2015 TBR Reading Challenge: The Writer's Life by Julia Cameron

2015 TBR Reading Challenge
Book: The Writer's Life: Insights from the Right to Write by Julia Cameron
My Categories: nonfiction, writing
Wendy Crutcher's Category: More Than One (I have more than one book by Cameron in my TBR pile)

In January, Sunita wrote about wanting to try writing Morning Pages. I was struck by the perfectness of this idea. And lo and behold, I had The Writer's Life in my vast TBR. So I promptly retrieved it and read it within a few days and started on my Morning Pages. I have now been writing since the beginning of the year, and some days are easy and some days just aren't, but I have persisted. I have yet to see the pay off from this writing practice, but I shall be patient.

In order to write this commentary, I re-read the book last month. On with the book...

How does one eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

That's the theme running through this book. People always take writing too seriously or try to appear smart or to approach writing as wanting to have written the perfect novel. But Cameron says that "writing happens a sentence at a time." And that "it's not so daunting to think of finding time to write a sentence or a paragraph." Enough sentences and paragraphs and you have a novel. People approach writing with an end product in mind and so find the task overwhelming. However, coming at writing by getting started and moving forward baby step by baby step is the way to achieve the goal.

Many consider that the biggest obstacle to writing is time. Cameron says, "The myth that we must have time in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have. One of the biggest myths about writing is that in order to do it we must have great swathes of uninterrupted time." The trick to finding time is to tackle a writing task one bite at a time by integrating these small pockets of time into your daily routine.

If it is so hard, why take up writing in the first place? "It's human nature to write," much like singing or dancing. "The writing life is a simple life, self-empowered and self-empowering. It brings clarity and passion to the act of living." Cameron even compares writing to breathing. I took that to mean that like pranayama teaches us to breathe better, we can learn to write better, but just like breathing, the point is to do it no matter what.

Cameron says, "Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability." When your pocket of writing time shows up on your schedule, you write. All moods are good writing moods. Power through the mood and write. "It is choosing to write even when writing feels 'wrong' to us—because we're tired, we're bothered, we're any number of things that writing will change if only we will let it." Writing can take you out of your less felicitous mood. Let it do so.

Writing about a change will allow you to lean into it, to help it along, to cope. Writing also allows you to rewrite your life if you so desire. Write out your anger, your pain, your revenges. "You [can] turn the dross of your disappointments into the gold of accomplishment." Thus, writing becomes an act of self-cherishing.

Writing is also celebratory. You can brag as much as you want over your accomplishments. In fact, remembering to enjoy your triumphs and channeling those emotions into writing helps to change you and that affects how you write. Every mood can be mined for writing.

For all these reasons and more, I write my daily Morning Pages and Gratitude Journal.

John Cleese: 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative

"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." So saying, John Cleese lays down the methods you can incorporate into your life to invite creativity in. You can't guarantee anything, but this handy-dandy how-to guide is a way to inspire creativity within yourself.

Before getting into the details, what is an open versus a closed mind needs to be clarified. "We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem, but once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness." Thus, the open mind phase is the creativity phase and the closed mind phase is the implementation or action phase.

Writing is an inherently creative activity, and thus writers need to operate in the open mode all through their period of production. Paradoxically, writers dread entering that zone. Once there are in it, though, they usually enjoy themselves, but they love it best after they've exited that mode. Writers, famously, don't like to write, but like to have written. If, however, creativity is a learned skill, then the more you practice it, the easier it'll get to descend into the creative mode.

Without further ado, here are the five steps...

Creating the Oasis

1. Space — "You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures, which would dictate a closed mode. Seal yourself off. Make a quiet space for yourself where you can be undisturbed."

2. Time — "It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time." To add to that Johann Heisinger says, "Play is distinct from ordinary life so as to its locality and duration. It's secludedness, it's limitedness."

Using the Oasis

3. Time — "Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original, and learn to tolerate the discomfort and anxiety of pondering time and indecision."

4. Confidence — "Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake." Alan Watts adds, "You cannot be spontaneous within reason. You have to risk doing and saying silly, illogical drivel."

5. Humor — "The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else. It is an essential part of humor. Laughter bring relaxation and humor makes us playful, and neither make the important and serious things any less important or serious. They allow you to puncture egotism and ceremonious pomposity to get to the underlying creativity."

A corollary to the presentation is that a problem is more likely solvable if you simply stick in the discomfort zone of unsolvability for a long enough amount of time. Thus, you need all five of the above steps in order to have the tenacity to find a solution or write that fight scene or that final symphonic movement.

Video

http://www.youtube.com/embed/ijtQP9nwrQA

Advice for Emerging Writers

"Emerging writer" is a much nicer term than "aspiring writer," isn't it?

The Missouri Review recently published a highly informative article on advice for emerging writers. I thought it very pertinent to my blog here, so I'm listing some of the points the article made. Do read the article in its entirety for all the details.

You're Talented, but Talented is Overrated — It's not enough to be talented. In fact, talent merely puts you in the "emerging writers" pool. It's consistent hard work that puts you in the "published writers" pool. E.L. Doctorow once sais, "Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."

Ignore the Clock — Anyone can publish. So publishing should not be your goal, but publishing your best work should be your goal. No one is truly waiting for your masterpiece, so take the time to make your manuscript the best it can be.

Don’t Wait to be Told When to Write — Make the time to write a priority. It's not easy to find the time with our various work, house, and family responsibilities tearing us in different directions. So schedule a specific time every day and guard it with your life against disruptions.

Read More Books — Sounds obvious, right? You read to learn how to write. But how many writers still read? Very few, you'll find. They're too busy writing. However, you need outside input to add stimulus to your imagination and growth as a writer.

You Need at least Three Professional Mentors — Guidance from established writers is gold. They can point out to know what you didn't know you don't know and how to go about learning it. They can help with problem-solving and general advice on career advancement.

Boosting Creativity to Recover from Writers' Block

Even for the most prolific of writers, the well does run dry sometimes. Yes, the writer must have the discipline to sit in the chair (BICHOK: butt in chair hands on keyboard) and write, but what if you sit there for fifteen minutes staring at a blank page and blinking cursor? What can you do to jumpstart that creative side of the brain?

Here are a few tricks I try (before giving up to sit in a lounge chair on the beach with a fruity umbrella drink—I'm joking... sort-of... well... a liquid restorative might be part of the plan, but the beach part is not doable where I live).

Music Soundtracks
Over the years, I have collected late 18th C and early 19th C music or music from period movies. I then collected all the tracks into a playlist on Windows Media Player. So I simply start at the top and let the music impart the sense of place and expansiveness of movement in that space.

Pinterest
Hey, who doesn't like scrolling through beautiful pictures? Take a look at my Georgian-Regency board. Those pins are a good jumping off point to other pins or websites with blogs and pictures.

Research Books
I'll pull out a random book from my shelves of research books and leaf through it. Sometimes, I'll get an inkling of an idea that after I dash off a few hundred or a few thousand words dies the horrible death of deletion, but once I start writing, I am writing.

Magazines
I'm a reproduction furniture catalog junkie. I love reading those catalogs and imagining the pieces in my characters' homes. I also enjoy looking through gardening magazines to imagine terrace and other outdoor scenes. Pictures of British country manors is pure unadulterated pleasure. Oh, to be able to actually go and see some of those houses!

Handwrite
Retail therapy at the writing supply stores. I'll buy a beautiful journal or thick creamy notepaper and a fresh bottle of ink (I love my lovely Mont Blanc fountain pen) or a new fangled smooth-as-butter fine-tip pen, and start writing out the scene that's percolating but not germinating. Something in the physical act of writing longhand—the cramping fingers, the hand moving across smooth paper, the flowing ink, the words appearing in blue (or violet or black or green) on the page in my handwriting—makes the words come easier and with wider latitude.

If all else fails, there's always the restorative, jus' sayin'...