The Inner Writer » The Inner Writer – the psychology of writing and being a writer

The Writer’s Circle

2012-02-09T06:04:07Z

Coach Jenna Avery summarizes her program:

The “Just Do The Writing” Accountability Circle, aka the Writer’s Circle, is a powerful system to help writers like you – novelists, screenwriters, songwriters, poets, non-fiction writers, and creative writers – stay on track with your work so you can get your writing into the world.

This system was created by a woman named Gina Hiatt, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who developed it to support academic writers (professors & grad students) stay on track with long term writing projects — you know, the ones that are a *little* harder to stick with. *grin*

After coaching clients privately for several years, Gina realized that they needed not just weekly, but daily accountability, feedback, support, and the ability to interact with others about the process of writing.

Because daily private coaching isn’t practical for most people, she developed a unique, proprietary, online membership website that places participants in small groups, each with their own coach.

What I’ve done is build a supportive accountability group for other writers, like novelists, screenwriters, songwriters, poets, non-fiction writers, and creative writers, upon the very same system, called the Just Do The Writing Accountability Circle or the Writer’s Circle for short.

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A Press Release about the program:

Creative Writers Use Online Social Accountability For Daily Motivation to ‘Just Do the Writing’

The “Just Do The Writing” Accountability Circle helps creative and non-fiction writers face the challenges of writing on a daily basis by providing an online social accountability network to help writers track their writing progress and receive coaching and peer support.

With the popularity of short-term writing programs like November’s “NaNoWriMo” and April’s “Script Frenzy,” two month-long writing sessions that happen online, it’s clear that getting social support and camaraderie around writing is inspirational to many writers.

But while writing furiously for a month can be exciting and a lot can be accomplished, it may also be a recipe for exhaustion and writer’s burnout.

Also, what happens afterward? Are the novels and scripts getting completed? Or are they put back on the shelf when regular life takes over again?

To meet long term writing goals, like completing a novel, building a library of spec scripts, or developing a body of other creative writing, experts like Julia Cameron recommend a practice of consistent, daily writing.

But for the average writer — even if seasoned — that may be easier said than done.

Creative fears, self-doubt, creative blocks, second novel syndrome, lack of time, procrastination, isolation, major life transitions, and other creative challenges get in the way.

Even successful writers will tell you there are days when scrubbing the toilets or polishing the floors suddenly becomes incredibly fascinating.

The “Just Do The Writing” Accountability Circle — aka the Writer’s Circle — is an online system run by creativity coach and writer Jenna Avery, who is determined to help writers make the commitment to daily writing, even in the midst of living regular, busy lives.

During recurring four week long sessions of the Writer’s Circle, members log on to a unique website where they publicly announce their writing goals to their small group of peers and coaches and report back about their progress by answering a series of questions at least 5 days of every 7.

Their peers and coach respond with support, guidance, and encouragement. Visual graphing allows them to see not only their own progress, but the progress of others, and the shared community around writing increases productivity and commitment levels dramatically.

Issues like perfectionism, negative thinking, and anxiety are all addressed by the coaches.

Molly Yarrington, a repeat participant in the Writer’s Circle, wrote a poem every day for 30 days using the online system, even while working, taking care of a sick child, and coaching crew.

She notes, “Along with developing a daily habit of writing, the Writer’s Circle has brought me an awareness of the real issues that have held me back, and believe me, they are not a lack of time, though I did believe that was the primary issue when I began.”

Participants are thrilled with the results they’re getting, like Fredrica Parlett, a self-described “hyperactive senior” who wrote 20,000 words of her novel during 3 four-week sessions of the Writer’s Circle.

Parlett says, “I’m writing again — that’s the bottom line. I feel encouraged to continue even on days when I don’t feel I have time or energy or desire.”

Avery points out that although writers can connect online through social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, the Writer’s Circle has a common focus that allows writers to more deeply commit to their work without getting sidetracked by social networking.

Jenna Avery is a writer, Certified Life Coach, and creativity coach. She helps highly creative artists, leaders, activists, and entrepreneurs grab hold of the bigger vision of what they were put here to do so they can bring their art, message, or movement out into the world in all its powerful, messy glory.

Avery is also the founder of the “Just Do The Writing Accountability Circle” and loves to support writers to take daily, regular action on their writing projects. She is currently writing a sci-fi screenplay and publishing articles using the online system herself.

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Two of the many testimonials about The Writer’s Circle – visit the site to read others [and at larger size].

Archetypes for Writers: Developing Complex Characters

2012-01-27T02:42:41Z

Jean Shinoda Bolen on Greek mythology

Author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. explains the idea of archetype as a “predisposition that contributes to our personality, helping define our strengths, difficulties, and meaning.”

She says the common forms “are based on the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. People are complex, there is a pantheon of these archetypes in each of us. They act from within us, and the more we know of them, the more conscious we can be about ourselves, the better.” [She is author of Gods in Everyman; her quotes are from myth & story : page 2]

Jennifer Van Bergen – exploring a whole secret life

In her article Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen writes about exploring these “underlying pre-existent patterns, or archetypes, in people’s behaviors and actions. Eventually, you see not simply the behaviors themselves but an entire ‘secret life’ going on, and from that you begin to discern a whole ‘invisible world’ where these secret lives interact, interweave, and form into stories.”

She says by “working at the archetype level.. your writing will never be the same.”

Her book Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious, according to summary by the Writers Store, notes it provides a step-by-step method, using specific exercises and coupled with detailed, in-depth explanations of the meaning of each step, to enable writers to find the characters they already contain within themselves but do not know exist or know how to access or develop.

Carl Jung

Archetypes, as the Wikipedia entry says, “have been present in mythology and literature for hundreds of years. The use of archetypes to analyze personality was advanced by Carl Jung early in the 20th century.

“The value in using archetypal characters in fiction derives from the fact that a large group of people are able to unconsciously recognize the archetype, and thus the motivations, behind the character’s behavior.”

The valuable shadow

Jung also developed ideas about exploring and using our personal shadow – “the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”

He said the shadow “also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”

Many writers and other artists realize how valuable it can be to explore and make use of these concepts of archetypes and the shadow self.

Another book on this topic is Psychology for Screenwriters, by William Indick, PhD.

[In her Amazon.com review, Rev. Marie Jones writes: "For any writer struggling to create powerful and believable characters, it is imperative that you understand the psychological aspects of why people do the things they do, why they behave in the ways they choose to, and what inner drives propel them towards potential greatness. The hero's journey talked about in myth and story has a structure based upon archetypes, themes and patters of human behavior that any writer can come to master when creating the perfect screenplay, and this book by screenwriter and Assistant Professor of Psychology William Indick is a priceless guidebook for navigating the interior of the mind."]

Wes Craven – consciousness is painful

For example, director Wes Craven (the image at top is from his movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) said in an interview that during the years while writing the film, he was reading “a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There’s a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake – which I did throughout this picture.

“His theory was that consciousness is painful. To know really what’s true, to know the truth in any given situation, is painful, often uncomfortable, and it’s not pleasant. So most of us, most of the time, will go out what he called ‘doors.’ He listed sex, eating, sleeping, being out in a crowd; today you could add television and drugs. Those things ease the pain of consciousness.”

Craven adds that the hero – an archetypal figure – is “the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it’s so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they’re truly conscious. That became the framework for the film.” [Quotes from page the shadow self : page 3]
~~

archetypes for writers, writing book, writing and the unconscious, use myths for personal growth

Developing Creativity: Writing With Patience

2011-12-20T04:47:44Z

“And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Patience is a somewhat devalued commodity. Particularly among those who ought to know better – writers themselves.” – Dennis Palumbo

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues.

In one of his HOLLYWOOD ON THE COUCH column posts, he refers to the early 60′s movie The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner:

“I think of this film sometimes when trying to help my writer patients working on long-form projects—novels, plays, screenplays, etc. The running analogy is a good one, because long-form writing is like running a marathon: it requires endurance, patience, a deep reserve of will power and commitment, and an almost Herculean ability to delay gratification.

“(To continue the analogy, other kinds of writing might be likened to sprints—short stories, sitcoms, poems, etc. Sprints require a burst of speed and power, the knock-out punch of a single idea or concept, and a quick build to an explosive finish.)”

And this can apply to other forms of creative expression as well, of course. Writing a blog post as I’m doing here does not demand the same attitudes and emotional resources as crafting a short story or novel; adding a creative accessory to your dress is not the same as costume designing for a movie, etc.

Palumbo continues: “Where the long-form writer gets in trouble is in believing that he or she can maintain over the length of the project the same vigor and intensity that’s brought to a shorter piece. Hence, when the work slows, or gets bogged down in exposition, or drifts off on tangents, the writer panics. His or her confidence flags. Enthusiasm drains away…”

He provides some suggestions to help “keep on keeping on” for writers, but that may be helpful for other creators – such as:

“Pace yourself. As I said, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. 16-hour days at the keyboard, living on pizza and Red Bull, may get you through a short piece or re-write that’s on deadline, but for a novel or screenplay it’s deadly. Hard on your family, your vital organs, and your outlook on life. // Expect slow spots, things that don’t work, and reverses…”

From his post Going the Distance.

Patience / Impatience

In another post, he writes more about how patience is being discounted – to the detriment of creative thought and work.

“As a result of this current frenzy for speed, for quick results, patience—with oneself, one’s work, and, more importantly, one’s way of working—is a somewhat devalued commodity. Particularly among those who ought to know better—writers themselves.

“Nowadays, few writers are advised to cultivate patience. There’s a lot of pressure to just write, to get it out there, to strive mightily to come up with the next high concept (“You got anything like Iron Man?” “We’re looking for another Harry Potter-type book.” “How about a police procedural show on Mars?”).

“We live in a competitive, consumerist culture, and there’s tremendous urgency to perform.

“A virtue like patience—sort of in the same homey, humble category as gumption—can get lost in the manic rush to produce material.

“It seems too that the word patience has lost some of its calming assurance, its reference to longevity, endurance, and the slow growth of technical skill.

“Rather than thinking of it as the quality that enables a writer to explore his or her material, growing more competent by small, even measures, patience has taken on the attributes of a necessary evil.”

Palumbo’s reference to “small, even measures” reminds me of the change strategy kaizen, which psychologist Robert Maurer, PhD says “has been a fundamental part of Asian philosophical systems for ages.” He notes that taking on a large creative project or some “big thing” or major change in life we want or need to do will often trigger disrupting or paralyzing fear.

He says that kaizen “disarms the brain’s fear response… It engages the brain in a completely different, much smarter, and infinitely more effective way… presenting ideas for change in a way that literally melts the brain’s resistance.”

From his article ‘Thinking big’ could be making you FAIL! – which includes links to his Kaizen program and book.

Palumbo continues:

“When a writer who’s struggling in his career or with his creative process tells me, through clenched teeth, that he knows he ‘needs more patience,’ what he’s referring to is an arms-folded, foot-tapping-nervously-on-the-floor kind of impatience, waiting for things to get better.

“When seen in this way, having patience becomes the sorry equivalent of having to eat your spinach: it’s supposed to be good for you—it’s a damned virtue, isn’t it?—but nobody really likes it.”

He mentions that Stephen Levine, a meditation teacher and author, once described the cause of suffering as, simply, “wanting things to be otherwise.”

Palumbo adds, “I think this is the key to understanding the value of patience for a writer. If a writer thinks she is being patient by, symbolically, gritting her teeth and waiting for ‘things to be otherwise,’ then she will in fact only add to her suffering.

From his post: For Writers, Patience is Still a Virtue.

~~~

Book: Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings [Kindle Edition] by Stephen Levine.

Related article: Therapist to the Hollywood Stars – Excerpt from Shrink Rap Radio transcript: David Van Nuys, Ph.D. interviews psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT.

Palumbo is the author of Writing from the Inside Out.

Photo at top from article: Dennis Palumbo from the Inside Out – An Interview with Dennis Palumbo by Colleen Collins.

Photo: J. K. Rowling in 1997 at a table in Nicholson’s Cafe in Edinburgh.

J. K. Rowling conceived the idea for the ‘Harry Potter’ series while on a train trip in 1990, and finished typing the first manuscript in 1995. She often worked at pubs and cafes during her lunch breaks from jobs and when she could get her baby daughter to sleep. From post: Creating a life of accomplishment.

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The Daily Writing Impulse

2011-08-04T18:00:31Z

Cynthia Morris says on her site Original Impulse: “Others dream of finally putting on paper the story they’ve been wanting to tell for years but have been afraid to begin.

“With me, they stop merely dreaming and they start writing.

“I’ve been a writing and creativity coach full-time since 1999, and I know that most of you aren’t looking for more platitudes about your creative self. You want to put the words down on paper.

“You want to know the right way to work so that you can stick with it. You want to make your writing into a real part of your life.”

About her Daily Writing Impulse subscription service – a prompt every day to your inbox.

Writers of all levels and genres can benefit from a daily writing practice. Members of the Daily Writing Impulse report more confidence, more connection with themselves and others, and more enjoyment with their writing.

You don’t need to become a reckless hermit to get your writing into your schedule. Over and over again, my clients report great satisfaction from writing just 15 minutes a day.

That’s right. Fifteen minutes a day builds a writing habit that you can maintain – on your terms.

Then there’s the problem of what to write. You’ve got a ton of story and blog ideas, but the starkly pristine blank page shuts that writing impulse down faster than you can say writer’s block.

You need the starter’s pistol to get you – and your words – out of the gate.

Get your writing out of your head and onto paper with the The Daily Writing Impulse, a monthly or annual subscription to daily email prompts.

They’ll spark your writing so that you’re eagerly setting aside 15 minutes each day to enjoy your writing fix.

The Daily Writing Impulse offers a simple, evocative writing prompt, delivered to your inbox, to keep writing in your life on a regular basis.

When you write daily, or even a handful of days each week, you will:
generate fresh ideas
develop existing ideas
gain confidence in your writing
feel a sense of connection to your creative juju
enjoy the satisfaction of seeing your potential develop into something real.

A testimonial:

“When I switched to Cynthia’s prompts, I never went back to my own.

“Using prompts generated outside myself helped me to break through the limits I had created. Cynthia’s prompts yielded more surprising connections and rewarding results. They often sparked a new way into my characters’ attitudes and interactions.

“It also proved I could write from anything, any time.” Julie Ball, writer, Australia

[From The Daily Writing Impulse site.]

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Also see articles by Cynthia Morris.

The Transformational Author Experience Program

2011-05-13T04:03:14Z

Featured teachers for the FREE Transformational Author Experience programs include New York Times best-selling authors Gay Hendricks, Marci Shimoff, Robert Allen, and Sonia Choquette… as well as leading book publishing and marketing experts including Jonathan Fields, Mari Smith, Marc Allen, Christine Kloser… and many more.

Register to learn how you could win a chance to BE the next big transformational author when you enter the Transformational Author Writing Contest.

Check out these prizes:

*Personal review of your book proposal by Marc Allen, President and Publisher of New World Library (Eckhart Tolle’s publisher) and be  considered for a traditional publishing contract

*Publishing packages with Balboa Press (a division of Hay House  Publishing), including visibility at all Hay House “I Can Do it  Conferences”, Hay House Newsletter and more

*Have your book professionally edited

*A gorgeous book cover designed to sell!

*A professional book marketing consult

*Custom creation of a video book trailer

*Guaranteed publicity for your book

*And much more!

[Text from the site.] Register free at The Transformational Author Experience Program

Shelley Hitz on How to Self Publish

2011-05-10T20:53:22Z

Shelley Hitz is author of the Self-Publishing-Coach.com site and a number of titles that help writers self-publish.

She says, “It might not be as much work as you think.

“In fact, if you already own a website or blog, you can seamlessly transform your most popular content into a book.

“Think about it: you can take the same great content you’ve already written for your site and reformulate it into a printed book, PDF eBook or audio book to make the most of all your hard work.”

Continued in her article (with video): How to Self Publish a Book.

Our Stuff is the Raw Material of Writing

2011-03-14T19:46:33Z

Writers and other artists are advised to “get out of their own way” to more freely express their inner experience.

It is also potentially a core benefit of counseling or psychotherapy. But what does it really mean: getting out of our own way?

Dennis Palumbo, a writer and therapist specializing in creative issues, addresses the question:

“If I, the writer, get out of my own way – that is, put my ‘stuff’ aside so I can write – what’s left to write about? My stuff is the raw material of my writing.

“In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and just say it: There is nothing but stuff. Which is great, because that means I’ll never run out of raw material. As long as I’m a human being, I have an inexhaustible supply.”

He goes on to note that this does not refute the idea that “the most important thing a writer has to do is get out of his or her own way.”

Continued in my Creative Mind post Our Stuff is the Raw Material

Writing from Your Subconscious

2010-12-26T20:58:55Z

Guillermo del Toro on the supranatural

The film Pan’s Labyrinth was acclaimed for its powerful story and richly beautiful as well as terrifying images.

Writer and director Guillermo del Toro once commented, “When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.”

In an interview, del Toro spoke about humans having two levels of thought: “One is conscious and the other unconscious or subconscious…

“Our problem is that we divide things that may be instinctive and collective and we have compartmentalized our perception so strongly that we only get them in glimpses and I think this is where the idea of the Jungian archetype comes to work…

“I believe that there is a whole dimension that I wouldn’t call supernatural but ‘supranatural,’ that I believe in.” [From San Francisco Bay Guardian interview.]

Steve Martin on writing vs editing

Another film writer, as well as actor, Steve Martin thinks “The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you’re writing from your subconscious, is beautiful — it’s thrilling. When you’re editing, which is your conscious mind, it’s like torture. And I’ve just kind of decided that anytime it’s torture, I want to stop. I’ll just put it down and wait until it becomes not torture.” [NY Times, 8.8.99]

Writing takes place in the subconscious

In her book Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen affirms that “Writing takes place in the subconscious. Some people view the subconscious as merely a dumping ground for stuff the conscious mind cannot or does not want to handle.

“Others consider that the subconscious only exists for people who have ‘problems.’ They think that if you are healthy, your subconscious will just fall into line with your conscious mind. Neither of these ideas is true.”

She adds, “The subconscious actually operates – in everyone – as an independent mind. It perceives, processes, and retains things that never enter the conscious mind at all.”

“We all have material in the subconscious. In fact,it is where nearly all our material is found, but that material cannot gather itself together, emerge, and become part of a work of art (or our life) unless the conscious mind allows it.”

Her book provides concrete information and exercises for, as she puts it, “doing archetypes” – not the “usual writing skills, but rather distinct, separate non-writing skills that, together, enable one to do ‘one’s own writing,’ and to access and develop one’s existing characters, and, ultimately, to write them in the context of their real lives (stories).”

Also see her article Archetypes for Writers, and my post Dancing with our unconscious.

Intuition integrates conscious and unconscious

Being creative and realizing our talents as an artist or any identity we want to be involves self-awareness and respecting who we really are, including our unconscious depths.

Brain/mind researcher Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler notes in her article Your Intuitive Intelligence that intuition is a “whole brain” function, and “draws upon both our higher mind, and our entire lifetime of experience stored in the subconscious mind. It’s probably our most powerful method of integrating our conscious and subconscious thought processes.”

Many writers and other artists attribute creative thinking and inspiration to the subconscious.

The book Sparks of Genius, among many other sources, talks about “those pre-logical glimmerings sensed amid the noise of formal thinking that intuitively synthesize an insight before it is translated into words, dance, music, math, pictures, whatever.” [Kirkus Reviews]

In his article Writers Thrive On Anxiety, hypno-psychotherapist Dr. Bryan Knight declares that hypnosis can help writers in a number of ways – including “releasing the creative power of the subconscious.” [From my article Can Hypnosis Enhance Creativity?]

Going to the cave

Author Steve Pavlina writes about “going to his cave” and becoming immersed in creative writing projects:

“For some reason these periods of intense concentration tend to reduce my need for sleep, much like doing an extended meditation. … I’ve never been into drugs, but I have to imagine there are drugs that could induce something similar to this state of being.

“In many ways it feels like my conscious mind goes on a trip. I lose awareness of my physical senses and become lodged in a reality somewhere beyond the physical universe, a world of pure thought and ideas.”

From his article My Experience of Creativity.

archetypes for writers, writing from your subconscious, writers inner life, writing book

Writers and achievement: endurability and tenacity, not just talent

2010-12-24T06:34:55Z

Author Dani Shapiro quotes from the essay “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years” by Ted Solotaroff, in which he comments about so many talented writers disappearing.

“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared.

“As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

A need for persistence and resilience to succeed

Writer Rachel Simon notes, “Tenacity has always been a primary theme in the lives of successful writers: some historians believe that Plato rewrote the first sentence of The Republic fifty times; Virgil needed ten years to write the Aeneid; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which itself required five years of work, was not even begun until Flaubert had written, and discarded, two other novels;

“James Joyce’s Ulysses took eight years to write, and countless rejections to get published; Ernest Hemingway rewrote the final page of A Farewell to Arms almost forty times…”

She adds that Ted Solotaroff “says in his essay that Bobbie Ann Mason submitted twenty stories to The New Yorker before one was accepted; Solotaroff adds that Raymond Carver wrote for almost ten years before his first story appeared in print, then persevered another seven before publishing his first book; Harold Brodkey’s first novel, Runaway Soul, took thirty-one years of revision between its 1960 book contract and its 1991 publication.

“These are just a few of the better-known examples, but every author, even the most obscure, has his or her own stories of tenacity.”

From The Writer’s Survival Guide: Chapter 3: The General Antidotes, by Rachel Simon [posted on her site]

Refining creative talent

“To be successful and high achieving takes inborn talent”; “Talent will out”; “You need a gift to be exceptional” – all these are myths, according to research detailed by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated.

These preconceptions also fuel a sense of inadequacy, lower esteem or decreased self-efficacy for many people, and distorted beliefs that we need to be “special” to reach high levels of excellence and achievement. From my post Outstanding gifted adults: Geoff Colvin on why Talent is Overrated.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Outliers that to master any skill requires about 10,000 concentrated hours. From my post Outliers and developing exceptional abilities.

Dani Shapiro writes further on endurance and the writer’s inner life in her essay A writing career becomes harder to scale:

“Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.”

Noting there is so much pressure on the writer to sell and make an impact in the marketplace, she asks “How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

“Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff’s essay: ‘Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness.’”

She adds, “The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to.

“And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves.

“But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.”

[Image: George Orwell chose to write Nineteen Eighty-Four while living in Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. From my post Places to be Creative.]

self concept as artist, artist stereotypes, developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type, psychology of creativity

Bunny – a Japanese cellphone novelist

2010-12-24T06:35:48Z

For Japan’s cellphone novelists, proof of success is in the print

One teenager who wrote a three-volume novel on her phone has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies, grossing more than $611,000 in sales.

By Yuriko Nagano, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Tokyo

Photo: “Bunny,” a 15-year-old cellphone novelist, tapped out a three-volume bestseller. The teen, shown at a Tokyo train station, does not want even friends to know of her publishing success, with 110,000 paperback copies of her novel sold since it was published in May.

She likes Care Bears, doesn’t wear makeup yet, and took her nom de plume from a character in the Disney classic “Bambi.”

And last year, 15-year-old “Bunny” became one of Japan’s top authors of a genre called keitai — cellphone — novels.

After getting its start as a tale told on tiny cellular screens, her three-volume novel “Wolf Boy x Natural Girl” has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies since its release in May, according to Starts Publishing Co.

he “Wolf Boy” author, who took her alias from Thumper’s friend Miss Bunny, started writing when she was in the sixth grade, after her parents bought her a cellphone. “I was so excited,” she says with a shy smile.

Bunny was using her phone mainly to text friends until she saw a TV ad about a keitai novel website that allowed users to write novels on cellphones for free. Inspired by some of the novels she read, Bunny took a crack at one herself, simply following the word limit of 1,000 characters per page.

Keitai writers can choose to “publish” their online content immediately or keep it unlisted. Most writers upload the content as they finish so they get instant feedback from the readers, who access the stories on the website and click through the pages.

Authors respond to readers by correcting errors and, in some cases, altering story lines.

The prize for the occasional most-read story is getting your novel into print.

Over the course of several months, Bunny tapped away in her bedroom, in between homework assignments. “Wolf Boy” ended up as a high-school love story between shy, pretty Miku and tall, handsome Shun, who is generally a gentlemen except when Miku is around (thus the name “Wolf Boy”).

One scene, from Shun’s point of view, is typical of the style:

“I changed into a suit for the party. . . . When I stepped out of my room . . . Miku was there. Miku was in a pink one-piece dress, wearing white heels. She looks mature because her hair is lightly curled. She’s looking straight at me. It’s hard to keep my cool when she’s looking at me like that.”

“Wolf Boy” became one of the most popular novels on the No-ichigo website. Unaware of her daughter’s work, Bunny’s mother was floored when she first heard about a pending book offer.

“I had no idea,” her mother says.

“Wolf Boy” has grossed more than $611,000.

Continued: Los Angeles Times February 9, 2010