Writing Help Blog

The Brutal Writers Guide: Part 2

by admin on October 28, 2011

By Rudy Wilson

The thing is, most writing is standard, informative journalism or worse, terrible fiction that is tragically unoriginal and that’s why no one wants to buy it! I encourage all people to write but most “writers” seem to be conformists and incapable of real honesty. They have no idea what “original” means, in terms of language and story. I receive many manuscripts from people that want me to help them, edit their work, (free of course), and 96% of it is trash. Why? Because it’s not real, it’s fake, it’s some made-up thing that people think is what they are supposed to write.

Let’s admit it: most writers and people are not creative or original but basically ignorant of art or anything new or …..well… sadly…anything but the straight way of life, and their writing reflects it. They try so hard to be original and real and all that but most come off sounding, at best, like imitators of other writers. And, no this is not about me, or my work. I am prone to the society’s influence as are you, but I disdain it in terms of its standards. Watch the lower channels on TV, the networks, for 10 minutes and if you aren’t sickened and afraid to live here, then drop your pen and get a bad job.

But you are different. You are willing to open the vein and bleed on the page; to go deep and bring up the true feelings that you find within, no matter what they look like. But you need writing help to express these truths in your work. There is a term we learned in childhood: SHOW & TELL. The balance between the two is so important. There is no fixed percentage of showing and telling required but at least shoot for 50/50. Imagine a story or a novel which was all narration, or telling. It would take an incredible magician to pull that off, but basically it’s information or journalism, fine if that’s your preference. But the key to fiction, even good creative non-fiction, is SHOWING! Action, dialogue, characters doing what they do, pushing the story and the conflicts forward, as we watch these people or situations grow, mutate, change.

The joy of having characters, be they human or hobbits or animals, is that these individuals become alive and we begin to TRUST them as we watch their growth and see them struggle and fall, get back up, survive, succeed or fail. There are so many different types of characters: the protagonist or hero, (the star), the antagonist (the mirror of the hero,) who stirs things up, causes problems, tries to bring down the protagonist, and it can be a person or situation or any number of angles. Then there’s the foil, a supportive, character who is expendable and generally helps the protagonist, and yet falls or sacrifices themselves for the betterment of the hero. They are usually obvious: the kid who we all know will get killed in the battle, the kind but weak friend to the hero who will ultimately sacrifice for his friend. We must show these characters in action! We see them talking, walking, crying, dying, LIVING!

We must give them plenty of breathing room, meaning, once we get to know them, they begin to take on their own personalities if we can let them, and we MUST let them. We must let them live, and then we follow and record and love them and show them! And we tell things in the right balance, narration when needed. It all depends on how you want to present your work and also how brave you are in trusting yourself to allow, ALLOW the story that already exists in your sub-conscious, and allow your characters to LIVE, BREATHE …etc. Good luck! Create something and watch it come alive…Nothing better! More on all this later! Read on.

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Creating a Character

by admin on October 28, 2011

by Rudy Wilson

If you are looking for writing help to create a character, here is what you must know: One must, as a writer fall in love with your characters. They must be seen, experienced as real people, entities, souls. I wrote a book once, my favorite, SHINY APALARIS, as the inspiration and the entire story came to me on a bench in Iowa City. As I sat in the sunny side bench alone, I felt a presence as strong as if a truck load of flowers had been dropped onto me, completely unexpected. “She” was as real as anyone else I knew. She told me her story. I wrote it down as fast as I could. Thank God I had pen and paper. She was a soul, and wanted, evidently to tell me her story. I have always believed she had been my sister, as the story involves a brother and sister. It is the saddest story I know, and the point is, it came directly from someone, ‘someone,’ to me. I still feel her presence. Now, admittedly, this was an unusual way to get in touch with a character. Most likely it was a strong urge from my subconscious about a story I want to tell, but it felt as if it came to me from outside.

Usually, we have some story, even some part of a story to tell, and then there are the people we want to use, to write about, to move, to see change and grow and resolve. The experts so often discuss conflict and resolution and it’s true – it’s inevitable – whenever anyone in writing or even in life does anything there are results, and therefore conflicts, and resolutions, not always good. So we have our idea for a story about so and so people and the plot is beginning to appear and we have an idea, an image of characters that we care about, that we need, that we must have to move the story forward. Can you have a story with no characters? It’s done, but there are abstract or obtuse characters somehow, but that’s a separate topic for writing help.

We feel the story, and I believe that once we have an image, an idea, a story, that it’s already done, basically, in the psyche, the subconscious. All we have to do is, in some kind of silence, see it, feel it, find the story and let it roll out and follow it, and our characters are the most important part of how to move our story ahead.

How to create a believable character? We must begin by having some feeling, some knowledge of him, or her, or them. We then feel them, we begin to see and sense them, physically at first perhaps, or mentally. We must begin to know them; to know all about them, even facts we will never even use, but we must treat them and embrace them as real people. As we fall asleep at night, they are there with us and we learn more about them. When we awaken, we might have an image or a detail about them, a mannerism. Mannerisms are important. They cannot be generic mannequins. I once knew a young girl, and I told her I liked her mannerisms. She, funnily, said, “I’m too young to have mannerisms.” But that was a mannerism.

We have to see these people, how they function , how they see the world, how they exist.

How?

That’s the hard part, the artistic demand. How? Simply by doing it. We have imaginations and they live there. We calm down and see, and know them and express them through words and actions. We watch them grow, and get defeated and grow some more and resolve their lives, or fail. We have to somehow be open enough, and honest with ourselves, to sense them, love them, let them grow and exist as we would our children, our creations, as that’s just what they are. Know them, love them, see them, learn who they are and let them go to grow. Then follow them where they take you.

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Some Aspects of My Writing Process

by admin on October 19, 2011

I feel very fortunate in that I was always drawn to language, as a form of expression, even as a child. My older brother was a great writer, a poet, and I’d mimic him and create verse and rhymes as a child in order to learn to write. He turned me onto some of the great classics, especially J.D. Salinger’s writing, which contains much knowledge about how to write. I spent many, many years reading the great novels. David Copperfield, for example was a Bible to me in my late teens. Dostoyevsky also had a major impact on me, and, as said, Salinger, in a more American, modern way.

My writing roots definitely spring from the South. I was born and raised until age ten in a small town in Mississippi and that has had a value to me, immensely. So many of my favorite writers guide are from the South. The South’s literature is rich and filled with originality, color, texture and earthiness.

I have been also fortunate in that once I see, or find or feel an image, then the building begins to create itself. My first successful short story, that ended up at The Paris Review, began with an idea I heard from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi concerning “desire, impression, desire.” I thought that if two people loved each other enough, it could bring them back to each other even over long time spans, lifetime after lifetime. I compiled two characters, one mainly myself, as I almost always write in the first person, and one was a girl who was drawn from a few females I’d admired or loved. The truly amazing gift here, not my gift but a given gift, is that once thought of: done. The story began to simply unfold before my heart and eyes and I followed the characters and memories that surfaced.

The critical ingredient in all of this, for me, is an openness and a form of honesty that allows me to let go, let the words and sentences write themselves as I simply follow along. It’s not always as simply, or as easy as that may sound. But, generally when I get an idea, then the book is done, and it’s just a matter of writing it down as I see the characters and can draw on my own experiences and imagination and possibly a desire to love. I say love, as I love my characters and often have to witness them do things I do not want them to do, but there they are, living out their own lives.

I love language more than story. I have been criticized about this but it’s true. The New York Times called my first novel, The Red Truck, more like a long prose poem. I feel deeply that form does equal content.

I am not a disciplined writer at all. I often go months without writing fiction. I cannot type and this has slowed me down. I handwrote my early books and the pain of two-finger typing them into the computer was horrible, and yet it is where much, if not all of the editing occurred, so perhaps it was a good thing. The House of Gizmo, an unknown, unpublished book I wrote, took me three years to type from several notebooks.

Now, as to punctuation! What a joy it is to me, the varieties and the creativity punctuation gives us. I taught for years at Indian Hills Community College, and one year at the University of Iowa undergraduate writing workshop and generally I’d stumble onto my favorite ‘lecture,’ punctuation is more fun than sex. I think the young people enjoyed that discussion. “The joy of the semi colon, imagine, a partial stop, with so much promise ahead, etc.!” Each aspect of punctuation contains easy references to this type of fun.

I am disciplined only in that, once I get going on a book, which I am now, I fall for my characters and especially this time, the writing is coming out as something so raw and real, even frightening. I am literally running after these people, listening, and observing and trying desperately to keep up with them. They are alive, they have their own personalities and souls, and it’s simply my job to trust them, to not betray them by writing what I think they should do, to be honest with what I see and feel they are doing — and to be open: allow, allow them to breathe and live freely, and then the great fun is on, the joy of writing down what I see in the language and form that I love.

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Brutal Writing Guide Part 1: See It. Write it.

by Rudy Wilson on August 8, 2011

The brutal, real truth about being a writer: all one needs to really do, pen or keyboard in hand is: WRITE. To be a writer, you must simply write, get the truth out of your head and heart and put it down in some form. All you have to do is SEE! Open your eyes and heart, your original, personal brain and soul, God given or from somewhere!

Our society does not encourage honesty. Surely we are not blind, regardless of all of the television and the conformity taught to us in school. Just SEE and then simply report it: write it down. And stop all the editing and censoring and worrying and fear. Fear will ruin a writer. I say writer, meaning a writer of personal, specific truth: your reality. You could, like many, write cook books and TV guides and easily accessible articles for mass production. But if your interest is in creating something new, brand new, original; then you must see the truth around you, whatever it is and simply write it down. Simply see reality as only you can see it. Then write it down, in specific detail!

So: wake up! Take a look. Take a chance. Write it down and forget about the words, in the beginning, just get it down…worry later! Edit and censor and fix it later. And yet here comes the hard part: you, as someone who assumedly wants to create something worthwhile as a writer must, must drop all the stories that you carry with you, the judgments: as many as possible and then as purely as you can, write down what you want to write. Even if it seems wrong or odd or scary: so much the better.

It’s one thing to wake up, shake off the straight world, and start to get it down, but how? Firstly, again, just write, pencil or pen, computer, just write it down, fast, especially if you have to keep up with the tremendous amount of input flowing in from outside and inside. See it, write it. Remember you have a blank sheet of paper in front of you. You can write anything you want to. What freedom! And again, quoting the late, great John Gardner, who wrote at times, 16 hours a day and many novels: DETAIL IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF FICTION! Don’t ever forget this.

If you don’t use specific detail then you are a cheater, a selfish writer. Why write “The garden was beautiful!” Why is the garden beautiful? And more importantly, why is it beautiful to you, only you, not according to gardening magazines or your friends or husband or wife, but very specifically, why and how is it beautiful: tell us, for goodness sake. Show us. Show and tell: now there’s an entire reality, the balance of how much to show and tell: fodder for another article.

Once you’ve written, in specific personal detail, about a chicken or a dog or a house or an interaction between whomever, or a street, or the rain, then what? Then comes a huge decision: form and presentation. One can write and write, freestyle, free writing, journal style, and that’s important, but how to create the form you want and is available to the audience you might want to address? I say forget any audience. Write it for yourself, even the form. Then, if you must, due to finances or need, you can edit or fix it to fit into some audience. This all depends on whether you want to be a journalist, a straight writer, catering to the norms of our society, or an artist, on the fringes.

Writing help is in some ways, the easiest art form of all. It requires no brushes or paint or clay or hands on involvement: just your own private, special details and guts. The hard work is in simply seeing and writing it down. It’s all there: all you have to do is be honest and report it.

Of course there is more to it. How to create real characters; the rhythm and syntax and balance of language, dialogue and structure. More on that later.

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Writers Guide to Complete Happiness Pt 3

by admin on October 4, 2010

In search of a writers guide to perfect happiness

The point

Why do writers write? Why do we do it. Probably for the same reason that cats paint. You realize what the success of that book says about us humans. We believe that cats could never paint, cats as animals could never, would never, paint. But our cats, what we make of them out of our imaginations as pets , our cats would paint. Of course they would. They’d paint better than we do.

We think creativity belong to us.

It does not belong to us. Has it never occurred to anyone that perhaps crop circles are made by the crops themselves, or the earth they grow out of. We think the universe needs us. So is that why we write? Because somewhere deep inside we know that it does not need us. Our very lives do not really belong to us. They happen to us. So perhaps it is out of a desire for control that we write about ourselves, alter the tense of everything, try to see ourselves as we would be, in the third person or as many people with different voices and faces. Of course everything we think that we create has already been done. We cannot step outside ourselves. When you read a book you are reading only what was given to the consciousness of the writer to write. You are reading them and yourself and neither of you are really your own creation.

Or are are we. Perhaps we all create this universe together. Then of course animals do create. They create their lives in the same ways we do. Together we have been created by each other and as we move through time, we create. But cats don’t seem to feel the need to paint. Why is it then that we feel the need to write? Our self conscious awareness of ourselves perhaps. Then it would be a burden and not a joy, but it is a joy. As much as we moan and gnash our teeth, these are the finest and sweetest moments, the times we place words, words that have been used millions of times, billions of times, by other people, we take these common groupings of letters and place them an order, that is special, unique and personal, something that could only come from us. Yet if only our egos wrote books no one would read them. More than that, their would be no joy. Do the animals miss the joy? If you look in the eyes of a deer, if you really look, you can see, they are missing nothing. Listen to the frogs as they creep across the windows eating small bugs at night. You can see the joy. But then whose joy am I seeing, I cannot step outside myself either.

Who can know another’s life, animal, vegetable, mineral or person. The universe is created anew each time we open our eyes. Words keep telling us that, words in books and words in emails and words on websites, everywhere. Over and over, I am told how wonderful life is, once a week at least, by chain emails sent me by my sisters, emails who threaten me if I do not return them or make them multiply.

Why do we write? To communicate? To spread something great like jam or peanut butter on the plain and everyday thoughts. Yes of course. To gussy up those things we never think to say to actual people, to write them down, to be proud of them. Always and forever. But also it is to have something we can leave behind, to have some bit of ourselves that we can point to, something of ourselves to show other people so that we can say, see that, that is me. Why is it is so painful then, when those precious parts of us, those sacred words are read.

Why do we write? If we do not want such words to be read by other people, why do we write. To express ourselves?

But if no one is going to read the words, there is no point. And so then perhaps, the point is, there is, no point.

Typing this I realize that it is very probable that no one will ever read these words; if they do I will never know about it. So this then is a message in a bottle and I will launch it, tossing it out to float upon the sea of words that is humanity’s creative universe; and eventually the bottle will break and the message will dissolve into letters, vowels and consonants; punctuation floating freely.

I J. K.

Lm, N.

Op, Q r;

.stuv.

Y………..

- Z

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Writers Guide to Complete Happiness Pt 2

by admin on August 17, 2010

Part 2 – Fiction versus nonfiction

My husband thinks I lie to people. We were still dating the first time he talked to me about this problem he thinks I have. I remember it very clearly, it was after a party one night, we had gone back to my place, I had taken off my coat, he had kept his on. I already knew he was upset. “You told Claudia that I called you fifteen times to remind you about the party, I only called three times, three is very different than fifteen.”

I was puzzled.“ Yes it was only three.” I said slowly, “ It seemed like fifteen but it was only three.” My voice was absolutely neutral. I had not been aware of any reason that he had to be upset, but if I had to pick one I would never have come up with this. I was sort of relieved except that my reply seemed to make him even more upset.

He was actually pacing back and forth. He stopped across the room from me. “ You lied to her.” he said, “ and you made me look foolish in front of my friends.”

I was shocked I went over to him, he looked so wounded. I put my head on his shoulder. “ Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you, but Claudia knows you didn’t call me fifteen times. I wasn’t lying, I was exaggerating, I was trying to make our life sound more interesting, I was being entertaining.”

We have had this very same discussion, much less emotionally, many times over the ten years we have been together. In the first few years he even attempted to break me of the “habit” using logic. I have tried to explain my behavior to him in different ways always hoping for a breakthrough. I’m not sure even now that he believes me.

You see my husband is an engineer, before he met me he had no idea what a storyteller was or what stories are made of.

When you ask my husband what the weather will be like tomorrow, be prepared to wait until he has the latest information from at least one website, but possibly two, he may also tell you his estimation of the accuracy rate of the websites he is quoting, because he has been checking the weather hourly all the previous the day and noted how far off they were from the actual weather at our house.

For his sake please take into account that the preceding paragraph has been written with a certain amount of exaggeration… but not much.

I believe we are all to a large degree, fictional characters. No one has any real facts about anyone, and what are facts in relation to truth anyway. This is the theory upon which I conduct my life. The world is essentially unknowable, so I might as well make my part of it sound interesting. I believe in Fiction.

Non-fiction is just a variety of fiction that tells bigger lies about itself because they believe their own stories. I love watching the science channel programs where they all declare that they know how the universe got started. I pay special attention to the part where they remember to call everything a theory. I want to note right here that I love science and that bible study groups are a great deal less honest in that they won’t admit that a book that has been edited many times and is obviously very entertaining in parts, to be a work of fiction. Of course using my definition of non-fiction the bible is one book that really fits it, but religion is such a fascinating topic. I think everyone should write a bible.

If my husband wrote a bible it would be very thoroughly researched like the article he’s contemplating on the comparative merits of the various smartphone operating systems.

The opening would have to include all known opinions about creation, possibly a statistical analysis of the likelihood of each being true based upon current scientific data.

My bible would be much like the one currently in use, but I would cut out the boring parts and update the apocalyptic visions, say the world ending with Jesus coming back in a spaceship or warping all the saved into a parallel dimension; perhaps all the liars and storytellers would be left behind, That would be ironic. Think of the parables. If heaven is for non-fiction only, Jesus wouldn’t make it in.

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Writers Guide to Complete Happiness

by admin on June 7, 2010

Lesson one – writers guide to complete happiness

I have known ever since I was born, that I am a writer. At seven I tried writing scripts for cartoons, mice tricking at cat into giving them a ride – The Shoebox Choo Choo, not ground breaking, but a beginning. At nine I formed my own “publishing “ company with my best friend. I would dictate while she would transcribe my every word, a series called The Ghosty Woods about a family of ghosts with a Mr and a Mrs Ghosty Woods and a teen age daughter named Ghostina. It ran to three volumes. In seventh grade I was the editor in chief of my very own magazine. In high school I had my own poetry corner in the student newspaper. In college I wrote short stories and plays based on classical works. I never made any money with anything , but I have been willing to suffer for my art. The only sliver of doubt that ever assailed me was my horoscope. I have had it done many times and they never mention writing, they are certainly wrong.

My first novel, self-published, was not a success, I just assumed I was ahead of my time. None of my writing teachers ever understood me.

Then I wrote another one, trying to make it more accessible and when it was finished I gave it to a friend to read. I had even given it a cover and a spiral binding.

She read the first chapter, all eleven pages. Then she called me to talk.

I remember very clearly that I was standing by the couch and looking at the clock when I answered the phone, it was four thirty two pm. We were still on the phone when my husband came home at six.

She had a lot to say. I’m not sure I actually heard very much of it. I will say here that it didn’t really matter that much to me that she didn’t like it. But something about the intensity of her criticism , the minutia of her dissection paralyzed me completely. I cannot write anymore without doubting my ability to judge it’s worth. My friend and she is still my friend, in her relentless pursuit of her own truth, has called into question the one thing in this world that I thought I knew for sure, that I am a writer.

Reading, writing, words are my vocation. I search in everything I read for that line, that sentence that makes me stop and say, “that is what I want, I want to do that.” I must do that or perish trying.

But now …. Oh it is terrible, I still want nothing else, even if I am no longer feel that I will be able to. And that has been a kind of death for me.

This all happened a while ago and at that time I had a series of dreams that followed me night after night every time I closed my eyes to sleep.

In this dream world I was not myself. I was as different from how I experience myself to be as was possible. Because in the dream no one liked me and I was very very bitchy. People went out of their way to make problems for me and I couldn’t get along with any one. I couldn’t keep a job and it came down to a night when my landlord kicked me out just for the hell of it. I was stubborn, I argued with him, but he pushed me out the door in the middle of the night was falling and I had no where to go and I was tired. Night after night I wandered the streets. I had no friends, no one would take me in. It was late, the street lights made paradise in the green trees overhead and the houses all belonged to strangers. One night after many months the dream changed. In my waking life I had decided something and I don’t even know what it was but in my dream I stopped complaining, I stopped whining about how people were unfair. I was simply tired and wanted to sleep, I accepted that no one wanted me. It wasn’t really okay, It was just the way things were.

As I was walking along I found a lounge chair someone had left by the curb.. It wasn’t broken or dirty just old and unwanted. I spread it out right there on the sidewalk and laid down. I fell asleep. I awoke in my dream to see myself surrounded by people treating me with respect and asking questions of me about their lives as if in my freedom from caring I had accomplished something amazing.

Confidence is neither won nor lost, but taken and given. The universe has given me mine and I take it back from those who would even without their knowledge deprive me of it. Even if I never publish a word.

“Consider to self publish eBook with all your best work for faster distribution and higher quality.”

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There Is a Boatman to Carry Us Across the River

by Chamaigne on February 16, 2010

This article by Gloria Wendroff offers another way of understanding the zone that artists, athletes, and writers talk about, that place where the flow is so smooth and strong that it feels like it isn’t just you any more, that you have gotten out of the way and something else has taken over. Most of us experience these “in the zone” moments, and seek for ways to re-create them. The added beauty of this type of writing is that it creates a profound meditation on that mysterious relationship between God and Self. If we go deeply enough into our unconscious, will we find a place where there is no distinction? If God lives in our hearts, then perhaps all we have to do is listen to our hearts to hear God. Gloria illuminates a path of inquiry through experience, and a way of accessing a richness that is just beyond our normal consciousness.

–Chamaigne Montana, Writers’ Voices Producer and Co-Host

A note from Gloria:

This article contains some of my experience and delight in Godwriting™ as well as the first Godwriting of three people in varied parts of the world. This article isn’t meant to be an instruction manual, nor can it be. Godwriting is more like Narnia. There isn’t a map. You can only go there!

There Is a Boatman to Carry Us Across the River

I always wanted to be a writer. After all, books were my parents. Books fed me, raised me, taught me ideals and gave me hidden clues as to who I might be.

For so many years, I wrote and wrote and rewrote. I was adept at moving words around, but the fact is I didn’t have much to say, and no knack for thinking up plots either. My writing was primarily moving words around. I could rewrite a line of poetry until three in the morning and not get it right. None of this kept me from writing, however – over and over again. There is something about writing – hard or easy – we have to do it.

I remember craving someone to come along who would give me a plot or theme to write about!

Incredibly, about forty years later, it was like the Greatest Storyteller of All came into my heart and did tell me exactly what to say. No plots however, though my life itself began to hold the twists and turns that fiction writers dream of.

What I call Godwriting, the Voice for God, you might call Higher Consciousness, Inner Voice, Spirit or Divine-writing, this writing from our pens or our laptops at its inspired best – sometimes, but not always — galloping out of us so fast we can hardly keep up with the words of this miraculous writing that come from “somewhere.”

Every day for twelve years, I have been Godwriting™ and sending out the messages I receive to subscribers all over the world and from all walks of life. Twelve years is over 4,000 days! Gradually, over time, I discovered a side benefit – ALL of my writing got faster and easier!

I didn’t have to do the endless rewriting and moving lines around and going back and forth. My writing became, well, spontaneous. From business letters to poetry to blog to newsletter, pretty much all of my writing takes care of itself now without struggle.

The easy God-given writing I’m doing now is spiritual. But fiction books have been written in the same or similar way. Fannie Flag did not take credit for writing Fried Green Tomatoes. It was an inspired book that came to her. All she had to do was to let it come.

In writing down The Heart of a Gopi, Raihana Tyabji wrote as fast as he could the words he heard whispered from somewhere deep inside. He didn’t know what was going to happen next any more than a reader of a book knows until he turns the page.

Mother Theresa said: “I am a little pencil in God’s hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. And He writes beautifully.”

Naturally, the writing I speak of comes from a deeper level of truth than our surface knowing or effort. This writing is effortless. It has to be effortless, or it would not be Godwriting. Godwriting cannot be forced. But it can be invited. And once in a while, when we’re lucky, it comes unbidden.

God is the boatman Who ferries us across the river of writing. But to get to the shore of the river, we have to move ourselves over to where the Boatman so patiently waits to take us across.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat, Love, Pray, tells how she got to the river bank while she was sitting on the bathroom floor in despair. Despair and her bathroom floor got her there.

We don’t have to sit on the bathroom floor, nor do we have to be in despair. To hear on this deep level, we don’t have to be anything at all but what we are. A subtle sense of sound, an inner hearing, comes to the fore, and we take a backseat. It’s like we turn the dial of our mind ever so slightly, the same way we fine-tune the dial on a radio station, and the static goes away.

I love what Elizabeth Gilbert writes. Furthermore, I loved the talk she gave on Ted’s Place. www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html. Elizabeth tells how genius used to mean a creative spirit that shares the room we write in. In those times, the writer wasn’t a genius. The writer had a genius. The writer couldn’t take the credit. It was understood that all great writing was inspired writing. Today the typical belief is that only a rare person is a genius. In contrast, Elizabeth Gilbert is sure that every one of us has a genius.

I agree with her. I have seen it. I have seen this shift come about in Godwriting workshops across the U.S. and in Greece, Turkey, England, Romania, Germany, and Israel where the publishers from three of those countries, miraculously paid my way so that people in their countries could be introduced to this deep-level writing and come closer to God and all that greater closeness brings with it. Everywhere people, writers and non-writers, found themselves writing down amazing wisdom in their own unique style of writing.

I would like to emphasize that it takes no special talent to Godwrite. It comes from the deeper levels that exist within each one of us. Everyone can plumb those levels. All we have to do is to leave the shores of the known and enter the beautiful and vast Unknown.

At the same time, I’m amazed that Godwriting came to me. When I really think about it, I can’t quite believe it. For so many years, I have been receiving beautiful Heavenletters™, and still it hasn’t quite sunk in. That I actually Godwrite seems like one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Yet I know it’s an ordinary process and what is really surprising is that we haven’t been doing this all along.

Here are incredible samples of the first Godwriting samples of three people, one from Fairfield, Iowa, one from Italy, and one from a gentleman in South America who took the Godwriting workshop in Romania!

J., a young woman in Fairfield was positive that she would not be able to Godwrite. She was so sure she couldn’t. Here is her first Godwriting:

J. to God:

Dear God, why am I having so many problems in my personal relationships?

God:

You are not having problems in your relationships. You are reaching out to encompass the world and, in that, losing the identities of those around you. They are as you of mind and body. Free as blossoms floating in air on wind.

Accept all occasions as waves or currents meeting in an ocean, touching and whispering to one another in certain directions but ultimately letting each take their own paths. Love is not lost. Feelings do not change. The heart loves. But as atoms move in the air, so do all mankind.

The following is from a single mother in Italy. Naturally, she heard God in her native Italian. For our benefit, Pitta has translated her first Godwriting from Italian into English. Pitta lets nothing hold her back.

Pitta to God:

My dear God, words one on another and I try to capture them and write them on my paper, and your words more fast than ever. Wonderful, it remembers to me what I have always wish in my life. But words are limits, words close every expressed concept where in imagination is more vast. Meet us here, in that point, where I am aware that You are me.

God to Pitta:

We can talk for all Eternity. I have much time, so you. Meet us on the paper, wonderful, yes. Words close, you tell. They could. But when we meet, also in words, your heart beats in a different way and so doesn’t exist closing. Everything can close or can be an instrument.

Now I give you a secret, a secret not for all yet. Men ask to Me: “God, oh my God what I have to do?”

But they are deaf, because I always reply. “YOU, tell me what YOU want to do, and I will do.”

Men ask Me what they have to do and they complain because I don’t reply them. I say: YOU, YOU, what You want to do? YOU, creator of your life, builder of your creations, what do you want? YOU who have all my instruments, YOU what do you want? What do you want to conclude, obtain, create, reach for? How do you want to mold this unarmed material in your hands?

I AM GOD and I will do all you want. Surprise? Shocking? Thinking well. Isn’t like this that world has gone on during all the time? What, what do you wait again? What signs do you want more? Look around, isn’t full, fullness, the measure of signs? Why do you think I am the responsible when things happen?

YOU tell me what you want, and I will occur for you. If you come wrong doesn’t matter. I am well-disposed to begin forever, infinity times. If it would not be so, if you couldn’t free choice, if I lay down the law, where it could be the Truth We have talk about? How could be the perfect Love? Perfect Love means perfect freedom.

Oneness, if oneness have to really be, doesn’t know Chief. Upsetting? So it is, or it would be not Oneness at all.

Santhan from South America is a yogi, and he refers to God as Bhagavan. In this Godwriting, God talks about Godwriting itself.

Santhan to Bhagavan:

There is an impulse to write.

Bhagavan to Santhan:

You hesitated to write your name, just as you hesitate to write these very words down, wondering who is it that’s writing. I too am Wondering. I am Wondering at the beauty of the moment.

We, and that is to say We in reference to the feeling of you and I, slowly melt into the I.

It’s like lying on the beach on a bright sunny day, with My Sun aligned at the perfect angle with the water so that He shines My Light to reflect on the water in such brilliance that everything is Light. You, the water, the sun and the light all become One.

So it is with Godwriting. We all flow together. All in awe and wonder of our Oneness.

The shower, the blessing of rain that I send you now, those miraculous sparkles of water that I send from the Heaven, the pitter pat of them falling on the tin roof next door, that sound which arises from their falling, the breeze that tickles the leaves in the tree and drifts in through your window to nudge the door which creaks, “Hello!”

The distant rumble of thunder, like a grunt of an old wise sheep dog, the big smile on your beautiful face. They all rejoice and share and bring together a symphony of this miraculous moment.

For the first time you write for your Self. You write for Me. The words flow from you, and you stare with glistening eyes of wonder (and the big smile) at these words that pour out. Fun, isn’t it? Yes, that is all I wish. This practice is a taste of Oneness experiencing Oneness.

The rains flow from the heavens, My heaven, your heaven, My clouds, your clouds, onto the ground, trees roofs and wet sheep dogs.

Oh, yes, it’s pouring now. That is flow. This is flow. It is flow from the Light within. The Light whispers. I whisper. I always whisper. My whisper is a song. I am the vibration, the composer and the instrument. I am experiencing your writing for Me Who is you.

All resistance will soon dissolve as our communication deepens and becomes more consistent. As you learn to look towards the Light within, the flow intensifies. At a certain point which we may call a threshold, you and I are One. It’s where you jump off the cliff. You let go completely to Me. Your awareness dissolves into the Light.

When the desire for Oneness to experience Oneness arises again, you return to awareness of your experiencing Me, yet you will still be flying.

So, beloved, you have begun Godwriting. Hear me, the Old Sheep Dog, chanting My song from the Heavens. Hear Me blessing you with rain. Wonderful, isn’t it? It’s the beauty of following your heart. It comes from an impulse. Like the impulse you have to climb up the stairs and stand on the roof right now. Go.

I am wowed by the writing of brand-new Godwriters.

What I’ve written here barely touches on Godwriting. So many questions remain. Why aren’t we already Godwriting? Why Godwrite? How is Godwriting different from automatic writing, free writing, inner child writing, and channeling? How do we know Godwriting isn’t just our own writing? How much do the two hemispheres of the brain have to do with Godwriting? What do Einstein, St. Catherine of Siena, Bernie Siegel, M.D., Melvin Morse, M.D, the Kaballah. and a Nobel Peace Prize winner have to say that relate to the process I call Godwriting?

Here’s my website: www.heavenletters.org

And here’s my blog:www.godwriting.org

In both places, you can find out more about Godwriting. You are also invited to post your questions and comments anywhere on either site, and I — and others — will respond to you right underneath your comment.

What good fortune comes up for you? Click to be WOWED!
http://www.heavenletters.org/random-heavenletter-universe.html

____________________________________________________________________________

“Come Play with Me!”

Godwriting™ Workshop in Fairfield, Iowa

Know the Heart of God — Discover God’s Words Personally Meant for You

“Take a moment now to feel My love. It is in you and around you. It is of you. It is your loveness meeting My loveness. We become a string that twangs in the joy of its One Self…”
Heaven Sutra # 211 – Supreme Oneness of Love

Saturday, February 20 and Saturday, February 27 12:30 P.M. to 5 P.M.
1 Workshop 2 Consecutive Sessions. Both Sessions Required for Good Journey.
703 E. Burlington Avenue, Fairfield, Iowa

Email gloria [at] Heavenletters [dot] org Call 1 773 979 0083
http://www.heavenletters.org/godwriting.html

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On the Road Again: A Writing Journey by Carol Bodensteiner

by Chamaigne on October 10, 2009

When I take a trip, I like to travel with someone. It’s enlightening to have another person’s perspective, to see things through someone else’s eyes, to be encouraged to go a little further when I might have given up. Writing is a journey on which I also benefit from having others travel with me.

A decade ago, I struck out on a new road, a journey of creative writing. A 30-year career in public relations ensured that I wrote plenty, but business writing and creative writing are quite different ventures. Business writing is a bit like going to the convenience store. Get in, get out, quickly, concisely, and persuasively. In less than one page if at all possible. Creative writing, on the other hand, is more like a road trip on which you spend hours exploring some unexpected hole-in-the-wall museum. A five-minute experience may expand across pages.

I’ve been fortunate to have many travelers join me on this journey. Many have been short term tour guides who helped me explore aspects of creative writing ranging from humor to personal essay, from ‘taking a smaller picture’ to developing extended metaphors. These knowledgeable guides joined me through well-known programs like the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City and various writing seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They also include a rich underground writing culture in my own backyard in Des Moines. Workshops held in home basements and church halls, places where other travelers gathered to explore prose styles, spiritual memoir, and story telling.

All these tour guides not only added to the suitcase of tools I use in my writing, but also expanded my awareness of myself and the meaning of my life experiences. The perspectives gained in these workshops have been as eye opening as those I gain seeing other cultures during travels through foreign countries. I have come away from every workshop experience inspired to keep on exploring, keep on writing.

Equally important, from the early days of my writing career, has been the chance to hook up with like-minded fellow travelers who have been an ongoing source of insight and encouragement. Several of us formed a writing group that agreed to meet every two weeks to share our writing. With very few breaks, we have kept to that schedule for nearly five years. While some members have come and gone and come back again, two of us have held the core together.

This writing buddy and I spent four days this summer sequestered at LaCorsette Maison Inn, a wonderful bed and breakfast in Newton, Iowa. Our intent was to write, and write we did.
After an early morning walk and breakfast provided by our hosts, we applied ‘butt glue’ (one of my favorite terms picked up at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and also known as dedicated effort) and applied our fingers and our minds to our keyboards for the rest of the morning.

Endless cups of coffee later – along about noon – we printed out the fruits of our labor, read each other’s work, and provided feedback. Then we headed back to the computers to continue writing through the afternoon, until ‘the sun was over the yardarm,’ as my friend who spent years sailing said, and it was time for cocktails. Which we usually sipped as we continued to write, throw out plot challenges, and work through possible solutions.

The outcome of this concentrated block of time was that we each brought home greater understanding of our characters and the stories we are creating, in addition to several chapters of new writing.

Our hosts joked that they could market retreats like ours as ‘Writer’s Blocks.’ I like it! Instead of viewing writer’s block as a problem, now I will think about writer’s block as the solution. It’s all in the perspective. New learning gained from traveling another road.

The result of my writing journey has been gratifying. I published a memoir in 2008, as did my writing buddy. My stories about growing up on a family farm in the middle of the country in the middle of the 20^th Century have sent me on another journey to learn the ins and outs of book publishing, distribution and promotion.

What I have been learning on that journey, I have been able to share with my friend who subsequently published her memoir about leaving a secure job on Wall Street to sail around the world. A journey, I can imagine and live through her writing.

My creative writing journey is far from over. The world offers endless places to see, writing offers limitless worlds to explore. I trust I will have travel companions to ensure I make the most of both.

Carol Bodensteiner is the author of Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, a memoir published in 2008. She writes from the acreage near Des Moines where she lives with her husband. Her website is www.carolbodensteiner.com

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Staying in the Scene

by Monica on October 10, 2009

I’ve been attending writing workshops and taking writing classes off and on for many years, in an effort to improve my skills as I write a novel. Often, I fear, I sign up for a workshop thinking that it will give me a deadline and thus motivate me to get more writing done; the reality is that the class itself becomes a way I can convince myself that I am doing something to make progress with my writing without actually having to spend the time writing. Even so, I almost always get something useful from the class; something that truly does improve my writing.

One of the most significant points that I have learned came from a week-long workshop I took at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival in 2007. The class was titled “Novel Solutions” – we writers love plays on words, don’t we – taught by Wayne Johnson. I got a lot of feedback on the 18-page excerpt from my novel in progress. Much of it ws positive, which I really needed. But there was plenty of criticism as well. As is always the case, I didn’t feel all of the criticism was valid, but there was one point that kept coming up that finally made me aware of a major flaw in my writing.

I needed to learn to stay with the scene to the end.

I could set the scene. I wrote vivid detail, employing all the senses. I used strong verbs to bring the action to life. And then, just as things were getting really interesting for my readers, I summed the rest of the action up in a sentence or two of narrative and moved on. Or worse yet, I left it for my readers to figure out what actually happened.

I thought I was being clever. I had convinced myself that it was a deliberate style choice, that it fit with my writing aspiration – to tell the story in as few words as possible, each word conveying maximum meaning. Spare, yet rich. Like Hemingway perhaps. (Okay, I said it was an aspiration.) I wanted to give the reader enough to stimulate her imagination , then let her fill in the blanks. Isn’t that more interesting than being given the entire picture?

What my first readers told me was, no it’s not. When I painted a scene, I brought the reader into it with me. By leaving them there abruptly, I wasn’t being clever. I was being lazy. When I examined the parts of my manuscript where I had done this, I realized that I had stopped writing in the middle of the scene because I wasn’t sure how to get to the end! Like many things in life, the only way out is through. I had to stay there with my characters until the end.

Here’s an example. My character, Miranda, is an Iowa farm girl in the 1930′s. She has gone to town with her father and in the general store dressing room tries on a ready-made dress that she has been admiring for weeks.

The dressing room was lit by a single electric bulb and a small window of etched glass high above her head. There was a mirror, tall and narrow, that produced a slightly waverying reflection. In the unfamiliar light, Miranda stared at herself in this mirror. She was fourteen years old and fully grown in height, but thin, with hips that were still slim and breasts that were small, high and firm, but this dress, this beautiful soft green dress, made her feel like a woman. She twisted her shoulders, first one way, then the other, and back and forth until her whole body was twisting, and the full skirt swirled around, rising and then falling again to graze her calf. Finally she spun completely around, and the skirt rose almost parallel to the floor to make a full circle, brushing all four sides of the small room before falling gently into place.

Miranda had been taking the extra eggs into town every Friday morning before school for six months, and she had saved just barely enough money to buy the dress. She wore it to church the very next day, and she was sure that everyone looked at her differently than they had before.

The reaction I got from the workshop was – “I loved the scene in the dressing room , but why did you stop? I want to see Miranda buy the dress.” My solution was to mention the egg moneybefore she actually gets to the store, and replace that last paragaph with this one:

Miranda carried the dress to the front of the store and placed it gently on the high oak counter. The clerk, whose every grey hair was tucked neatly into her bun, peered over her glasses at Miranda, her gaze moving from Miranda’s curly slightly mussed hair to her obviously homemade white blouse.

“I’d like to buy this dress,” Miranda said.

After that workshop, I re-read my entire manuscript and found multiple instances where I stopped in the middle of the scene, or sometimes just a few moments too early. Learning to stay in the scene has definitely improved my writing.

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