A Writing Contest for the Winter Solstice!

Cash Prizes and Inspiration!

Explore the contest now:
http://www.thefictionwritersjourney.com/Contest_Winter_Solstice_2005.htm

What follows is a whirlwind of suggestions. One may open up a story for you --or you may want to ignore these ideas...

A story about a holiday of joy, spirit, tragedy, family friction ...

A story about ice skating on a moonlit night that evolves into a personal essay, memory or a tale of mystery, love or tragedy ...

A story about a grandmother or grandfather in the winter of their lives. The story might be poignant, funny, wise, filled with hatred, jealousy or misfortune ...

A story about the old one you will become or are ...

A story about movement, moving on, evolving; emerging; discovery; death ...

A story about the mystery of the unseen ...

An story about defying your Inner Critic and slamming the door on negativity ...

A story about a bear hunt in northern woods, wolves,camping in winter, ice fishing ...

A story about the passing on of family rituals ...

A story about pregnancy, birth, flying into the night on the wings of an eagle ....

As you can see, there are no limits to what can be submitted.
The Winter Solstice can be only a jumping point, or it can becentral to your submission.

Submission categories are: Fiction and Memoir/Personal Essay. Cash Prizes in both categories.

Join for the mailing list of the Fiction Writer's Journey to keep informed about the contest and much more!

Prizes and Submission Guidelines

Questions@thefictionwritersjourney.com

Manuscripts mailed!!!!!!!

Following yesterday's blog. I mailed the "Aunt Jane" manuscript to five friends.

Only one has replied. Said it was good. I wrote back, "What no comments on grammar, typos, etc. Please, I want feedback."

She replied, "Well, maybe you should tell earlier whose sister Jane is.
Too late to see typos. I'll look tomorrow. Partner thought it was good also." I felt relieved to get a little critique rather than just "it's good."
That doesn't do it for me. I want to know why it's good, or I doubt the comment.

Sigh. Four more to go. You'd think I'd sent it to God. And I tell myself I'm going to send off to some external site.??????

This is hard.

Every time I blog I hope hope hope I gain a little bit more confidence. This is practice for me. And I need practice both in craft, going deep into that underground place where truth lies, and in just being gutsy enough to share what I write.

I think sometimes the sharing is the hardest part of all. It's some deepseated fear of not being good enough to be worth reading. And yet I like many of the things I write. I have cried over them; laughed aloud; and found them erotic. Why should someone else not feel the same.???
Wrestling with the ICK, the superego, all the negative messages embedded in this writer self...I am in "boot camp" doing mental pushups.

I'll keep you posted on the fate of one "Aunt Jane." It's really a pretty good piece. Claire

PS Is hearing me be so graphic about my writing useful? Good nite to all you others out there perhaps also sitting at your computer doing the same push-ups I'm doing.

Mission Accomplilshed

For anyone following this blog regularly, I have said I wanted to write some short pieces as well as work on novel. And today I finished, oh, fifth draft of a short piece about my wonderful Aunt Jane. I think I'll send it somewhere. It is done. It is the best I can do.
And for once, dammit, I feel ok about it. I told her story and mine intertwined with hers. She wore gold hoop earrings; so do I. She smoked for too many years; so did I. She was a mavrick; so am I. She was much alone; so have I been. She loved her work; so do I.
Cheers.(And I think it is written well.) And to say that, for me, in a public place, is cause for celestial celebration.
claire- definitely a work in progress

Some thoughts on writing and being...

What does it mean to be fully present?
I see how completely I am entrapped in my mind.
How cleverly my mind weaves its ego needs and concerns into
my journey into presence, which is also the place I want to
be with my writing. To write, simply what flows. Trusting my
Inner Writer, trusting she leads me to my truth.

Eckhart Tolle said you can't get there, get to presence,
you can only be there.

How I long to be there.
Simply be. Knowing I am.
Who is the I am?
I get it, I lose it, I get it, I lose it.
I lose it.
I yearn for it, hunger for it.

Who is the I am?
I think she is quite wonderful and at peace.

A Writing Contest for the Winter Solstice from The Fiction Writer's Journey!

Oops! Writer late at night....

Somehow my blog on P.D. James was copied twice. Sorry.

A reminder not to blog when you are very tired or have had one glass too many of your favorite drink.

I wonder if others get this compulsion to write. I think I should be working on a personal essay or some such. I've written myself out on the novel today. I reached a place, after a hard to write scene, and was done . But I'm not done writing. And so I'm here blogging when perhaps I should be writing.(And what is the difference? There's a question to ponder.)

I more and more want to try some short pieces as diversions from the long haul of the novel. Maybe the kind of pieces I published back in my thirties/largely personal essays.

I also wonder if I have an obligation to use whatever small talent I have to write out against the politics running our country. My view, right or wrong, shouldn't I be expressing it? A friend just wrote me about the necessity to have "moral outrage" in your work. I am pondering that; provocative thought.

I need to sit down and wander into the rabbit holes that fill my mind, trip into one and fall, fall, fall, until some bramble bush catches me and there is a spark of an idea- something I wish and need to write about. And then I will immediateley start to write, sloppily, maybe even on the back page of the novel I'm reading. But it will be a genuine start.

And later at home, at the laptop, I'll translate into something more stable.

I am impatient and want to know, NOW, what the topic is, perhaps so I can tell you. But that's not how it works. All I can share with you is that Julie, my dear lead character is castigating herself with guilt and has no immediate way of shaking loose from it.

How fascinating that she is me and yet she is not me at all. She is definitely my child, but even then, she runs beyond me, and does not do the predicted. I am so new at this novel writing business. I wonder how many I will have to write before I have an idea what I'm doing.

Good night. I hope this doesn't post twice. Claire, AKA, Aella (whirlwind)

P.D. James and Tenancity/Faith

I am a major fan of British mystery novelist, P.D. James. Her last book came out about two years ago (when she was 83). I read it with sadness, thinking it her last book. Also, she had her PI beginning to fall in love after decades of clinging to his dead wife. Ah so. That to me signaled her goodbye statement.

Then, I with wild delight, read that James has published another. And the reviews are as ravishing as ever.

I will buy the book tomorrow. I will, I must write her (after all she is 85 plus) and tell her how much enjoyment her books have brought to me.

Her forte' is description and atmosphere. And secondly, characterization. These are literate mysteries and well plotted. Any lover of Great Britain will be doubly enthralled.

But most of all, a cheer for the writer who writes another quality book at 85.

To me, working on my first at 66, it brings affirmation that work ability does not end at any predestined age.

She is a writer who described having her first child during the blitz of London. As she tried to push, she also tried to hear where it sounded like the next bomb would drop.

She is a gutsy lady and good writer. Brava. Claire

Writing Technique: Point of View

Understanding Point of View

Point of view one is of the fiction writer’s most powerful techniques. Writing from your character’s POV means that you get inside the main character’s head, heart and gut ––literally see the world through the character’s perspective. So, for example, when you are in the “bad guy’s” POV, be true to that POV. An excellent example of this is Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov thrusts an ax into his landlady’s head. Thus begins one of the greatest novel ever written. Did Dostoevsky have to put an ax into anyone’s head to write this? Clearly not. And neither do you. But Dostoevsky needed to experience Raskolnikov’s physical journey as a murderer as well as his emotional journey from darkness to redemption.

William Faulkner wrote: “... the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself... alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the sweat and the agony.”


Faulkner has given us a tough assignment, yet it is an assignment at which we much excel as fiction writers. The best way to succeed at this is to leave behind what you believe to be “true” and open yourself to the vast possibility of life experiences outside your own. For it is not true that we can only write what we experience. As writers, we access the imagination, that cosmic place where everything is possible and the great expanse of human emotions resides.


One of the best ways to experience the power of point of view is to write an emotionally strong scene between two people who, when they tell their story, have very different versions of the experience. For example, write a fight between two people, perhaps a mother and a daughter or a father and a son. A fight has built in tension, which makes the scene easier to write. You also have opportunity to use dialogue – when people fight, they usually have a lot say! Begin by asking yourself what is the issue between the mother and daughter (or father and son, or any two people). First write the scene from the daughter’s point of view. This means you get inside only the daughter's head. The reader can hear what the mother says and see how she acts, but cannot know her thoughts. This exercise brings you totally inside the daughter. The only inner thoughts you use belong to the daughter.


Then put the daughter's story aside and write the scene from the mother’s point of view. You need not have the exact same dialogue and almost certainly the story will be very different from the mother’s point of view. This time around, you show the reader only the mother’s inner thoughts. The daughter speaks and acts but we do not know her motivations other than by what she says and does.


This is a great eye opener of an exercise geared to deepening your understanding of the writer's technique of point of view. It also encourages dialogue. Even if you've never written dialogue, give it a try. I've worked with a lot of people who think they can't write dialogue -- only because they've never tried. The truth is everyone can write dialogue! So can you!

A Blog on Blogging and Heather's Reply

It was good to see a reply from Heather to Emily's very passionate request for replies.

When Heather mentions a school system that does not encourage creativity, I want to jump up and down to say I AGREE. I don't think our country (USA) does urge and reward creativity. I don't think parents for the most part do either. Somehow, and it puzzles me, creativity is seen as "extra," "luxury," "fuzzy-headed," and a host of negative words.

It's only been in the last ten years that I have become acutely aware than the health system in the USA is not the best in the world. We seem caught up in such arrogance. We're big, hence better. And if we happen to get a BA /etc from Harvard/etc, we're obviously the best (and brightest).

Absurd. Right now one of the writers I know, and very much admire, flunked out of Radcliffe. She just wasn't ready for college. She is highly literate, and her education has come from her own reading and work experiences.Another writer, supported herself and children working as a waitress. She knows as much about literature as anyone I know. And she writes skillfully.Also, she's seventy and becoming a better writer each time she writes.I see it. Exciting.

Need we mention people who do have degrees who are not literate in either the academic meaning of the word or the ethical/philosophical.

We could make a long list of the creators in history who did not have formal academic training.

I don't think we value risk-taking or playfulness. Perhaps that is why jotting down a quick response to a blog may seem a waste of time or something that we don't want to do because we think we chance making a fool of ourself .

I think a blog should be the kind of place where we could risk making a mistake. Certainly interesting conversations never start when everyone is worried about saying the 'right' thing.

Now, there are so many blogs. Maybe everyone is blogged out- and one more is just one more too many. If so... that's understandable.

The reason I'm using this blog is that it gives me a break from writing on my novel. Usually (not tonight) I spend some time thinking of what I'm going to say, and it's good exercise. I guess tonight I'm taking the chance of having some sloppy syntax, a misspelled word....

I wrote every night this past week but one, and think I'll skip tonight because It's late, I'm tired, and just got home from weekend trip.

But I wanted to write something, and it was the reply from Heather that triggered this. Hi there in Australia. Thanks for being my writing prompt for tonight.

I know some people say "get a life" to people who blog. My response is who are they to decide the content of my life.

While I'm writing, thinking about the content, getting the words down on the laptop screen, I believe I'm doing important cognitive work. I'm practicing. Albeit, not totally loose, and not totally working - but it's practice. I can feel that. I always feel a bit of fear about what that invisible audience might think. But, that's the risk-taking part.
How do I think I can try and market a novel with all sort of 'unacceptable' things in it if I can't make a modest entry here.

But, again, I'm 66 and I've taked a damn long road getting here. And I know a lot about fear (let's say I have my doctorate in fighting fear), so, maybe it's just not time yet for some readers/writers to blog??. And people must emerge in their own time.

I would like more comments because I really learn from hearing what other people who like to put words on paper have to say.

It's a curious hobby/passion. Why do we go off and do this. I know for sure I feel comforted and less alone in this personal addiction when I read about how fellow addicts feel. I read and reread books by writers who write about their personal writing life.

No matter what happens in my writing life, it has nourished me. I love words, like the feel of writing a strong sentence, like pouring out pain and rage when I feel it, like having this as my companion. Only cigarettes back in the sixties and seventies were such good faithful friends.

Maybe we writers are all a little mad, and I just don't care. Writing gives me a vehical to express indignation, fury, love, compassion, ...so much. And it's mine. Maybe no one will read (or enjoy) this, but I enjoyed writing it.

I guess also, I feel a little presumptious being the only constant contributor, as if I knew more than other people. That's surely not so.

Well, this blog on blogging is not my greatest effort, but it's what I think blogs are all about. Pen on key, take risk, and practice. (Or, be silent if that is what your soul says you should do today.) And, just for the record, I never press the "publish" button without feeling anxious. It's part of the process/at least for me.
claire

Forged With Fire:Creativity and the Creative Spirit, Part 4

An Overview of the Creative Process


The creative process falls into two parts, the intuitive/divergent and the rational/ convergent. The intuitive/divergent is the first part of the process and follows the "spark," that wonderful, life-giving, fantastically fleeting moment of inspiration. The intuitive resides in the right side of the brain, the same place as dreams, emotions and feelings and has been called the chaos or the great seething sea of the unconscious. One of the great difficulties and joys of the creative process is that we must fall down the rabbit hole or dive into this great seething sea. Creativity is risky business.


Living a creative life demands faith in your inner world and the only way I know to take the plunge is to trust that order will emerge. It must. Order is as integral as chaos to the creative process, but the order will be new and often unexpected. Gertrude Stein put it this way, "You cannot go into the womb to form the child... What will be best in it (your creation) is what your really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation."


The process of gestation and birth is a perfect symbol for the creative process, whether it be the birth of a child, an animal, the emergence of a butterfly from the chrysalis or the flower from the seed buried under winter's frozen earth. Birth is a continual marvel; it warms the heart, brings out the fierce instinct to protect and fills the mind with wonder. We need to hold our own creative ideas in similar awe. We need to give them the warm, safe place in which to germinate. We need to protect them in their newborn vulnerability, which is the same as protecting our deepest self. This is precisely what, I believe, makes the first steps of a creative endeavor so difficult. Too often we don't trust our own deepest truth; it makes us feel too vulnerable or it seems incongruous with the person we think we are or must be. Our Inner Critics are all too quick to discard these newborns as silly, frivolous or worse, as boring and still worse, as downright stupid.

The poem below by Franz Kafka is a passionate refute to the Inner Critic.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Do not even listen, simply wait.

Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,

it has no choice,it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-- Franz Kafka


Imagine such faith in the creative process! Imagine being self-nurturing enough to give our stories and books, any of our creations, such time and patience, Yet, if we do, Kafka promises we will receive ecstasy that brings untold meaning to our life. Mere publication pales in relationship to such abundance.

This does not mean, however, that we sit and stare at our navels and imagine the work will magically appear full blown on the page. This is a misunderstanding of Kafka's passionate metaphorical intent and also neglects the second part of the creative process that has everything to do with order and linear thought. Rather, Kafka's poem feels like a star burst of passion for the intuitive part of the process, which is for many of us the hardest part. We are not taught about the creative process; school is about growing up and out of childish meandering and play. Such a puritanical view ultimately feeds right in the Inner Critic, who then negates the intuitive and places the emphasis on educating the mind by getting good grades, getting into good colleges, getting the good job etc. etc. etc.

This is an education that is out of balance; it eviscerates the creative process and turns out lopsided human beings who believe the intellect is CEO of our existence.

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a societythat honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." ~ Albert Einstein

"Creative minds play with the objects they love." ~ Carl Jung

"From myself to a child of five is but a step." ~ Leo Tolstoy

Just look at small children to see how seriously they take their play. In fact, play is how we first learn and through it we find delicious joy in the unexpected. How delighted children are when their "play" leads to new understanding. Creative people never lose joy in their play. Not that our creative work is always a big joy ride. It's hard work, often frustrating, but in the end, why do it if we can't ultimately find fun? Which is why, for example, writing in the white heat is so fantastic. Because the outer reality no longer has any pull and we are immersed in the mystery.

Katherine Anne Porter put is this way: "Perhaps in time I shall learn to live more deeply and consistently in that undistracted center of being where the will does not intrude, and the sense of time passing is lost, or has no power over the imagination."

No matter that we, like Katherine Anne Porter, "yearn for that undistracted center of being where the will does not intrude," it is often the hardest destination to reach, precisely because it requires an act of faith.

Please write your thoughts, feelings and experiences. All you need to is click "comments" below.

Unexpected Gifts and Brenda Ueland

Writing is not all anxiety and danger. Unexpected gifts lurk within the writer's grasp.

In the novel I'm writing (I don't have a name yet), I have a character who plays a social worker. I had made her young, bright, and kind. As I moved along, I realized it would be neat to have her older, more involved, also very kind, and, lo and behold, motherly.

For someone whose own relationship with her mother left a lot to be desired, this writing is sheer joy. I feel like I'm cheating a bit, but for one brief chapter, the character and I are almost one. At this moment the older social worker, I call her Greenie, is taking my lead character, Julie, shopping. Julie is relishing being mothered in a way she never was. She used to envy seeing girls shopping for clothes with their mothers. Now she is doing that with the her Auntie Mame type social worker: Greenie.

Also, there is the very slowly developing love relationship with Steve. The ability to have he and Julie capture parts of something I had long ago, is a chance to relive it. It's fun, sexy, nostaglic, and energizing. This male character has a long life expectancy.(In other words, no plans to kill him off!)

A novel is indeed a "bully pulpit." I've got the Cuban Missile Crisis to discuss; unionism; black-white relationships; growing up in the south; and more, more, more. Describing New York in the sixties. Making jabs at the deficit mental health systems and exploring the mystery of psychotherapy. Bully pulpit indeed, as well as an incredible journey.

I can't imagine what I will do when this is over. It will be hard to let Steve , Sweete, Karen, Andrew, and Leona go. My guess is that I'll be working hard to discover how I can find another topic/issue/character that moves me to write. Again, in my mind I cheat and think I could write a sequal, then I could stay with my characters. I wonder if that's why some mystery writers stay with their PI for book after book.

I thought I'd blog this since usually I'm whining about the pain of it all. And that's true enough, but, the fun is there too. Really, being a writer is such an enormous gift.
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Brenda Ueland

Note: Today I bought, for maybe the 10th time, Brenda Ueland's book on writing. I keep giving it to people I work with; this copy I intend to keep. She is ageless/wild/ savvy. It was the first book on writing as a passionate way of living that I ever read. I read her in my thirties and am reading her in my sixties. (Ms. Ueland died in 1985; she was 93 and living as creatively as she advocated). If anyone has missed reading her, the title is: IF YOU WANT TO WRITE.

(When I sat in my car reading the introduction, I discovered that Ms. Ueland wrote an autobiography available from Holy Cow !Press, Duluth, MN. I intend to order it.)

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Dealing with Anxiety

After blogging last night about my angst/anxiety, I pulled out Emily's book of quotes and went through it slowly. And slowly I begin to calm down as I read person after person saying the way to yourself lies in your passion and to deny that passion (and any work it entails) is to die. And I wrote down one quote which I don't have with me, but in essence it said, ...if you don't write your story, it will not be written. No one saw the world as you saw it; when you saw it; and that perhaps is something you owe yourself to share.)
Fini

More About Anxiety

I've got a well thought out blog waiting to be typed in. I keep going over it: I've revised it three times. But I don't think my heart's in it. And I have a feeling it's never going to be blogged. The times I blog are really when I have the guts/or desperation to write right here on the Blog page where the PUBLISH button is visible below: a frighening orange square screaming PUBLISH.

Today's anxiety is about being told I'm doing good work. I wonder how alone (or not alone) I am in this. I am "on a roll," I guess, in that I'm writing a lot, every day, and more material is in there waiting to come out.

I often go to bed thinking about my characters. They are with me everywhere. I wonder if it's Marilyn or Sharon who should die. And cold-bloodily I figure it out. I write about the developing love affair. Must admit I like getting to those parts; particularily fun to write.

I'm intrigued by what will happen. How can I play with it. How can I be in this flow and yet manage to make sure it's gritty true. I don't want to write superficially. But the gritty truth is probably what is making me anxious. And it's the truth I so much want to have the courage to write.

I have a pretty long history of thinking I could write nonfiction, could teach writing, could do some reasonably good personal essays, but a novel--no way. A novel would mean opening me up. And I never thought I'd be ready and willing to do that.

OK. So, I'm on a roll. But does that mean it's good or just that I'm on a writing "high."

Emily tells me it's good. I poliltely tell her I wished I could connect with that belief. I tell her I don't think she would lie, but, but, but. She says I'm one of her toughest cases re inabity to assess one's own work with some objectivity.

She tells me again she thinks this is good. The characters are alive and moving on. They are doing my novel for me.

I get off phone and e-mail a friend about how anxious the hour with Emily made me. Now here I am at the blog saying the same thing.

I worry about the deeper waters coming up. Some of the most raw material is yet to be written. Is the writer up to it. The character is. She's really pretty cool. And she's in a lot worse situation than I am. This back and forth dialogue in my head begins to feel a bit crazy. I'm glad I'm meeting a friend for dinner. She's a writer also. I need more feedback on this.

This is new territory. I feel like I'm surfing. And I'm going for the best wave there is. Nothing second rate, the best.

My character, Julie, isn't going to cop out. She's going the whole nine yards.
It's the writer I worry about. This is about what I believe and feel and can imagine or have experienced. Anyone reading it would know a lot about me.
I use four letter words, I'm not too hip (and I so want to be cool), and I know about the darker side of life. The things you almost never talk about.

So, another page of learning about the art and craft of writing. It's dangerous and frightening. It may be the road to healing the characters as well as the author.
probably to be continued...