Back Again

It has been a while since I’ve posted on this blog, which should knock my credibility as a daily writing coach, right?  Well, I have been writing every day for the last two months.  In fact, I published my first ebook on Kindle two weeks ago.  The story of what happened between July 9^th, my last post, and November 2^nd, 2012, when I started on the ebook will take a few posts to tell.  I don’t want to blast you with a 3,000 message when you are still trying to get over the holidays.  Suffice it to say, I have a note from my doctor.  Well, all my doctors, the cardiologist, the neurologist, the team of surgeons and sundry other medical personnel who saved my life after I returned from Squaw Valley.  The note says, please excuse Helen from daily writing because she has to have open heart surgery and will be very sick and very weak for a long time.

Well, I’m back, mostly.  They were right about the sick and weak part, but it didn’t last forever and Thedailywritingcoach.blogspot.com, the blog, is alive and well.  So is Helen Page, the writer behind the blog. 

For now, I just want to wish everyone a happy and healthy, make that HEALTHY new year and much success with your writing.  More to come on a regular basis.  I promise.  Cheers, Helen 

“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart...pursue those.”~Michael Nolan

Photo courtesy of katerha

Greetings from Squaw valley

I am loving the literary life here at Squaw. I don't know if it will make me a better writer, but it certainly makes me aware that this craft is not easy. The message over and over is that it is hard and requires daily practice. Even the award winning authors here say that. So when we are feeling defeated by our muse it is good to remember that no one has it easy but we can 't make quitting an option. Imagine if Shakespeare did that.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Village S,Squaw Valley,United States

Write, write, write

As I head off for Squaw Valley I am reminded of Stephen King's advice to read a lot and write a lot.  My tip for you is the same as it has been for more than 15 years.  Write every day.  Write for a minimum of 15 minutes.  Don't promise yourself you will write for 5 hours on the weekend because you are too busy during the week.  You will be overwhelmed come Saturday.  Instead, get up 15 minutes earlier than usual, set a timer for 15 minutes and write until it goes off.  That's all you have to to do.  But do it every day.  EVERY day.  And you will be more productive over time than you can imagine.  More about my 15 minute method in upcoming posts.

Today's prompt is the flag I made after 9/11.  I created a flag that spoke to the suffering and loss, and to the tributes and hope that followed.  It started with the ribbon of flags from around the world, for this was an assault on humanity.  The plaid ribbons honor the firefighters that day, the ribbons with ladybugs are for good luck, many ribbons with hearts because heart is what was needed.  The puppy dogs and baseball bats are for the children orphaned that day.  The teddy bears are for the children who died.  The stars and insignias are for all in uniform who served that day and in the days following.  The flowers are for the tributes that came from around the world.  The top row start are closed hearts for those that were broken, and solid hearts for healing.

Choose an image from this flag as your prompt and write for fifteen minutes, fiction or non-fiction, centered on freedom, survival, or independence.

Happy 4th of July everyone.

The Daily Writing Coach is back after a year's hiatus.  I have been writing during the past 12 months, though not here, and dealing with life issues that pushed the TDWC onto the back burner.  I don't use this blog to chat about personal matters too much, but a changed marital status--the big D, one of life's major stressors--and health matters--another major stressor in the form of disability problems, upcoming surgery, possibly the big C, though the easily curable one--took the focus away from my passion and onto practical matters.

My exciting news is that I've been accepted to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and I leave Saturday for a week to immerse myself in nature and writing and expect to return fully recharged.  Or, overwhelmed by the amount of work my almost completed novel still needs.

I celebrate a birthday at Squaw, which, because of recent life events, I am regarding as a new beginning.  What better way to celebrate a resurgence is for me to reconnect with my writing life in a major way.  To start, TDWC will appear three times a week, with a post, a writing prompt and, on Friday's, a writing tip.

I have plans to migrate the blog to a website and I hope you will stay with me as I complete the transition.  I'll keep you posted on that progress.

Writing projects this past year have included the start of a mystery, something I have always fantasized about writing but never had the courage.  At my age, though, what better time than RIGHT NOW do anything.  I have worked on a children's story for my beloved great-nephew, Michael, 9 1/2, and he is truly great in every respect, and so far (it is half-finished) he has given it a thumbs up.  I have also worked with writing and coaching clients and have been privileged to read the work of the gifted women in my writing group.

But now it is time to return to my beloved blog.  Please keep in touch and let me know what you have been doing since our last visit.  The next post you receive will be from Squaw.  Wish me luck!

Photo courtesy of Teofilo.

Careful what you’re calling writer’s block, because we believe what we think.

Here's my writing block, given to me by a friend many years ago.  It is the only block that I allow within twenty miles of my desk.  Let me tell you why.

Positive affirmations help all of us get through hard times.  It is part of the mental game of life.  We become our sideline coach, telling ourselves, you can do this, when we face an unusual challenge.  Whether we are aware of it or not, we talk ourselves into believing we can overcome an obstacle or complete a task.  This reinforcement often functions under the radar, because we do it so frequently that we don’t actually hear the words in our head.  But if we didn’t believe we could brush our teeth in the morning or get ourselves out the door to an appointment, we wouldn’t.

But negative reinforcement is just as powerful a motivator, though much more subtle.  Take writer’s block.  Well, don’t take it if you can avoid it, but think about, for a minute, what happens to your mental self-coaching when your writing practice hits a snag.  The slowdown can take a variety of forms.  You suddenly notice it has been several days since you’ve written a word.  Or, you sit down at your writing nook and can’t come up with an idea.  Then, most likely, you find your head full of accusations and threats—what’s the matter with you, thinking you can write?  If you were a real writer you would (fill in the blanks).  If you don’t get something written today, that’s it.  You better give up your dream of writing your book.  And then the killer of all creative energy rises up from a dank swamp and says, bingo, you have writer’s block. 

Guess what happens when you get into this mindset?  We believe what we think.  If we think we have writer’s block, sure enough, we won’t write a word.  

Tom Jenks, a writing teacher of mine and now the co-publisher of Narrative.com, once said to me that when he sits down to write, he faces all of his shortcomings.  I think that is a universal experience at some time or other for all writers.  We are trying to make something out of nothing, not an easy task.  And, when you do get words on the page, how do you know they are the right ones, that anyone else will thrill to them the way you do?  As much as we want to write, need to write, we can get the cold sweats because a corner of our mind believes we aren’t up to the task.  Our shortcomings loom too large to see our strengths.  We can’t get the words to work their way through that wall of doubt, so we decide we have writer’s block.  And when we tell our brain we have writer’s block, it snaps to attention and believes you.  It doesn’t produce a word. 

I'm not diminishing the terrors that can arise when we set our hearts on becoming a writer and then our inner life shuts down. How do I know this?  Because, I've spent hours, days, months afraid of the writing process, afraid of what it will tell me about myself--that I'm not good enough, that I'm on the road to failure.  And so I stop writing.  I’ll say I don’t have time to write, or some other excuse.  But I’m running away from the thing I love because I don’t want to face my shortcomings.  As I have written in other posts, this was my reason for becoming a daily writer--so I would no longer fall into that trough.

Remember, though, doubt is not writer’s block.  Fear of the blank page is not writer’s block.  A temporary brain freeze that shuts down your creative energy for a bit isn’t writer’s block.  Not the deadly paralysis we think of when we hear the term.  Unless we tell ourselves it is.  

I've learned that when I am in the grip of a writing slump, I must analyze my feelings in that moment.  Try it.  Ask yourself to identify the feeling underneath the belief about writing block.  It is more likely that you are experiencing fear, doubt, and exhaustion, possibly even boredom.  Because writing block is not a feeling, it is a belief. 

Our inner life flips back and forth between thoughts and feelings.  An oversimplification, I know.  But it works in this regard. It is easier to change a belief, such as, I have writing block, if we don't confuse it with an emotion.  Thoughts and beliefs will bend to logic.  If you think you have writing block, pick an object around you and just briefly describe it.  List the color, the shape, your opinion of it.  Just do two or three sentences.  If you had writing block, you couldn’t do that.  So there is the lie in writing block.  It sort of doesn’t exist.  

But if you identify the feelings as you think you have writing block, you will probably come with something much more real, such as, I'm afraid to write.  I've had my writing rejected and I am filled with self doubt.   These are states of being you and all the rest of us have lived with all of our lives in different circumstances.  And in order to function in the world, we have come up with strategies to confront and overcome these feelings.  We give ourselves a break to relax.  We talk to a trusted friend.  We encourage ourselves in some way. 

To my mind, though, the best way to overcome an attack of failure of confidence is some compassion.  Instead of saying I have writer’s block and I can’t do this, try this.  “I’m attempting something hard, challenging and some self doubt is part of the job.  I’ve done other hard things in my life, and I can do this.”   Trust me, there are days when I do this on an hourly basis.  Eventually, though, I get myself to a better place.  For the time being, that is, because we flip back and forth between emotional state.  Or, at least I do.

I tell myself what Hemingway told himself when his work frightened him.  “I wrote a good sentence yesterday and I will write a good sentence tomorrow.  I can write a good sentence today.”  If he could talk himself down from a writing block, I think we all can.

Please drop me a note in the comment box below and share what helps you get through a writing slump.  Good luck everyone. 

Voice

Of all the difficult tasks that await the writer, understanding voice may claim the prize as the most elusive element of fiction.  It is the one that makes a story memorable.  How do you define voice?  No two writers describe it the same way.  I think that is because, unlike transitions, point of view and other elements of fiction that can be learned, parsed and practiced, voice comes from deep in the psyche of the writer, as impossible to explain, manage or bend to our will as our creative vision.  To me, voice is not something I consciously choose, but rather it is the song that arises with the story, the rhythms and intent of the storyteller (we have many inside us) that delivers the story to me.

People think voice is diction, dialect, the sound of the characters speaking.  To me it is not.  Those things are manipulated by the narrator to hold the reader’s interest, controlled as best I can (note, the writer is not the narrator of the story, but a character), to do justice to my story.  But the voice lifts all that up so that my plot, characters, setting, narrator become story.  Perhaps you can see that I am having my own difficulties conveying voice.  It is everything you read about when a writer talks about voice, because that is his or her experience of voice, a unique attribute of each story.

The voice in my stories changes with each tale, because each story, I hope, is different and unique with its own singular voice.  Once the voice comes to me, and I believe it comes unconsciously, then I must stay tuned to that frequency as I write. But getting those sound waves to reach my consciousness?  That requires listening to my story as it comes to me.  Sometimes I wait between each line that I write to hear the story coming through its voice, rather than just as text coming from my brain.  That is one of the beauties of writing every day, thevoice rising up from the depths finds it channel, its opening and I can connect with it more easily.  It is not flailing away against closed doors.

Above all, voice is authentic.  I don’t strain to achieve voice, for it is the voice I hear in my head when my story is speaking to me.  It may come with the first line I write, or emerge slowly over several drafts.  I can think through a character, a plot, but I feel as though voice is delivered to me with the words.  I know that I must go deep inside and allow it to come to me. 

It may take many drafts before the right voice for the story appears, but when it does, you know it, your reader will know. 

For another take on voice, read Susan Cushman’s post about her recent stay at a writer’s conference.  http://tinyurl.com/3hmy8bx 

See if you can distinguish the voice in your stories.  That in itself is a writer’s meditation.  Please let me know in the comments your experience with voice.