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 […]
Gold Threads in the Dark
December 21, 2020 by
Feeling creative is, for some of us, a life-support function – especially in recent times. It’s easiest for those who have shelter and food, while holding awareness of those who don’t. For hundreds of millions, just thinking up and acting on the next step toward survival — if survival is still possible — are supremely […]
The Light inside the Cave
May 1, 2017 by
I became (again?) a cave painter one recent morning, hyper-aware of wanting to inscribe something from deep inside, something from far beyond that would echo through and far beyond me. I was in a new space, in every way: the first spring in a new residence, with a writing chair facing east. In the first […]
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 […]
Storied Synchronicity
April 30, 2015 by
After an editorial project that enchanted me day and night for a month, I’ve spent days getting back to myself with yoga, deep-tissue massage, and exotic literature to whisk me into other inner worlds. This morning, noticing my mind had again wafted back into the project – one that altered my deep interior and will nourish me […]
Quadraphonic Choices
October 30, 2014 by
I just discovered new depths to a technique I learned thirty years ago: creating a four-square grid to hold all the elements of a difficult decision. I’m writing about it here, in case I ever want to recommend it again – now with some updated spin. Back then, it was about intellectual, emotional, and social […]
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 […]
Speculative Magical Links
September 1, 2013 by
Unusual worlds are opening. I’ve been journeying along one of my less-traveled paths, returning to a lifelong love of fantastical stories. Clues to my own emerging voice pop out of page and screen. This post’s trip report has links to a few favorites, some notes on writing and consciousness, and a little peach-flavored magic realism. The […]
Voice II
June 8, 2013 by
“If I write that, people will think it’s me.” This quote from Amy Tan, in her spirited TED talk about writing fiction, has been singing to me for days. It struck the place in me that’s so focused on integrity that the idea of representing something that’s not-me, when my name is on it, felt dangerous, […]
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 […]
Voice, Format, Audience
April 2, 2013 by
Mercy. Another writing career. The inner machinery of expression – the place I go to inside, to feel words form – is changing again. It’s being altered by the convergence of two worlds from opposite extremes: (1) inside-out: shaping ever-subtler inner experience into outer form, and (2) outside-in: practicing the audience-driven formats of screenplays and […]
A Kaleidoscope of Women
November 11, 2012 by
Visions of “the feminine” started shape-changing for me this summer, watching Beasts of the Southern Wild. Startling imagery, elaborate mythology, a rich resonant soundtrack, poetic and vivid dialogue – and the unimaginable performance of its tiny girl hero-star – coalesced. Ancient self-images, affections, terrors, and enthusiasms got remembered and rearranged, transformed, even though the movie’s surfaces […]
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 […]
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 […]
You Do the Math (or Not)
February 28, 2012 by
Getting the giggles about the collision between two emails this morning: one, from webwizard Seth Godin, saying that what we do, in life / business / culture is not math (simple on/off duality), and the other, from a long-ago meditation teacher, pointing out that we live too much from the wrong-headed math of surface interpretation. When […]
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 Nature of Writing and Editing
August 11, 2011 by
A velvety pastel lotus blooms, eventually, from a seed case. Bees, in a scouting party for a new home, do a waggle dance to signal their choice of locations. In my universe, this is speech, writing in water and air. In this way of feeling, cave paintings of Lascaux feel newly alive, ancient gematria more shimmering, pictograms […]
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 […]