Giving the Inner Critic What For!

Okay, do you have the symbol of your Inner Critic?

If not, find one.

Take it in hand.

Hold it before you.

Look it in the eye, if it has an eye, or dead on center.

Talk to it, out loud. Be as firm as you need to be. Say something such as, “Inner Critic, I’m going in search of the Rabbit Hole now and if I’m lucky and brave, I’ll fall right in. But for sure that won’t happen if you’re around. So get your butt in gear and get out of my writing space!”

Pause, listen, get a sense as to whether your Inner Critic believes you. If not, repeat your statement, make yourself sound more commanding. Say it until both you and your Inner Critic know that you are in charge. Now, literally, carry your Inner Critic away from your writing space. Turn its back to a wall, bury it under a mound of towels or dirty clothes. Do whatever you need to do, short of annihilating it, to keep it away while you are creating. At the same time, advise the Inner Critic that when you finish creating, you will come and get her. Tell her this will be the routine whenever you are writing, and if she has hopes of ever being partners in your creative endeavors, she’d better learn to stop nosing in and berating you.

When you are certain the Inner Critic is safely under your control, return to your writing space.

Do this exercise as many times as you need until you feel the imagination overpowering the Inner Critic. You may need to do it every time you go to work in this book or on your writing or in other areas that demand creativity. I do this exercise when I am feeling anxious or upset and need to get control of my emotions. After a while, you won’t need the symbol of your Inner Critic; you’ll be able to carry on a conversation in your mind. When you no longer need the physical image of your Inner Critic, you can enshrine it on top of the refrigerator or on the back of the toilet bowl!

Creative Chaos: Its Call, Its Difficulty and Its Freedom.

A TeleSeminar from Emily Hanlon

Tuesday, April 22, 1 pm eastern time

Chaos is integral to the creative process.
Without chaos, nothing would be born.

This chaos has been called the great seething sea of the unconscious and it is the most difficult aspect of the creative process. It follows on the heels of the first spark of creativity, when everything is possible and nothing has taken form.

You try to give form to your idea, but the idea refuses to be tamed. Possibility and excitement turn into fear and overwhelming discouragement.

What happened to my great idea! Everything is falling apart. I'll never get it done... woe is me... I'm not really creative...

At this point, if you give into despair, you are in danger of aborting your creativity. For it is in the chaos that the spark of creativity is nurtured. In fact, you might even call the chaos the womb of creativity.

This TeleSeminar explores the irresistible call, difficulties and ultimate joy and freedom of creative chaos!

If you can't attend the TeleSeminar, you can listen online
or download the audio to your computer, CD or Ipod.

Cds are also available.

Tuesday, April 22, 1 pm eastern timeRegister: $20

I Am Not I

There is a very particular risk inherent in the creative process: when you take the journey inward, you discover that you are not who you think you are, or you are more than who you think you are. But sometimes these images reflected through the inner mirrors are so alien that they first appear ugly, even demonic and cause us to run. The trick is not to run, but to persevere. The image will shift, the fear will dissolve and the stranger seen through the creative mirror will become familiar and quite wonderful. These unknown parts of us will guide us through unseen doors, into unexpected landscapes.

A poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez speaks wonderfully to this point.

I Am Not I

I am not I.
I am walking beside me
whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit
and at other times manage to forget.
The one who forgives sweet when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who remains silent when I talk,
and the one who will remain when I die.

How do we discover these who walk beside us and tend to be who we are not? How do we learn to lift the smoke screen?

First of all, I'd like to suggest that these ones do not walk beside us, but these unseen, unexplored voices live inside us.

There are different ways of finding this inner self which some call the dark or shadow side, hidden self or true self. Whatever you call them they are parts of our selves that have been secluded, usually in childhood or adolescence, when it seemed somehow dangerous to put them out into the world. We learn very early in life to pass judgements on those parts of ourselves that don't meet with acceptance and, in so doing, we doom ourselves to live through a very small part of the totality of self while casting other parts of self into the shadows, where we keep them hidden, silenced in the dark.

Carl Jung said that the unconscious is a great friend, guide and advisor to the conscious and that psychic wholeness comes from bringing the unconscious and the conscious into balance. He believed the primary way of doing this is through dreams. I believe that this communication is also part and parcel of the creative journey. The trick is in breaking through the stranglehold that the rational, conscious mind, the "I" we think we are, has on us.

As far as I am concerned, this is the most difficult part of the journey, quieting the inner critic so that we can go unfettered, without judgment and criticism, into the great sea of the unconscious. This breaking through is also the hook -- or perhaps it is more accurate to say that when we finally break through into the creative unconscious, we are hooked. For there we find the hidden selves who hold so much of our deep yearnings and explosive drive. They hold talents, wisdom and knowledge we never dreamed we had. For the fiction writer, our hidden, disowned selves often come through as powerhouse characters -- if we let them! In so many ways, these hidden selves are partners in the dance of creativity.

To explore these ideas in more depth and see how they affect you and your writing, buy Emily's book, The Art of Fiction Writing and receive two e-books free!

You've heard it said, "Write what you know." How limiting! There's a cosmic world accessed through you imagination!

Write what you know?
This is not only boring but is contradictory to the basic core of creativity, which by definition brings into being that which has not been before. If you write from what you know, if you remain slavish to the facts of what happen, you are writing out of you concious mind and will remain stuck in the straightjacket of you conscious perception of “reality.” That said, there is nothing wrong with using your life or any aspect of your experiences as a jumping off point, as a doorway into the unconsious. The key is not to be slavish to the known. Rather we need to have out writer’s antenna out for the doorway into the unknown and the unseen. Gertrude Stein put it this way: “You cannot go into the womb to form the child... What will be best in it (your writing) is what your really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”