In the last weeks we’ve developed a way of working which I’m analyzing into steps below in hopes it might help those writers among Riehlife’s readers. [Note: This is filed in the Write, Pen! section where you'll find all of the Riehlife writing suggestions stored.]

The rules for freewriting, of course, are along the lines of “write as fast as you can without making corrections” and so forth…in an effort to get around the critic, and go deeper than the intellect.

In what I’ve coined as “Directed Contemplative Writing” the need for speed is replaced by placing the mind.

In Clive Matson’s “Let the Crazy Child Write!” workshops, one question he always asks participants to answer the first night is “What is the Crazy Child for you?”

Right now, my answer would be “directed contemplative writing” because using this technique allows us to produce writing that is akin to listening in on the unconscious mind, the creative unconscious.

1) Choose a nugget to work, from previous writing, conversation, or your thoughts.

2) Keep it simple…no more than one word or at most a short phrase.

3) Use your nugget as your touchstone throughout the piece. What Gabriele Lusser Rico calls “rhythm and recurrence.”

4) Journey to the place you need to be in to write closely with your nugget…maybe a real physical place, an emotional space, or frame of mind.

5) Scan. What do you know about this nugget? Follow it through like a thread through a maze. Take your time.

6) Go for sense image and the life of the object. Stay with the body, the visceral, in order to take the reader there and in order to keep you in the charged writing space.

7) Learn what it takes for you to get comfortable and cozy.

Writing is inherently risky because it involves revelation. One writing process guru says we need to “hush and hold” at the beginning of creative work.

What makes you safe and cozy?

For me, it’s fuzzy socks and a blanket my mother bought on her travels…combined with the cave conditions of dim light and quiet.

For others, it’s being surrounded in a coffee shop with muzak as an aural surround. Learn what it takes for you to get comfortable and cozy companion.

Click here to read Yvonne Perry’s report “Janet Riehl’s Nashville Visit” on Yvonne Perry’s Writers in the Sky blogspot.

The Riehl Family on the Homeplace…everyone played music or wrote poetry as a matter of course. Anna Riehl, my grandmother, in foreground, wrote the poetry collection “On the Heights.”

ADVENTURES IN CREATIVE COLLABORATION

Collaboration means to work together. When I chart the “greatest hits” of my life, many of these experience revolve around rich working collaborations. One of my greatest joys in life is collaborating with friends. I count good ones like the time with sound engineer Scott Kidd on one hand. (Click here to read Scott Kidd’s credits on All Music.) He’s one of the greats, and so humble. This time working with him was beyond anything I could have imagined or designed.

Recording the audio for “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” in Nashville with Scott was both collaboration and peak experience. Essentially, I commissioned Scott to work with me in creating an audiobook and the audio for a multimedia ebook (text and links that take you to audio, video, or external locations…an ebook that functions like a website or a blog) for “Sightlines” in what turns out to be a very active collaboration.

Scott is a dream collaborator because he’s skillful, relaxed, fun, responsive, and on point. For this project, I couldn’t have imagined anyone more right to work with. My father would say, “He has a good touch on it.” He understood about the importance of family stories, history, heritage, and legacy. That’s the undercurrent of my upbringing, my current collaborative life with my father, and the five sections of “Sightlines” 90 poems. A sound editor like Scott is comparable to a film editor who pulls a project together like a collage.

At the core of Scott’s talent for collaboration is his talent for sharing his humaness. I cannot say enough good about the man, truly. At only 31, Scott is a man of heart…a man of soul…a man of quiet, efficient action. He sees the big picture and get the details right while making it all easy and fun. He’s an engineer with an artist’s sensibility and intuition. He really understands what collaboration is.

ADVENTURES IN COMPASSION

“Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” is a downhome family love story beyond death that won a DIY honorable mention in 2007. My sister’s death in 2004 launched the spiritual process that gave birth to the book, but “Sightlines” is more than a dead sister book. It’s a book of homecoming…to my family, the homeplace, and to myself and a larger sense of family.

Early in our work together Scott shared that his family had also experienced a sudden death (his uncle) and that he had found “a soft spot that wasn’t there before.” This statement so struck me becuase it’s the very essence of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on compassion: “The times when you are suffering can be those when you are open, and where you are extremely vulnerable can be where your greatest strength really lies. Say to yourself: I am not going to run away from this suffering. I want to use it in the best and richest way I can, so that I can become more compassionate and more helpful to others. Suffering, after all, can teach us about compassion. If you suffer, you will know how it is when others suffer. And if you are in a position to help others, it is through your suffering that you will find the understanding and compassion to do so.”

In his own direct and honest way, this is what Scott has done. He’s infused his technical expertise with such gentleness that you may enter as a client, but walk away feeling as if you’ve made a friend. Scott said that in the beginning of his career he’d tried to model someone who was extremely businesslike. But, that just wasn’t him and caused undue stress. “I just had to be myself,” he told me. That’s been the cornerstone of his success in working with many of Nashville’s music royalty.

Our work sessions were bookended by playing with his Boston Terrier Tucker, eating Sushi together at Peter’s, and marvelling over the pro-quality wedding album his father-in-law gave them as his present.

What I learned about doing business in Nashville from working with Scott, listening to his stories, and lunching with Hal Manogue and Yvonne Perry at the Yellow Porch (where it felt like we were just hanging out on our front porch, jabbering, watching the world go by) is that it’s very relational…very old school…old world.

BLOG DUET WITH YVONNE PERRY OF WRITERS IN THE SKY

Click here to read Yvonne Perry’s report “Janet Riehl’s Nashville Visit” on Yvonne Perry’s Writers in the Sky blogspot.

Find out:
1) Why I wanted to make an audiobook of “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary”….and how long I’ve had this dream.
(Yvonne is one of the folks who inspired me in that direction when I appeared on her January 12, 2007 podcast)
2. Audiobook and multimedia ebook products from the recording session…what’s next?
3. The music and poetry and stories and humorous asides used.
4. The recording session and process.
5. Did I practice?
6. Why go all the way to Nashville? Relational business as a way of life.
7. Hints for tackling an audiobook project

“Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” shares good company with these other Independent Author Guild Members and their books.

Floyd Orr
Kevin Thompson
Shirley Mahood
Lynn Osterkamp
Shannon McRoberts
Joy Collins
Linda Gould
Laurel Osterkamp
Trudy Schuett

Find out more about Dianne K. Salerni’s prize-winning book “High Spirits” by clicking here.

First Place Winner in the 2007 Reader Views Literary Awards

“A delightful discovery, mixing the right combination of gothic mystery and conspiracy.” ~ Brian Trent, author of Remembering Hypatia

“Gone With the Wind meets The Titanic …” ~ Rick Barber, 850 KOA in Colorado

When you receive a “Listenback” from a critique on your work, what can you do next?

Use the feedback you’ve received to set up exercises to try things out.

Use this releasing question: What other poems are inside this poem?

Editing and re-writing are like sculpting.

Some time back I phoned in my 6-word memoir:

Country girl roamed.
Home grazing sweetest.

and my 6-word description of “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary”

A downhome family
lovestory beyond death.

for the May Story Circle Network Podcast. Frankly, I’d forgotten all about it. Then, this morning on the Independent Authors Guild listserve, Bobbi Chukran mentioned hearing my voice on the podcast, so I went to check it out, never having heard the podcast before.

My short portion of the May SCN podcast–my own 6-word biography and how it can be applied to book marketing–can be heard towards the end…along with other listener contributions from SCN Internet Chapter e-circle members who responded via the Listener Line as I did.

The main podcast on memoir is also excellent, and I encourage you to enjoy that as well.

Here’s the description:
Author Linda Wisniewski talks about her recently published memoir, “Off Kilter: A Woman’s Journey to peace with scoliosis, her mother, and her Polish heritage.” Linda tells us about her experience with writing as healing, and she gives us some great tips on how to pursue
publication.

I will share my secret of being able to write when there is no time for writing.

When I am in a boring job that only requires my presence, when I wake up at night and tend to remember all of the dirty deals that people have handed me—these kind of times.

I think. Sometimes I write scenes in my mind. If I get a a chance I jot down enough to jog my memory. Sometimes years later I run across these notes and it brings back the whole thing. I wrote a book one time based on four lines I had written down years before.

Many of you are too young to recall Eugene Manlove Rhodes, one of the foremost western writers of his day before writers of western stories got to be lilke blades of grass in the spring. But, before the days of tape recorders egend says that Rhodes would sometimes quote whole chapters of a book that he was writing, that he had NEVER WRITTEN DOWN! Somehow he got it all done.

Keep writing. It is a refuge. Like I said in my talk last week at the Writers Club: I can’t say that writing saved my life, but it saved my sanity.

Keepwriting!

Dear Janet,

My sweetheart, Nan, and I drove around Clear Lake to take photos of Mount Konocti and buy a copy of your wonderful book “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” at the Lakeport bookstore.

On a whim, we went over the Hopland grade to Lakeport. As we reached the summit, we could see Konocti off in the distance. The top was bathed in morning sunlight, the foothills were dark green, and the base was in shadow—three levels of heaven. The photograph came out great and captured the “supine form” of the Konocti Princess.

View of Konocti from the Hopland Grade by John Frary

I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” It is beautifully written. I clearly identified with the toil and tribulations you underwent and endured in losing your loved ones. I was a caregiver for my wife who passed on six years ago. A warm, loving relationship can endure and be strengthened by difficulties that are not even imaginable in the beginning.

I especially liked ASHES WASHED CLEAN. Your poem reminded me of a crazy experience I had helping my best friend scatter his mother’s ashes over the S.F. Bay. The Neptune Society’s boat broke down before we could leave the harbor, and so we took on the task of finding a suitable place to release her beautiful soul. We carried the urn and walked for hours, beyond the marina and all the way to Fort Point under the Golden Gate, where we finally released her to the outgoing tide.

This is the hour o’ soul,
Thy free flight into the wordless
And there fully forth emerging,
Silent, gazing
Pondering the themes
thou lovest best
—Walt Whitman

Please let me know when you will be in Lakeport again for the signing of, hopefully, a new book? I’ll be there!

In friendship,

John Frary

P.S. In this photo taken from Lakeport, Mt. Konocti has a cuter “nose” and seems to have “pitch poled” to the bottom of her bed in Clear Lake.

John H. Frary’s “View of Konocti from Lakeport”

What do singing on Broadway, training dogs, and mastering the art of the business pitch have in common? Patience, preparation, and perspective. I learned this valuable lesson from a young friend Annemieke Farrow (daughter of Stephanie and John Farrow of Albuquerque, New Mexico).

Annemieke transitioned from a successful theater career in New York City to running a thriving dog training business in Los Angeles.

During her theater days in NYC from 1999 to 2006, she survived 4,273 auditions by using these useful rules of thumb:

1) Prepare, prepare, prepare.
2) Set a goal of what you want to learn in the audition
3) Relax and enjoy yourself once you get there.
4) Release the outcome by declaring the experience a success if you’ve learned something and enjoyed yourself.

I recently discovered that I could transfer Annemieke’s audition survival method to an appointment with a NYC agent at the Missouri Writers Guild Conference in Columbia, Missouri.

I’ve been working on building my skills in pre-marketing a book by learning how to write a clear plot summary, synopsis, and email pitch letters to publishers and agents. This was my first face to face pitching session. I asked successful published writers I knew for specific advice and they were very generous in responding. In the 5-10 minute session, I did my best to apply their advice and also put Annemieke’s basic audition thriving tips into practice

I told the literary agent right off that I was a Pitching Virgin. I told her my plan for our meeting was to present: my writer credentials; a 2-sentence essentialization of my project; six things I’d do to support the book; three questions I had for her.My questions were: 1) What would make such an offbeat project most marketable? and 2) What do publishing firms do these days to assist authors in promoting books? and 3) How does her agenting service work?

She said that major publishers don’t do much of anything to market books for most authors these days. Mostly they work with Sales Teams who speak to book buyers at stores and sales reps working through the established distribution channels.

She explained that in agenting, a book could either go to auction (if there are many interested publishers), or go for the best offer
available from the one firm interested, say.

So, there you have it. I’m no longer a pitching virgin. Even though my book isn’t right for her agency, I declare my session an absolute success because 1) I learned lots; 2) It was great practice; 3) I enjoyed the experience, in spite of the considerable adrenaline rush of having to condense so much into such a short amount of time.

Comparing author and movie-maker pitch sessions to the auditions that musicians and actors endure as regular fare of their professional life is helpful to me. Because, in the pitch session, in these days of the author as personality, you are auditioning yourself, not just your work.

It’s taxing, yes, but part of connecting with an audience and a market for your creative work, which, in the business world, at the end of the cycle, become products. These products are of and for the culture first and foremost, but it is the business end…especially in a commercial society built on Capitalistic principles…that will determine who reads or sees or hears your work…and, for how long.

August 24, 25, & 26, 2007 Nancy Connally’s three-day case study on critics and critiquing began here.

August 21, 2007
How to Use Criticism and Spring Back from Rejection

August 22, 2007 Janet Muirhead Hill Identifies Categories of Critics a Writer Meets

August 23, 2007 August Janet Muirhead Hill Tells Writers How to Separate our Personhood from Our Work When Receiving and Using Criticism

June 12, 2007 Janet Riehl’s essay “The Art of Critique” in two parts begins here.

November 24, 2007 Riehl’s “Relishing Writing Rejection” featured on Eliot, a literary blog for the St. Louis Writers Guild