Tag Archives: Writer

When Your Feeling the Writing Flow…Or How I Spent My Tuesday

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It was empty when I walked in, the freshly polished floor shone in the early light. The smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls rolled through the mall in waves of ecstasy.
My footsteps echoed though I only wore Vans.
The mall was my savior.
I people watched, wrote new chapters of my new project and took notes on what I saw.
When you’re in the mall there are things you don’t see, unless you’re there wasting time for five or six hours, as I did on Tuesday.
There’s something different about being there with only the security guards, the mall walkers doing their laps, a laptop and a Moleskine.
There’s a different feeling to it when the stores are preparing to open on a Tuesday. There’s no anticipation of it being busy. The shop keepers seem to understand, “Today is a get your hours and go home day.”
Sitting in the Starbucks, a pool of wetness at the base of my Venti iced latte, I started to write.
It wasn’t like the other times, it didn’t sputter, it wasn’t clogged with traffic or nonsense.
It was the beginning of The Flow.
There were glimmers it might happen, the morning TM was amazing, breakfast tasted better, but I couldn’t believe that I would write with such energy.
The first few sentences weren’t remarkable, but they were sentences with structure, flavor and they flowed.
With each description, each piece of the story I didn’t notice my latte was creating an lake in the middle of the table, nor did I notice the two people watching me write, who incidentally saw me look up at them and turned away.
I wasn’t sure how long I was writing, maybe thirty minutes, possibly forty, but they moved together as fast as my fingers across the keyboard.
It’s an incredible feeling to make the scene the way your mind sees it. To create the atmosphere the way your bones feel it and to feel the flow of the words without noticing how much time had gone by.
When the flow comes, the writing moves without effort.
It’s the Zone, the box or your own little world.
It moves and you don’t see how fast the words come until you’re staring at your words, look at the clock and see it’s been forty minutes since you looked up.
That’s the best type of writing.
Feeling the flow.

How Living in Wyoming Made Me a Better Writer

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The year I graduated from high school, we lived in a small trailer on the plains of Wyoming.

It was beautiful to me.

Snow drifts grew to be as large as a truck. The days blended together as the grey, overcast clouds blocked out the sun. We hid in our rooms, or the living room, a dull orange light from the lamp or the white glow of the television casting its glow upon our faces.

It was these nights, with my sister, mom and dad huddled on a couch or under a blanket, which reminded me life wasn’t as bad as my teenage mind thought it was.

Each day, my sister and I would wake from our sleep, hurry to the bathroom, for if we didn’t there would be no hot water, or worse yet, not water at all.

We’d dress in adjacent rooms, only a panel separating our rooms.

It was there on those mornings, when we stood for the bus in 20 below weather I thought not of living somewhere warm, but thought of how beautiful the snow looked, the shape of the ice on the road as it jutted from the black top.

You see, in Wyoming, when there is slush in the road, it freezes like the world turned upside down. There were mornings when I was worried we’d hit one of these icicles and the bus would stop on the freeway leading to the nearest town where we attended school.

Life was easy on that plane in Wyoming. I had school, different girlfriends, and I’d stay up late writing.

Those were the days of teenage angst ridden poems about love, pain and the things which I’ve now outgrown, but the things I wrote were the beginnings of who I’d become years later, 20 years later.

Now that I’ve been away from snow drifts, the world turned upside down and the long bus rides, I think about why I wrote, not what I wrote. I remember thinking, no one will ever see this.

I loved that I could write something I thought was beautiful, and not care if the world saw it or not.

I liked the feeling of writing that way, it’s something I’ve tried to do again, but my mind fails me at those moments.

I think snow drifts and a trip down the rabbit hole will help, but I’ve been in the darkest places, and prefer the light, it keeps the dark away.

I saw life through my 18-year-old eyes a few days ago as I sifted through journals of poems and stories.

I liked what I read, the carelessness of the writing, the sense that the writer knew no one would see it, least of all himself in 20 years.

I’m going to return to writing without caring, because I was happiest when I stood in 20 below weather, my life in front of me and the discovery of what comes next.

What do we do when our life gets out of control?

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For most people, stress is an everyday occurrence and they just live with it, deal with, or put it out of their mind until they’re laying in hospital bed.

Almost a year ago I was stricken with Shingles. I thought it was something older people got, but I was wrong. Shingles can attack anyone who’s had chicken pox.

Having Shingles was especially unnerving since my parents had said I’d never had chicken pox, well I obviously had and band of scabs stretched across my clavicle, spread up my neck onto my head and right ear.

I missed a few days of work, luckily I noticed it early and started treatment.

After my recovery I began to think about how I became so stressed that a virus ravaged my body.

I discovered there was a perfect storm around me.

  1. My grandfather died.
  2. My dad ignored me at my grandfather’s funeral.
  3. I became depressed enough that I wanted to take my own life.
  4. My fiction writing became stagnant.

It was months later, after someone I worked with confronted me and said, “I don’t care about your problems”, which sent me over the edge. I talked about this in a previous post.

The death of my grandfather was something I knew was coming, but having little contact with my dad’s side of the family, I was unaware of how bad he was.

My dad’s snubbing me at the service was something I didn’t think would happen, This comes mostly because it was his father’s service and I thought he’d need the emotional support, I was wrong.

The depression which set in after leaving my grandfather’s service hit me a month later when the first sign of Shingles appeared.

My writing had always been my escape from depression, even as a kid I’d create stories in my head, never writing them down.

Writing has helped me discover who I am as much as TM has, possibly more since it’s been in my life longer.

As a teenager, writing helped me find who I was, and even though I wasn’t quite sure who I was, writing always helped.

When I wasn’t able to write, my depression became worse; which led to more stress, eventually leading to Shingles.

I’d never experienced sickness like Shingles before. Sure, I’ve been suffering from migraines since 2004, but I’d never had something knock me on my ass like Shingles. It made me begin to reevaluate my life.

The catalyst to getting over my depression, the stress I’d suffered from my grandfather’s death was a mental break.

The break made me realize I wasn’t healthy, mentally, physically or spiritually.

When I broke, I knew something had to change. That was the middle of March, just after my 38th birthday.

The one thing I thought of when I broke was this, “Every one will be better without me.”

I believed this, not because I was selfish, but because I believed I was doing something good for those around me.

When you’re depressed enough to want to take your life, you completely believe if you weren’t there, every one would be better.

This thought is not selfish, it’s a belief that life for you is better without them, it’s not about getting away from life, it’s about you being better because they’re not there to cause problems for you. This one thing is a misconception about suicide.

I’ve been to the edge with a knife, and I know what it looks like to stare at the blade and resist the urge to “make things better for those around you”.

Depression nearly took me, but it was my desire to see how this story ends which has kept me going.

When it was at its worst, I found something to help me get better.

Life takes us places we never thought we’d go. Sometimes we end up in a place where we need help.

Please ask for help if you need it!

Suicide Support Line

 

 

 

Writing to Help Others.

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We disguise who we are from ourselves. We do this to keep others away, keep ourselves happy and to, hopefully, chase the demons we deal with.

The disguise we use often depends upon the nature of the demon. Childhood trauma is a big one, but hiding from things we don’t want others to know, this keeps us happy, but also maintains the disguise.

Keeping up the illusion gets harder as we get older, and creating ways to deal with our demons may lead us down a darker path.

A path filled with pills, bottles and cutting, but writing creates a forum for our demons. It brings them to the forefront of who we are, and more importantly who we strive to be.

Writing, like meditation is our outlet and with that outlet we discover we’re stronger than we believed possible, even if we must discover it through our fiction.

Fiction is the one outlet which we can put a character in a situation and possibly work through the issues we’ve dealt with through them.

The process is difficult, but leads us to a different path, one devoid of pills, bottles and hopefully cutting.

Finding the right story to get through our trauma may be difficult, but keeping a journal of the trauma and story ideas helps.

In the pages of our journals we find an avenue to get through the life we had, have and hopefully will lead us to a better day.

Writing fiction helps us to find ourselves through our characters. It encourages us to get through another day and discover, we are better than we were told, and it helps us to know, just like our characters, things to get better.

They get better because we keep writing. We keep trying and we decide the disguise, though useful, isn’t necessary anymore.

When we write, we discover there are others who’ve needed the help. Who’ve waited for something to help them through their dark paths.

We write because we know there’s that one book which helped us, and we want someone else to feel the same hope we felt.

We lose our disguise because we no longer feel the need to hide from the world. We abandon the disguise, we get through it and we write to help others.

 

Death, Fear And Discovery…

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St. Louis Cemetary No. 2

Death comes only when we’re not expecting it, for those are the times we don’t fear it.

These words have been making the rounds in my head for the last week. I’ve been doing TM for the past four months and though I no longer worry as much about who I am, I do feel myself worrying about others more often.

I’m not sure why, but I feel like there are things in this life which can be solved, not by weapons, callousness or hate, but by wanting to be better than we were yesterday.

Death it seems is something which I’d wanted to do, at least in the early part of this year. It’s now nearly August and I find myself looking to experience new things, take trips places and do the things I’d put off out of fear.

Life it seems is more important to me than it was a year ago, and this past year I’ve lost my grandfather and my wonderful Abigail.

My grandfather was something I saw coming; Abigail, I knew was going to happen soon, but I didn’t want it to. She’d sat by me through all my migraines and now, when I have one, I cast my eyes toward her bed, which still sits in the corner, and I find myself thinking about what a good dog she was and how she came along and helped me get through many things. I think that’s why she lived her 16 years, she was watching over me.

We often hide from the life we have, either in alcohol, drugs, depression or repressed feelings, but today I can honestly say I am living the life I want.

It’s an odd feeling to live the life you want, and not give shit what anyone thinks about you, or your life choices. I discovered that there is only person I need to make happy with my choices, myself and I don’t care for the thoughts of anyone else.

This year I found myself, I wonder what the rest of the year will bring?