Who Is Doing the Creating?

Who is writing your stories? How intimately do you know that part of you?
Do you trust yourself to write in total freedom or are you afraid of exposing
yourself? To whom? Mother? Father? Child? God? Self?

Have you met any new parts of yourself on your writing journey?
Do you delight in these parts? Take them on a walk? Out for coffee, tea, wine or a beer? You might be surprised...

Sound nutty?
Ask yourself how far you will go in letting your imagination guide you.
The imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets!

"We are all guilty of crime the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What those powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring."

--Henry Miller

The Skeleton in Your Closet: Embracing Your Darkside

I sent my Soul through the Invisible

And by and by my Soul returned to me

And answer’d ‘I myself am Heav’n and Hell.’
—Omar Khayyam, Sufi poet

As the poem by Omar Khayyam suggests, our power as human beings comes from the blending of the light and dark, the gentle and powerful. Power can be used to create or destroy. Destruction can be seen as positive or negative. Darkness can be terrifying or magnificent.

Your Inner Writer knows that creating is a constant dance between heaven and hell, yin and yang, intuitive and rational, head and gut and heart, and in that dance there is no right and wrong, no like and dislike; there is simply being and dancing the passionate dance. It is this shadow world of the human psyche that becomes the grist for the artist’s mill.

The Task of the Artist Is to Bring the Dark into the Light

If you have doubts, go to an art museum and look at the great works of art. The image of the brutally beaten, crucified Christ has captured artists’ imaginations for two thousand years. There is the severed head of John the Baptist and the agonies of the saints. There is great secular art: Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women, Goya’s Disasters of War, and Picasso’s Guernica are but a few that come to mind.

Turn to literature: Macbeth is probably one of the bloodiest plays written. If you haven’t seen Roman Polanski’s movie version, rent it and have yourself a walk on the darkside equal to any Stephen King movie. Oedipus gouges out his eyes. Othello murders Desdemona and then commits suicide. Raskolnikov splits open his landlady’s head with an axe. War and Peace—the very title combines the polar opposites that must unite in the dance.

Myths and Fairy Tales Are Mirrors for Life’s Journeys

Turn to fairy tales and myths where the dark, fertile, churning underworld of the unconscious drives the stories and is home to its heroes and heroines; this is the archetypal Wonderland where all is birth, death and rebirth and the impossible is always possible. In the myth of Persephone, for example, Persephone is the young girl whom Clarissa Estes compares to our uninitiated creative self. Persephone must, if her creativity is to go beyond innocence, descend to the Underworld. In the myth, she is picking daisies and the earth literally opens and she is stolen by Hades, King of the Underworld, who is entranced by her beauty. Hades is the darkside rising up to give passion to the innocence of creativity itself.

Demeter, earth mother, Persephone’s mother and a powerful goddess in her own right, goes to Zeus and begs him to get her daughter back. Zeus says yes, but there’s a catch: If Persephone has not eaten anything in the Underworld, she can return to her mother. By mistake, however, Persephone eats three pomegranate seeds. Mistake? Let’s put it this way—would you want to go back to mamma’s house once you’ve tasted the joys of passion and reigned as Queen of the Underworld?

It is important to the understanding of this story not to mistake the mythical underworld for the Christian hell. The Underworld is not a place of retribution, and Hades is not a fallen angel. Rather he is God of the Underworld, the powerful place of death and birth. But Hades needs a queen; he needs the moist power of the creative feminine. So Persephone “mistakenly” eats three pomegranate seeds and must return to Hades for six months out of the year. Although Demeter mourns and the earth falls into the cold, barren days of winter, you can bet there are all kinds of happenings going on in the inner core of the earth where Persephone reigns as queen beside her dark, seductive lover. Need proof? Just look at the wild fertility of Spring, the product of their months together.

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And More Interviewing Questions 3 of 3

See previous two blog for questions 1-38.

39. Character, do you yell and scream or do you keep your feelings inside?

40. Write a memory about anger from your childhood. §

41. What do you think about love?

42. What does love mean to you?

43. Does love nurture?

44. Does love hurt?

45. Does love make you sing and laugh?

46. Do you like to laugh?

47. Character, do you ever think about killing yourself?

48. Do you ever think about killing anyone else?

49. What’s the most violent thing you’ve ever done?

50. Character, there’s something you need to tell the writer right now, something that you’re afraid the writer wouldn’t ever know about if you don’t tell him now.

51. Writer, put what the character just told you into a scene. §

More Interviewing Questions To Ask Your Character

See previous post for questions 1-12

13. Describe something really bad you once did.

14. Where did you grow up?

15. What did your father do?

16. What about your mother? What was she like?

17. How did your parents get along?

18. Do you have any brothers or sisters?

19. What was the thing that scared you most as a kid? §

20. Character, be the child you once were. Write about your world from the point of view of the child. What do you see? Feel? Write a scene. Show, don’t tell. §

21. What’s making you run so fast?

22. Who are you running from?

23. Who do you hate?

24. Why are you crying?

25. What’s hurting you?

26. What’s making you so sad? Write a scene. §

Interviewing Your Characters 1 of 3 blog entries

Some Interviewing Questions for you characters:

Interviewing your characters is a powerful process that allows you to get out of the way and have your characters speak. We too often try to decide who we think/want our characters to be, think and feel.

Consider this: why would you open up and talk to someone who is trying to define you without honoring who you are?

Remember, our characters are not us. We want to become our characters. Only then can we allow the characters to write the story. And once you do that, you are letting in the mystery and magic of fiction writing.

The secret to the success of this process is being loose enough, inner critic-free enough, to go with the creative flow and let be born whatever or whomever will be born.

You may or may not visualize the character’s physical presence absolutely—I never have a photo perfect picture of my characters; rather, sit quietly and feel yourself opening to the character’s presence, allow the character’s energy to rise up within you.

Get a sense of the character as he or she appears. Sense the energy, hear the voice, let the interview take on a life of its own. If nothing comes to you right away, don’t push it. Instead, go for a walk, or while you’re doing some mindless task, or just before falling asleep, ask for a character to come forth. Take whatever comes. Don’t worry. Don’t second guess. Play with the character. Sense the energy.

Alternately, begin to read the list and stop at the first one that creates a reaction -- good or bad -- inside of you. Then close your eyes and listen to your character speak. Then begin or write. Alternately, write down or type the question and invite your characters to speak.

Have fun!

1. How old are you?

2. What kind of work do you do?

3. Are you married?

4. Do you have any children?

5. Are you in a good relationship to your spouse or lover?

6. Have you ever been unfaithful?

7. Has your partner ever been unfaithful?

8. What kinds of things make you angry?

9. How do you express that anger?

10. You’re in a scene with someone who is making you very angry. Why? What’s making you angry?

11. What memory does the scene bring up?

12. What memory does the memory bring up?

Memoir Writing as a Jumping Off Point

Autobiography and memoir are very good jumping off points to explore your authentic voice. Many people use their lives as jumping off places for their stories. But please be aware that I just said jumping off places. Using your life as fuel for your writing doesn’t mean you have to be slavish to the details. Quite the opposite.

First of all, it’s important to remember you’re working from memory when you are writing autobiography and memory is faulty, at best. In addition, you are writing the memoir from a particular point of view – yours. If you told the story from someone else’s point of view, you would have a very different story. And finally, it is important to remember that you are writing the story from the point of view of the person you are now, not way back when.

Of course, you want to put yourself back in time as much as possible, but the story is always filtered through the totality of life experiences that simply weren’t available to you say, when you were a child, a young adult, etc. This is what makes memoir writing so exciting, I think. It takes you on a journey into the past that is actually a journey in the now and, if you are brave and open to the unknown, which means what you do not know, the writing becomes a healing journey.

Memoir writing could be a whole show because it’s such a fascinating way of writing. I think one of the most powerful aspects of memoir writing is the ability to change what happened to you, give yourself that which you didn’t have in the past but so desperately wish you had. To do this, you cannot be stuck in “reality” and go on the premise that “This is what happened and so I have to write it as it happened.” No! Forget whether it happened or not. Remember, the you who is writing the story is not the who you were then.

As a writer, we have the opportunity to change reality and do the thing you couldn’t do in life. There’s a great quote by Philip Roth, whose novels are thought to be very autobiographical. He says, “When the imagination is finished with fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to fact.”

So as writers whether we are writing fantasy or memoir we enter a far different and far more cosmic reality where anything is possible. This is where the healing comes in.