Samples:
Free Your Inner Book in 20 Simple Steps
It is normal to have a certain amount of anxiety about the reaction that your writing is going to illicit – especially from the people you know. It is understandable. You need to find a way to put some sort of safe psychological distance between your writing and what the reaction to that writing is going to be. So let me give you a little history lesson that might help…
At the beginning of this book I asked you what you thought a writer looked like. The image I portrayed of a drink addled, recluse on the verge of a nervous breakdown is probably in some degrees what your image of a writer is. To be fair, it is the image we instantly get when we think of people in all the creative arts arenas – painters, singers, designers etc.
When you tell somebody that you want to be one of these creative people you tend to get asked a bunch of similar fear based questions along the lines of “aren’t you afraid you are never going to have any success?”, “aren’t you afraid of the humiliation of rejection?”, “aren’t you afraid you are going to fail?”, “aren’t you afraid you are not good enough?” Let’s be honest – often the person asking you these things is yourself!
But, the question we should be asking ourselves about this is, why?
Why should you feel afraid of the work that you feel you were put upon this Earth to do?
And, why is it that it is only the creative arts that make us really nervous about our mental health and capacity to cope, in a way that other jobs tend not to do. My father was an electrical engineer – he played with electricity all day – but I don’t ever recall anyone ever asking him if he was afraid of being an electrical engineer and questioning his sanity.
So, why and how have creative people managed to earn themselves this dubious reputation of being alcoholic manic-depressives? In the 20th century alone the death count of really brilliant creative minds who died young (and often at their own hands) is staggering. Society, as a collective, doesn’t really blink an eye because it is almost expected. Creativity and suffering go hand in hand and that is fine and normal.
However, it wasn’t always like that!
In ancient Greece and Rome, they had some surprisingly different ideas about creativity in general and creative people in particular that might help you put some much-needed distance between you and your creativity. These ancient societies that brought us arts and ways of thinking that have endured the test of time did not happen to believe that creativity came from within. They believed that creativity was a sort of divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and mysterious source, for distant and mysterious reasons. The Greeks called these divine attendant spirits of creativity, daemons; Socrates, for example, firmly believed that he had a daemon.
The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. They did not think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, like JK Rowling’s Dobby the house elf. Dobby would come out and invisibly help the artist with their work and shape the outcome of that work. And everyone knew this.
I like this way of thinking. It was a very helpful psychological construct that would protect the artist from the results of their work. The ancient artist was protected from, for example, too much narcissism - If your work was brilliant, you couldn’t take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius Dobby who had helped you. Equally, if your work bombed, its not entirely your fault - your Dobby was just kind of lame.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that actually makes a lot of sense to me. There are many times when I am not entirely certain of where a creative project has popped up from. Sometimes when I sit down to write, whole days disappear and I haven’t a clue where they went. I even come across short stories and scribbled paragraphs that I don’t even remember writing.
It was only with the onset of the Renaissance that things in the West changed. They put the individual human being at the centre of the universe above all gods and mysteries. The beginning of rational humanism, which got people believing that creativity came completely from the individual and for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius.
Allowing one mere mortal to believe that he or she is the vessel, the font, the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a touch too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It completely warps and distorts egos and it creates these unmanageable expectations about performance, the pressure of which has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
Gaia
I had just turned 14 when I killed everyone I had ever known…
It was one of those mornings that was becoming less rare. The air was clear and the sky was almost blue. I had set out to get samples from the outside as usual. I had gotten used to being by myself on these trips since my aunt’s death 2 years previously but I was looking forward to taking on Ashanti as apprentice when she finally turned 8.
I was proud to be a scientist, keeping the records of things since the drop and monitoring safety levels in the outside – amongst a whole host of other things – just like my family had done since the beginning of bubble life.
I had taken some bark and moss samples and was heading down to the stream to test the water levels, concentrating so much on the feel of breeze on my face and the real sunshine on my skin that I almost missed the bundle of rags lying on the water’s edge. Sometimes I wish I had but the universe had another plan for me. I saw it move from the corner of my eye and at first thought it might be a trapped animal. That it was another human being never entered my mind. In all my expeditions I had never encountered even traces of another person and the last record of any being seen was in my great grandmother’s journal some 100 years previously. A bedraggled, half-starved group of travelers with tales of war and famine. My great grandmother had brought them food and clean water, medicines and blankets but she had been afraid of the hunger and disease in them and had never gone near. I had always thought her cowardly, thought that she should have invited them to join us for surely they had died in the harsh winter that followed – turns out she was wise, wiser than I could ever be.
The bundle of rags moved again and I saw it had a face, a young face, no older than my brother, perhaps 17. Bald on his chin but with thick dark hair on his head, shiny and clean looking despite what was obviously a long dunk in the river. His eyes were closed and his skin had a blue tinge to it, his body shivering in the wet rags.
My very first stranger. I needed to help him. I began to take the wet rags off him. They were actually finely made but torn and ragged clothes, dripping and freezing from the river waters. I had several hemp sacks in a roll for collecting samples and I used one to rub down the skin on his arms and chest trying very hard to concentrate on the job at hand and not stare at this stranger’s body. The hemp sack dried his skin and brought some colour back to it, but he still hadn’t opened his eyes. I bent over his face to listen to his breathing – that could have been it, that act just there, the one that killed everybody I knew?
As I lent my face close to his he took in a deep shuddering breath and then starting coughing hard. I grabbed him and sat him up patting his back until it subsided. His eyes had flickered open, blue and sharp and he was looking around puzzled. He looked at me and spoke but it was a language I didn’t understand. He coughed again, a deep hacking sound that came from deep in his chest. Took a deep breath and spoke again. I shook my head.
“I don’t understand you, but you are safe now” I told him. He took my hand and kissed it. My first touch from a stranger. Maybe it was that act that did it?
I heard the Marco whistle go off. Time to get back. I left the stranger with my bread and cheese and a couple of the sacks and made my way home, my head full of the things I was going to write in my journal and not full of the things we had been taught since birth about the outside and the people in it.
Which of these things was my biggest mistake? I couldn’t tell you.