Breathing your way back to writing

My mind won’t settle down. A wind sets it spinning and I hesitate to write what scatters through: thistles in a dog’s coat. Seeds strewn by a machine, some rolling into tilled earth, some onto pavement. Dust weeping from an eye. What ants and beetles push and carry.

Sometimes it’s hard to find a way into a day’s writing. Nothing seems to cohere, and the cursor blinks and blinks over the next white spot on the page. Today, restless, I get up, search the shelves for a book, one of my favorites—David Abrams’ brilliant “The Spell of the Sensuous” —and flip through it to rub against the words, drop myself into the order of another mind. What catches my eye is a moment in a section on “the progressive forgetting of the air—the loss of the invisible richness of the present.”

Abrams writes of a loss of a deep connection between the body and the aliveness of the world that begins with “forgetting of the air, the forgetting of this sensuous but unseen medium that continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the subtle depths within us the fathomless depths that surround us.”

In the smallest of steps toward remembering, I draw a slow breath, and another, returning to the room, the telling still life of the desk (crumpled tissue, empty cereal bowl, blue tincture bottle labeled “inspiration”…). The carpet is soft under my bare feet.

I know this feeling of returning, of grounding myself in the body by breathing, then noticing, once more, the world outside my mind. It’s the core practice I use, and recommend, for daily writing: Breathe, observe just one thing closely, intimately, and write what you see.

Remembering the way back

I know how valuable this process is for me, and yet I let myself push it aside. “You’re writing about the past today,” my rushed mind says, getting ever more bossy the more desperate and frustrated it feels. “You don’t have time to stare at a leaf or the stupid reflections in a water bottle. What does that have to do with anything?”

Given its way, it would probably say breathing is a waste of time as well: “Forget the air. Just be creative, okay?”

Stressed or tired or feeling my confidence dinged, I sometimes respond automatically to that inner voice (you probably recognize the Inner Critic’s inflections in it) and act as though it’s got my best interests at heart. It takes effort to shake off its trance, to come back to myself.

So I learn and relearn, forget and then rediscover.

I think we all do, beautiful writer person. The trick is noticing we’ve forgotten what works for us, and beginning again.

Reminders help. And serendipitous contact with voices like Abrams’ when I most need them. When I return to the past later today, I’ll begin in my body, breathing, paying attention to what’s right here and making room for the possibility of binding the subtle depths inside me to those fathomless depths that are as near as the sky and the birds outside the window.

It’ll look for all the world as though I’m just gazing into the palm of my hand but I'll be going as deeply as I can, following its map of lines: head, heart, life.

(Cloud image by Horla Varlan via flickr)

 

Writing about conflict? Here’s a tool for you.

I thought of you, beautiful writer person, when I heard a guided meditation on conflict this week.

It was offered as part of a program for mediators and others who regularly step into the midst of disputes, but as I listened, I realized that it was an excellent door through which you might step into scenes from your life that could deepen your story or memoir or poem.

The meditation is led by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Zen priest based in Northern California, and it’s available here. There’s no religious or even philosophical orientation, just an opportunity for entering an inner space and exploring what’s there.

 

How a night owl got an a.m. writing habit

This is how you change your writing life: You do something differently.

I know that’s no great revelation. Still, I can forget it in an instant, swept along by my routines and the slick thought loops in my head.  My mind must hold a record for the speed at which it can bounce from “I want more time to write,” to “There’s no way to do that!” to “I think I’ll check out ‘Orange is the New Black’ on Netflix.”And then do it again. Repeatedly. For weeks.

Sometimes, though, I wake myself up by moving the furniture. More than once I’ve dragged the bed into the living room to make space for a writing studio. And recently, I did the mental equivalent by shifting my schedule to find room for my poetry project.

This time, didn’t make a spreadsheet or even look at my calendar. My computer and filing cabinet are littered with fancy renditions of a “perfect schedule,” color coded and neatly printed, with time slots for everything including the 10 glasses of water I’ll drink and the 23-minute power nap I’ll take. I love the exercise of creating those visions of efficiency, but once they’re done, they make me twitchy. And by the time I get to Day 2, I feel like a failure.

What’s working? Can you copy that?

So I started with a different question, one I think we don’t ask nearly often enough: What’s working for me now? Not “What rotten habits do I need to break?” but “What's making me happy and giving me the results I want?"

The answer was easy. Some time ago, I got into the habit of rolling out of bed and going straight to the gym. I had never been that person before, and could go for months—years!—without exercising. But I started going to group classes and found that I liked the Follow the Leader aspect, the too-loud music, the endorphins, the crazy Russian lady teacher. I didn’t have to think, I just had to show up and put my right foot in, or shake it all about, when someone gave the cue. You didn’t have to be fully awake to do it—who knew?

Perhaps best of all, for the rest of the day, I didn’t have to think about that exercise I meant to squeeze in, or feel defeated when I didn’t get around to it.

What was working for me? Crossing “exercise” off the list before the day roared off the blocks. I got great pleasure out of knowing that no matter what else happened, I had a tiny accomplishment to show. I could definitely use more of that. I could tack my writing onto that routine.

It made me happy to imagine walking into my working hours having already spent time with my own thoughts, my own words. Without a lot of angst or drama, I decided to try it. Mostly, I was curious to see how it would feel.

Let's just pretend it's night...

It took me a few days to set my alarm an hour earlier and see what it was like to open my computer to a writing file without looking at e-mails or news or anything else. It helped that I was too sleepy to care much about what anyone else was doing at that hour. I’d been snoring just moments before. I typed the date on the top of the page, dimmed the brightness of the screen so I could pretend it was still night, and let myself write.

I’ve learned that it’s not good to stare too long at a blank document without moving my fingers, because my body’s apt to slide back into a snooze. I’ve pointed myself to writing prompts when my mind doesn’t find a foothold or pick up where it left off the day before. I'm still learning what works.

I’ve been surprised by the images that wind up on the page, the stories that bubble out of sleep. And I've been struck by this unthinkable twist: It’s possible to be a confirmed night person and a person who writes her way out of dreams before 7 a.m.

Guilt and self-blame vs. desire

This “first thing” writing is an ongoing experiment that may well be replaced by another. But it feels like a keeper, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I'd been resisting this for years.

There seems to be a difference—a big one—between setting out to fix something broken (“I’ve failed because I can’t make enough time to write!”) and deciding to build on something that makes you feel good. The first seems to come straight from the Inner Critic. And the second seems rooted in those natural magnets, pleasure and desire.

The magic is in following the pull. 

(Image of moon at dawn by Babu Kantamneni via Flickr.)

31 invitations from the muse: Prompts and games

You could think of this post as a hallway lined with doors, 31 of them, to push open when you want to want to enter a new space in your writing.

It's a month's worth of writing prompts—lines, games, images. The visual prompts give me particular delight. They're the work of two of my favorite creative people, David Glynn and Lynell George. David's are the color photos, Lynell's the black-and-white.

I hope you lean into them, and all of the entrances you find below, and discover something that surprises you. 

The muse says: Start here

1. What's scribbled in light on her body? What has she just released?

Opening lines and phrases

2. Everything I’m about to tell you is a lie.

3. Forgetting is the fourth stage of memory, the fifth stage….

4. Window, cigarette hole, sky—

5. When I held it in my hands, it….

6. Nothing survived but the ….

7. The chairs.

8. Something cracked.

9. The Comforter, the Mind’s Promise, the Beautiful Order of Thistles…. (found in Mary Ruefle's "Madness, Rack, and Honey.")

10. This is what he would bury:

11. They had no words for ____ so they ____…..

12. It looked like a ____ when it finally landed....

13. The questions.

 

Instructions for poems and other pieces:

14. Place a sheet of white paper under the vase of flowers to capture the scatter of pollen. Read the words inscribed there.

15. Find a seat in a crowded place and let conversations flow past you like wind. Write down the secrets you hear or imagine.

16. Scry through the belly of a glass of cold white wine. Write what appears in the glass.

17. Ask a question and flip through a book, stopping the pages with your finger and finding your answer in the words beneath it. Write the question, and the answer.

18. Type a section of something you’ve written into the “Electronic Poetry Kit.” Make poems by rearranging the words. Make a list of missing words you long for, words you don’t want to live without. Use them to make lines.

19.  Something delicate, or dying.

 

Stolen titles awaiting new bodies

20. Dark Wild Dream

21. Becoming Animal

22. Bitters

23. A Ruin That Isn’t  a Ruin

24. A fact. A mood.

25. Seven Days of Falling

26. A Photograph of a Plate Glass Window

27.  A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

28. Woman With a Yellow Scarf

20. The Book of Questions

30.  A Guide to Forgetting

31. The light, the globe.

That's enough for a month, if you took on one a day.

Bonus: A trove of amazing toys and prompts you may not know about—for all the days after.

(See more of Lynell's work at lynellgeorge.com. Find more of David's at glynns.com.)

What to do when the safari (or your project) winds up neck deep in quicksand

Last week was a hard one. I’d given myself a couple of days to do what sounded like a simple writing job, and I filled hours and screens with words, but nothing worked. Each draft looked worse to me than the one before.

It happens sometimes. Notes that sound brilliant when you take them down seem insipid when you try to spin them into paragraphs. The big ideas that are supposed to tie everything together unravel. Every phrase seems recycled. Mine did, anyhow.

Laboring through the rewrites, I could see myself beginning to criticize every line almost before it was out of my head.

 So it would be tough to pretend that I’ve got the magic goggles that keep me from going snow-blind when my writing shatters onto the page and the flakes begin to swirl. Sometimes I stare at the words on the screen and I can’t make out the shape of anything. I’m supposed to be a writer? Who am I kidding?

     The sign says: "Look out! Quicksand" —in Dutch.

Oh boy. Now we're in deep.

When I was a kid I couldn’t get enough of an old black and white jungle movie in which a bunch of city-slicker explorers on safari stumble into quicksand. The person at the front of the line sinks up to his waist and starts flailing, and the hero behind him throws him a branch and says, “Stay still. The more you struggle, the more this stuff will pull you down.” We know the first guy’s a goner—he was the anxious, whiny one who never listens. And, sure enough, he goes under, thrashing and screaming.

Just to underline the hero’s wisdom, we get the alternate scenario. The safari’s only woman trips into the goo and again the hero yells, “Just listen to my voice. Grab the branch and stay as still as you can.” She does what he says and there’s a big, goopy embrace when he’s pulled her out.

I memorized the quicksand rule, just in case I ever needed it.

And I guess I have. With my mind serving up images of blizzards and quicksand, I’m getting the picture of what it’s been going through lately. I didn’t realize it had been so tough until I saw the words on the page.

It gets pretty mucky out (and in) there

When I’m working with writers, sometimes I’ll ask a couple of questions about a character or wonder about an image or a chronology and the next thing I know there’s a flurry of pages as they pull out versions one through seven and say, “It’s a complete mess. Maybe it was a bad idea to take this on. Is there anything good in it?  I just can’t see it anymore.”

I’m not in the muck of the writer’s mind, so I can look at those attempts without the angst and doubts and confusion of the struggle and experience what’s on the page. I listen for places where the writer seems to be excited, and for what makes me curious. From there, it’s not hard to connect the stars into constellations and feed back to the writer what I see. There are always stars glittering. We both get still, looking at the words, and we begin to see the way forward.

If only I could do that for myself.

Writers who need writers….

I can easily get caught up in the idea that I should be able to power through any rough patch on my own. So I thrash and flail and keep on sinking until it occurs to me to admit that i'm lost, and I need someone to throw me the perspective I don’t have. Someone outside my head, who can see what I can’t.

It's a huge relief to ask for help. I'm positive that what separates writers who keep going from the ones who stop before their best work is done (or sometimes even started) is the presence of trusted writer friends and workshop peers and editors and coaches who help us still the struggle by witnessing our efforts and telling us what they see.

Go ahead. Let someone see what you're trying to do. You don't have to struggle alone. And if you need the branch I'm holding, just holler.

 (Photo by rs photo via Flickr.)

Looking Away: A simple meditation for freeing inspiration in a crazed writing life

What do you do when you reach that “writer action shot” moment—staring off into space with words bouncing around like bumper cars in your mind but refusing to find their way to the page? I used to simply gut it out, staring longer, “thinking harder,” hoping something would come into focus. But recently, I’ve been using a technique I learned from my meditation teacher, a practice called Looking Away. It’s worked so well, and freed my writing so much, that I wanted to introduce you to both the process and to my teacher, Jona Genova.

Jona has done brain research, worked on Wall Street, helped launch restaurants, been a cookie queen and studied Tibetan Buddhism in her fluid and fascinating life. She now teaches meditation and works as a healer from her base in Malibu, Calif., and her organization Samadhi for Peace, samadhiforpeace.com.

We talked this week about writing and meditation, and some highlights of our conversation—including instructions for Looking Away—are below. Especially if you’ve had difficulty meditating in the past, I hope you’ll give it a try. It’s a tiny practice with surprising power.

Meditation may be more familiar than you think

“Creative people tend to be great meditators, and even those who think they’re not probably already have a meditation practice—they’re just not calling it that,” Jona says. “So a first step is to tap into how you’re already meditating.” The techniques you use to center yourself before doing creative work are closely tied to meditation, she explains.

Visual learners, she says, may naturally picture themselves doing a task successfully, the way a musician might envision a performance and see himself going through each step, creating a strong image of what’s going to happen.

For many writers, the process might be more intellectual, using words to pull inward and separate from the world. “It might be a peaceful thought you go to,” she says, or a practice of telling yourself, ‘"t’s going to be okay. Just relax. I have plenty of time to do this.”

That means there’s no one meditation technique that’s right for everyone. “I meet many people who are frustrated because they’ve tried meditation by the book and it’s difficult for them,” she says. “I always say that it’s different strokes for different folks—it’s important to find the meditation that resonates with you, and where have a visceral response to the technique. More than likely, it will relate to (or be) the practice you’ve naturally found for yourself, and you can build on that.”

 

Starting when you don’t know where to start

But it’s not unusual to have trouble recognizing what you always do, Jona says. “You may say, ‘I know I have a meditation practice in there somewhere, but I can’t find it.’ That builds frustration.

“When that happens, the very simple technique I would offer is to engage the process of Looking Away,” which is particularly useful at stressful moments in everyday life.

To describe the effect of Looking Away, she tells a story from her childhood. Her brother was a catcher on a softball team, and during a game, his arm was injured. “So my grandfather ran into the dugout and grabbed an ice pack, the kind you smash so it’ll become cold.” He was a strong man, and when he clapped the pack between his hands, it exploded, its chemicals flying everywhere.

“The next one he grabbed did the same thing. The third time, the coach said, ‘That’s our last one…’ So my grandfather brought himself out of the moment and was a little more gentle. Breaking that ice pack in a more gentle way produced the result he wanted”—and he was finally able to ice her brother’s injured arm.

Go gently, writers, she advises: Brute force probably won’t liberate the muse. “If we try too hard, we’re not going to get the result we want. To some people that effort may feel like squeezing, holding on, or confining our ideas to one train of thought. And when we start to go down that road, it really inhibits our creativity.

“It may seem counterintuitive, but taking a few minutes to not pay attention to the thing you’ve been focusing on can actually put your body in a state that’s able to give you what you want.”

Looking away, step by (short) step

Here’s how Jona suggests Looking Away when you get stuck:

1. Accept that distraction and frustration are going to happen—they happen to everyone, and it helps to acknowledge that.

2. Take a few deep breaths—it may sound cliche, but it does help to clear your mind a little bit and relieves some of the pressure. Then take a very brief break for a meditation.

3. Set a timer for two minutes—and only two minutes; we’re practicing restraint.

4. Sit in a chair and elongate your spine without a lot of strain or thought about it. Try to sit in a comfortable way that makes room for your breath. Once you’re there, find your breath and ride the rhythm of your inhale and exhale, feeling the rise and fall of your body.

Your mind will probably want to go to the task at hand, but bring yourself back to just feeling the rise and fall of the body, and every time your mind returns to your project, bring it back to “feel the rise and fall of my body."

5. Remind yourself to trust this very ancient practice that’s worked for many, many people. Just go with it.

No need to panic if ideas come

She recommends keeping a journal by your side during meditation. “You take your two-minute break, and more than likely, you’ll see ideas pop up about what you were working on. It’s okay to turn to your journal and jot down those thoughts in one or two words rather than letting your mind race through: ‘Okay, don’t forget that. That was a really good one. Don’t forget it! Okay, now back to the breath, back to the rise and fall.'”

“That’s just too much. Don’t make it so hard on yourself. Write down the ideas that pop into your head and enjoy the fluidity of going back into your meditation: 'Okay, got it down on paper. I can go back in. Everything is fine.'”

Less really can be more

“Somewhere along the line, we all picked up the idea that to be successful, we need to work harder and faster. And it’s just not the case,” Jona says. “There’s more and more research telling us that a relaxed state and a well-rested person is going to perform better. So try to shift your framework.

“Spending two minutes in meditation and going back into daily life gives us an experience that I feel is missing in some practices,” Jona says. “What occurs in meditation should flow into the rest of our lives so that eventually, we can’t tell the difference between being in meditation and everything else. When we take those two-minute breaks, we’re carrying with us the resonance of that meditation, that way of being, into what we do next. Less is more sometimes. We just have to recognize that just because something seems simple, that doesn’t mean it’s any less effective. There’s great depth in that simplicity.”

You can find Jona Genova at samadhiforpeace.com, and she's Samadhi for Peace on Facebook. To see one of her short and simple guided meditation videos, click here. 

(Photo by Marcus Hansson via Flickr.)

Weapons for the duel with your Inner Critic

Like most every writer I know, I’ve wrestled with my Inner Critic, the negative voice inside that patrols my life and work carrying a big red pencil to circle my flaws and shortcomings. It's the vampire “best friend” who sits down next to me when I’m stuck and tired and says, “Honey, maybe you’re just fooling yourself about this writing thing. How could this possibly be taking so long? Anyone else could have produced a masterpiece in the time you’ve spent on these two pages.”

But one of the great benefits of collaborating with people on books is getting to know experts in a wide range of fields. One of my favorite partners is a warm, ebullient Louisiana psychologist named Kathryn Elliott—who just happens to be an Inner Critic specialist. With her husband Jim, she developed Anthetic Psychology (anthetic means “blossoming”), which focuses on techniques for freeing people from their Inner Critics.

Kathryn was full of writer-specific Inner Critic insights I want to share with you. She's a master at helping people free up creativity that's been pinned under the weight of critical inner voices. This is just a taste of the work she does, but if you're struggling with self-criticism, it may help you imagine what your writing life could feel if it weren't being shaped by negative voices.

You'll know the Inner Critic by the pain it tries to inflict

“When a writer is feeling blocked and hearing inner messages like, ‘You should be writing right now!' or 'What do you think you're doing, taking off in that crazy new direction? You should stick to what you've always done!’ it’s an automatic clue that the Inner Critic is pouncing,” she says. "You can identify when the stinker is functioning inside you because it’s always going to have emotional pain attached.”

That’s what the Inner Critic does, she explains: It leads you to feel bad about yourself with five different emotional punishments. Its negative messages make you feel:

* Defective: “Who am I to think I’m a writer? I’m no Cheryl Strayed/George Saunders/Marcel Proust/Pablo Neruda/hot writer of the moment. I’m deluding myself to think I’ve got what it takes. I’m a C-level writer at best.”

* Ashamed: “Everyone can see I’m not producing like should. What I’m writing is garbage. How am I going to show this to anyone?”

* Guilty: “I told my editor/writing group/coach that I’d have these pages ready in a week, and I’m nowhere near finished. I haven’t lived up to what I said I’d do. I’m a terrible person.”

* Inferior: “My colleague has produced two or three pieces and I’m still struggling through this one. It’s obvious: I’m just not as good as he is.” 

*Anxious (filled with magnified fears): “I’m not going to make it as a writer. Everyone will see me as a failed artist, that screw-up with the fantasy that someone would like or buy this crap.” Anxiety, Kathryn says, is predicting disaster for the future—expecting that all your plans and dreams will fail. And there’s no way to feel creative or productive with that “certainty” circling in the background.

But there’s relief….

The good news, she says, is that “if you can identify any of those emotions arising around your writing, you can label them: ‘Oh, that’s my Inner Critic, not the truth.’ And once you’ve identified this negative influence, you can do this wonderful thing: Accept your humanness.

“You can say: ‘I’m not a perfect writer creature. I’m a human who has certain gifts and interests and talents, but I’m human. I’m not a perfect robot of a writer,” she advises. “Once you can say that, you will be relieved of that inner turmoil. Your self-acceptance will rise. When you’re in that relaxed, freer place, you’ll be able to access the talent and vitality that’s in you for writing, and you’ll be able to deploy the gifts inside you once again. It’s an essential thing to do if you’re going to be a writer.”

'Am I going to take orders from an inner tormentor? Or follow more positive guidance?'

“Stuckness,” she says, “is a clue that you’re in a hypnotic trance induced by your Inner Critic. Thinking that you could be super-human is another part of the trance state that the Inner Critic induces in us when it’s being installed in our lives. We start buying into perfectionism from the time early on when a powerful person in our lives demands it: 'Look at you! Your shoe is untied. You got ice cream on your shirt. That won’t do. You should look perfect.’ We’ve been indoctrinated by voices and thoughts like this.”

Inner Critic perfectionism, she says, “occurs through a welding of our executive selves to our Inner Critic. When we’re fused psychologically, it seems true it that we should be perfect—and that we should be able to reach perfection.”

“Breaking free of all this is simpler than you think,” she says. “It takes a fundamental values shift. ‘What am I going to guide my life by? Orders from an inner tormentor who cracks a whip over me about how I live each day? Or more positive inner guidance?’ That’s everyone’s decision to make.

“You may say, ‘I like that my Inner Critic gives me a kick in the butt.’ We say: If you want emotional torment, have at it. But realize that it takes a toll—alcoholism, drug abuse, Internet addiction…. Because you have to anesthetize the inner pain that comes with listening to the Inner Critic.”

Challenging the Inner Critic, step by step

If you’re ready to get out the lightsabers and challenge the IC, Kathryn suggests these steps as a starting point:

1. Identify the specific “shoulds” that the critic is instilling in you. Those are things like: “You should be writing five hours a day (or you’re not a real writer).” “You should be inside working instead of spending time with your friends.” “Your work should be better/faster/more polished the first time out.”

Take a pen and paper and start writing out the shoulds circling in your head: “Jane, you should plant your butt in the chair at 5 a.m. if you ever want to write a novel.” Make a list. There will be one should after another.

'At some point, we have to come out of our obligated, "good little person" trance.'

2. Choose just one of the shoulds and realize what it’s saying: You don’t have the right to be human in the way you are. The Inner Critic says you don’t have any rights at all. And your task is to get free by saying, “I’m not buying that. I have the right to be who I am.”

“At some point, we have to come out of our obligated, 'good little person' trance,” Kathryn says, “thinking we have no rights in our own minds and personalities.

“So say aloud to your Inner Critic, ‘I have the right to not write five hours a day’ (or whatever your Critic is demanding)." Or "I have the right to write an escapist novel about singing cowboys instead of a tragic memoir I once told someone I was writing."

This is a private conversation between you and your IC, not your editor. You’re having it to get free from an inner tyrant. Tell it: “I have the right to write whatever I want, whenever I’m good and ready. I can write one sentence or many, and I’m still a good person. I have the right to write crap.”

“When I was working on my Ph.D dissertation,” Kathryn says, “I’d get blocks. I’d say, ‘I don’t see how I’ll ever get it done. My husband Jim told me, ‘Just sit and write garbage. Write “bla bla bla bla bla.” You’re typing a declaration of independence. You have the right to write one sentence, or even one word.’

"As you make the choice to write what you want, you’re moving in the direction of freedom from an inner bully that blocks your creativity and gifts."

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

This whole business of addressing the Inner Critic aloud, of saying, “I have the right to write what I want, the way I want,” may sound silly to you. But I can tell you from my experience that it feels great to start rebuilding your writing life from your own real choices and preferences instead of the Inner Critic’s rules, admonishments and fears.

I got a tremendous sense of liberation from one of the exercises Kathryn and Jim developed, a slightly longer version of asserting your rights called YASNY, for “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’

You can take your Inner Critic out of the executive chair and put yourself there.

If your Inner Critic is berating you for not writing like one of your idols, try saying: “I have the right to write garbage. And you ain’t seen garbage till you see what I can write! I can dump it till the cows come home!”

Most people playing with YASNY, Kathryn says, throw back their heads and laugh because it feels so good to assert their freedom and defy the Inner Critic instead of deferring to its judgments.

Saying: “I have the right” is like buying a fishing license, Kathryn says. You can fish or not. You can get up at five and write because you want to try it. Or you can assert your right to do something different. “You’re saying: “I own the executive power in my own life,” she explains. “You’re getting your Inner Critic out of that executive chair and putting yourself there.”

The question to keep asking as you invent your writing process your way is: “Does this make me feel more alive, or is it a response to a punishing feeling?“

“When you declare your independence from the Inner Critic and say, ‘I have the right to live my life the way I want to, to write the way I want,' you open up a world that is your natural self, the part of your personality that’s full of aliveness and creativity,” Kathryn says. “We see it in toddlers running through the house. That vitality is unadulterated humanity. That’s what you’ll feel like—what your writing will feel like—if you’ll start tapping your own natural self.”

You can find out more about Kathryn Elliott and her Inner Critic work at her website, antheticpsychology.com. The book she wrote with Jim Elliott, "Disarming Your Inner Critic," is full of techniques for taking on the voices that stop us.

(Photo by xddorox via Flickr.)

The world expands beyond the glass. Open a window. Let something wild fly in.

A pigeon muscled into my imaginings recently. I was suspended between lines—words were elusive and connections weren’t coming—and I couldn’t help but notice that the avian equivalent of a Harley had pulled up outside my office.  The throaty coos echoed in, amplified as they bounced off the many concrete surfaces nearby, and I sat, almost drumming my fingers, willing the words to come and the bird to pipe down.

Man, I remember thinking, you’re quite the delicate flower. It’s just a bird. But at that, the pigeon gunned its engines and the decibels climbed. I figured I’d see if I could spot it and shoo it away. I got up from my chair, and as I reached the glass, I heard a small voice in my head saying, “Open a window. Let something wild fly in.”

Open a window. Let something wild fly in. The pigeon was gone as soon as I pushed the curtains aside—it had been on the ledge and startled at the movement—but I’ve been repeating those words to myself all week, thinking at first about the disoriented sparrow that flapped around our living room when I was a kid, and a bat that whizzed past my ear in the dark, both of us vibrating like tuning forks.

Those small encounters stay with me like dreams. I don’t know why the wild comes to us that way—maybe because the contact is inevitable, with only thin glass panes and our habits of seeing keeping us apart.

I take everything as a message for my writing—though this was the first delivered by carrier pigeon—and I’ve been trying to open myself to what’s around me rather than shutting it out. Even on the Internet, I’ve been spending time with what’s less familiar to me, paying attention when I something feels wild and alive as it comes through my computer screen. Perhaps that’s why I’ve stumbled onto so much inspiration this week. I can feel something new taking shape.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that regularly I round up a few “small and magical things,” mostly related to writing, that I gather ‘round the Internet and append as links to the bottom or margin of the newsletter.  This time, I want to share them at slightly greater length. If something strikes you, I hope you’ll engage it. Go to the comments and let me know what happens.

1. Beautiful musings on writing, reading & the stories we tell 

Guernica magazine online (www.guernicamag.com) has a memorable excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s new book “The Faraway Nearby,” which explores the way we make stories. Guernica’s presentation is laced with exquisite images of eggs in nests, the work of Northern California photographer Sharon Beals—even more reason to click the link.

A taste of Solnit:

“Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

Read the rest of the excerpt at:http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-faraway-nearby/

2. A sharp-eyed guide into the work of memoir writing

Friends and clients working on memoirs, I highly recommend the pieces to be found on the blog of the wonderful teacher and writer Debra Gwartney. Two posts in particular, a recent one titled “A Few Memoir Pitfalls,” and an older one called “On Beginning a Memoir,” are excellent starting points and refreshers, full of examples from powerful works. Go read them, especially if you’re puzzling out that big question, “Who’s the I telling this story?”

From “A Few Memoir Pitfalls”:

" A memoir that truly engages ... explores emotional patterns, the relationships that draw us in, that still have their hooks in us for reasons that are often unconscious. These memoirs recognize that the person called “I” is attached to a certain version of the past. At the same time, it’s important to remember that memory is malleable—our memories shift over time. Just ask your sister about a certain day in your childhood, and no doubt you’ll have divergent details of whatever episode you brought up. Also, the way you remember a childhood incident today is likely not how you remembered that same experience five years ago. Our memories are there to serve us. The ways we need to be served change as we change. Tapping into this very notion—just how are my memories serving me?—is a door into compelling memoir writing."

You can find Debra Wartney at:http://www.debragwartney.com/blog/

3. Roll the words in your mouth and discover what they mean

You’ve never seen a maluma or a takete, but from the sound of the names, which of the objects is soft and rounded and which is jagged? Poets and others will be interested in linguists’ research into the evocative power of names, and the way they sound.

The New Yorker “Elements” blog has the details.

4. Notes on scraps of paper: snapshots from the creative process

Creating is messy, and the Pocket Notes project,http://www.pocketnotes.org/ collects the evidence: “Pocket Notes can refer to a passing scent, a bill, a type of bond, a memorandum, an effort, commentary or reference, an indication, a formula, to notice something, an observation, a piece of news, a reminder. Pocket Notes documents process, charts, maps, lists, graphs, diagrams, drafts, recordings, & the leftovers of experimentation.”

For me, flipping through the pages of Issue 2 opened a dozen windows into wildness, as writers and creators show notes, scraps and drawings and describe their projects.

Start here, with the messy notebook of Amaranth Borsuk, and then see the rest of the projects by clicking the “current issue” link in the menu bar. See what shakes loose.

5. Your turn

Take the inspiration and run. Keep writing in small bursts, if scraps of time are all you’ve got. And don’t forget to open a window, beautiful writer person. Let something wild fly in.

(Image of birds by $omebody, via Flickr)