemade sourdough pancakes, you’ll get to a place much sweeter than the place you’re at now. I totally promise.
Do this: write a list of the 100 things you know for sure how to do. I bet you’ll dash off ten things you’re good at without breaking a sweat. You’ll push on to twenty and start to chug. Climbing up to thirty, a little voice inside your head will start to sound like The Little Train That Could. Forty? You may feel like giving up. But here’s what you get when you push past the point that you thought was the outer edge: the ideas dam has burst and they start to flow fast and frenetic and suddenly you see the wisdom in the 100. It’s not the first or second or even the fifth ten things, it’s the ones past where you thought you knew where you were going that are the really interesting ones.
You can do this for a year. Write about the 100 things you look for in a soulmate. The 100 things you learned in college. The 100 places you want to visit while you still inhabit the planet. This is important stuff. Not because of the things themselves, but because of the process of learning to open up to the place in your heart that exists beyond everything you think you know. It’s the stuff beyond that, that gets really good. Use it up! Use it all up as it comes in. You can never use it up completely. Unless you want to, and that’s an entirely different choice, baby.
an accidental blush
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a fine blush
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spontaneous creation
Journal THAT
a guide to writing
Cynthia Gregory
There are some conventions in writing that insist that you have a plan. For instance, back in high school when you had to write the dreaded five paragraph essay, there was a formula. Personally, I never understood the formula with its Roman numeral and abbreviated heading titles; it never made sense to me. How could you know what you were going to say before you said it? I quietly complied with the assignment and made an outline. And then I wrote whatever came into my head and aced the drill. Ha.
The idea of planning an essay is like reading a roadmap. Chances are, if you know that you’re going to drive from San Diego, California, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you will consult a map. You will choose one route or another, and more or less follow it. You’ll have a general idea of where you want to go, but will build in the flexibility to stop in Winslow, Arizona to see the Barrington Meteor Crater, or swing by Stanton, Iowa, to marvel over the giant Coffee Pot Water Tower.
I am told that there are some travelers who travel like it’s a race, speeding from the first rays of light until deep night – but I have never been that kind of traveler. I know writers, wonderful novelists in fact, who know every plot twist before they strike the first key on their laptop. There is a special place in heaven for these extremely organized and disciplined writers. The rest of us rely on bat sonar to get us where we want to go.
Journals do not generally have a plan. That is the great beauty of the process. You’re writing it pretty much for the satisfaction of the creative process. But what if you are journaling for a greater purpose? What if you are taking random notes with the hope that you will organize them into something more or less cohesive and useful? Maybe a plan will work for you.
If you need to have an outline, then write one. If you are the type of grocery shopper who carries an itemized list and ticks the products off one by one as they are dropped in the cart, you may need to make an outline. Go nuts. Use Roman numerals, capital letters, everything. If an outline will make you feel safe and satisfied that there is order in the universe, have at it. But if you are more of a right-brainer, someone more randomly creative – or a left-brainer with an appetite for adventure, you can safely forget everything your eight grade English teacher exhorted about the delicious conformity of the outline, the clear mesas of organization, and write without a road map.
I once had a (completely manic) writing teacher who said that creative writing does not need to conform to an outline because the issuer of thoughts and ideas, the subconscious brain, knows exactly what it is doing. It could be that if your subconscious has a plan, you should not mess with it. A journal does not need to proceed in a linear manner. That is, one thought need not link to the next thought and the next and the next after that. That’s the beauty of the journal.
For instance, say your vague, generalized plan for your journal is to write about childhood memories, a true and wonderful goal. You do not need to start with your first memory, move on to the birth of your little brother, then start working on the preschool years, graduate to primary school.
You can skip all over the place if you want. Write about that trip to the county fair. Pick up the trail of that summer vacation where the family hit all the national parks north of Bryce Canyon. Write about the winter you found out about the Tooth Fairy and Santa. Describe piano recitals out of sequence, your first love after the college years. Start at the end, finish in the middle.
Chronology doesn’t matter in your journal because your heart – arbiter of all that is true and good – knows how it all fits together and it is never, ever connected by a straight line. Creative juice likes backtracking. It adores leaps forward, sideways slides. Creative energy is a baby bird learning to fly – it swoops and swings, aims high and lands in the middle branches, totally content to have made it anywhere at all.
Carry your journal with you whenever possible. Pick it up spontaneously when you’re sitting at the gas station filling up your car. Bring it to your doctor’s appointment and write in it instead of reading six-year-old articles in a middling magazine. Keep it with you so that when you have those sweet, random, poetic moments, you can record them exactly the way they played in your head, sound by sound, because if you wait to write them down later, like a dream, you will find that the image have turned to vapor and faded.
Instead of sitting on the sofa watching TV at night, write in your journal. After you fold the laundry, write in your journal. Write at dusk. Write when Venus sits like a diamond on the tip of the setting moon. Instead of sitting at your desk at lunch, working, take a break and write in your journal. When you wake up in the morning and the house is still quiet and you haven’t so much as mumbled your first word of the day, write in your journal. Fill the quiet place in your mind between dream-time and day-time with filaments of creation so pure, so honest, you can almost taste the honey sweetness.
So many parts of our modern lives require control. We control our money, our electric bills, our newspaper subscriptions. We control how much access our children have to the Internet, how many ways they have of communicating with their friends. We manage what we eat, how much we exercise, and what kind of shampoo to use. We are dizzy with the need to control the million details of our modest lives.
So give up control in one area of your life. Give up control of your journal. Just give in to the spontaneous nature of your innate creative genius. That’s right: genius likes to be spontaneous. And play. And have fun. Just like you. Genius.
We love this so much we wanted to share. Please read and comment. Do you agree or disagree? Love it or hate it? We honestly want to know what you have to say. Sincerely yours, PSS
“A recent study has shown many people benefit from rereading familiar stories as the encounter “reignites” their emotions and increases their knowledge.
In broad terms the research found that people were generally keen to return to a well-thumbed book or to listen again to a favourite piece of music so they could gain a “richer and deeper insight” of the experience and increase their understanding.
The study concluded: “Consumers gain richer and deeper insights into the reconsumption object itself but also an enhanced awareness of their own growth in understanding and appreciation through the lens of the reconsumption object.
“Given the immense benefits for growth and self-reflexivity, re-consuming actually appears to offer many mental health benefits.”
“Vladimir Nabokov maintained that you couldn’t say you had really read a novel till you have re-read it. On the first reading you may be gripped by the story, and so you read fast…
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winning the word lotto
Journal THAT
A Guide to Writing
cynthia gregory
I started playing golf a couple of years ago, and found that I loved it. I love getting all Zen with the process, holding my stance, addressing the ball, letting everything else in the world fall away except my focus on that girlie pink golf ball at the end of my six iron. There is a simplicity to the sport, an elegance. Never mind it was invented by the same people who invented the caber toss, or that it was first created as a diversion during the great plague, hitting balls from one great mound of dead people to another. Seriously? Yes. But there you are: those Scots are a resourceful bunch, and I mean that in the most respectful way . Golf: walk in a park, strike a ball, walk some more. Golf has to be one of the more refined sports in the world. Unless you count water ballet.
Whether you’re talking about water ballet, golf, or writing; sport or art, there is one consistent truth: practice. Terra ballet or aqua ballet requires a laser focus on practicing the fundamentals so that in performance, the movements flow. I went to the golf course the other day for the first time in about two years (short romance; long story) and decided to hit some balls at the driving range. When I learned to golf, I got over the stand-in-one-place-and-hit-the-balls quickly. I wanted to play. But after a hiatus, it seemed wise to hit a bucket of balls, get used to the weight of the club, the swing of the hips, the tock of the ball when you hit it just right. Or contrarily, the wild flailing that occurs when you fail to focus, jerk your head up in time with your spastic swing, and miss the ball entirely (hoping no one else has noticed the putz with the bad swing trying to look like she meant to miss the ball). Practice, baby!
I mentioned the Bear Street Writers group and part of our weekly ritual before, but would like to delve into it with more detail now. What made our practice effective was that we adopted certain rules, and fooled them to the letter. We wrote each week at the same bat time, same bat channel. We never deviated from the prime directive: write, read, NO COMMENT. The no comment part was essential, I think, to helping build trust among us, that no matter how weak our similes, how badly mangled our metaphors, how hackneyed our prose, no one was allowed to comment. Though really, we were more likely to burst into spontaneous applause at some incredibly clever turn of phrase than one or more of us had plucked from the air like filaments of spider web, than to boo and hiss.
The process is ridiculously simple. Here it is in six easy steps:
- Assemble your group of writers in a place where you will not be disturbed during the writing or the reading process. Have extra supplies handy: pens, pencils, plenty of paper so you won’t be forced to beg off your compatriots. If you are meeting in a café, do the polite thing and buy a tea or coffee or pastry and support your local business owner.
- Once gathered, have everyone write a word or phrase on a slip of paper. Fold the paper into a tidy package and drop it into a hat or cup or ashtray or whatever.
- Over the agreed period, select one slip of paper from the stash, and write for a subscribed amount of time. For instance, begin with fine minutes. On the next round write for ten minutes. Hitting the zenith, write for fifteen minutes, and then begin the countdown. The next drill is ten minutes, and at last, wrap your session with a five minute free-write.
- You can use a stop watch or egg time, or alternate watcher of the watch. But you must keep time. You can’t know how important it is to have one person keeping track of time – so everyone else is free to write.
- After each round, read your work aloud. Do not use funny voices, do not use accents, to not alternate volume and tempo for emphasis. The writing, the words, grammar, syntax, sentence structure must stand (or fall) on their own.
- Under no circumstances under the moon and stars are you permitted to a) apologize or warn about your writing, or b) comment on someone else’s work. If you feel badly enough about your writing, skip your turn to read but understand that if you do this too often, you will be dis-invited from the group because it is a shared responsibility to stand nakedly before your community and read what you’ve created. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel worthy or good enough or saturated with talent, you signed up for this shindig, and now must exercise the real courage it takes to write and be public. Everyone else is shedding pretense and defense and about a million insecurities to participate in this process, so just screw up your best brave face and read. It won’t be nearly as bad as you think it will be. No giant, gaping maw will open and swallow you into the catacombs. No comets will burn out of the sky and drop on your head. All you do is write. And read. And you survive.
But you didn’t “just write.” You wrote. In a public place. With other sentient beings and then demonstrated the audacity to read those thoughts aloud, risking judgment, ridicule, persecution, love. And you were loved. How cool is that? The scary part is never what you think it is. And after you get this process down, you will know what it feels like to win the word lotto. The words will just come gushing out of you like the mother of all literary rivers. And you will know what it means to have written.
persephone's step-sisters 