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It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest... It's like falling in love. Only more so. It feels like something criminal... I wouldn't say you could make or have a literary life just by stringing together affirmations. ... But in the real world the chances of making it as a writer... are as good as making it as a tap dancer, a magician or a movie star. To be a writer, you just don't go through realistic channels.  Reality is when you pay the rent. Get caught in traffic or your car breaks down. Really it's an AM/FM sort of thing. You've got reality and then there's the miraculous and the transcendent. And once you start, time stops. Carolyn See **Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers

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So what are the actual rewards of the writing process? I think it's in self-discovery and in surprising yourself by being smarter at some emotional level than you thought you were. I write a lot in the middle of the night when I'm very much alone because everybody's asleep and I can feel uninterrupted and unpulled in any other direction.  And it's a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.  I've watched my children get involved in the worlds that they've created with blocks or dolls or animals, and they occupy them so fully that if you pull them away, they can't return to them. That to me is what a good writing episode is like.  .....Antonya Nelson  [Atlantic Unbound April 11, 2002 theatlantic.com] .....*Female Trouble: A Collection of Short Stories - by Antonya Nelson

*related interview:**Susan K. Perry, PhD    author of "Writing In Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity"

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When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.****Madeleine L'Engle*****quoted in newsletter of National Association of Women Writers - NAWW **Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life  //  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved. The book.. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon.. is about two men who create comic book characters -- but it's also about how artists create magical things from the events of everyday life. Writer-director Nora Ephron    [Sleepless in Seattle etc]  [O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2002]

 

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I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stonecutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.****Harriet Doerr (1910-2002)****Her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, won the American Book Award for first fiction in 1984; she was age 74. She had returned to Stanford to work on completing her B.A. at age 65. [LA Times Nov 26 2002] Stones for Ibarra  - The story of an anglo married couple.. who, in a burst of idealism, move from San Francisco to an old family home and abandoned mine in Mexico.. "in order to extend the family's Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived." [from review in 500 Great Books by Women : A Reader's Guide]

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I'm not writing for some noble purpose, I just like telling a good story. If what I write about helps others understand this world we live in, so much the better for all of us. Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief... Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself. Octavia Butler  - from Voices From the Gaps - Women Writers of Color profile **books by Octavia E. Butler:***Lilith's Brood****Parable of the Talents

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Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write by Gayle Brandeis When she was a senior in high school, Gayle Brandeis had an epiphany with a strawberry: instructed by a teacher to really look at the fruit, she wondered if she had every really looked at anything before. The poem she wrote that day "launched" her onto her "life's path" and changed her writing forever. In this book, Brandeis uses fruit as a metaphor for sensual and creative exploration...  [Publishers Weekly review] "Anyone immersing herself in Fruitflesh is sure to find her writing liberated, and enriched by the many stimulating exercises."  Susan Perry, Ph.D., author of Writing in Flow "Gayle Brandeis shows us how to write sense-soaked prose and poetry that celebrates the embodiment of the life!"  Oriah Mountain Dreamer, author of The Invitation and The Dance

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There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women's power in the culture. ...  I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine. Although these represent opposite perceptual modes, every individual is generously endowed with all the features of both. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess : The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain

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Psychoanalyst Albert Rothenberg noted that more than half of the U.S. writers who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature had alcohol difficulties. However, his research showed that making a list of writers who abused alcohol could be matched by a list of writers who did not.  He theorized that writers use alcohol.. "to cope with the anxiety that is generated by the creative process itself." While engaged in janusian and homospatial thinking, the writer must dig up from the unconscious, frightening and anxiety-producing material. from book: Jane Piirto. My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers. The title comes from the Keats sonnet: "When I have fears that I may cease to be / before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain..." related pages:**--addictions**--anxiety**--the shadow self

book cover painting: "The Muse"  by Robert Stinson from Jane Piirto site

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I always hated those articles in Writer's Digest that made writing seem like such a calculated process, that I was supposed to be scouring bookstores and making demographic studies before I ever began to write.  I found all of that very depressing. ... my experience with writing speculative fiction had been very limited because I'd had it drummed into my head in creative writing workshop courses that one could not expect to be a respected writer when writing commercial or genre books. Legitimacy has always been very important to me. Finally, though, I said the heck with all of it. I wasn't going to try to be Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates, I was just going to be me, and I was going to write about the people I know. ...

Tananarive Due.  from darkecho.com interview book:    My Soul to Keep

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excerpt from article:   Kaizen for Writers: One Page at a Time - A conversation with Robert Maurer, Ph.D. by Jerry Lazar, November 2001 issue of "Written By"

[Kaizen is a Japanese term that literally means "good change." Pronounced kigh-zen, it refers to an ancient Zen philosophy that prescribes "constant, small, gradual improvement"] If the page is empty because the writer is in fear or overwhelmed, Kaizen has the potential to conquer that fear. Instead of saying, "How can I write 20 pages?" or "How am I going to write an Academy Award-winning script?" or "How am I going to finish this by the end of the week?," you tell yourself, "How am I going to write ONE page today?" As Lao-Tze wrote, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step." The problem with big goals is that they send the person into fear, and fear diminishes creativity. One page doesn't sound like very much, but if you can do one good page a day, that's two feature scripts per year! So make the intermediary goals quite small. Novelist Anne Lamott tells the story of her then 10-year-old brother who had a school report due on birds the following day. He had procrastinated for months. She writes: "He was at the kitchen table close to tears, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father put his arm around my brother's shoulder and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

That's excellent advice for any writer. ... In both building and presenting the character, particularly in visual arts like films and plays, Kaizen moments are the most useful. When it comes to character, asking yourself questions like, "How would they deal with driving? How would they eat this meal? How would they deal with a stranger on the bus?" -- such questions allow you to get inside the psyche of a character. Whether these end up in the final product or not is less important than that they're building an identity in your mind.    Robert Maurer, PhD article excerpt and photo from site of Robert Maurer, PhD, director of behavioral sciences for the family practice residency program  at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, and a faculty member with the UCLA School of Medicine *book:** Anne Lamott.  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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I've received my fair share of attention, financial gain, fame and the things that everybody thinks are really cool. None of it was particularly satisfying. But book writing is the first time that my internal voice has been brought out in a creative way. Instead of being the interpreter of other people, where all I do is read a script, I get to be responsible for my own ideas. It is incredibly liberating and gratifying.        Jamie Lee Curtis    [Reuters, June 19, 2001]    <<< her books for children include Today I Feel Silly

 

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Her poem also made me feel that I wasn't alone in my belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven.  If stone-sober people can f**k like they're out of their minds -- can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe -- why shouldn't writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane? Stephen King [about one of his wife's poems] - from On Writing : A Memoir of the Craft

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"I grew up seeing writing as a very lonely, painful profession. Dad was always locked in a room or wandering around the house. He wrote into the wee hours of the night and slept until noon. It wasn't terrifically appealing." Thus for the first 30 years of her life William Styron's youngest daughter never dreamed of becoming a writer herself. "Not only would I not have considered it," Styron says, "you would have had to put a gun to my head to make me do it." ...

At 34, following a "dark period" of rejection as an aspiring actress, Styron is now celebrating both her impending marriage... and the publication of her first novel, All The Finest Girls... the spare and haunting story of Adelaide, an emotionally damaged young woman.. "My parents are not perfect, and some of my childhood was not jolly. ... But part of growing up is acknowledging that and moving on."    [from profile by Jennifer Tung, Talk magazine, May, 2001]   book: All The Finest Girls by Alexandra Styron

 
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Human beings used to be influenced primarily by the stories of our particular tribe or community, not by stories that are mass-produced and market-driven. As George Gerbner, one of the world's most respected researchers on the influence of the media, said, "For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell." The stories that most influence our children these days are the stories told by advertisers.  Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. *from book:*Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel book excerpt and photo from jeankilbourne.com

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video:The Whole Wide World   "Poignant, based-on-fact drama, set in Texas during the 1930s and charting the complex relationship between two independent-minded souls: pulp novelist Robert E. Howard [Vincent D'Onofrio], the obsessive, overbearing creator of Conan the Barbarian, and schoolteacher/aspiring writer Novalyne Price [Renee Zellweger], upon whose memoir this is based."       [Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide.]   book:  Novalyne Price wrote One Who Walked Alone at age 76.

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It is March and I have left the tidy community of Finzel perched on the ridge of Little Savage Mountain,
left its black roads, its tavern, the Community Fire Hall, and small, dark houses, each with its plume
of smoke rising into the winter air, turned east and dropped into the white valley of Finzel Swamp.

I have walked out of order and certainty and into the margins of a land still shadowed by the Arctic.

Finzel Swamp is a relict community, formed thousands of years ago when the icy tongues of glaciers
pushed Canadian flora and fauna south for hundreds of miles. When the glaciers receded some ten thousand years ago, most of the boreal plants and animals migrated slowly back with them.

But not here. Here they stayed, the tamaracks and black calla, in a poorly drained bowl perched high
in the Maryland Appalachians, protected by the even higher ridges on either side. Here in this frozen
valley, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, there is no asphalt, no stop sign, no sidewalk, just the
wide, white space, pathless, interrupted only by the frozen etchings of alder and black spruce, the
scribbled, heart-shaped tracks of deer, the marginalia of some creator who mused for a while on the
edge of the page, then dropped the pen and headed north, leaving us to decipher the notations.

book: Stirring the Mud : On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination by Barbara Hurd

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"I don't write to teach. When you approach a novel you bring all your experiences, the wisdom you've accumulated up until that moment... You tell what you know and what you don't know shows up too. You go through a very vulnerable process of trying to figure all that out through the writing. I write to share my ideas about all this, to give expression to my restless and relentless creativity but I do not presume that my writing will teach anyone anything."           Ana Castillo   [bookreporter.com interview, 1999] portrait from author site anacastillo.com **book: Peel My Love Like an Onion : A Novel

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"Art is as important to the human psyche and physical body as air is, as oxygen, as water. And alas, because it's not something we can quantify reliably, we tend to think art is a luxury. Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked."    Maya Angelou    [from interview: shambhalasun.com]    video: Intimate Portrait: Maya Angelou**book: Phenomenal Woman : Four Poems Celebrating Women

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"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15."   -- Willa Cather "When I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea -- it's the great passion of my life."  Willa Cather The Song of the Lark is "Cather's most autobiographical novel, it is the story of a young girl's awakening to her artistic gift- and the struggle and devotion that gift will require of her.  from Willa Cather biography on American Collection site for the PBS TV movie based on book **books: Willa Cather. The Song of the Lark****Janis P. Stout  Willa Cather : The Writer and Her World

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"All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise
of the useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing
just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes.

The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated
struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order
East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod."

   writer Annie Dillard    [her books]

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*************************M.J. Rose

   << on writing "Lip Service"

[How did the idea of the characters come?]

The inspiration for Julia and her husband Paul came from
a dinner party I attended. I didn't know the couple who inspired
my characters, but their demeanor with each other fascinated me.
For weeks I couldn't stop thinking about this shy woman and
her so obviously controlling husband and finally the only solution
was to start writing about them.

[How would you describe your book?]

An adventure story about a woman who finds the last thing she expected ? herself.

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About self publishing

[What was your first reaction when the publishers refused your manuscript?]

It wasn't the rejections that bothered me, it was the reasons they rejected the book.
The editors loved it. But the marketing people just weren't sure how to sell it
and that's why they ultimately passed on it.

I couldn't quite understand when they said it was a little too sexy
and a little too intelligent. I thought those were good things.  ......

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[Do you think Internet is a new media?]

Yes but I prefer to describe it as a new delivery system. A book is still a book.
A news story is still a news story, but the net gives us an alternative to how
we obtain these things. As a communications vehicle, the net continues to
evolve and excite me. I love the ability to meet people and work with people
all over the world whom I otherwise would never have gotten to know.

M. J. Rose, Angela Adair-Hoy  How To Publish and Promote Online

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image and quotes from author site  www.mjrose.com

   novels:

M.J. Rose.  In Fidelity   [Kirkus review:] "...a well-crafted study of infidelity,
wrapped within the context of a psychothriller....altogether, a satisfying blend."
[excerpt:]   "The basic precepts of therapy are based on how your past affects your
present. Lilly liked to say we should live in the moment. But she spoke out of
idealism, out of theory. Her past had no ghosts living in it yet. A few minutes
later I sat in my car in front of Cooper's dorm and watched my daughter walk away.
The luckiest of us learn to use our histories as a ladder to climb to the future. That
was what I hoped my daughter would be able to do one day."

M.J. Rose.  Lip Service   [Romantic Times Magazine review:] "Although highly sensuous,
Lip Service isn't your average erotic tale. The novel is an intelligent and well-crafted analysis
of a woman's personal identity quest."
 

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********************   Winona Ryder as Jo in film Little Women

 
"Every few weeks [Jo] would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit,
and 'fall into a vortex', as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul,
for till that was finished she could find no peace." ... "Late at night my mind came alive with stories.
I gave myself up to it, longing for transformation." Jo March

  from the novel by Louisa May Alcott: Little Women

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"I was a loner growing up, and in many ways still am.
I have a public side of myself that loves to moderate panels, give speeches,
teach in front of large groups, and be assertive (even when I shouldn't be).
But privately, I am fairly introspective. I think most people who knew me
in grade school, high school or college as a quiet, withdrawn person who
rarely talked in class would be shocked to see what I've amounted to.

I'm sort of shocked too. I drive myself harder than any external force, such as parents
or school, ever did. But no one could have told me when I was growing up that I'd be
into computers, book writing or parenting. I changed a lot in my late 20's (I'm 41 now)."

Lynda Weinman [studiob.com interview] author of Designing Web Graphics.3

<< related page:*introversion / shyness

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"He's a man who makes life drunk. He is like me."   Anais Nin

from book: A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller 1932-1953

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The day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

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There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered,
who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage,
conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair,
and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

                                Anais Nin
book: The Diary of Anais Nin

 
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"I continue to create because writing is a labor of love and also
an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind."

  Alice Childress (1916-1994)    |   novel: A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich by Alice Childress
 

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Erica Jong: "I was afraid that the gutsy female voice I had discovered in my poems was unacceptable. .. I was terrified of exposing myself this way. Of course, that was the very reason for the book's success. It said out loud the things many women were thinking..  It was loved, hated, and blamed by reactionaries for the decline of Western civilization."   (about her novel Fear of Flying)  [Mirabella Online, Oct.99]

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"Amy Tan listens to movie soundtracks while she works."
/ "Charles Dickens walked one hour for every hour he wrote."

  [from book The Observation Deck: A Tool for Writers by Naomi Epel]

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"I didn't write ['Harry Potter'] with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I've always wanted to be a writer, ever since the age of five or six, when I wrote my first 'book' - a story about a rabbit... I have always written and I know that I always will; I would be writing even if I hadn't been published."  J.K. Rowling   [scholastic.com]

 'Rowling has received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Exeter University -
in part because "what she writes makes the world a better place," according to an
Exeter professor.'   [www.canoe.ca]

    books by   J. K. Rowling :

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone (Leather Bound collector's edition) Mary Grandpre, Illustrator

  dvd:The Magical World of Harry Potter: The Unauthorized Story of J.K. Rowling

"Filmed before the hype and hoopla that greeted the fourth Harry Potter book... [this] is a quickie
introduction to author J.K. Rowling and a cursory history of her life before the magical novels and
the acclaim that greeted her after they were published. ... you may be pleasantly surprised by Rowling's down-to-earth demeanor. Despite the use of only a little film footage... the author's humor and warmth
come shining through. However, it's obvious that the filmmakers didn't have access to Rowling per se, so they use their footage judiciously and concentrate on the phenomenon that is Harry Potter, talking to young readers, booksellers, and even Rowling's childhood neighbors, the Potters, from whom she stole their surname for her hero. --Mark Englehart

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