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.

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.

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!

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

Dig a deep hole to bury your sorrows. Bury them, do not forget them. For, they are alive and will burrow their own tunnel until there is a cozy place underground, just big enough to turn around in, just big enough to curl up on the white fluff of wild geese down inthe corner beneath the curried sheep’s wool. On this soft bed, you will be safe.

This is your place to dream. It’s a place to cry. A place to shrivel up, but not die—not yet, not yet—because in the underground burrow are all the suupplies you need for consolation and later, for resussitation.

There’s a cupboard filled with chocolate and music and friends who peer into your heart and say words that come from deeper than their lips. These friends understand writers. They leave you alone when needed and come when beckoned.

This writer’s room is your world. It’s a safe and cozy womb. No, you are not buried alive, you are planted here, sown here by the grace of goddess and who can say what words will shoot up and what flowers will bloom from this green stalk planted in the darkness of your underground writers room?

Burrow in the darkness of your nurturing writing burrow. Pick up pen and let it all go…let it all flow.

I suggested he do a Sensory Scan. You can do this, too.

1) Take each sense in turn: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell.

2) Scan each sense. Put yourself back in the situation you want to remember in order to write about. Let’s say you are working with sound: A door slams. A person screams, groans, giggles. A cane taps on the corridor.

“Yes, it’s working. Pictures are coming in,” reported Jake.

And, then, write, dad-gum-it.

This aphorism is something I said at a book evening at Left Bank Books in the Central West End, St. Louis…when the conversation turned to writing. The author of the evening urged me to write it down, so I did. (One of the foundational rules: write it down.)

What I was getting at is that we need to know the rules, take them into our work, not slavishly seek and follow them. In that way, we find a firm foundation. In that way, we find our unique, throbbing voice.