Refilling the Well of Creativity

Yesterday, final day of our incredible retreat with my incredible partner-in-teaching Jordan Rosenfeld and 18 incredibly intrepid writers, I found myself rushing faster and faster to the finish-line, my vision narrowing to one thing and one thing only -- escape!! Well, not really escape. The weekend was filled with heart-felt memories and deep learning. Rather… solitude… space… freedom…

Finding more and more of a struggle to reconcile the outer me as teacher and presenter to who I am finally able to re-embrace as the shy, silent backwards daughter wrapped in a cloud of cotton candy. I'm left to wonder about that journey out of silence into the exotic world of words -- damn, who knew there could be so many words generated at once?

Have you ever considered how many words are being written across the world at this very instant? How many being said? We're all worried, and rightly so, about over-population of humans. What about over-population of words?

After the yapping excitement of returning home calmed, I settled in to revel in Maya Angelou on Oprah's OWN Super Soul Sunday. She spoke of the pieces stolen from us when slung slights, criticisms, cruelty, discomfit. Makes you wonder how any pieces are left at a ripe old age. Fortunately, love and acceptance for exactly who you are go far toward filling in those missing pieces.

Can't help but think of how many little pieces I lost this weekend, not stolen in meanness but offered with joy. Whole chunks of my thoughts and beliefs and knowledge and experience and magical thinking left me to grow and multiple on their own. I'm left feeling a bit like Swiss cheese.

The darkness of scarcity lifts as the light of abundance sweeps in.

Blessed time to go inward, refill, allow for space and the reconnection to that which sustains me -- my own writing and the sea.

Writer's Courage

Over the past six or so years of providing plot consultations to writers, I rarely have had a cancelation. When one happens, the occurrence tends to give me pause. When it happens twice with the same writer, I can't help but speculate why. Always, my imagination settles on one degree or another of writer's fear.

Years ago, I heard Maya Angelou say that a character trait most important in life is courage. 

This is so true for both the protagonist of a story and for the writer, too. Having worked with writers of all genres and all ages, I appreciate and honor the courage and fortitude it takes to continue to keep at it, to keep showing up, to face antagonist after antagonist, pick yourself and your characters off the ground over and over again, dust yourselves off, and start again, to believe in yourself and your story and the transformative nature of creating something out of nothing.

Here's hoping the writer in question remembers there is nothing to fear in life but fear itself... Naw... How about this? I'm not that scary. The process is intense but truly is nothing to fear. 

Like your protagonist, face your greatest antagonist / fear and you, too, become the star of your own life.