“Find your own voice.” “Make each character sympathetic yet unique, with no stereotypes.” “Give the main character a meaningful arc, someone the reader can root for.” These imperatives appear, over and over, in courses for writers. I’m noticing that our atmosphere of complex cultural chaos – in the news, online, among friends and family, and […]
New Nonlinear Narratives
July 29, 2023 by
After a revelation – about why I was so enchanted by an author’s work – I stumbled upon a technique for story-generation and voice discovery. The jolt came when I realized that her discontinuous, multi-format structure was resonating with the way time and reality feel to me now (erratic), my attention being whipsawed by climate […]
Life as Speculative Fiction
August 14, 2021 by
From deep inside the world of fiction writing, I see classic elements of screenplays and novels playing out in our public life. Every day brings disruptive incidents to start new plots. We face increasingly large obstacles with higher and higher risks and cascading disasters. Conflict erupts everywhere, and point-of-view characters (each of us) keep going […]
Inner Q&A for Chaotic Times
May 29, 2020 by
Once again, decades of inner work – as a writer and meditator – are taking on new form. Both activities stimulate and respond to major shifts in perception, to create coherent new narratives. It was no surprise, then, to realize that a technique I’ve been using for years – a quasi-meditative centering exercise for making […]
An Expression of Pink Trees
March 19, 2017 by
I missed it. At least the camera missed it. By the time I realized I wanted to capture the glorious explosion of flowers haloing out from a stand of neighborhood trees, two days had passed and the flowers were turning gray. That was weeks ago, and now it’s a strange mercy: to keep from feeling […]
Degrees of Intimacy … in Words
June 3, 2016 by
Fiction-writing is a different beast – thrilling to engage after so much practice in resolving everything into concepts, expressing them, and inviting an audience to ponder and, ideally, agree. I’ve been experimenting with live readings of fictional vignettes to a group of extremely varied listeners. The group was facilitated by long-time fiction fans who expected […]
Significance
March 8, 2016 by
After being tossed an opportunity to list the most significant events of my life, I watched the parades of memory march by – different parades on three different passes of the question. My notion of what ‘significant’ means began to crumble. The first pass included the usual suspects: outer events that changed the course of […]
Exper…
September 18, 2015 by
I got a sweet little shock when I looked up the etymology of experience and experiment, wondering how they could feel so different while being nearly the same word. Their shared history is adding rich new sensations of fearlessness to daily existence (even to the past and the future, as well as the Now). First, the two exper words: ‘Experience’ […]
A Perfect Score of 42
July 12, 2015 by
I found a new way to relax, even feel more creative and awake, when hearing the word ‘perfect’. My mind started chewing on it after two encounters with someone steeped in fashion philosophies: In the first, he announced that painful difficulties reflected the perfection of the moment; in the second, he said he wasn’t perfect. […]
Resolution Means Flow
December 28, 2014 by
Fierce determination, popular while January 1 approaches, feels opposite to going with the flow. Yet they can be the same, considered in a certain light. Traditions of beginning again personally on January 1, when the outer calendar begins again, offer rituals for backward reflection and forward vision. If the ritual is superficial – a Procrustean chopping and […]
Midwinter Relativity
December 16, 2014 by
In a vast field of frozen dark-gray slate, a luminous pearlescence blooms above a slow horizon in the southern sky, this silent dawn near solstice. Moments of enchantment pass before the mind remembers: this is the sun, rising in the south. The wakening mind expands: the sun is not rising – this is […]
Sea Legs and Inner Ears
September 14, 2014 by
Waltzing back and forth between the right-brain’s flowing cosmos and the left-brain’s key-tapping to make words, not yet being fully immersed in an all-senses state, I feel a dizziness that brings a memory to the surface, one that resonates across the decades: We’d been on a long sailing trip, eating and sleeping on board, as […]
Merit in the Marketplace
May 6, 2013 by
A phenomenal new wordal popped out of the dictionary this morning: the mer root within merit. Turns out it started as sale value, leading to the Latin meretrix (prostitute) and the English meretricious (attractive in a vulgar way). This surprise led to contemplation of merit badges, merit scholars, meritocracies, certificates of merit, earning merit in religious […]
Alchemical Storytellers
April 23, 2013 by
Just finished redesigning a house. A bank account. A host of motives. Woke up this morning knowing my novella’s main character’s circumstances were all wrong for the plot, mismatched for the themes. Switched it around in a great rush. Then rested, wondering where those first images had come from, why they’d felt right before, even […]
Seven-Story Forgiveness
August 17, 2012 by
Every word, every thought, changes along the vibrational scale of consciousness, so that its meaning is different depending on the speaker’s intent and the listener’s awareness – creating the sound of different notes and tones with a single word. I wrote about this earlier in relation to ‘gratitude’: in the lowest vibrations, ‘gratitude’ feels like helpless […]
The Animation in Receiving Art
April 26, 2012 by
Such second-hand creative raptures in recent days. I feel blessed. Sometimes, opening the heart to another’s art is as marvelous as the inspiration to express. Yesterday, I got dazzled by a psychologically intriguing Juliette Binoche film called Certified Copy. Following Ms. Binoche’s character and her paramour through their reality-shifting interactions is a levitational experience. This morning, I […]
Bliss, Fulfillment, Happiness, Passion
March 13, 2012 by
Fun to wonder if the apparent convergence of blogs and videos about “find your passion” (links provided below) has been statistically true – or is just a mirror of my own focus. Multiple notes and links led to discussions of this staple of the “consciousness movement” in a compressed time span. Impatient with so many […]
Flicker and Peep
February 29, 2012 by
These are the words – flicker and peep – for the play of light and shadow, for the sound of sound, in the felt senses. Waking early, in the cold and dark, I notice flames dancing and crackling in the fireplace now. Outside, coyotes yip-whoop in starlight. Time collapses between aboriginal and modern. The resonance […]
Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Flow?
February 7, 2012 by
Awoke to a vibration of wistfulness: glad for the relaxed pleasure in encountering everything with soft regard, and glad to feel only a faint rippling awareness of multiple kinds of violence in the world – sprung from obvious conflicts of identities, motives, and boundaries in the news. It was inspiring to notice the ripples without […]
The Ever-Morphing Novella (=Life)
January 25, 2012 by
Why do I expect to revise my novella after it’s been published? (I hear this is possible with e-books.) It’s already rewritten itself at least four times since it was conceived last summer. The same could be said of me, still experiencing alterations of perception, inspiration, intent, and relationship with life-as-a-work-of-art. Transformation practitioners know about […]
Adaptation: Not Always Second-Hand
January 15, 2012 by
Once again, a word-origin is revealing a hidden coherence: ap, which becomes apt, adapt, aptitude, adept and inept. It’s about fittedness, fastening two phenomena, one or both of them in motion. Like dancing: the fittedness being between the music and the body, or between two or more bodies, in spontaneous or rehearsed choreography (on a […]
Creativity’s Hidden Gateways
January 12, 2012 by
Several new emails in the past 24 hours have touted creativity programs and ideas. One of this morning’s emails feels like a goad. It was about setting up the day to be about one’s own creativity, versus checking the incoming mail and web feeds to see what others are doing. Fashionability (attention to what others are doing), can […]
First Wordals
August 11, 2011 by
Wordals – as word-portals – evolved in my writing practice as mind-unlocking gateways into higher/deeper states of awareness. Unlocking the traps of words frees the mind into a more vast experience of being alive. All around us now is talk of potential new universal languages, decryption of recently discovered ancient languages, possibly extraterrestrial symbolic and […]
The Opening
August 10, 2011 by
Hilariously, I “open” this website – all about being original, alive, and aware, in the moment – with one of the oldest conventions of public speakers, from elementary school onward: the etymology of the title. Turns out it works pretty well. “Open” is from upo, meaning under, up from under, or over, which aren’t contradictory at […]