LIFE-WRITES: Freeing the writer’s inner voice

Because Life-Writes is about drawing on submerged inner resources, it means that I’ve chosen to share many of my own private thoughts and family memories to illustrate many of the points made in the text. As a result, this has become a very personal book, because the examples, stories and anecdotes are real-life revelations, not fictional ones. Drawing on our inner reserves means that we have to be honest with ourselves about how much we are actually willing to give, or reveal, to a general readership in order to further our writing career. Where, we must ask ourselves, does reality end and creative writing begin?

The original idea for my book, Creative Pathways: Freeing the Writer’s Inner Voice, came after reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a sort of personal journal of a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor of Japan towards the end of the 10th century AD. Today, a pillow book refers to an illustrated manual of erotic advice but Sei’s book was a mixture of diary, gossip column and ‘commonplace’ book that showcased her literary observations off to perfection. History tells us that both her father and great-grandfather were both noted poets and scholars and, were Sei Shonagon alive today, she would probably be one of our leading literary lights. In this capacity, she can quite easily fill the role of ancestral spirit, or kami, of creative inner thought.

Unlike Julie Andrews’ ‘Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music, however, the ‘things’ that Sei Shonagon commented upon were not always pleasing. Nevertheless it is her wide-ranging observations that set the pattern for some of the exercises for my creative writing workshops, combining Zen-like word-pictures and contemporary commercial writing ambition in order to free
the writer’s inner voice. The age-old categories were Sei Shonagon’s own – the ‘things’ in Creative Pathways were mine.
For example:

The Pillow Book:
Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

Dried hollyhock. 
The objects used during the Display of Dolls. 
To find a piece of deep violet or grape-coloured material that has been pressed between the pages of a
notebook.
It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then comes across the letters of a man one used to love.
Last year’s paper fan. 
Night with a clear moon.

Creative Pathways:
Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

A collection of old family photographs
Old theatre programmes
A particular piece of music
Wood smoke
The smell of hawthorn or bluebells in blossom

Here we have two collections of memories (or, from the writer’s perspective ‘ideas’) that immediately spark very clear images in the mind’s eye despite the fact that eleven centuries separate
them.
 
Make a note of your ‘things that arouse a fond memory of the past' in your Ideas Book