WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

A long time ago, during a low point in my life, someone tried to advise me: “When you come to the end of a rope, tie a knot and hang on.” I remember snapping back: “When you come to the end of a rope, you should let it go and find another one!”

My particularly rope that I’ve been hanging on to is Writing to Get Published By A Major Publishing House. Letting go felt impossible, until now.

What changed? There were a lot of factors, but the main one has to do with author John P. Locke. Last fall I did some editing on one of his novels, and over the course of the next few months, we became friends. From him, I re-learned a key element to my own writing process that I had forgotten: Writing is fun.

John didn’t say this out loud: I got it because of who he is and how he communicates and writes. When we talk, everything seems easier and more lighthearted. There’s definitely a ‘flow’ there that inspires me, simply because of his attitude towards his own writing. When I first read John’s novels, I recognized in them the quality of a really fine writer. His style is fast and furious, hilarious, descriptive, violent. From the first few pages of Lethal People, I knew that, if he wanted to, he could be published by a Major Publishing House.

To my fascination, John had no interest in mainstream publishing. The idea of months of querying agents, then more months (in my case, years) of an agent trolling novels, and the odd desire to receive hundreds of rejection letters, meant nothing to him. He wanted his books out and available, with a cover he liked, blurbs and ads and press releases that he approved, interviews and reviews by people who were appreciative, and a writing-and-publishing process that he enjoyed. He’s already working on his fifth novel – and he only started writing novels a year and a half ago.

John writes because it’s FUN.

I had forgotten that feeling. How books used to pour from me, with cheerful abundance, like a fountain. How words were playful, interesting things – not heavy stones to build a tome. Sentences could come and go, like a breeze. Chapters were filled with laughter and (usually) lots of kisses. A story was light as sunshine, and sprang forth like flowers.

Thanks mostly to John Locke, but also thanks to all the other pioneers of this exciting Independent Publishing Movement, I was finally able to let go of a rope I’d clung to for far too long. Since then, I’ve found that I can sit back and watch in wonder as one sentence leads mysteriously to the next, and stories grow of their own accord – because it’s ‘flow’ – because it’s fun.

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Writing Practice

Think of a ‘rope’ in your life that you’re hanging on to. It can be a big rope – like a job you’re not happy with but feel you have to stay with, or a relationship that perhaps is nearing its end. Or it can be tiny – like a sock you’ll never finish knitting or a haiku that isn’t working. Imagine how tired your arms are, how exhausted you feel, how you long for someone to come and help you back up the rope to where you were. Feel your loneliness: there’s only you there, hanging on to that rope, legs dangling over the abyss. Maybe even cry a bit.

Now, instead of trying to climb back up the rope, imagine letting go. You realize that to hang on to a rope when your arms are aching is just plain silly. There’s no danger – everything around is soft and slow and warm and lovely. You’re tumbling gently through a safe, interesting world that is totally unexpected, but still your very own, because it’s your own creation. Think Alice’s rabbit hole adventure, for example.

Close your eyes and allow the best experience imaginable to come to you – don’t try to force it. You might find yourself with a whole new way of looking at something that you were previously stuck on.

Now write it down. First, describe the rope you’ve been holding onto and the misery and ache you feel. Then describe the wonder of what occurs when you let go of the rope. Think outside the box – in fact, maybe nothing happens at all. Maybe everything that you were afraid would happen when you let go disappears. Maybe you simply feel relief.

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Daily Happinesses

• a fresh cord of wood delivered
• intrigue
• a wide-brimmed turquoise sun hat
• castles in Bavaria
• the eye of love

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

From the time I was eight till around sixteen years old, my father and I used to play chess practically every night. I used to become absorbed not just in the strategy, but in the characteristics of the pieces. Pawns were brave but not very skilled. Bishops were clever. Knights were maverick and tricky – rather like guerilla fighters. Rooks were strong and powerful, but they needed a lot of room to maneuver. And don’t get me started on the talented, adept, versatile queen who gracefully defended the kingdom for her dull, quiet, fuddy-duddy old king.

Stories can be written about anything in the world – and character given to just about anything as well. A plump teapot, a sheer, terrifying cliff, a roiling sky… Even typefaces have distinct personalities. But chess pieces are the best things in the world to characterize. When I played chess, wondering what each piece was thinking and feeling was far more vivid to me than the action.

Still, one of the most important qualities I learned from those evenings was the importance of learning to finish. Even when it was obvious I was going to lose, my father would turn the chess board around and say: “Practice your end game.” We both knew I was strongest in the opening – where I could be impulsive, brave, and safely move quickly. But when it came time to actually close in on that poor old king, I tended to tune out. Not any longer. After so many years of finishing a game, it makes me slightly ill to have to interrupt one – or leave any story unfinished.

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Fun writing practice

Select a chess pieces and write a short story using that piece as the protagonist.

Narrate your story from a first-person point of view, building on the idiosyncrasies of the personality of the chess piece. Write it in a dreamy, fairy-tale style. Describe the town and the fields and the woods around, as well as the battle itself. Remember to stay in character: a rook is not going to sneak up on a pawn early in the game, although it might come up behind you near the end.

Intersperse lots of melodrama and emotion into your story. You might even want to write something like “Ah, me!” when the queen is dragged off in chains to the enemy dungeon. Perhaps you are a pawn, and your only goal is to reach the opponent’s side to rescue her. Will you make it?

Write at least three paragraphs: beginning, middle, and end.

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Daily happinesses

• lots and lots of silk and satin pillows
• taking a nap
• feeling beloved
• reindeer in Lapland
• sparkles on the snow

We’re taught in basic marketing and promotion courses that ‘you’ is the most important word. You simply can’t use it often enough. This is because the most important person in your life is you. The funny thing about romantic love, and why it can sink us to such despair, is that we think the happiness it supposedly brings us is contingent on someone else. We long for that ‘you’ – I love you…

Well, here is a different approach: Write a love letter to yourself. Dig deep into the inner recesses of your soul and write out all the wonderful, magical, enticing, and beautiful things about you.  You can include seemingly small details (like the shape of your eyelid or the inside of your elbow), but always remember that it’s not the parts that make a whole person. The whole person is made up of parts.

Have fun with this letter. Feel safe – no one will tease or scorn your effusiveness. Say much, much more than you ever would to someone else. Did you do a good deed that you told no one about? Do you love the way you sing a lullaby to your children? What about your humor, your kindness, even your silliness? This is not a moment for any sort of self-deprecation: imagine how hurt a lover would be if you were at all critical in a love letter! Ugh – don’t do it! Treat yourself as tenderly and passionately as you would someone you were absolutely crazy about. You can even draw on this letter, decorate it, attach a photograph, a painting, or a piece of music. Sprinkle it with essential oil of rosewood. Share what you love about yourself with you. Most importantly, tell yourself “I love you.”

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

For many years, every morning I write down three phrases that I call my ‘daily happinesses.’ These are simple – usually appealing – images that help me peek into another, more objective, reality.

In a way, they are also writing prompts. Each one of these little phrases conjures a vignette, a mood, a story, a person. For example: “Planning for a garden of rare and wild roses.” “Penguins diving into the sea.” “The silence before applause.”

When I was in college back in the seventies, I vividly remember stumbling across this paragraph, written by Sylvia Plath in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams:

“How I envy the novelist! I imagine her… pruning a rosebush with a large pair of shears, adjusting her spectacles, shuffling about among teacups, humming, arranging ashtrays or babies, absorbing a slant of light, a fresh edge to the weather, and piercing, with a kind of modest, beautiful x-ray vision, the psychic interiors of her neighbors – her neighbors on trains, in the dentist’s waiting room, in the corner teashop. To her, this fortunate one, what is there that isn’t relevant! Old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors, and budgerigars; little mannerisms – the sucking at a tooth, the tugging at a hemline – any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations – those rumbling, thunderous shapes. Her business is Time, the way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays, and double-exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer. I can take about a minute.”

For me, reading this paragraph was a revelation. Writing furiously at the time, both novels and poetry, I knew in an instant what she meant. Every single detail in life – doorknobs, the tugging at a hemline – is relevant to a novelist.

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Fun Writing Practice

Writing prompts are more than just a way to get you started. They are small awarenesses that keep you alive to the subtle qualities of writing fiction. Just as on the stage of a play, every prop is relevant to the action, characters, and dialogue, so every detail in a novel is relevant. It matters.

It also inspires.

Come up with a few of your own. Simply observe the folded sheets, or the curled up cat, or the sleet at the window, or the quirky smile of a friend, and write it down. You might be amazed at the story that surrounds an everyday image regarded in a different light.

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Daily happinesses

• fresh pineapple in the middle of winter
• Friday night
• snow crystals blowing off trees in the sun
• beauty
• a noodle shop in Hong Kong

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

When I moved to England at age eleven I remember being amused by the amount of conversation people spent discussing the weather. The reason was that it hardly ever seemed to change. The weather was pretty much misty and drizzly and sometimes it might rain harder, other times it might be so damp it just felt like rain … I think in the seven years I lived there, I saw a cloudless sky perhaps twice. And yet every rain seemed different. That difference was in myself, not in the weather.

I tend to love rainy days. They instill in me a feeling of coziness, of stories, of Sussex. Firesides. Long walks through the forest, discovering wildlife, the gentle patter on leaves. Bluebells by the brook. Yellow raincoats and Wellington boots.

When you’re writing a description, you’re trying to evoke a mood around whatever it is you’re describing. Metaphors help, and so do adjectives. In this week’s writing practice, you’re going to use weather as the backdrop for the mood you’re trying to evoke.

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Fun Writing Practice

Describe a thunderstorm from the point of view of someone who is going mad (think King Lear!)

Do not describe the person, or going mad, and don’t use any personal pronouns.

Now describe the same thunderstorm from the point of view of someone who is on their way to meet their true love. Again, don’t talk about this person, or love, or include any action: just describe the thunderstorm so that it appears exciting, passionate, inspiring …

If you’d like to choose a different kind of weather, by all means do so. For instance, a blizzard can be described as terrifying or cozy depending on the mood you’re trying to evoke. Even a hot, still summer afternoon can seem sinister if done well; Raymond Chandler comes to mind.

A spring dawn can be bittersweet and nostalgic or filled with anticipation and delight, depending on whether the clouds are thickening and eclipsing the sunshine or they’re tinged with pink and gold. A breeze can be snapping or balmy. Stars can seem lonely or twinkling.

Have fun with this weather practice – you’ll find it helps in mastering a mood in your story or essay. You may also find it helps you master your own mood.

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Daily Happinesses

• getting into a warm car on a cold night

• realizing that less is more: clearing the clutter

• heavy velvet curtains

• the blueness of the sky against newly fallen snow

• sweeping away the cobwebs