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Seven Ways To Connect Your Writing And Your Life
An important question for any artist is: How can I built a career and simultaneously be true to myself? Its an important question, and during the twenty years Ive taught writing, hundreds of students have expressed the belief that success and personal integrity are mutually exclusive.
The Lifewriting approach to fiction suggests that not only do these two qualities overlap, but that the safest, surest, most satisfying path to discovering your true voice, your deepest creative flow, and ultimately crafting the most satisfying career, is to be true to yourself. It suggests that Aristotles famous debate concerning the relative merits of plot and character is a trick: Plot and character are actually two sides of the same coin. Character is best revealed through action. And plot is merely what happens when a given character engages with a specific situation. It is not only possible, but advisable, to shift back and forth between those perspectives, seeking to create a seamless whole.
How do you, personally, define character? You MUST have some theory or feeling for the human condition, or youll have nothing to write about. The best and simplest way to learn characterization is to study psychology. And the best psychological study is yourself. Why? Because you have more information about what makes you you than you will ever have about what makes anyone else tick.
What this path demands is the honesty and courage to look deeply into your own life, and some model to organize the different aspects of your personality and emotional history. Then you need some mechanism to help you apply your discoveries to your writing.
The very finest model of the human condition is the 6,000 year old model from India, the chakras of yoga. Supposedly seven energy centers within and around the human body, they mirror Maslows hierarchy of human needs. Both yogis and psychologists suggest that until the lower more basic needs are met, one cannot move to the next level of life.
The Chakras represent survival, sexuality, power, emotion, communication, intellect, and spirit. Lets take a peek into the way each of these levels can be used to connect your inner emotional world, and your writing.
1) Survival. What are your deepest fears? Remember that fear underlies most anger, and fear turned inside-out inspires most comedy. What comic or horrific use can you make of your own most secret fears? Create characters with the same concern and needs. I promise you: plenty of your readers will have the same problems. Die Hard and a hundred other movies a year punch this button. We fear dying, disfigurement, abandonment, old age, and diseaseall survival values. All superb story sources.
2) Sexuality. What turns you on? Sexuality can be an important aspect of your characters lives . What was you r first experience? Best? Worst/ Most recent? Least ethical? At what point do you feel you began to have mature sexual relationships? When do you think that sexuality is appropriate or inappropriate? What people in your experience have been uplifted, healed, damaged or debased in their sexual interactions? Every one of them is a character, and an opportunity for you to express your opinions and philosophies. The movie A History of Violence used sex brilliantly to help us understand the powerful bond between the leads.
3) Power. What is your physical condition? What does it say about your actions, values, and priorities? Craft characters with distinct physical attributes, and allow their life history to express itself in their movement and appearance. Rocky or Million Dollar Baby utilize dynamic training and fight scenes to express depths of passion and desperation. While physical power is the most basic form, this evolves into financial and political powerany form of control over self, family, or others. Explore your own attitudes toward these kinds of power, and begin to craft characters who breathe.
4) Love. What is love? Mature affection as opposed to immature puppy love? Love for ones children and family. Love for country? For all mankind? What is the difference between love and sexual attraction? What is the price you see people paying for their heart space connections? What are the greatest advantages and disadvantages of human contact? Forrest Gump is about a man with a beautiful loving heart and the mind of a child. His life is better than almost anyone he ever meets, despite their advantages.
5) Communication. What is your belief about education and perception? What is our obligation to communicate with clarity and honesty? What kind of mischief is caused by miscommunication? Is verbal communication better, more immediate and more honest than nonverbal? In Billy Budd, an inarticulate character strikes a man dead, largely due to frustrated communication.
6) Intellect. What are your intellectual strengths? Weaknesses? When have you had to modify your world view because reality didnt match your theories and beliefs? Creator with Peter OToole tells of a brilliant scientist locked in an intellectual prison, unable to deal with the death of his beautiful wife. ago. He must either change his map of the world, or his heart will die.
7) Spirit. What are your spiritual beliefs? Are you an atheist? Agnostic? Buddhist? Christian? What do you see as the spiritual and philosophical differences? If you didnt use the specific labels, could you create characters of each type, and demonstrate the differences? If so, why? If not, why not? Have you ever had a crisis in faith? Ever felt a prayer was answered? Did it happen in a way you expected, or otherwise? Ghandi dealt with a man of great spiritual commitment who found the strength to loosen the grip of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
Once you have thought through each of these levels as they apply to your own life, you are now able to create characters of uncommon complexity and depth. And you have taken a huge step toward releasing your true writing potential whether your intent is artistic, commercial, or, most wisely, both.
BONUS : Several Ways To Improve Your Writing Skills
Studying process involves a lot of written assignments that are usually the deciding points of any course grade. They may be difficult and time-taking but the results you get afterwards are essential both in your academic life and in your future profession regardless the field. Looking over your essay, tutors evaluate your writing skills, your ability to analyze, to assess, to compare and contrast, to express an opinion and to sound persuasive and affirmative. As you can see, there are a lot of important factors that influence the grade the tutor gives to you for your written assignment. There are a lot of types of written assignments and as a good student you are supposed to know how to write them all.
One of the hardest essays to complete is a compare and contrast essay. From the first sight it may seem that it is very easy to compare and contrast things but this really depends on what things are you comparing and contrasting. It takes time to compare material objects like buildings or monuments; imagine how time-taking the process of comparison of philosophical currents is. It is very important to choose objects or events that can be put under the same category at least in one feature out of the others. It is impossible to compare orange juice and rocky mountain, isnt it? But these are simple material matters that can be easily defined. What to do if you are given a number of matters that seem irrelevant in all the characteristics known to you? That means that you have to do a little research and evaluation. It will be a good thing to make a chart putting the things you want to compare and contrast on the top and the characteristic features aside. This way you have a possibility to see in which way they are similar and how they are different. After the evaluation process you may start actual essay writing. At the beginning you may also do a little research on possible essay formats, styles and structures, unless the requirements are set by the tutor. This really matters, for you have to show that you are intelligent, educated, well acknowledged in the subject, literate, creative, have ability to evaluate and to analyze and what is the most important, you are a unique individual with own point of view.
What sin also very important about essay writing is proofreading and editing. You may of course be exhausted by writing process and miss some mistakes, so it is better to postpone the proofreading process to times when you feel good and can attentively and step by step go over your creation and make some necessary corrections. After you are satisfied with what you have written you may submit your project and you may be sure that the result is quite possible.
Studying process involves a lot of written assignments that are usually the deciding points of any course grade. They may be difficult and time-taking but the results you get afterwards are essential both in your academic life and in your future profession regardless the field. Looking over your essay, tutors evaluate your writing skills, your ability to analyze, to assess, to compare and contrast, to express an opinion and to sound persuasive and affirmative. As you can see, there are a lot of important factors that influence the grade the tutor gives to you for your written assignment. There are a lot of types of written assignments and as a good student you are supposed to know how to write them all.
One of the hardest essays to complete is a compare and contrast essay. From the first sight it may seem that it is very easy to compare and contrast things but this really depends on what things are you comparing and contrasting. It takes time to compare material objects like buildings or monuments; imagine how time-taking the process of comparison of philosophical currents is. It is very important to choose objects or events that can be put under the same category at least in one feature out of the others. It is impossible to compare orange juice and rocky mountain, isnt it? But these are simple material matters that can be easily defined. What to do if you are given a number of matters that seem irrelevant in all the characteristics known to you? That means that you have to do a little research and evaluation. It will be a good thing to make a chart putting the things you want to compare and contrast on the top and the characteristic features aside. This way you have a possibility to see in which way they are similar and how they are different. After the evaluation process you may start actual essay writing. At the beginning you may also do a little research on possible essay formats, styles and structures, unless the requirements are set by the tutor. This really matters, for you have to show that you are intelligent, educated, well acknowledged in the subject, literate, creative, have ability to evaluate and to analyze and what is the most important, you are a unique individual with own point of view.
What sin also very important about essay writing is proofreading and editing. You may of course be exhausted by writing process and miss some mistakes, so it is better to postpone the proofreading process to times when you feel good and can attentively and step by step go over your creation and make some necessary corrections. After you are satisfied with what you have written you may submit your project and you may be sure that the result is quite possible.
