Several times now I have had the profound experience of listening to famed author and illustrator, James A. Owen give his incredible lecture titled, “Drawing Out the Dragons.”

There were many great lessons shared and some terrific insights into life. One particular seemed to penetrate me deeply; each time I’ve heard Drawing out the Dragons, I have felt challenged, recommitted to Live Deliberately.

Much of my early life, I lived like a stick floating down a stream, subjected to the whims and will of the water flow, victim to whatever happened to me, resenting most everything, because I wanted something else, but felt powerless. In recent years I’ve discovered that I have a voice, and it is my choice whether or not I use it. Rather than letting life and the elements act on me, I have chosen to act. I have chosen to live deliberately.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This is what I think it means to live deliberately.

– Seize the day. “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” – Henry David Thoreau

– Have no fear. “If you really want to do something, no one can stop you. But if you really don’t want to do something, no one can help you.” – James A. Owen

– Let go of pride. “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.” – C.S. Lewis

– Find your tribe. “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

– Learn, always. “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

– Know thyself. “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” – Lao Tzu

– To thine own self be true. “Every once in a while, the Universe opens itself up to you and you alone, and shows you something that no one else is going to understand. And you have to decide in that moment how much you believe in what you have seen–even if everyone else in the world tells you you’re wrong.” – James A. Owen

– Choose.

The Road Not Taken

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost

Mining the Pain

July 15, 2015

Travis Heermann

Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Life Philosophies Reader Investment & Empathy The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

Pain is a part of life. Suffering is the human condition. It rains down on us and we wallow in it. It eats at our guts and we keep feeding it until there’s nothing left but a shell.

If there is anything that every single member of the human race holds in common, it is one thing.

Love.

All of us have loved. Most of us have lost. Lovers, children, parents, friends, pets. Betrayals, unravelings, deaths, or simply unrequited yearnings. All love comes together, and then it must, inevitably, come apart. Someone said that all love stories ultimately end in tragedy.

Rather than philosophize all the live-long day, I should point out that this is going somewhere.

Artists are uniquely suited among us to use that pain to illuminate the human condition. Music and poetry and prose comes along at just the right moment, lances that boil of loss that’s festering in one’s soul and lets healing begin.

On the way to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, I was driving through the forests of upstate New York toward New Hampshire, with a background noise of hurt emanating from how a woman I really loved was breaking my heart. And then some song I had picked up on a free Starbucks iTunes card cycled through my iPod for the first time and blasted a hole in my heart ten-miles wide, splattering bits of my soul all over the inside of the car. The song was “Sometime around Midnight” by Airborne Toxic Event, and it evoked a tidal wave of sad, sick, helpless desperation that I swam in for the next several hours. I listened to it over and over, memorizing every word. That song, in that moment, was about me.

So I arrived at Odyssey, started getting to know my amazing classmates and teacher, and settled in. The first week brought in the award-winning horror writer Jack Ketchum as a guest instructor. During his lecture, he said something I will never forget:

“In your writing, examine love always, and binding.”

And then Ketchum went on to explain that stories are almost always about love coming together, coming apart, or strengthening, renewing, reaffirming the bonds between characters. There are, of course, exceptions, but anytime you’re dealing with human beings in conflict, the crux of the story is almost always one of love’s multitude of forms. Even war stories are often the about the camaraderie among soldiers.

His lecture crystallized for me what I had been writing about for years. And throughout the rest of the workshop, I applied this newfound insight in every story I wrote.

And all that pain I had experienced in the car, I poured into the stories. They were raw, dripping with emotion. But they were real.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I was procrastinating over on Facebook, and another quote popped up on a friend’s feed:

“Great writing is not perfect; it’s real. It bleeds and leaves a trace.” – Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence

The writing I produced in the midst of that pain back then is still some of my favorite, because it all came straight from the depths. It was far from perfect, but it certainly left a mark on me.

Writers of all stripes are uniquely suited to distill our pain into art. But what makes it “art,” rather than commonplace catharsis? Does anybody really want to read your therapy? Unlikely. It’s not the fact that you’ve had the courage (or neediness?) to put your pain on the page and show it to people. It needs to offer the reader something of value: a unique insight or perspective. What do you want the give the reader as they walk away?

Growth is a good place to start. People lose patience quickly with those who wallow in their pain for interminable periods and never learn from it, never get past it, or repeat the same mistakes over and over, and so will readers. What did you learn from your pain? Will your characters learn it too? What does your story have to say about love and binding? This discussion is leading us straight into the idea of “theme.”

You may not know what your story is about until you type THE END, but you should be able to look at it with an objective eye and identify its theme. The hard part here is being able to look past whatever emotions you mined to build the story to look at it objectively. All that raw emotion feels absolutely, 100% true and real to you, but not necessarily to the reader. You still must have the ability to lead them into it.

Just like nothing should get in the way of love, the writer should allow nothing to get in the way of writing about it, especially not worries about who will read it. You may have loved and lost, but maybe you can get a good story or two out of the experience.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

In August, 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

Finding a Good Story

July 14, 2015

Frank Morin

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I love a good story.

I’ve always hungered for good stories, and consumed them in whatever form I could get, from books to movies to campfire tales. I played a unique version of D&D with my brothers that we developed ourselves. It stripped away most of the dice and complexities that we found boring, and concentrated on the pure fun, the central creation of the game: the story.

As a writer, I keep the thrill of finding new stories alive with my family. We tell a lot of stories in our home, and we’ve gone way beyond reading standard bedtime tales. For the past ten years, we’ve built stories interactively, plunging into the midst of fantastic adventures, bringing worlds alive through spur-of-the-moment adventures we tell on the fly. There’s nothing quite like the exhilaration of riding the cusp of a fun story, trying to figure out the next step in time for the words to flow from your tongue.

Not only are such storytelling experiences tons of fun, but they are tremendously valuable as writing tools. The mental exercise of building a good story off the cuff like that helps break through inhibitions or blockages that can happen when we as writers don’t dare to take the plunge and throw our story off a cliff just to see what happens. If something doesn’t work, who cares? Make a change and try something different.

It’s also a wonderful chance to gauge audience reactions to various story elements with instant feedback. Kids are brutal critics. If a choice I make in a story doesn’t work, the kids will frown and say, “Dad, that’s stupid.”

Okay, try something different.

It’s a magical experience to feel a story coming together in the moment, see the excitement in my kids’ eyes as they get it and enjoy it, join with them in laughter as we throw a surprise curveball into a story and cause our heroes so much trouble.

My Petralist series started in this way, with the kids helping me develop the basic idea for the magic system, and the world taking shape around our initial story concept. It’s transformed a lot through the process of moving the story to print, but its inner heart is unchanged. I think that’s why Set in Stone has done so well. It’s a good story.

So when I feel like I need inspiration for writing, or if an idea is feeling flat or boring, I take it to the family to give it new life.

About Frank Morin: When not writing or trying to keep up with his active family, Frank’s often found hiking, camping, Scuba diving, or enjoying other outdoor activities. For updates on his popular YA fantasy novel, Set in Stone, or his other scheduled book releases, check his website: www.frankmorin.org

Grief and Method Writing

July 13, 2015

Kim May

Conflict Kim May Reader Investment & Empathy Submissions No Comments

Method acting (using memories of your own painful experiences in order to convey that same emotion in a performance) is a subject that actors often have opposing views on. Either they think it’s the only way to effectively convey strong emotions or they think it’s a cheat that does more damage to the actor’s psyche then it’s worth.

Oddly, method writing doesn’t have the same stigma. Maybe it’s because it’s incredibly hard to create when we’re feeling strong emotions like grief. It could also be because some of those experiences were so painful that we don’t want to revisit those memories for any reason. However, if you are able to string words together in the proper order when those painful moments arise you can use them to add depth and authenticity to your writing that it may not otherwise have.

Last year I attended the Anthology Workshop that Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith do every winter. It’s very intense and requires a lot of prep work; most of which is writing six short stories for six specific themed anthologies, each edited by a different professional editor, in six weeks. I was determined to write all six. Not only did I want to get the most out of the workshop (it’s not cheap) but I also didn’t want to let Kris and Dean down since they were kind enough to let an unpublished writer (me) into the workshop.

Unfortunately the day I started writing the first story my cat stopped eating. She was almost nineteen years old and her mobility had been declining for several months. In fact I had to place the giant tackle box I store my make-up and hair pieces in (old theater habit) next to the bed so she could use it as a stair. Having watched her brothers go through a similar decline prior to their deaths, I knew what was coming.

I had so much invested in the workshop that I was hesitant to pull out, especially since I didn’t know exactly how long she had left. She outlived her eldest brother by a decade so I kept writing in the hope that she would hang in there long enough for me to finish the last story. All of this weighed heavily in my mind when I wrote Blood Moon Carnival, which is in the anthology pictured above. All of the sadness, fear, and grief I felt I poured into that story. It wasn’t easy but the end result was definitely worth it. Without that experience the protagonist’s reactions wouldn’t have right. Grief for a friend or grandparent, while intense, is different than grief for a spouse or child — something I didn’t realize until I experienced it.

As I said before, because it’s hard to create when intense emotions like this take over your mind you shouldn’t feel bad if you can’t utilize them in the moment. I think the only reason it worked for me was that I did it prior to her death. I certainly couldn’t have done it right after her passing. If you’re not able to use the experience while the memories are still fresh, you can draw on them later. These kind of memories don’t diminish with time.