Susan Reynolds's Blog

Try Writing a Passionate Opinion Piece

One of my biggest challenges in writing has been finding my voice. For years I struggled to even understand what was meant by “voice.” If I wrote marvelous, well-crafted sentences, wasn’t that enough? 

Well, no, voice matters, and it’s something that does not come easily to most. Voice is the indistinguishable something about the way you tell stories. It involves the way you observe life, others, events, as well as how you experience them, and how you recount them—the details you pick, the mood you set, the emotions you infuse, the style and the words you choose. Ideally, voice is distinctive and engaging. When you read something by an author who writes with a unique voice, it’s often unforgettable. Their voice becomes a huge part of what makes them great.

But how does an aspiring writer find his or her voice? Reading as many novels as possible–carefully analyzing their style, identifying how each author is distinctive or unique, noticing how they select details and invoke emotion, how to propel the story forward, how they write superb endings—helps tremendously. I don’t know how anyone who aspires to be a professional, published writer who ever achieved it without extensive, in-depth reading.

I called last year, my “year of reading,” during which I read over 90 novels, focused on women authors known for unique styles or voices. I wanted to see how they differed from other authors, how they broke the mold and developed a unique voice.

Experimentation is another way to discover voice. I recommend writing anything and everything—from short, descriptive emails or letters, to long, detailed opuses, to short stories, to essays, to whatever strikes your fancy that day. 

When George Floyd was murdered this past summer, I allowed the passion reverberating through my pained heart to flow onto the page, in the form of an opinion piece. I sent it to various newspapers, none of which printed it, but I’d like to share it below. What I’d like you to notice is how I’ve brought in details from my childhood and married them to my supreme horror that this tragic event happened.

I discovered that writing this opinion piece unleashed emotions and energy I tend to suppress. It’s not perfect but it’s got fire, clarity, and brevity. It’s my voice, my distinct way of remembering and feeling. That’s what you want to employ when you write novels, or anything really.

Here’s My Opinion Piece

It’s Not Enough to Simply Be Anti-Racist

This summer I saw a photograph, in The New York Times, of white men gathered around a tree, looking proud. They’d hunted down, tortured, mutilated, castrated, and hanged a young black man.

My eyes paused; my heart stopped. I looked closer. One man looked like my father. The 1930s date and location in Georgia made it conceivable. The resemblance was so striking I considered finding a photograph of him to compare. But who wants to imagine that her father could ever participate in such a heinous act? I set it aside, but the image haunted me, left me feeling deeply ashamed of white people—my people. 

My father wasn’t a monster. He’d dropped out of school after eighth grade to help his seven, younger brothers and sisters survive the depression. They called him “Bull” and forever worshipped him. He and his parents picked cotton on someone else’s farm—on par with the poorest blacks in 1930s southwest Georgia.

Prior to the war, he’d studied at Coyne Electrical School and, right after Pearl Harbor, volunteered as a Navy Seabee during World War II, until ulcers ravaged his stomach. If one space hadn’t opened up on the last transport out, he would’ve died in a Pacific jungle. Navy doctors replaced 3/4 of his stomach with a sheep’s stomach. He used alcohol and later pain pills and tranquilizers to mitigate his pain. Deep depressions led to long stretches in Veteran’s hospitals drying out, pulling himself together again. 

Once discharged, he worked on a top-secret government project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, unaware he was helping build the atom bomb. He met and married a nineteen-year-old, local farm girl, also working there. After the war, he launched Reynolds & Wamble Electric Co., offering electrical installations and repairs in Albany, Georgia. They had five children, bought one of first houses in a new neighborhood.

His parents managed a roadside gas station/general store/attached apartment outside Doerun. We’d gather there every Sunday, right after church, for family dinner. Daddy served as Deacon at a Baptist church. I remember squirming as his deep, melodious voice wafted over the congregation, marveling at how people adored him. My mother would slap my leg, shoot me a stern look, hiss a threat to tell him later that I wasn’t paying attention—though I was.

My parents believed in discipline, bragged that their toddlers would sit silent and still, ankles crossed, arms on our laps—for hours—while adults talked. Daddy used his leather belt to thrash my brothers’ bare behinds. We girls sometimes had to lift up our dresses for a beating, though rarely. Mostly we were ignored, discounted.

Anna, an elderly black woman, cared for us while our mother worked at a local bank. Anna had unruly grey hair, missing teeth, and a hitched-up hip. She fried us bacon her way, burned and crispy, laughed when we misbehaved, giggled when we threw our vitamins down the sink. She gave us pennies, so we could carefully select penny candy at the local store. When cleaning, she’d lift a throw rug, put a finger to her mouth, wink, and say, “Don’t tell your mother,” then swoosh the dirt under it and do a little dance. She hugged us often, called little Roy her “preacher man.” We adored her.

We’d often go along when Mother drove Anna home. We’d wave at Anna’s grandchildren, huddled on the porch of their ramshackle house. We’d beg to get out and play with them, but Mommy shushed us, hurriedly drove away. When we’d ask why Anna’s grandchildren didn’t go to our school, she’d say, “They have their own school,” angrily adding that it was “brand new,” though ours was also brand new.

On more than one Sunday, while the men sat outside and the women cooked inside, a black man would walk past, his head down, go into our grandfather’s general store. We’d follow him in, as we did most customers, linger nearby to see what he bought, notice that he barely spoke to our grandfather, who always seemed such a sweet soul. As the Black man exited, us trailing behind him, Daddy and my uncles would laugh, make fun of his bowed head, his ragged clothes. One day, my father called several grown black men “boys” and “niggers.” His tone sliced through me. They kept their eyes cast down, their arms at their sides, wordlessly walked on.

Even at five-years-old, I recognized cruelty and hatred. I cringed but said nothing. A single word risked a belt whipping. One night I overheard Daddy telling Mommy that a “nigger” who wanted to register to vote had been tied to the back of a car and dragged through town. Recognition thudded into my heart that Mommy and Daddy hated Black people—based on the color of their skin alone. 

What about Anna? Why was it fine for an elderly Black woman to care for their children, while the mere sight of a Black man turned them into savage bullies?

Without ever discussing it, we children decided not to be like our racist parents. Their bigotry repulsed us. Daddy’s business failed. Although he fretted that Pollacks and Italians and, God forbid, Blacks in public schools might tarnish his children, he moved the family 40 miles north of Pittsburgh to work on a power plant. Luckily, our teachers offered broader perspectives. We embraced the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, 1960s idealism. As teens, we sought peace & love—for all races, all ethnicities. We clashed with our parents, marched, protested and celebrated increasing equality. One brother fought in Vietnam, the other avoided a life in Canada by scoring a high draft number. We went to college, married, had families, didn’t beat our children, raised them, instead, to treat everyone with dignity and respect. We insisted upon it. 

My father died in 1984, my mother in 1998. My brother recently reminded me that our mother once said we should not celebrate the day Martin Luther King was born, rather the day he was murdered. How I longed for bigotry and hatred to die along with their generation. 

When I saw Derek Chauvin’s knee forcibly cutting off George Floyd’s breath, despite his pleas to live, I realized why that lynching photograph hit me like a thunderbolt: I am the child of a heartless racist, and his complicit wife. Yes, I’d done better, far better, considered all colors and ethnicities equal, had black best friends in the 1970s, literally sobbed with elation when Barack Obama won the presidency, feeling so proud of the progressive America I loved. Surely, true racial equality would follow. 

Sadly, hateful white people did their best to emasculate our first, Harvard-educated, highly moral, brilliant, idealistic black president. Now one of those haters is president, and we’re suffering a nightmarish backlash. Recently, I asked myself: Have I done enough to atone for my racist father? The answer is no.

It’s not enough to do better solely on your own, to live your own life as an anti-racist, to express fury, press for the prosecution of the men who murdered George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, and all the hundreds and thousands of black men (and women) who preceded, or will follow, them. 

White people of all ages need to fight for everyone’s right to live a happy, peaceful, full, long life. We must demand that our government protect all people, no matter their color or religion or ethnicity. We must use our voices and our power to protect and defend them on a daily basis. Rebuke and educate anyone—including friends and family—who cling to racism. 

We must embrace every black and brown and mixed-race child, every Mexican and Chinese and Somali heritage child, every Hindu and Muslim and Jewish child, as our child, and then move heaven and earth, the United States government, and all government officials, including policemen, to respect, honor, protect, defend, uplift, support, and love them. 

It’s the absolute least we can do.

Susan Reynolds  is a published author who has lived in South Georgia, Western Pennsylvania, NYC, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Napa Valley, Paris, New England, and currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I feel like the opinion piece captured a significant part of my voice, but my capturing it in fiction is still a work in progress. 

Writing Tip: Write your own opinion piece or essay, about something that lights a fire in your belly. Write it tight, focused, intense, passionate, and cut it down and down until it’s under 1200-1300 words. Keep crafting it until you feel it sings. This kind of writing will help you discover your unique voice, what drives you to write, what matters to you, what you observe and how you report it.

Everything I write is deeply personal. Even attempts to write fiction are largely drawn from my life experiences. Good times are included, of course, but it’s the pain—when I felt shocked, disappointed, devastated, or deeply hurt—that lights it up. Sadly, it’s fear of wounding the people I love that stops me from writing. How can I write my story without hurting them? 

In the 1990s, when I asked my ex-husband if he’d sue me for publishing a memoir about our failed marriage, he didn’t even want to read it. He’d always had a strong ego, a locked-down image of himself. Adept at covering pain with humor, he made one request: “As long as you describe me as devilishly handsome, highly intelligent, an exceptional provider, and a stud in bed, I don’t care what you say.” I quoted his request verbatim in the prologue. Luckily for him, and us, really, it didn’t sell.

Not enough time had passed, emotional reverberations still rocked both our worlds. I’d aimed for objectivity, compassion—and fairness, but the wounds had not yet healed. He did what he did, but he wasn’t a monster, or I wouldn’t have loved and married him, would I? Still, from my point of view, he’d thoughtlessly destroyed what I wanted to be my only marriage, thwarted my desire for a happy family. I didn’t regurgitate all my anger onto the page, but had I been fair?

Years later, when my singer/songwriter daughter penned a song about how she felt I’d failed to hear or respect her anguish—it cut me to quick. My heart stopped. How could she possibly feel that way? I nursed my wounded ego in private, properly praised the artistry, tried to hide my pain.

When her brother—and my friends—wailed on my behalf, I said her perceptions belonged solely to her; and while it felt unfair to me, she had a right to tell her story. My son had had a different history with me, proving each person’s experience is distinctly his or hers. I’d had lots of therapy, learned this, knew her version reflected a slice of truth. Yes, I cried whenever she sang it—as she’d do while I sat front row, her most ardent, faithful supporter—but I wouldn’t dare suppress her art. It became one of her best, most requested songs for years Fancy how that felt?

She also wrote painful songs about her father, and then all the boyfriends who disappointed her. She’d been recording affronts in journals for years, developed a powerful, artistic voice, and I admired her confident use of it. Thankfully, she’s worked through a lot of her pain, found love, writes happier songs.

But I’ve been stuck, unable to write my story, mollified that the telling might hurt my children. Still, I’ve long known that my path is to write my story, fictionalized or not, and their father, and they, would be in crucial storylines--if I told my truth. I would focus on my debacles, from a healed, sensitive perspective, employing everything I’ve learned about writing, but still . . .

Today, it just so happens, this quote popped up on my Facebook’s “history” feed. I’d posted it years ago:

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”  —Anne Lamott

Clearly, Anne Lamott would encourage full speed ahead, damn the consequences. I essentially agree, but here are five things I needed to recognize first:

I know how to be objective:  Years spent as a journalist taught me how to be objective. Report: Who, What, When, Where, and How. Focus on your feelings, don’t judge their actions. I’m not a vindictive, hurtful person:  I often consider other people’s feelings far more than my own; and I’ve always been harder on myself than anyone else. The storytelling will reflect that. I have gathered wisdom:  I am mentally healthier, more emotionally stable, and more nuanced when writing than even a few years ago.   I worked out the pain first:  I’ve resolved the traumas. All that’s left are the bones. The passion would be there, but not rancor, or finger-pointing, or misdirected fury.  My story is my story.  No one is stopping them from writing theirs.

Whether I write a novel or a memoir, I’ll write from a place of honesty, fairness, and respect for all involved. My goal will never be retribution. I write to heal myself, heal my loved ones, heal anyone who reads what I write. That’s who I am, that’s what I do.

If you’ve been hesitant to write fiction or nonfiction because it might harm a loved one, examine your motivations. If you’re so angry you need to vent “on paper,” then vent your little heart out, but don’t publish what pours out. Write furiously, then set those pages on fire, literally. Doing so psychically transports the blame to the perpetrator—and sets you free.

However, please do write what you need to write. Writing has its greatest power when it comes from the heart, shares deeply meaningful experiences, helps others learn from your mistakes.

The time to censor is when you edit and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite—as all writers seeking publication must do. That’s the time to identify transgressions, exaggerations, distortions, anger, or harshness, and reconsider the perspective. If you honestly wrote what happened, without subjective finger-pointing, it’s likely fair. 

If it’s not, rewrite those parts until they are.

Whatever you do, keep writing.

Tip: If you’re writing about painful events that include someone you love, or once loved, remember to strive for objectivity. Simply report what happened—and your response. Focus far more on yourself, tell your story, and let readers make their own decisions.

Writing as a Spiritual Practice Will Save You

I had lost all impetus to write, allowed myself to fall into a deep and dark cauldron of negativity. Is writing itself worth the effort? How about in a pandemic, when there’s a highly contagious, lethal virus circulating that could kill you and a lot of people you love?

But writing should never truly be about the final product. Writing is a spiritual practice, something you do because you feel compelled to do it. Most likely, you’ve always loved reading, fell massively in love with a writer’s voice, perhaps drew from it while you were growing up, or, when grown, while suffering from one of life’s major disappointments and feeling lost. Quite simply, the storytelling thrilled you. Words held magic and meaning. The way an author strung together words formed unforgettable images in your mind, caused feelings to grip your heart–and you fell in love with writing.

People become writers because they have stories to tell. Most start with their own, in some fashion, because that’s what they know, what they’re trying to sort out. They want to grasp how they came to be who they are—and why they should matter to the world.

Unless you’ve been truly blessed from birth and have a writing genius that requires no instruction or practice, years will likely be spent learning how to write, or at least to write something that holds together and achieves that original goal of transporting readers deep into their own hearts and imaginations. It can be a long, slow, tedious, frustrating path, and pilgrims often lose their compass, fall into doubt, give up entirely.

I’d been scribbling in diaries, later we called them journals, from the age of nine, recording observations I made, and later endlessly ruminating on what some boy might be thinking and why wasn’t he thinking about me? But I had no idea how one became a writer and didn’t consider it a life choice. For college, I focused on psychology, because it also fascinated me—but fate brought me to writing anyway. 

I’d spent one summer in NYC during college, for which I forever owe my sister for taking me in. I loved the massive stimulation and opportunities for expansion it provided. After graduation I moved there. I had $100 in my pocket and had to take a job, any job, or go back to the small town I’d grown up in. Fairchild Publications, then the publisher of various trade magazines, including Women’s Wear Daily, hired me as a receptionist, in their editorial department. I sat right in front of John Fairchild and had no idea that he was huge in publishing.

Six months later I asked a friendly editor if I could write a book review, and soon began writing obituaries and small, newsy items. Six months later I wrote larger news stories, asked to write a feature story. I held my first subject captive for three hours, typed up every word he said, cut out individual sentences, moved them around on my bed until they made sense.

My editor loved it (I still have that clip with his congratulatory note on it), and my journalism career launched. Secretly, I’d read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at age sixteen and longed to be a novelist, or memoirist, not a reporter. Still, those years taught me a lot about storytelling, how to craft sentences, how to capture a mood, create atmosphere, relay crucial information in captivating prose. And I was a writer.

Years passed, I married, had babies, stopped working, stopped writing until I met someone who’d written a bright, breezy article and had it published in Cosmopolitan. During our first lunch together, once we’d quieted our toddlers with grilled cheese sandwiches, she leaned in close, her intensely blue eyes staring right into my dark, brooding eyes, and declared, “Once a writer, always a writer.” We became forever friends and signed up for creative writing classes at a local college.

From there, I studied at UC Berkeley, attended writing seminars, devoured books on writing, read hundreds of novels and memoirs, studied the craft. At the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, I won first prize in screenwriting for a nine-page script I’d penned while there, and the movie producer running the workshop said he’d read anything I wrote.

I furiously studied screenwriting for a year and never wrote a screenplay. Writing dribbled down to long letters. Then I met a shaman, got therapy, got divorced, and finally had something compelling to say. I wrote a memoir, sent it to New York publishers.

All fifteen or so editors who saw it sent it back, but one editor wrote a personal note, said she liked it, suggested another editor at another house. I had no idea at the time what that meant. I didn’t know that she was a legendary editor. Years later I learned this should have inspired elation, confidence, a huge push forward.

It never sold. I took it hard. A few years later, as founding editor of a regional magazine, I wrote stellar features. Resumed taking classes, going to seminars, lectures, and book readings. The magazine folded six months later.

My passion for long-form storytelling kept getting sidelined. Finally, children grown, mostly gone, I sold my Napa house, jetted off to Paris for a year–at last! I focused on photography, my other passion, but obviously fulfilling my Hemingway fantasy, wrote a memoir about the experience.

Agented push this time, more editors, more passes, another funk. Luckily, I’d begun writing and editing nonfiction books, all of which sold to publishers. Got gigs editing other people’s novels. Ghostwrote a few. Still, I was supposed to be a novelist, or at least a successful memoirist. When would that happen?

I wrote in my last blog about all the emotional imbroglios that compounded a sense of futility. Enough to silence me for two years, enough for me to question whether I’d ever write again. And then this pandemic, which, oddly enough, caused just enough introspection for me to feel something so deeply I stopped being a blockhead and started writing again.

You see, I’ve always come back—because writing is my purpose in life. Writing is what I need to do to feel fully alive and productive. If you have a gift, you are meant to share it, and stories can literally save someone’s life, help them find that special something inside themselves that will deliver purpose and meaning to their life. It’s no small thing to write stories, it’s everything.

If you’ve been stalled, or blocked, or wondering if your scribblings amount to more than a hill of beans—when the whole world is on fire—please let me be the one to tell you that they do. If you love writing, keep at it. What you produce doesn’t even matter. It’s the writing practice that will keep you sane. 

And who knows where it will lead?

Tips: Allow yourself to feel what you feel and if you can’t focus enough to write on your current work in progress (WIP), write about all the confusion and sadness you are feeling right now. We’re all suppressing huge grief and juggling invisible fear. Write about that.

Listen to music that moves you, opens you, makes you weep like a wounded child. Mine today was Down In My Soul by Marlena Smalls and Hallelujah Singers. Find yours.

Subscribe to my blog and write along with me. See link below.

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Finding Your Inner Writing Shaman

It’s not just Covid-19 that left me wondering whether it mattered if I wrote my novel—or not. The truth is that I stopped writing two years ago. Yes, years. And I am the author who denied the concept of writer’s block (see Chapter 9 of Fire Up Your Writer’s Brain), the proclamation itself had also been published in Writers’ Digest and shared on popular blogs. And yet I had simply stopped writing and couldn’t work up any desire to start again.

I’d spent a lifetime writing and the previous fourteen years writing and editing nonfiction—as well as editing other people’s novels—and longed to finally complete the story that I’d been writing various parts of for a decade (some 200,000 words lying around in stacks of paper or on various hard drives). But I’d lost sufficient impetus to write, and the longer I went without writing, the emptier and less like a writer I felt. 

I succumbed to a web of negative thoughts—“Who cared if I ever wrote a novel or not? Most novels don’t sell well anyway. I don’t have anything meaningful to say.”—spiraling all the way down to—“Although I’m good at helping other writers craft their novels, it may well be that I don’t have an original mind or enough creativity to spin a viable novel plot of my own.” Small surprise these levels of negativity squashed my ability to write—repeated, self-generated flagellation has that effect (see my entire book on writing advice).

To be fair, during this dry spell, I somewhat unwillingly sold my darling cottage on a New England pond, uprooted and moved into an apartment in Raleigh. This entailed months of sorting through, well, everything I owned and discarding literally truckloads of things, from furniture to piles of paperwork. Way back in 2002, I had willfully sold my adorable Napa Valley home and fled to Paris for a year, then NYC for a year, and that move had involved shedding a four-bedroom house and half of my possessions. This last move involved splitting the remaining half by half again, so it did keep me busy.

I also felt like I’d lost a dear friend. She moved beyond me into the world of remarriage and, worse yet, real writers, those who wrote and successfully published novels. She now hung out with him—and them—far more and me far less. She’d long been my primary cheerleader and support, and the psychic loss devastated me. She’d gone where I longed to go, and it wasn’t envy I felt so much as this horrible, sinking feeling that I not only would be alone forever but had misread my destiny—I wasn’t going to remarry or be a successful novelist after all. 

All that and my son hadn’t felt sufficient desire to see me for a long, dry spell (I’d moved 3,000 miles away, but still) and my daughter and I had been enduring a complicated separation process that went on for years. I felt absolutely abandoned and dismissed—my two Achilles’ heels (the psychological wounds, not the children). And I’d allowed these emotional imbroglios to silence me.

It was no one else’s fault—only mine. All self-inflicted wounds.

I’d lost my passion for writing. I’d written two memoirs that didn’t sell (the 1990s one about studying with a shaman wasn’t polished enough to sell, but the 2011 one about my year in Paris might have caught hold in a better market), and when my last nonfiction proposal didn’t sell in 2017, I allowed myself to feel discouraged. In truth, the concept was a bit overdone, the writing was stilted, and the topic had become almost blasé to me—so no surprise it didn’t sell. Truth is, I didn’t want to write nonfiction anymore.

My editing business also dried up, until last year when a client hired me to ghostwrite her novel. You’d think that alone would have driven me back to my own work, but I only felt the years growing shorter and my desire to write fiction scurrying farther out of reach. 

I focused instead on reading. Last year I read 86 novels, focusing on literary novels with strong female voices, as that’s what I aspired to achieve. But now it was March and I still wasn’t writing, couldn’t even lodge myself in front of a computer long enough to type more than three sentences. I’d made new friends, volunteered to work with children, saw the beginnings of renewal with my daughter, totally reconnected with my son, and still just could not sit down to write. I could barely propel my body into my writing space. It felt like an iceberg blocked the door. Occasionally I slipped past it, but quickly left again, desperate to avoid any consciousness of lost opportunity.

And then a pandemic hit our shores, and after ten weeks of isolation, spent watching gruesome news’ reports, an urge to climb out of the darkness steadily grew. Experiencing the pandemic dramatically heightened the realization that I’d been frittering my life away. I whittled my worst fears down to the bone, asking myself: “Once your grown children are solidly on their paths and barely notice that you’re still around, what does one do to make life worth living? I’d not been blessed with grandchildren—one hopes—and had no special someone. I searched for purpose and meaning, but simply couldn’t conjure the level of passion required to write. 

At my darkest, as I listened to reports of thousands dying and the grim fact that this virus was likely to keep me fairly isolated for a year, I wondered: Would it really matter if I died now instead of twenty years later?

The more losing my life felt like something that could happen, the more I realized that I was no longer willing to wither away in an apartment in Raleigh. And then, right on cue, a shaman who had re-mothered me in the late 1980s spoke clearly to me in a dream. She left our planet a few years ago and I hadn’t seen her for more than twenty years. But here she was, insisting that I had whole new chapters ahead, but I had to write that damn story (my adjective, not hers). She reminded me, as she used to do repeatedly, that it’s not about my ego, but about how what I write will benefit others.

My internalized mother/shaman communicated in a very direct manner, kind yet stern. 

I do believe, as I always have, that the facilities that enable one to write well are a gift. It’s like having a crown set upon your head as a child, only it’s a crown of thorns. I always believed that my gifts—for observation, feeling intensely, gathering my thoughts, stringing words together to form images, being persistent, a passion for storytelling—were given so I could write stories that help others, and it’s always been my responsibility to do the hard work required to make that happen. I’d spent decades honing my craft—reading, studying, writing, rewriting, editing, coaching, teaching—but these last few years I’d been negligent and lazy. I’d gotten mired in small-minded grumbling. I’d also been fooling myself—frittering just wouldn’t do.  

This “novel virus” reaffirmed that my life won’t feel sufficiently meaningful again until I develop a renewed sense of purpose. Writing has always provided that for me, and I’d discarded my writing practice as if it were an empty, battered suitcase at the end of a journey. Hell, I’d thrown it over a cliff.

So, after ten-weeks of necessary isolation, my long period of coma-like existence has seemingly come to an abrupt end. I’m once again fired up by the realization that I am a fairly accomplished wordsmith, who has stories of value to share.

I’m telling you this because others have expressed their feelings of “why bother” and “who can concentrate on writing in a pandemic?” and I truly want to offer anyone who might find it inspiring the opportunity to “write along with me.” I will keep posting blogs, offering tips I’ve learned along my path, and doing what I can to inspire others to simply write. I’ll share my process in hopes that it bolsters your process.

So, what do you say? Ready to write? 

Hint: Listen to Robbie Robertson’s Music for Native Americans, specifically, “Ghost Dance” to get fired up to write.

Photographs of Norma Jaichima also by Susan Reynolds

[image error]Norma Jaichima



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 Mindfully Meditate, then Write

Thanks to Coronavirus, our reptilian brains are scanning for danger and sensing it everywhere. The resultant, almost constant flight-or-fight responses likely cause muscle tension, headaches, upset stomachs, racing heartbeats, shallow breathing, and difficulty concentrating long enough to read, let alone write.

We need to counteract anxiety by relaxing, but bingewatching and overeating won’t get those words flowing. If you want to focus long enough to write, you’ll have to do two things: reduce all news exposure and quiet your mind. Mindfully meditating for a mere ten minutes a day will truly help you achieve a deep state of relaxation, relieve your troublesome symptoms, and regain your ability to focus on your writing. It’s simple, free, and rocks when it comes to reducing fear, improving brain function, fostering stress resilience, and becoming a more productive and ingenious writer. *

For novices, mindful meditation simply means sitting still, breathing slowly and deeply, and clearing your mind of all thoughts.

How it works:

Labeling your emotions with words activates your left PFC, which calms your amygdala and reduces anxiety.
Engaging your concentration alters the connection between your thinking (cortex) and the emotional (amygdala) parts of your brain, strengthening your neuronal pathways and thus allowing for more voluntary recognition and control of emotions.
Activating your cortical networks near your cingulate cortex (increases empathy and self-awareness), the insula (focuses on internal body states), and the somatosensory cortex (senses your body in space), making the focus on youand how you are feeling – allowing your own happiness and calm to be the mainstay.
Engaging in self-observation and awareness activates the middle PFC (center of metacognition, “thinking about thinking” or evaluating one’s own reasoning).

Mind, body, soul, and brain benefits include:

Physiological: lowers blood pressure, increases blood flow, reduces headaches, reduces carbon dioxide that causes acidosis and reduction of brain cells, increases serotonin, decreases cortisol.
Mental or spiritual: balances your state of mind, increases creativity, increases sense of peace, increases awareness, bolsters positive thinking, elevates your consciousness, builds confidence and wisdom.
Psychological: improves empathy and compassion; decreases insomnia, phobias, anxiety, and eating disorders.
Brain: increases grey matter in the insula, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex (improves psychological health, attention, compassion, empathy); increases left prefrontal cortex activity (lifts mood); reduces cortical thinning; increases power and reach of gamma waves (more neurons fire together and form new synapses).

Here’s how you do it:

Create a Space. To calm and center your mind, find a quiet nook in your house, having relative peace and quiet will allow you to focus on the meditation with the least amount of distraction.
Sit Erectly. Buddhists believe that energy flows best when your body is sitting erectly. Balance on a somewhat firm pillow with your hips neither thrust forward, nor leaning back, and your legs crossed. Or sit straight on a chair, feet flat on the floor. Place hands palm upward, on your thighs. Some like to touch their index fingers and thumbs together.
Inhabit Your Body. Visualize that you have a string running from the base of your spine that you are using to slowly pull each vertebra upwards into alignment. When you reach your crown (the top of your skull), your shoulders and hips should both be level on the pillow or cushion, and you should feel fully present in your body. Ideally, you will feel relaxed, but alert. Sleepiness is not the goal.
Minimize Distractions. If you use music, keep it soft and soothing. Keep your eyes open, but softened and facing down, focusing no farther than a couple of inches in front of your nose. This helps you achieve the desired mind containment. If you have trouble minimizing your focus, try laying a small object on the ground in front of you and use it to refocus whenever your mind wanders.
Breathe. Controlling your breath is also very helpful in slowing your body down and focusing your mind. Begin by focusing solely on your breath, neither forcing nor exaggerating breaths, just noticing as each breath enters and exits your body. As you breathe in and out normally, consciously use the motion of the breaths to relax your body and your mind. If you’re a shallow breather, who rarely breathes from his or her diaphragm (stomach), ease your way into taking slower and deeper breaths. Placing a hand on your bellybutton, so you can feel your belly rise and fall as you breathe in and out, will help you learn to breathe deeper.
Corral Your Thoughts. The focus is on how your mind works and mastering the ability to focus upon and control thoughts by first learning how to clear your mind of thoughts and focus solely on being fully present and conscious in your body. When your thoughts wander or emotions rise up—and they will, galloping about like wild horses—take notice of where they’ve gone, mentally label them (“distraction,” “fodder for later thought,” “the usual fear,” etc.) and then bring your mind back to the present, to the meditation. Focusing on your breath is a good way to bring your mind back to the process. While it may feel as if you are wasting time by keeping your mind clear of thoughts, in fact, your mind is learning a new way to slow down, relax, and perceive and process information. You are effectively training your mind to eradicate extraneous distraction and focus clearly on one thought at a time. Keep clearing your mind for 10-20 minutes.
Cool Down. Once you have meditated for 10-20 minutes, slowly bring your awareness back to the room. A few deep, cleansing breaths is a great way to notify your body and mind that you’re transitioning from focused meditation to living in your normal world.

You are training your mind to simply be. And in doing so, you are training your brain to dismiss distractions, avert negative thoughts, ignore past history, and listen to internal cues.

All of these skills will vastly improve your writing sessions. I promise!

  Time to Mindfully Write . . .

  Resources:

 Mindfulness Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA offers a selection of audio files you can listen to or download. http://marc.ucla.edu.  Right now, they’ve got a Co-vid section: https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/covid19-mindfulness

Sounds True.Com: Audio cds and digital downloads on everything from Qi Gong to Taoist to Kabbalah meditations; Tibetan, Buddhist, Vipassana, and Zen practices; and guided meditations from teachers such as Pema Chödrön, Jack Kornfeld, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and many others on http://soundstrue.com. Free daily download: https://www.soundstrue.com/collections/best-sellers/products/mindfulness-daily

*Sevinc G, Hölzel BK, Greenberg J, Gard T, Brunsch V, Hashmi JA, Vangel M, Orr SP, Milad MR, Lazar SW. Strengthened Hippocampal Circuits Underlie Enhanced Retrieval of Extinguished Fear Memories Following Mindfulness Training. Biological Psychiatry [Internet]. 2019.

Train Your Brain to Get Happy, Susan Reynolds, Simon & Schuster, 2011

Whether suffering from pandemic lockdown or Coronavirus brain (a thing!), feeling blocked adds to a writer’s already high stress levels. To combat difficulty focusing enough to write, you need to tamp down fear, which means calming and reassuring your writing brain.

We all have three basic parts to our brains:

Reptilian – The primitive brain sits at the top of your spinal cord, silently (usually subconsciously) focusing on your survival needs—food, oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure, and reproduction. It’s your “on-duty security guard” ever ready to jumpstart “fight-or-flight” responses, reflexive actions, or other instinctual reactions.
Limbic – Just atop your reptilian brain (and deeper within your brain), the limbic brain is focused on your emotional life and the formation of memories. While you dream, it is strengthening or abandoning synapses, turning short-term memories into long-term memories, or cleaning out information you don’t need to retain.
Neocortex – This is that wrinkled, gelatinous cap we are all so used to seeing. The most highly developed, “newest” part of your brain is in charge of high-level thinking, including some aspects of creativity. It consists of four lobes, each divided in a right and left side—Frontal/CEO; Prefrontal/Integrator, Regulator, and Reflector; Temporal/Hearing and Memory; Parietal/Navigator; and Occipital/Sight. The Cerebellum aka “little brain”—where 50 percent of your neurons live—handles motor control, focus, emotional reactions, and fine-tuning.

Your reptilian brain is constantly scanning your perimeter for danger, which it communicates to the limbic brain, and then your cortex. It does this by generating the flight or fight hormones that signal to your body that you are in immediate danger and need to react. Even when you are watching TV or listening to music, your reptile is always scanning. It likely why Feng Shui advises not working with your back to a door.

Unfortunately, with a pandemic, the danger is invisible. Nevertheless, your reptilian brain is in overdrive, as are your flight or fight hormones, which make it a challenge for your cortex to function at its peak capacity.

What you need to do is calm the reptilian and limbic portions of your brain. Some suggestions to try in a quiet room:

Calm your mind. Utilize your rational neocortex to list of all the steps you are taking to keep you and your family safe. Write down what you know is true: that you are choosing concrete steps to protect yourself, that the vast majority of people survive, that, at least for the present, you are truly safe in your current Do this just before sitting down to write. Make it a writing mantra.
Bolster your focus. We all know now that meditation reduces stress and benefits your brain functioning (more on that in the next blog). I suggest an unguided meditation, that allows your mind to ramble until it calms itself and focuses on its own—no pressure to perform or match your stride to anyone else’s. You can find lots of unguided meditations online. Or simply sit still in a quiet environment until thoughts stop careening in your skull and your brain quiets. Give it a solid five minutes to rest.
Respond to music. Music alternately calms or fires up your limbic brain, in a productive way. If you need to calm yourself, choose calming music and keep the volume low, but when you feel ready to write, pump up the volume with songs that fire up your spirit and dance! Get your writing brain fired up.
Do what you can. Accept that writing is what you do. Unless you are a frontline worker, it likely feels frivolous to do anything. But writing is what you do, so do what you can and feel good about it. If words will not come, try plotting what you will write next and think of that as your contribution to everyone’s health and sanity, especially your own. Writing matters, all steps involved in writing matter.
Tamp down fear. If you still find it nearly impossible to focus on your current writing project, write instead about your fears. Forget structure or even clarity, let your frightened innerchild write it all out. Vomit all that anxiety onto the page and keep regurgitating until you feel spent. Let the reptilian brain go wild. No fear is too small or insignificant. Then either rest or go back to Number 1.

If steps 1-5 have not restored your ability to focus enough to write, take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Just kidding.

Instead, be gentle with yourself. This is not a time to add pressure or guilt or more anxiety. Sometimes writers let things brew and your ability to focus and be productive will return. Meanwhile, read great novels, seek out fascinating and educational nonfiction, expand your reading list to writers you have yet to explore. All writers need to read outside his or her genre. Find a multitude of ways to expand who you are as a human being and all of this will infuse your writing when the time comes—and it will.

Remember that your reptilian brain is doing its proper job of scanning for danger. Limit CNN and other cable news’ channels, step away from politics, go out and enjoy nature, cook something fabulous for your loved ones, dance, sing, play with your kids or grandkids, do crossword puzzles, decoupage something, paint your garage, rearrange your office, create in other ways.

Each of these positive and creative actions will calm your brain and help it realize that the coronavirus will not last forever, and, most importantly, is not currently seeping into your lungs and that you are not in immediate danger. Get plenty of rest and eat well to reinforce your limbic brain. Make maximum use of your neocortex (thinking brain) to reassure your entire being that you are an intelligent being, doing the best you can to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Do this often, but particularly before you sit down at your writing desk.

If you still feel blocked, remember that writing is more than physically getting words on a page. Sometimes writers upload information via vast and intensive reading, dream up new ideas, or simply germinate—all which bolster writing when the time comes.

Happy writing, or germinating!

A recent study on 138 undergraduate students investigated the relationship between creativity and different aspects of thought patterns presumed to influence the preparation and illumination phase of the creative process.

Aspects of thought patterns they studied included:

How much one relied on habitual patterns of thought, such as ruminative brooding and/or ruminative self-reflection.
Whether one suppressed thoughts or welcomed them.
How much one engaged in mind wandering.
The person’s ability to use associative thinking.

Associative thinking occurs when all avenues are open in your brain and your mind, and you allow your mind to “free associate,” or automatically link up ideas, thoughts, observations, sensory input, memory of existing knowledge, and your subconscious. Rather than relying solely on what you know or have observed in relation to what you are focused on, you allow any and all thoughts to arise, which helps your brain’s neurons to spark and connect in unique ways. Creative ability, they found, was fueled mainly by the person’s associative ability.

The results also suggested that what drives the need to create is not creative ability per se, but rather a tendency toward self-reflective pondering and the ability and penchant for letting your mind wander (daydreaming, as an example), in which all thoughts are welcome.

Creative types were more likely to keep an open mind while pondering and were more likely to welcome what others might well view as intrusive thoughts, whereas ruminative brooders tended to restrict thoughts and suppress intrusive thoughts. In fact, the only variable that seemed to influence both aspects of creativity they studied (preparation and illumination) was the students’ lack of resistance to thought suppression. In other words, the more creative students excelled at associative thinking and tended to welcome all thoughts, which is why the more creative students likely reported a feeling or experience of being found by thought, rather than finding it.

Researchers concluded that the need to create is associated with having thoughts that interrupt one’s ordinary stream of consciousness and that are seen as welcome rather than interfering.

What this means for someone who wishes to be more creative is that self-reflection or pondering is productive, while brooding, or negatively ruminating, likely stifles creativity. It also indicates that keeping an open mind while pondering or thinking and allowing thoughts to pop in whenever they arrive is productive, while suppressing thoughts or holding to a narrow train of thought would likely be unproductive.

Thus, it also holds to reason that doing these 5 things will bolster your creativity:

Broadening your perspective by reading widely
Embracing curiosity and welcoming new experiences
Becoming a better observer and using a journal to record them
Pondering new information and linking it with existing knowledge
Learning to welcome all thoughts during daydreaming or meditation

The more you feed your mind, the more thoughts it will have to associate.

And best of all, this study indicates that daydreaming and other forms of mind wandering foster creativity. So spend a little time each day allowing your mind to wander, and when you ponder, do so in a reflective manner, keeping an open mind and allowing all thoughts to surface. Then, whenever you feel the need or urge to be creative, embrace the fine art of free association.

This is the second in a series on creativity. The next post will address specific ways of thinking that can bolster creativity.

   

[1]“On Being Found: How Habitual Patterns of Thought Influence Creative Interest, Behavior, and Ability”; Verhaeghen, Paul; Trani, Alexandra N.; Aikman, Shelley N. Creativity Research Journal, v29 n1 p1-9 2017

 

All writers are creative, right?

They are if they meet certain criteria. But what is that criteria?

That’s a question researcher Jordanous Keller wanted to answer. So he conducted an empirical study and analysis of language commonly used to talk or write about creativity. Using tools from natural language processing and statistical analysis, he and his team identified words highly associated with dimensions of creativity. Keller then chose 30 research papers examining creativity from various academic standpoints, ranging from psychological studies to computational models, and 60 academic papers on topics unrelated to creativity.

Keller and his team then identified 694 key words associated with creativity and 14 common themes or components of creativity. Transferring his findings to writing, here are 14 elements of creativity that will give you a good idea if you’re being as creative as you’d like to be:

The 14 key components of creativity related to writing are:

You are proactively involved in a cognitive process from which an idea or product results. You are tenacious enough to continue the quest, even when thwarted by obstacles.
You are able to cope when incomplete, missing, inconsistent, contradictory, ambiguous and/or uncertain information in involved. You are comfortable not knowing what to expect and willing to risk failure. You embrace experimentation
You possess knowledge about writing, as well as the talent, skills, experience, and expertise that will recognize gaps, needs, or problems that need solving and to generate, validate, develop and promote revolutionary ideas in your genre.
You’re not a genius, but you’re smart, informed, alert, and focused.
You are working towards some end target, goal, or result and producing something (tangible or intangible) that previously did not exist.
You are capable of working independently, ideally with autonomy over actions and decisions, and you love to challenge cultural or domain/genre norms.
You make an emotional investment in your work, but you view creativity as a positive process that offers fulfillment and enjoyment irrespective of the outcome.
Your work is often unpredictable, unexpected, surprising, unusual, and/or out of the ordinary.
You are always evolving as a writer and becoming better at what you do.
You communicate and promote your work to others in a persuasive and positive manner. When required, you’re a good collaborator.
You’re spontaneous and engage your subconscious while writing.
You use reasoning and good judgment to consciously evaluate options, to recognize potential value in each and identify the best option, and you make decisions rather than stagnate.
You are making a useful contribution that is valued and recognized as an achievement and that reflects influential advancement. Your work is relevant and appropriate to your genre.
You’re good at generating a variety of different ideas to compare and choose from, staying flexible and open, and experimenting without bias. You use multi-tasking to allow ideas to emerge while your cognitive focus is diverted.

So how do you measure up? If you’re falling short, stay tuned as I’ll be clarifying these concepts and discussing ways to bolster creativity in coming blogs. Meanwhile . . .

Happy Writing!

 

Jordanous A, Keller B (2016) Modeling Creativity: Identifying Key Components through a Corpus-Based Approach. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0162959. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162959 Editor: Peter Csermely, Semmelweis University, HUNGARYReceived: March 8, 2016; Accepted: August 31, 2016; Published: October 5, 2016Copyright: © 2016 Jordanous, Keller.

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As a writer, words and language are some of the most essential tools we use to tell a story. The words, phrases, sentence structure, and style we use can take us from being a  writer who tells an interesting story to a superb writer who mesmerizes, surprises, and delights our readers. Turns out that learning new words and deciphering complex language are also fabulous stimuli for boosting your creativity. Here are five simple ways you can mine metaphor and language, while reading or writing, to boost your creativity.

Read outside of your comfort zone (field, genre, usual favorites). Reading something seemingly unrelated to what you usually read or write creates and sparks neuronal connections that often lead to a “bright idea” or a fresh way of thinking about something. It can lead to that marvelous “aha” moment we all desire.
Read complex works that require you to decipher new material. If the sentence structure or the new information is complex and causes you to have to read more slowly, with a focus on interpreting what you’re reading, your brain responds to your request for it to “work harder.” It’s like working a muscle, something that doesn’t occur if you never read anything that you have to struggle to understand or that introduces you to new concepts or new ways of thinking about things.
Practice Close Reading. A study in which literary PhD candidates were asked to read sections of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, sometimes casually and then intently, with close, analytical concentration, they found that close reading stimulated many more areas of the brain than casually reading. It literally lit up their brain, and the scientists concluded that close reading offers a kind of cognitive training, teaching concentration and the flexibility of moving between modes of focus. It also activated parts of the brain related to movement and touch – readers were “placing themselves” within the story, and these effects tended to last five days after they read the story.
Work on your verbs: Writing teachers insist that verbs matter. Action-specific, uniquely apt, or surprising verbs are encouraged, and there may be some benefit to using them beyond exciting the reader. Researchers at Michigan State University created a “noun-verb” test to see if they could predict how the brain comes up with unusually creative ideas. MSU neuroscientist Jeremy Gray wanted to prove that the brain works hard to form creative ideas. “Nobody learns their ABCs in kindergarten and suddenly writes a great novel or poem,” he said. Study subjects were given a series of nouns and instructed to respond creatively with a verb for each. They were then measured for creativity through a series of more in-depth methods, including story writing, drawing, and on their creative achievements in real life. Those who came up with creative verbs were those also identified as the most creative in the second part of the test, as measured by the more in-depth methods. So when you need fresh ideas, to fire up your neurons, spend fifteen minutes focused solely on creating new and different action verbs.
Learn new vocabulary before falling asleep. Right before you sleep is a great time to break out a dictionary and learn new words. Your brain can be highly receptive and, if you spend a few minutes intentionally studying the words, your brain will continue processing—linking neurons—while you sleep. Even better, create a few sentences using the word before falling asleep.

It’s always good to fire up your writing brain, and stimulating it by reading books outside your genre or comfort zone, struggling to understand complex language and new concepts, and learning new vocabulary words, most particularly verbs, is a fun way to do it.

Happy Writing!

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The Tethered Angel stood in front of a stone tomb in Oakland, California’s Mountain View Cemetery. Her nose and mouth had been worn away and the tip of one wing had been cleanly broken. She wore a long gown, the hem of its top layer gathered in one hand. Her hair fell in one long swirled braid. I photographed her in close-ups and tinted the prints in shades of blue and brown and silver. She seemed haunted by a sense of forever waiting, guarding someone else’s door. How would she look if she could spread her broken wings and fly? Where would she go? Each time I returned, I prayed she’d be gone, free of the real and imagined bonds that tethered her glorious wings. Not long after, I flew off to Paris.

Because writing requires so much mental concentration, after days spent conjuring words on a bright screen, my neurons seem to sputter into silence. “Stop thinking!” they plead.

Craving a visual activity, I signed up for photography classes and eventually ventured to an Oakland, California cemetery to photograph angel statuary for an assignment. One angel captured my imagination and I returned often to photograph her. As noted in the photo and caption (opposite), she became a visual reminder that I needed to untether my soul and follow my dreams—wherever they beckoned me to go.

When my children planted feet on their own paths, I sold my Napa Valley home and spent a year in Paris where I focused solely on reading (such bliss!), writing, and photographing angel statuary and art. Being surrounded by the stimulus of Paris, with its exceptional architecture, art, and ambiance—they adore, admire, and support writers in Paris, for example—felt like heaven. Everywhere I looked, my eye lighted upon something exquisite to photograph, which spurred me to develop further as a visual artist. By the time I came home, my photographic abilities had grown, along with a renewed passion for writing.

These days, in New England, I still photograph, though I focus more on landscapes. I find that the process of framing shots through a viewfinder (or on a small screen) gives my neurons a needed rest, feeds my hunger for visual creativity, and bolsters my ability to focus when writing. Photography has also benefitted my writing by:

Teaching me to look for and think about dramatic images/story lines before I set up the camera/sit down to write.
Learning that taking a moment to think about what interests me and to search for something that illustrates the emotion I want to capture infuses the work with passion and vigor.
Training my “writing eye” to focus on what’s “in view,” what’s most important in a scene, and to screen out what clutters or distracts from the central focus. And:

To notice the small details I want to capture and make sure they’re included.
To balance the image/scene/story, adjusting the “view” to capture the most dramatic aspects of the image/scene/story.
To be aware of the setting, staging, lighting, and how changes affect the final capture.
To experiment and return to the scene if I’ve not captured what I wanted.
To scrupulously edit out anything that didn’t fully work, confident that I’ve grown and will continue to grow through the process.


Helping me do something that stimulates my visual creativity while allowing my mental and verbal creativity to take a badly needed break.
Keeping me centered and happy.

We’re so lucky to love writing as we do. It will give us a passion to ride well into old age, and I’m double lucky that I love photography. If you don’t have a visual passion and your neurons feel spent after writing all day, I find Pinterest a very relaxing visual treat (follow me @Susan Reynolds), and it’s an amazing resource for finding images that spark ideas for characters and setting.

And, if all else fails, there’s always Netflix.

Don’t forget to Fire Up Your Writing Brain by resting your neurons occasionally.

Happy Writing!