So you want to be a writer

I have a few simple rules for the practice of writing:

1. Keep a journal. Write in it every day - your dreams, your thoughts, something you saw in the street or in the clouds, something you read. Keep your journal secret. This is just for you.No judgment, no critics or editors, no consequences.

2. Read every day. Go on reading binges. Appreciate books that are less than perfect, because they will help you to see what you may truly be able to do better. Notice what grabs you and what leaves you yawning.This will help you recognize your natural genre.

3. Write for a short and specified time every day. 15 minutes is great, 5 minutes will do. I time myself with a quarter hourglass. I write until the blue sand runs out, and sometimes for a few minutes more, but it is important tp respect the time limit. This practice is different from keeping a journal. Now you are writing The Book. You may be clueless about the shape of the book to begin with, but if a story wants to come through, it will reveal its form and its dimensions.

When your project has taken shape, and you are ready to set deadlines and send out proposals characters, do this:

4. Apply the work habits that worked for you in the past.What work habits and schedules have made you most productive in any field in the past? Have you done best on a daily 9-5 schedule,or on wild overnight rushes to meet a deadline?Do you do better in solitude or among workmates or with a partner? Apply those past habits to your writing project.

5. Shhhhhhhhh. Don't waste energy and lose magic by talking to much about that book or script you are working on. If being in a writing group suits you, well and good. However, don't talk to the world at large about what you are doing or not doing. And avoid, like the plague, the feedback felons who bring you down instead of saying what you need to hear from a creative friend, which is More, More!

I am about to publish my 26th book, Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through Twelve Secrets of Imagination. I am still learning what it means to be a writer, and what risks it is necessary to take and what habits it is necessary to grow or reinforce to bring something truly new into the world. Yes, I am writing new books, different from anything I have published before.No, I cannot say any more because of rule #5.

Borrowed lines

Writers enjoy the thrill of petty larceny. Though I don’t recommend grand theft, I encourage people at the start of my creative writing programs to borrow lines, images and plot ideas from each other. At the beginning of one of my 5-day adventures in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at Mosswood Hollow, we accomplished this through a card game.
    I had everybody write a summary of a dream or a story or just a few good lines on one side of an index card. Then we took turns to pull cards from the deck and make up more of a story or script from whatever was dealt to us, pretending that the card we drew contained our own material. We also agreed that whatever was read in front of the group would be common property.
     This provided great starter dough! Here is a cycle of seven little verses I wrote that morning, riffing on seven of the cards that were shared.

Borrowed Lines

1
Turn Off

Turning, turning. They kept her turning
till she didn’t know which way to turn.
So she turned harder, the other way
and became cyclone. She carried their houses
and banks, their laptops and diamond rings
and every sure thing in the swirl of her rage
until she turned all of them off.

2

Cat People

What you most hate is what you will become
unless you agree that
what you most fear is what you must do.

3

Worker bees

On the porch, a few of us are fanning ourselves.
Most are torpid in sunlight, in a heat stupor.
Until one of us rouses and flies up counter-clockwise

and we rise to follow, filling the air with our hum.

4

Breakfast Time

I love the spring bunny in a shaft of sunlight
on the dew-glistening grass, sweet and soft.
I drop from the sky in vertical descent,
talons exquisitely precise. Breakfast time.

5

All Roads

To tell you I love you is to love myself.
I must breathe this from my gut
and sing it with lungs and belly
until all roads lead to my heart, and you.

6

Key to the Attic

May you never forget the key to granma’s attic
in the place between sleep and awake
where you found another world when you were nine
that calls you now, all these decades gone.

7

The Right Line

Take the U Train
not the Them Train
never the Should Train
not the Might-Have-Been Train
pass by the Wannabe Train
skip the Must Train
Take the U Train, you.

The card game mentioned above is a literary variant of my Coincidence Card Game, whose rules are fully explained in Sidewalk Oracles. I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year at magical Mosswood Hollow from May 21-26 and at a beautiful country hotel near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Art: Remedios Varo, "Sympathy" (aka "The Madness of the Cat"), 1955

Meta-journaling: starter dough for the writer inside

On lazy days, when my creative daimon has given me time off and is not breathing fire down my neck, I fool around with old journals. I might take part of a dream report, marry it with another, and let them consort with a new idea that is skipping at the edge of my awareness. Suddenly I find I have a new story, or some pages for a new book. This almost never feels like work. When it catches the interest of the daimon and he is on me again, the play becomes the work that isn't work because it is the Work, what we are called to do. The practice can be called journaling from journals. Thoreau did this, and so did Jung. Thoreau journaled all the time. He wrote down his observations of nature, his thoughts and dreams, his notes on his constant reading. Most interesting, he journaled from his journals, picking over old volumes, plucking out promising bits and pieces, copying them out and marrying them up as fresh drafts. It became his habit (as biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr. reports in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind) “to work back over his journals…to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier journal work, measuring, weighing, culling and sorting his materials…taking up earlier threads, reweaving and combining them.”

Jung's Red Book is the magnificently illustrated journal he created from his "black book" diaries, which remain unpublished). I highly recommend the practice of journaling from journals. As you pull together threads and themes from multiple entries, you find you are making a personal dictionary of symbols and even unveiling the hidden logic of your life story. You'll discover that your journal is a data base in which you have gathered evidence of "supernormal" phenomena such as precognition, telepathy and mutual or interactive dreaming. As you notice recurring symbols and situations, you break loose from the dumb wheel of repetition and put yourself on a spiral path of growing awareness and self-evolution.      For any writer, as for Thoreau, it opens treasuries of material and above all it supports the writing habit. Playing around with old notes removes the terror of the blank page. When you dip into an old journal, you are never at a loss for a theme. The simple processes of selection, arrangement and retitling will fire the imagination. Before you know it, you’ll be in the midst of writing something new. If you have a writer or artist inside, you'll find that old journal entries can be great starter dough. As you push and pummel and play with their shapes, suddenly you find there are a dozen loaves, or a layer cake, on the rise in your creative oven. So: don't just write your morning pages. When you decide to make time for the practice, play with your pages from other mornings, mix and match, cut and paste. Your creative spirits will come closer, guiding your fingers, whispering in your ear.

When the clock is the writer's friend

Timed writing. 30 minutes max. So you can make room for it in almost any schedule, and make yourself do it when you don't want to.
    You stop when the time is up, like on Top Chef. Drop the pen, close the Word document. You're not finished? Great, that means when you return to the draft, you know exactly where to pick up. Oh yes, and since you are not on Top Chef with the clocks running in front of the cameras, you can always cheat and steal a few minutes more.
    We do this in my writing playshops. We do it every day during my writing retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming." Sometimes we raise the bar. For example, you have 30 minutes, in your own space, to produce a page you can read to the group. Or: you have just 5 minutes, in the space of the whole group, to write a quick sketch that you can share.
    Yes, writers can make the clock their friend. If you have only 30 minutes or less, perfection is not on the agenda. There is simply no time to entertain the inner critic, or indulge the procrastinator. They'll come after you later, but not right now.
    In my writer's life, the clock can be a friend in larger ways. I love fierce delivery dates, like 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, or tomorrow, or the first of next month. Possibly because I used to be a journalist, accustomed to rushing copy together for almost instantaneous publication, I'm not impressed by deadlines that are too far into the future. On a certain level, I have learned that you can't really start a book (as opposed to an article) the night before a due date and expect to hand it in on time. But part of me still wants to approach any writing project, even of book length, that way. I would have thrived on the serial model of publication of both fiction and nonfiction that prevailed in the heyday of Balzac, Dickens and H.G. Wells.
   Blogging is a consolation, and a gentle workout for the writing muscles, but not the same thing.
   I don't put blog writing on a timer, just the big stuff. When I next turn the dial on my timekeeper - you can see he is a very fierce enforcer - it will be in the cause of bringing through some more pages of a new book.

The Tarot of writers

Triumph of Death fresco (1480) at Oratorio dei Disciplini, Clusone

In an afterword to his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino described Tarot as "a machine for constructing stories." In his two-part story, travelers who are trapped or stranded communicate through cards drawn from two early decks, the Visconti Tarot and the Tarot of Marseilles.
    In the time of the Renaissance, a Benedictine monk named Teofilo Folengo wrote poems in which the fortunes and characters of individuals are revealed by the Tarot cards that are dealt to them. His Tarot poems appear in his 1527 work Caos del Triperiuno, written under the pseudonym Merlini Cocai. In one of the sonnets, he finds room to mention all 22 of the major arcana in a bragging contest between Love (the name for the Lovers card at that time) and Death personified as female, as in the macabre and magnificent 1480 fresco by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis at Clusone, where all the powers of this world bow down before La Morte.


“What a Fool I am,” said Love, “my Fire, 
that can appear as an Angel or as a Devil 
can be Tempered by some others who live under my Star. 
You are the Empress of bodies. But you cannot kill hearts, 
you only Suspend them. You have a name of high Fame, 
but you are nothing but a Trickster.” *


The monkish author was a living testimony to the power of Love. He abandoned his monastery and roamed Italy with a lovely young woman of noble birth named Girolama, though he returned to the cloister, in Sicily, to seek a peaceful Death.
    Fr Teofilo's use of the cards to compose poetry started a literary craze among the sixteenth-century Italian nobility for a game that came to be known as Tarocchi appropriati, or "Appropriated Tarot". As described by Paul Huson in Mystical Origins of the Tarot (Destiny Books, Rochester VT, 2004), "Here trump cards were selected by one player and presented to another, who would interpret them thematically by a process of idea association to create verses about himself or herself, about another person, or most popularly, to praise certain well-known ladies around the court."
    Many writers have been inspired by Tarot. The Tower and the Hanged Man fascinated W.B.Yeats, whose magical diaries are filled with personal Tarot readings and was thoroughly familiar, as an adept, with the use of the major arcana in ceremonial magic and pathworking by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
    Leading Tarot authority and novelist Rachel Pollack published an anthology of Tarot Tales (co-edited with Caitlin Matthews) and more recently produced a strange and wonderful solo collection of Tarot stories, The Tarot of Perfection (Magic Realist Press, Prague, 2008). In her Introduction, she explains an exercise in "Tarot for Writers" that she developed for her students in a course at Goddard College in Vermont.
     In this spread, you draw seven cards in sequence with the idea that they will answer the following questions about the characters, themes, and plot development of a story:

Who is my character?

What situation does he or she face?

What is the outer motivation?

What is hidden?

What opposes her or him?

What helps?

What is at risk?

I tested this just now, with a deck I like a lot by rarely use for personal readings, the Tarot of the Spirit. My "character" proved to be a theme, presented here as the Three of Water (3 of Cups in other decks), Love abounding and overflowing, going beyond duality. The "situation" is the ultimate Three, the Empress, Trump III. Perhaps the "situation" my character faces is to encounter and claim (or be claimed by ) the Threefold Goddess. The "outer motivation", by a curious paradox, appears as the High Priestess, one of the most "inner" of the cards. Perhaps the "outer motivation" is the desire for initiation and admission to the Mysteries. 

    What is "hidden" is the Father of Wind (King of Swords elsewhere) shown here as a double being riding a rearing bull through a flaming sky. What "opposes" is the arcanum numbered I, here called the Magus; he is shown leaning over a cubical table where the four magical weapons are laid out, a whirling golden lemniscate (figure of 8) above his head. What "helps" is the Mother of Wind, shown here as a glamorous woman in a swirling marigold dress, weaving the reins of power the Father may or may not be able to hold into a larger figure of 8, a Möbius power strip.What is "at risk" is the Brother of Wind, the reckless, sometimes tormented Son of the family. 

    A family drama then, with greater forces in play. So many clues to follow. Who or what is the Magus that opposes? What is in the visual echo between the figures of 8 above his head and in the control of Wind Mother?
    Will I write from these cards? Maybe, but writing this reminds me that I have an unfinished Tarot novella that was first inspired by a dream, one of those dreams that haunts you - with its mystery and its invitation - down all the long corridors of the years.

*There is a complete translation of the sonnet, with all the attributions to the Greater Trumps, at Mary Greer's Tarot blog, an excellent resource on all things Tarot.