Where Were You When. . . ?

Four of us fill the spaces on two sofas in Fred's cozy living room. I have a 37-year friendship with Fred and a 20-year friendship with Lew who sits on the sofa beside Fred and opposite the sofa where I sit next to my new friend Terry.

Lew asks why the American people always have to fight to gain their civil rights. One of us mentions Dr. Martin Luther King's peaceful demonstration and his "I Have a Dream" speech. "I WAS THERE!" Lew shouts triumphantly above our voices. Suddenly we're listening to Lew. "There were mobs of people. It had rained, and the ground was soggy and muddy. They laid planks over the mud for people to stand on," Lew says.

Lew is himself an eyewitness to history. It makes me wonder: who else do I know who was somewhere witnessing a major event in history? I've known people who were at Woodstock. How did they get there? What were the circumstances of their lives that made them want to show up there? What are their memories of that event?

Recently I recorded a man's sad personal story of child sexual abuse at the hands of his Catholic choirmaster/organist who was the good friend of the famous Cardinal Spellman in New York City.

I've heard about tribes with a tradition of oral history. Designated historians in the tribes collected the stories and retold them to the people year after year. At this time in our culture, with technology changing so quickly, I believe the spoken word preserved in various mediums won't remain accessible.

Right now, I'm searching online for a company that has the technology to record to a CD my scratchy old 1970's reel-to-reel live performance recordings of my show band. I will have to pay at least $50 for this service. Even CDs are becoming outdated, as consumers download music to iPods.

Even while books are disappearing from consumer popularity, the written word will remain, not in our computers (I've lost my hard drives countless times over the years!), not online for Kindles and Nooks, but in books and notebooks, journals, diaries. It's still important to write down the events of our lives--sure, on a computer, if typing, or even speech recognition works best for you--but then print it out and save the writing. Make copies and send them to family members and friends (very important!). You're recording history and culture in a medium that won't be lost.

My definition of "a memory" is not the whole story. A story has a beginning, middle and end. A memory is a snippet. Back in Fred's living room, I'm seeing Lew from a different perspective. As long as I've known him, I haven't known he witnessed Dr. King's speech. I want to know more about what he saw and heard that day. How did he feel being there? What was his attitude? But the group's conversation has moved on to Ghandi.

Two days after that inspiring afternoon with my friends, I'm still thinking about Lew: he was there, watching and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King! How did he come to be there? I know he was living in the D.C. area at the time, in the military, working at the Pentagon. Was he there on an intelligence assignment? Was he there out of curiosity? Did he support Dr. King's views? Did he know the breadth and scope of Dr. King's vision at that time, or did he learn about it in the years that followed? Lew's memory of the day Dr. King spoke is not the full story. There's so much more I want to know.

Now in the 60th decade of my life, what would my stories be? Where was I when. . .?  Where were you when. . .?  Who wants to know? Who cares? I do!

When I'm Dead

Simply writing for publication isn't enough anymore. The many decisions that go along with this process require knowledge of where-to's, when-to's and how-to's that one person alone can't locate and retain in memory. I'm starting to think it takes an Internet village of Webinars, web sites and blogs for writers, and social sites, along with a local group of writers who sponsor speakers, and one or more friends, whom you ideally perceive to be better writers than you, to meet with regularly for specific one-on-one feedback.

My friend Terry and I live in different towns, a 45-minute drive apart, but ever since she attended a life writers' workshop I facilitated in the spring, we have been getting together every week for lunch and information-sharing. We're both writing books. With an M.A. degree in Creative Writing and the award-winning talent to go with it, Terry is the writing partner I've been looking for. So far, we've attended a seminar together, and we're signed up for another one.

Terry suggested we get together once a week to read our writings aloud to each other, and today was the first day of our new plan. I read my work to her, and then she read it back to me. We discussed some places where I could make changes, and I heard the rightness of those changes. 

At Terry's recommendation, I'm posting one of the pieces I read to her today. (The other one, the first story for my Life with a Buckskinner book, needs polishing before it's ready for public exposure!) Jane Cooper's famous poem "Rent" is the inspiration for the tone of this piece. What would you write on this subject? 

When I'm Dead
by Renelle West

When I'm dead, I'll be gone,

completely and forever.

I won't hover over my corpse, or over the crematory

or sad friends.

I won't say a good word to God for you, 

or to Jesus, or to any prophet or angel you believe in.

I won't watch when you self-pleasure

or visit you in your dreams

or appear at the foot of your bed.

I'll leave you behind with your memories,

fantasies, mind's tricks.

All that will be left of me: my bones lying in ashes.

When I'm dead, don't feel you have to honor me--

I likely don't deserve it;

I won't be there to hear it.

You don't have to talk about my death in euphemisms.

I didn't transition, cross over, or pass away;

God didn't call me home;

I'm not with angels.

I fucking, flat-out died!

If you criticized me in life,

proclaim my faults aloud when I'm gone.

If you rolled your eyes when I spoke live words,

roll them when you remember me.

If my death reminds you of yours,

then grieve the loss of your life in your tears

before your curtain falls,

because it will.

When I'm dead,

I won't be back in any form.

No thinking or faith or belief will bring me to you.

No one living will be able to contact me in another realm.

Remember me in your truth,

But if you tell yourself lies, they will hurt only you;

I won't know.

Whatever I gave you along my life's journey
will stay with you; it's yours to keep.

I won't exist anywhere to understand you, forgive you,

or know what you were thinking

when you interacted with me.

I couldn't read your mind in life;

I won't exist to read it when I'm dead.

If we were torn apart, we should have mended our friendship

when I lived.

It will be too late when I'm gone.

My forgiveness of you after I've died is not necessary for your

continued well-being.

I won't be somewhere else feeling angry or bitter;

I won't condemn you or bury you in karma.

When I'm dead,

know that when I lived, I was conscious of and grateful for

the many gifts you gave me.

Your words and actions--trusting, generous, harsh, indifferent, loving, condemning, or compassionate--

molded my thoughts, attitudes and behavior.

I hope my relationship with you made me a better person in life, 

but that will be for you to judge, not me.

When I die, the covers of my life's book will close.

My last breath will be my last event.

This is my only life.

When I'm dead, I hope I leave behind something good in your heart,

because there won't be any more somethings.

I leave to you your triumphs and shortcomings,

your joys and sorrows and your journey forward.

They were always, only yours; never mine.

When I'm dead, I'll be gone,

Completely and forever.

Let's Write a Book!

Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for writers! His logic is rigorous, and he takes the reader beyond the obvious, into the realms under the highways of common understandings and information. Don't miss reading What the Dog Saw, his collection of outstanding articles published in Harper's.

Especially read Gladwell's Preface in which he tells how he came to choose his subjects and where he finds his stories ("You don't start out at the top if you want to find a story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.") Be sure to read his chapter, "Late Bloomers; Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?" His premise is that many people are slow to develop their genius and craft, partly due to a propensity to experiment.

My way of writing songs has always been to write the lyrics first and then fit them into a melody/rhythm. Before I wrote my last recorded song, "See Him Home," some little thought in my head suggested that I first write the melody. I thought that was crazy, but the deadline for when I would have to have a song ready was a week away, and I was desperate enough to try anything. I sat down at the piano and a melody floated out of the chord changes I was playing. Next, the words fell into the spaces, words so touching and real, they surprised me and made me cry.

A few nights ago, I was thinking about what I'd like to write next, after my book Life with a Buckskinner hits the screens of the Kindle and Nook readers and the audio version is in the ears of iPod listeners. I could write a memoir about the years when I nearly died from a dark-ages abortion and the Catholic church annulled my marriage to my first husband. There's a piece of history I'm hoping our country never has to go back to! I could write a memoir about what it was like growing up in a family with a brain-injured father. That's the most common injury of war veterans these days.

I was in a quirky mood that night, and I've chewed up and choked on those old topics enough. That little backwards thought in my head started buzzing around again, suggesting that I first write the title of a story, and then fill in the story. So I wrote down a bunch of titles.

And then I got this freaky idea to let others write chapters for these books. They'll be collective works, written by a number of people instead of just one. Each chapter has to stand on its own with a beginning, middle and end. There won't be any money for the contributors--it takes some capital and editor's time to get an e-book out, and most books sell fewer than 100 downloads, for a pittance--but there will be plenty of notoriety to go around!

It doesn't matter if your chapter is fact or fiction, serious, funny, long, or short (a few hundred words). Write whatever and however much you want to write. The only limitations are that your chapter can't have any "explicit" sexual material in it, and it needs to somehow fit with the book title. Include made-up or real-life stories in your chapter, to provide a balance of showing and telling.

If you're interested, do this:

1. Friend me on Facebook, if you're not already on my Facebook page.
2. Send me a message telling me which book(s) you'd like to write a chapter for. I'll give you my email address.
3. Write the chapter; make sure your name is on it and which book you're writing the chapter for.
4. Attach the chapter to an email.

I'll start as many of the books as I get contributors for. I'll publish a book when the word count gets up to 40,000-50,000 words, the size of a novel. If you know anyone who would be interested, send them this blog link.

Renelle's Facebook Page

Here are the book titles:

• How To Be Something You're Not
• A Perfectionist's Descent into Mediocrity
• How I Quit Smoking and Everything Else
• Surviving the Presidential Election; When Moving to Another Country Isn't an Option
• Confessions of a Non-Bloomer
• Can I Do Anything About This? Plus 200 (or however many we get) More Decision-Guiding Questions to Ask Yourself  (each question has to be explained for its importance, with examples of how/when to ask the question--again, humorous, serious--your call.)

I'd love to see one or more of these titles out there entertaining people, wouldn't you?

Deep Within My Heart Lies Imagery

"Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us."  --Franz Kafka 

As writers, we need to be developing high standards through reading the writings of authors with high standards. The problem is that when you know you have a good story to write, you're also likely to be sure that you won't be able to write it in a way that would meet your high standards. And maybe your assessment of your abilities is correct--your writing won't meet your standards--for two possible reasons: you haven't written enough to hone your craft and style, or you've honed your craft and style, but because it's totally yours, it doesn't look like any other writer's work, and you lack confidence in your unique creations.

Whatever the reason, getting down the first sentence might feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill when he knows that each time he gets it to the top, it's going to roll down. Why struggle to get your words onto the page when you already know they won't measure up to your expectations, or anyone else's?

Before you walk away from the computer again (!), before you lay down your pen and turn your back on the blank paper lying on the table again (!), visualize the events of your story and ask yourself this question:

What images do I see, hear, smell, taste, and feel (touch) when I remember the events of my story?

Now you're ready to begin describing one of the images. You might hear your father saying certain things and your spoken responses. You might see the rotting porch of your childhood home, with elongated black spaces where planks were missing. You might smell the cinnamon in the gingerbread cookies your mother baked before Christmas. You might feel your dog's scaly nose and the wet lap of her tongue sliding up the side of your cheek. With these descriptions you are showing the reader what you want him or her to experience through imagination.

In a recent letter to me, James, a prisoner in a state correctional institution, describes prisoners as "T. rex's in a phone booth."

Songwriters use imagery in lyrics like these:

"Deep within my heart lies a melody, a song of old San Anton."

"Strolling with my girlie when the dew is pearly early in the morning.
Butterflies all flutter up and kiss each little buttercup at dawning."

"Stars shining bright above you.
 Night breezes seem to whisper I love you.
Birds singing in the sycamore tree.
Dream a little dream of me."

These lyrics are from my "Cake Song" on the most frequently-downloaded track from my Spiritland album:

"Sunny cake, funny cake, hearty cake, party cake,
Wishy cake, squishy cake, fatty cake, patty cake.
. . . icky, sticky, mucky, yucky, gooey, chewy, yummy tummy."

Here's my first paragraph of Chapter 1 in my book, Life with a Buckskinner, to be published soon:

"When I remember Whitey, I hear his rolling laughter. The first time was over the phone on a summer evening in my father’s home in Canton, Ohio, in 1973. I was standing in my stepmother’s shoebox-sized income tax office when I dialed the number shown in the Canton Repository want-ad for a “female singer with a working lounge trio.” The stranger who answered the phone was Whitey. I told him I was calling about his ad. I had a high singing voice; I could play a clarinet, a ukulele, and some piano; and I wasn’t young—I was 29 years old. He laughed and then in a voice resonant with kind smiles, said, “We’re not teeny boppers, either!” He was right. He was 35, and we couldn’t have known it then, but he’d already lived more than half of his life."

The above paragraph includes sensory images and a foreshadowing.

Here is my partial description of my first night on stage with Whitey's band. I contrast the location of the stage in that lounge with the location of stages in other night clubs where I've performed.

"The best thing about this room was the small stage rising up in front of everyone, in full view of every seat in the room. My place on the stage was out in front of the band, and Whitey had taught me in rehearsals to never turn around, no matter what happens in the band behind me. Onstage that first night, I might as well have been standing all alone in the bright lights at the end of a fashion show runway. I was so terrified, I forgot I was supposed to sing and faded off several times during the first song, “Girl from Epanema.” “Sing!” I could hear Whitey shouting over the music.

Having a stage out in front of everyone was, and still is, unusual for small night clubs. We had an inside joke in our band that the bandstand area is an owner’s afterthought. I’ve performed facing a wall; in front of the bathroom doors; looking at the backs of people facing the opposite direction; next to a popcorn machine spewing black noxious smoke; in front of an elevated TV set showing sports events that everyone was watching; beside a giant moose head (or some hairy dead animal with horns); between the dining room and the lounge, so the diners spent the evening looking at our backsides, and several times a night, some brazen woman on the dining room side would grab the drummer around the waist from behind, threatening to pull him off the stage backwards; up at the end of a huge empty dance floor where the people beyond it looked like slow-moving bedbugs; and on a rotating stage in the center of a huge convention-sized lounge. The last room was in a Holiday Inn in Michigan. On week nights, a few people crowded next to the bar, and the rest of the room was empty; still our band went round and round like a mechanical band on a merry go round, playing to an empty room through three quarters of each revolution. When we asked the manager to stop the stage from turning, she made the stage revolve faster until my head felt like it was going to drop off onto the floor and my stomach threatened to spill its contents.

The most memorable places my band, and later I, played were in rooms where the stage faced a flight of carpeted steps leading down from an upper entrance level. At the Holiday Inn in Bismarck, North Dakota, we giggled through our songs as customers slid down the stairs on their butts or tripped and bounced to the bottom, striking comical poses on the way down."

It's good practice and fun to write words that paint a picture of sensory images. Think of one image from an event in your life that you'd like to describe, and try these steps to see if they work for you:

1. Write a simple description in sentences or phrases.
2. Flesh out the images by replacing "be" verbs with colorful action verbs
3. Add specific adjectives to describe nouns, and if the adjective requires comparison (tall, big, little, long, short, etc.), either compare the object you're describing to something else to show the size or duration, or use a specific noun or adjective
4. Replace cliches with your figures of speech you make up
5. Keep working with the words to refine the picture until it comes into focus as your original piece of artwork

In the Comments section, give us your secrets for writing images and sensory descriptions. Would you add any steps to the ones above?  I'd love to read your descriptive passages and ideas showing images! Please share your ideas with us. If you've never published, posting your writing here is a healthy beginning.








 

Shhh! Very Busy Learning!

I haven't learned this much since my Western Civilization course in college! Every day I see a term or initials that stand for something I don't know anything about, and I'm off on another rabbit romp into a summer Iowa cornfield. At least these days with the Internet, I find information with a few clicks compared to the "olden days" in college when I stacked my room with library books to write one 5-page research paper. You have to be at least as old as I am to fully appreciate this instant access to everything in the world!

For instance, do you know what DRM stands for? I didn't until I read a blog comment John Locke made to a writer who had e-books published on Kindle. He wrote that to get the DRM off her books--they're annoying to readers and don't protect copyrights anyway--she would have to change her titles and resubmit her books.

Until today I didn't even know who John Locke was. The presenter, author Jane Friedman, at the publishing webinar I watched on Thursday, mentioned his name. She also named Amanda Hocking and J.A. Konrath.

Amanda Hocking is a best-selling Kindle e-book writer, who is gifted with an unusual, delightful creativity. You can see for yourself on her blog here:
Amanda Hocking

Based on everything I've been learning, here's what I suggest: if you're a writer, write, publish, and market. If you're a writer, you're writing because it's something you do, like breathing. Writers write in every cranny-space of time and place. We can't help it. If you know how to do something, write a book that tells how. If you love reading fiction, make up a story.

Long before you finish writing your book, you have to begin creating and implementing a marketing plan. Search online for the place where the readers hang out who would read your book. Start your own blog, create a website, and learn how to use Twitter and Facebook to connect with people who would read your book. Your book can cost readers as little as $.99 to download from Amazon. Amazon pays the author $.35 for each $.99 download.

When the book is finished, send it off to an editor for editing and proofreading. If you have Power Point, you can create your own cover and save it as a JPEG file. Be sure you learn the elements that make a good book cover! (Hint: the title and your name have to be really BIG!)

For $99 you can send your book off to Book Baby to have them format it for e-readers and distribute it to all of the e-book outlets. 

All this time, in between writing your book, you'll still be doing what you love--writing on your blog and everywhere else where you can get to know potential readers.

Here's what I learned today--you probably already know it--DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. I believe it's on software CDs for Microsoft Word and other programs you buy. I've been running into it on iTunes, and now with my brief affiliation with Audible Manager (a subsidiary of Amazon that sells audio books). These huge companies have software that monitors your computer use and shuts you down to keep you from making copies of a product you downloaded from them.

Authors in the webinars tell us that someone pirating one of our books shouldn't be a concern. Jane Friedman addressed the battle to get attention all writers are engaged in and wrote, "Obscurity is a greater threat than piracy."

And now I learn from reading John Locke's comment that I shouldn't allow Kindle to use that "protection" on my books when I publish them. Here is a company I found online that is taking on and fighting against the use of DRM software:
Defective by Design

So now who is John Locke? By now, maybe you've already googled him and found out he's the first independent, self-published author to sell a million e-book downloads on Kindle, and he did it in 5 months. He's much more than that, or he couldn't have done what he did. He's a marketer, a lovable, sweet man who joyfully answers every single reader who writes to him and happily answers every blogger on any blog site where he writes. He also reads other independent authors' books and generously praises their work and supports them on their blogs. He has the online joyful larger-than-life presence of a Bill Clinton. I wonder if he's the extravert in his real life that he is online. It's hard to imagine how he would get so much done if he were.

Here's his website where you can download his book that tells you how to do what he did to market his e-book online and sell a million copies:
John Locke's Website

This is J.A. Konrath's website. He writes thrillers and lives in a suburb of Chicago, for my Chicago-suburb readers. Who knows? He might be your next door neighbor!
J.A. Konrath's Website

Numbers show value, and over a million readers read Konrath's blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing." He interviewed John Locke as a guest, and afterwards more than 100 writers wrote questions for John, which he answered. I learned heaps about publishing and marketing from reading the interview and all of the comments. Jane Friedman mentioned Konrath's blog in her webinar presentation as a valuable source of information for publishing.

I can't finish this post without mentioning how this information I've learned has caused me to change my mind about my own writing project, Life with a Buckskinner.

To repeat what I've already written in other posts, the book is primarily a collection of my humorous stories published in the Muzzleloader magazine in the early 1980's. My husband was the talented leader/jazz musician/arranger of a Las Vegas-style showband on the road in the 1970's-80's, and I also sang and played instruments in the band. We'd been out less than a year when he decided to take up mountain man reenactment as a side distraction from our stressful life. We were a team, so wherever the van went, there went I! Since I had no interest in guns or camping, my life style of performing at night and sleeping during the day worked well for me during our first few years at rendezvous. Gradually, I started staying awake longer and decided I might as well bloom where I was planted. I became known as the "Erma Bombeck of Muzzleloading."

Initially I was going to write an introduction telling how Whitey and I got together, went on the road, and ended up in a lean-to at rendezvous. I was also going to write a short afterword about us, and then self-publish the e-book and audiobook.

Then a few weeks ago I started thinking about what an interesting period of musical history our story would be, juxtapositioned with that buckskinner life. Based on that idea, I decided to flesh out the musician story and include the published stories in a section in the back. And, of course, my stories of the road would be so delicious to read, I would have no trouble finding a traditional publisher for my book! I have time to wait for the year or so it takes for a traditional company to publish my book--so I thought!

Today, based on John Locke's encouraging words, I've changed my mind again and returned to my original plan. I want this little 100-page book to come out soon, not years from now. Here is my plan of action:

• Write a beginning and end chapter to tie the stories together. 
• Stay with a $.99 pricing plan for Kindle books.
• Put a marketing plan in place to find and hang out where my readers for this book are congregating and use social media to stay in touch with them. 
• Have cover designer Becky Fox finish the covers and upload them when I retain the publishing services.
• Finish recording another 4 stories. 
• Have Bo, a world-class fiddle player who happens to live in my town, record some original fiddle 4-bar ditties for the beginnings and endings of the stories.
• Send my beginning and ending chapters to a friend who will edit/proofread them for a fee. (Yes! Writers need editers!) 
• Buy a block of ISBN numbers for selling the books ($250 for a block of 10)  

Purchase ISBN numbers

• Submit the e-book to Book Baby for formatting and distributing
• Submit the audiobook to CD Baby for distribution to all of the online places. 
• Order short runs of printed books and audiobooks for signings at book fairs. (I will not publish this book through a subsidy publisher such as i-Universe. I'll share printing information with you in another post.)

From everything I've learned, writing and publishing a book without marketing it is like singing in the shower. Only you will know what your voice sounds like and the song you're singing!

Does writing, publishing and marketing sound like something you would like to do? If so, I've learned that a dreamer usually comes outfitted with the talent and ability to accomplish the dream. Honing the craft of your talent is hard work. But in the end-phase of getting it all out the door, you can read and follow the directions of those who have succeeded and are willing to share their knowledge. They're sharing information everywhere. I hope you're okay being a life-long learner!

Check out my new toon! I started wondering what a combined show of "Ice Road Truckers" and "Swamp Loggers" might look like and....

How to Write a Great Story--Don't!

When people learn that I have facilitated life writers' groups and edited life stories for authors, they often tell me they have great stories and ask me if I would write their stories for them. In my younger years, when I believed I would live a lifetime that would last into eternity, I consented to the hours of painstaking listening required to glean from the client those hundreds of tiny sensory details that make a story rich and real, and I spent unpaid months putting the story together in a way that fulfilled the client's expectations.

You already have at least one, and maybe dozens of great unwritten stories waiting their turn to adorn the pages of a book. In this context, you know that the abstract adjective great that appears in the title means that your life events and experiences are interesting, unique, and even unbelievable, and you know that everyone else would agree with you, if you could only write your stories down. 

It's the second use of the word great in the title that I want to address in this post. "Write a great story"  implies a finished written piece that meets not only the expectations of your inner critic but the high standard of quality literature that a book publisher or magazine editor would demand before consenting to publish it. And, of course, you have to give your readers a great read! That concept has choked my recent writing attempts and made me wonder if fear of failure to reach my expectations is the main culprit that spawns the dreaded writer's block in other writers, too.

This morning I started again to write down my great story of my years as a singer with a band on the road. It will accompany my collection of already-published-and-deemed-worthy humorous stories of my life (on that same road) with my husband. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't meet my expectations for writing this story in a great way.

You see, I care about the final written version of this story, in the same way I cared about becoming a great nightclub singer. That had been my dream ever since 5th grade when I saw the movie, Pete Kelly's Blues in Dover, Delaware, when I watched Peggy Lee bulging out of her slinky black dress, leaning against the piano in an  inebriated glaze-eyed swoon, singing the blues, or rather, slurring the blues. I wanted to be a singer like her.

I was already 28 years old when I finally won the audition to sing with a working lounge trio in Akron, Ohio. I had three weeks to not only learn 28 songs, but to completely change from my operatic style of singing in my lyric soprano head voice to a pop style of singing in my chest voice. I'd never sung in that voice before, but the leader of the band (who later became my husband) had helped two other operatic females morph into pop singers and knew he could teach me, too.

In the first two weeks, my chest voice sounded thin and weak and truthfully terrible. I couldn't hit high notes without going into my operatic head voice, and in those years of pop music, that was unacceptable. I was certain I would fail in achieving the end result of ever being a great singer. After all, I already knew what great female pop singers sounded like: Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Karen Carpenter, Barbra Streisand, and Olivia Newton-John.

In hindsight, in those early beginnings of my music career, what I didn't and couldn't know--and this is key to our discussion of writing a great story--was how I would sound as a great singer. I could not then know the meaning of the word great as it pertained to my vocal abilities yet to be developed. My inner critic was incapable of judging my potential and my performance, because it didn't have a defined standard for me. I had to stop criticizing myself and crying (!) before I could embark on the learner's journey of finding my voice.

By now, you've probably guessed where this discussion is going. I called my creative partner Terry this morning and told her about my failed attempts to write. She told me she was having the same doubts and fears about her ability to get her stories written. She said that I was shutting down my creative process by my stubborn insistence of being critic and editor before I could write down the first sentence.

Her solution was simple. We both have to let go of our preconceived expectations and outcomes. Specifically, I must take off the editing, critic, and English teacher hats and simply write the images, feelings, and sensory descriptions within the events--like Julia Cameron's "morning pages," like the way I tell other writers to write, like the way my song lyrics pour out all over the page before I know their rhythms and melodies. As always, I will write with pen on paper. Terry writes with a pencil because she loves the smell of lead dust. Writing by hand forces my thinking to slow down and breathe.

When fear of failure prevails, letting go of control is counter-intuitive but necessary if we're going to be writers. This word great, as in "writing a great story," must remain an abstract word, always reminding me that I won't have a vision of a final outcome or meaning for that word, ever. There is a point in the process when I will my put on my organizer/assembler's hat and try to make sense out of those scribbled words, but the initial flow-out has to be unfettered by judgment. 

I don't know what the final story will look like, and that's okay. It will have its own rhythm and style, its own expression, its own arrangement of words on the page, its own voice. The process and the outcome will surprise me. They always do!

Help for Writing Your Stories

Good news for writers: there is power in the written word. Whether you want to teach others what you have learned through experience, help bring about awareness and change, record what will become history, or bring fictional characters to life, the goal is to share your ideas with readers.

I italicized “readers” because unless you find readers to read what you’ve written you won’t accomplish any of the reasons why you write. Besides, writing something that will have a permanent home among the dust clumps under the bed isn’t as much fun as writing with the anticipation that someone else will read it and love it.

This past week I’ve been busting out in a “writer’s spring”—the upheaval of turning in new directions and making new decisions. Now, having written the content for my new web site and revamping and redirecting this blog, I’m finally ready to begin sharing with you what I’ve been learning about writing, marketing, and publishing.

I'll still write stories from my life, past and present, which I hope will give you writing ideas. Also, on each blog post, I'll include "Writer's Block," a block of stuff about writing, a block of a small-town village street on a summer night where you sit on your front porch steps and think about things, a section designed to enthuse your muse, maybe even compel you to step away from the demands of your life and write. The Writer's Block might include one or more of the following:

• A brief review of a book relevant to writing
• A writer’s how-to segment, which could be an English lesson, suggestions for finding time to write, information about marketing or publishing, or ideas for making your writing life more fun
• Quotes from other writers
• Questions based on my life story segment to help you think about your story
• A suggested writing assignment

So here we go!

Writer’s Block

Ya Gotta Love That Voice!
A pox on truth-tellers if they can’t launch their stories into sunny skies! Really! Mark Twain and British poet-novelist Philip Larkin would be labeled “negative,” if not downright whiney in today’s society. To me, their voices are refreshing, a touch of authentic human angst, offering the gift of catharsis in this cultural wilderness of spin.

In 1898, Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography about his maid, “[She] has a high-keyed voice and a loud one. . . .talks all the time, talks in her sleep, will talk when she’s dead. . .and is consumingly interested in every devilish thing that is going on. Particularly if it is not her affair."

British poet-novelist Philip Larkin wrote, "I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any--after all most people are unhappy, don't you think? He also wrote, "Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up, I realized it was just children I didn't like.

After graduating from Oxford, Larkin worked as a librarian for the rest of his life. About his career, Larkin wrote, "I have never felt anything but degraded as the librarian in this hole of toad's turds," and "I am entirely unassisted in my labors and spend most of my time handing out tripey novels to morons."

Why Not Write and Publish an E-book?

Writer’s Digest sponsors excellent Webinars. On Thursday, August 11, 1-2:30 p.m. you can learn about publishing an e-book. The cost is $79. Learn more about it and register at this site. You can also order a download or DVD of this webinar from the Writer’s Digest Shop:
Writer's Digest Shop

Suggested Writing Assignment
Making a plan to write is as important as writing. Start a list of writing ideas of events and experiences in your life that were unique to a period of history you lived through, or activities/events you participated in that few others would know about. A list makes writing irresistible!

Here's my short list:

• Graduate student in the 60’s counterculture revolution
• Getting high with Timothy Leary
• Getting high with Jim Varney (Ernest)
• Getting high with. . . .no. No more  : )
• Singer/musician with a Las Vegas-style showband on the road for eight years
• Life with my husband who became a “Buckskinner.”
• First runner-up to Miss Kentucky and how I found out the pageants were fixed.
• When the Catholic church annulled my marriage

Happy writing! Let me hear from you!

Rescue from Writer's Mud Hole

Accomplishments seemed to come more easily for me when I was young. As a writer in corporate marketing and technology fields, I went to an office every day for a decade and wrote with purpose and focus, always thankful for my creative muse who never let me down. After all, the audience was well-defined, the content was focused, the tone and writing style were already determined, and the rules were established. All I had to do was write all day into the night and on weekends and holidays until I was burned out.  

Nowadays, slogging through my own first writing project, Life with a Buckskinner, I've been unwilling to admit that I'm stuck and can't get myself out. That is, until I woke up this morning and had the first honest conversation with myself about why I haven't written the introductory chapter. That is, until I admitted to myself that I need to ask someone for help. That is, until my friend Terry Hess arrived today for our usual Tuesday lunch and I asked her to have the conversation with me.

Terry is in my life at the perfect right time. She has a master's degree in creative writing and has won awards for her stories. Reading her stories reminds me that we all have remarkable life experiences that would make great stories, if only we could write them with a mastery of the craft of writing combined with the grace and beauty of an artist. Terry has a wrenching life story and a rare talent of writing prose like poetry--sentences that gently rock you, while gathering you up into a storm until you suddenly break open into a wound of blood and tears. She is my example and mentor.

Fortunately, she has read my already-published stories that I will include in my book, and after a few minutes of back and forth with her, I wasn't stuck anymore. The answers were clear. And you know what? It was the way I had originally planned for the book to go, with an introductory chapter and an ending chapter. I'd been second-guessing myself and lost my way. But I still would have needed the conversation with Terry. My idea needed enhancement, with even more direction and focus. Suddenly, writing looks like fun again--at least after I've had an early-evening nap to renew my energy. 

Today I promise to admit it to myself as soon as I get stuck again and to ask for help immediately. With my life sliding on a downhill slope, I don't have time to lie to myself that I can, by myself, think my way out of a writer's mud hole. I'll look for the outer signs: procrastination, confusion, and indecisiveness.

If you're expressing yourself in a creative life, I hope you have one or more creative partners who believe in you, who have experience and skills that complement your skills, and who inspire and challenge you to rise to your highest and best.