Hypnotic Cues for Creativity

I keep various toys and such around my office to help me ZONE OUT FOR WRITING. Some toys have a relaxing effect in themselves: like a slow-moving mobile, or one of those glass things that you turn over and watch bright-colored goop inside slowly run down to the bottom. It's THE LAVA LAMP PRINCIPLE: you stare and forget other stuff and slow down to the motion of the object. Relaxing.

Other things work to induce a relaxed and focused frame of mind (called TRANCE) not because they're innately hypnotic, but because I associate them with the way I felt the last time I messed with them, and I then start feeling that way again.

For example, a particular piece of music, or the smell of just-watered house plants, used again and again, becomes a cue to go into a particular frame of mind.

The blue image is something I put together just now while playing with some of my office objects. I like to look at it. It's a pale blue marble in a cobalt blue plastic box, shot close-up with flash and with the window light behind it.

I think it would make an interesting cover image for my most-recently completed project, my novel "COBALT BLUE." In the book, cobalt blue refers to the color, a tube of artist's oil paint, and to A MYSTICAL VISION.

If that picture doesn't put me quickly into a productive writing state, I don't know what would. BTW, the way I learned a lot of this stuff is from my psychologist-husband Bob Dick, who uses clinical hypnosis a lot in his practice.

An Adventurous Woman

Recently, and for the first time ever, I read two huge biographies of the same person, back-to-back.

And who was the fascinating subject? Not Benjamin Franklin or Clara Barton or any of those classic worthies.

Instead: Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who was in the league of Cheekiest Women of Our Time.

She married the son of Winston Churchill, and then producer Leland Hayward, and diplomat Averell Harriman, and in the interims was the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe.

"Pamela had been in the headlines for some fifty years, nearly always in extreme terms: the dazzling saloniere, the 'international siren,' the homewrecker, the gold digger, the power broker. 'If I had ever gotten bothered about what people thought, I would never have gone anywhere,' she told a reporter for The Washington Post in 1983." From Reflected Glory by Sally Bedell Smith.

According to one of her biographies, the word was that when she needed surgery three different men paid the same tab.

Now, I don't admire that. However -- I do greatly admire that she appeared to live the way she wanted to live and didn't appear to be held back by propriety. She was a 70s girl in a 50s world, and that took a lot of cheek.

She also wound up accomplishing quite a lot, when she went political in her later years. She became a major fundraiser of the Democratic Party, was sometimes referred to as the "doyenne" and "First Lady" of the party. So The Life of the Party by Christopher Ogden has a double meaning. She was "life of the party" in two ways.

As a 70-something she made People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People List. And she even died with flair: of a stroke in a swimming pool in Paris.

What Writing Type Are You?

What type of writer should you be? This little quiz is a hoot: as much fun as finding out your sleep number or your Myers-Briggs type. It's also flattering. And encouraging.

I took this test and learned I should be a screenwriter. What I write is novels and nonfiction books and articles, and virtually everything but poetry and the city directory. But I've never sold a screenplay (though I have sold screen rights.)

I wouldn't mind a bit getting a story into the theaters.

BTW, I first ran across this item on the site called Mom and Apple Pie: Serving Fresh Poetry. The link's to the left on my blogroll.

Wonder how Henry James would be profiled by this test! Or Don DeLillo.

Horseback Writers, Galloping Creativity

For writers in or near central North Carolina:

Writer and rider Billie Hinton, a wonderful regular commenter on this blog, will be hosting in October an all-day experience using horseback riding to jog loose the creative juices. It's called "CREATING FORWARD MOTION IN YOUR WRITING."

Billie will lead the workshop at her home. "Up to 4 participants will explore forward motion and movement with horses, planned writing breaks, lunch, and guided exercises in the midst of autumn color and hopefully, sunshine!" Email Billie at billie@billiehinton.com for details.

I highly recommend it. BTW, Billie is also a psychotherapist.

The Definition of Courage

Shirin Ebadi, a woman judge in Iran, was demoted to the position of court clerk after the Islamic revolution in that country in 1980. The very thought of such a thing happening makes me feel momentarily blind with fury. Ebadi fought back using her legal skills, and in 2003 received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last week a reporter for my local Raleigh newspaper interviewed her and asked her this question: "Would you define courage?"

She answered: "Courage means persistence in your belief, that difficulty along the way does not cause you to deviate from your path. It means you will make your best effort for what you believe in."

Succinct. It applies just as well to the long stumbling process of writing.

Ebadi, who has been jailed and gets death threats, has had to put up with a lot worse, though, than uncertainty and rejection and revision. Sunday, two days after that interview was published, she refused a summons from Iran's Revolutionary Court. Her book is Iran Awakening.

Publishing Requirements, Art Trends: How to Hitch a Ride

A large part of success in getting published or in almost any activity is being able to BORROW ENERGY from the great forces. Even when making the most iconoclastic art, it helps to have an awareness of the tides and trends--for making the best choices of allies, venues, timing, and marketing strategies.

Friend, shaman, and author Kelley Harrell gave me this week the startling seasonal wreath you see here, in celebration of our heading toward the cold season. I love it--the drama of it, the mystery, and the gutsy lack of cuteness.

Among other things, this wreath reminds me that, though we're heading for cold, we're now in the harvest season: editors who were at the beach a lot in summer are back in their rolling desk chairs now. It's time to send out the new ideas, harvest results from earlier efforts, and begin a new cycle.

The dark image, with its mirror and cross and feathers and cobwebs, is also for me an image of the meditative moment: when action will come to a dead-halt, before setting forth again in a new revolution.

Until I placed this rather delicate structure where it is, I hadn't realized how my mantel has been working on a theme. At the other end, though I know you can't see clearly, are prints by my artist and office-partner buddy Carrie Knowles. The shorter one is a highly stylized rendering of a greenish-gold sun. The tall one is three pictures: each one of the same wave forming and growing taller. (She made that rising wave while living in Australia, only weeks before the tsunami hit Asia.)

All these images are reminders of the great universe beyond the day's activities. They also manage to remind me that even if my work is new and odd, I can still hitch a ride on the existing power and HELP MY CHANCES FOR SUCCESS BY:
*locating the most sympathetic markets for my style and purposes
*calling people when they're most likely to be in their offices
*finding out the schedule and deadlines for a target magazine's theme issues
*jumping on opportunities wherever they turn up
*not planting flowers in the shade, thinking they'd be so much more comfortable there (as a beginning-gardener friend of mine once did)
*figuring out when to try to ride a big wave and when to run for high ground

May we all have an especially rich harvest this year!

A Liberating Vow

From frequent contributor and novelist Billie Hinton:

"My personal philosophy is that we all focus entirely too much energy
on 'how we can make things happen,' when really what we need to do is
VOW it, SEE it, and do the DAY-TO-DAY WORK we need to do while the universe puts the bigger pieces together."


This could be very relaxing approach, as well as a lot more productive. Day-to-day work is not a small thing, after all.

Besides-- remote control of the publishing industry through tensing of my neck and shoulder muscles is a poor strategy, now that I really look at it.

Strategy (and Hope) for the Stubborn Artist

A recent essay in the New York Times Book Review quotes Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, as defending the potential of the books that get the least marketing effort and sell the fewest copies.

This situation, he says, "is where the major writers of the future usually start. It's where much of the best writing is, the work of the ODD, UNCOOPERATIVE, INTRACTABLE, PIGHEADED AUTHORS who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The 'system' can only recognize what it's already cycled through. What's truly new is usually indigestible at first."

I tell myself that. And at the same time I know it's easy to discount criticism of my work as lack of appreciation for genius. (please take that comment in the ironic way it was intended)

HERE'S MY STRATEGY: I do my work the way I want it. Then if it doesn't sell the first time out, I take any feedback and revise in a way I think will satisfy the editor and that still is true to my vision, my voice, my purpose.

Sometimes I go through that process several times before a book sells. And it takes a godawful long time. But I've always felt that the book was better. And I take comfort in remaining fundamentally pigheaded, though it may not always show.

Advanced Decision-Making Skills

I've been obsessing today about whether to schedule a trip to NY and London--for book research--in October when the weather is better and my gut tells me is the best time, or in November when the airfare drops about $200 and I'd have more time to get ready. What would you do?

I knew something like this was going to happen today when I went to get dressed and was completely stymied: all my clothes were wrong. This is never a good omen. But I did manage to get dressed: jeans, boots (we had hurricane Ernesto today) and a striped T-shirt. How could that be so hard?

And then an epiphany in an e-mail from one of my sisters-in-law, who said in passing that she'd NEVER REGRETTED A SINGLE ADVENTURE she'd ever taken. I like that attitude. From that perspective, it doesn't matter if my trip is in October or November. I'm just tickled that I'm going.