In the book the author interviewed creativity consultants Michelle and Robert Colt who have studied what goes on in the brain when we write. They first describe the four types of brain waves, “Beta, the fastest is associated with stress, work and concentration.” Most of us spend the bulk of our waking time here. Alpha waves are a bit slower and are “associated with creativity, calmness, and insight.” This is the brain state of “being in the zone” where your work feels effortless. Theta waves are the next slowest. We experience this state when we first wake up or have an ah..ha moment where you have a really creative idea or the solution to a problem pops into your mind. People who meditate slip into theta quickly and remain there through the period of meditation.. Delta waves, that we experience in deep sleep are the slowest.

When we write we start out in beta, but very quickly move into alpha and eventually theta. The Colts explain that , “any moment of intense creativity is a theta burst. And when you engage in deep dialogue with divine mind, you are having mystical theta bursts” In the state of mystical theta bursts you are surprised by what comes out of your pen (or keyboard). I remember when I had my first experience of this state. I stopped writing to look around the room to see where the words were coming from because they didn’t feel like they were coming from me. It sounds strange but it actually feels delightful and it’s really were the best writing comes from.

I was really excited to read about the brain states because it explained what I have been teaching intuitively for years. I tell my students to never wait for inspiration before sitting down to write because if you do you will likely be waiting a long time. I explain that you often have to write a half a page or a page where not much is happening, where you will feel sluggish and resistant before you start to feel a sense of the creative flow. I now realize that you are actually writing your way out of beta down into the brain states that give you access to the more creative states. It’s why establishing writing as a habit or practice is so important because you never really feel like writing until you slip into the more creative brain states and the best way to get there is to sit down and start writing.

The information about brain states also explains why we have hard time coming up with creative solutions to life’s and the world’s problems when we are in our everyday (beta) mind. This reminds me of what Einstein meant when he said, Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. Reading about the brain states makes me aware of how important it is when I am faced with a problem to slow down and calm down knowing this will help me tap the more expanded brain states and allow creative solutions and new ideas to surface.

I often use this assignment with my students: Do a ten minute freewrite starting with the prompt Why I write. . . Try it, let your mind run, this can help you tap the energy behind the desire to write.

Raspberries

Sweetness tinged tart, rising
from root stock my father planted
in the fog haunted garden,

hands plunged into black earth
gritty beneath fingernails, on his knees
seeking the salvation nurturing
seeds can bring a burdened soul.

Vines dripped red berries
sprinkled on vanilla ice cream
in the dark kitchen, on the long nights
when dreams would not let him sleep.

The War in the Pacific, an ambush
in a Philippine jungle, flickering
through his mind for fifty years.

This luscious flavor now on my tongue
pulling out thoughts of him,
tossed in the bowl of memories

heavy in my hands
now that he has been released
to the earth, he so carefully tended.

-Suzanne Murray

WRITING EXERCISE TO PLAY WITH: Use different fruit for your writing prompt: oranges, lemon, watermelon, figs, blackberries, . . .or whatever one pops into your head. Have fun.

Writing Exercise: Start a ten minute freewrite with the word kumquats. Remember to really let go and let the writing lead.

Woody Allen said that ninety five percent of life is showing up. This is especially true when it comes to our writing. If you have a hard time showing up as consistently as you would like, give yourself permission to return to picking up the thread of your work just a little bit at a time. Lower your standards on what you think you should be able to accomplish. Be willing to forgive yourself for all the times you have failed to show up to your work. Honor that there will likely always be a part of you who wants to write and a part of you that is resistant to the letting go that is required to really engage the creative mind. This can be very liberating. Writing is not unlike training to run a marathon. You start out running a few blocks and you work your way up each day to the full twenty six miles. In your writing this can translate into doing “freewriting” or stream of consciousness writing for ten minutes a day for a month then building up to showing up for longer periods of time where you also play with the art of revision and work on finishing a piece. In working with my students and coaching clients I focus in part on learning to fall in love with the process and to find joy in simply showing up to the creative work. Then the writing becomes it’s own reward, free of the expectations of what we think it needs to be and we learn to allow what wants to be born out of our creative spirit.

Author Ray Bradbury keeps a file of opening lines and titles of stories yet to be written. Try this. Make a list of all the stories within you that really want to be told. Then pick one and write on the theme for at least ten minutes a day for a week (or better yet for a month) and see how that feels. Have it be okay that some of what you write may feel uninspired. It all counts as practice that helps you to develop the habit to showing up to your work and evolve your own writing voice and style. The more you show up the more likely you are to hit the zone where your creativity really starts to flow and magic happens.

I first started keeping a journal in college and have maintained that practice for over thirty five years. Expanding into creative writing followed as a natural progression of this practice of putting pen to paper along with a deep love of books and working with words. Besides the experience of deep satisfaction that comes from engaging the creative process, writing has also served my personal growth in profound ways.

Journaling differs from creative writing in that it is more a conversation with yourself. It provides a way of making sense of your life experiences and becomes a form of self analysis. Creative writing allows you to more deeply access the unconscious and the insights of your Self. The benefits of engaging the writing process on these different levels are many.

James W Pennebaker, PhD, who spent years researching the healing effects of writing. describes in his book, Opening Up, what many people who have kept a journal often discover on their own, “that if we can create a cohesive personal narrative of our lives and if we can link up our emotions with specific events, then we have the power to take control of how those emotions and events affect our lives.” As Isak Dinesan, the author of Out of Africa, said “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”

Evidence for the positive effects writing has on our physical health is found in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed, “that merely writing about past stressful life experiences results in symptom reduction among patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis.”

Poet May Sarton said that “… the only way through pain … is to go through it, to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means …. Nothing that happens to us, even the most terrible shock, is unusable, and everything has somehow to be built into the fabric of the personality ….” Through writing, we can find order and meaning in everything that has happened to us. Whichever form our writing takes: journaling, poetry, memoir, fiction, or essays; it has the power to heal us and to help us grow.

Recently in one of my ongoing writing classes a participant new to the writing process exclaimed with a sense of happy surprise, “I’m learning so much about myself” I know I am always having that experience when I write. Robert Frost said, ” No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” One of the greatest joys, I get out of writing is when I uncover ways of seeing or perceive that I wasn’t consciously aware of. I’ll stop in the middle of reading over something I had just written and say to myself, “wow I didn’t know I thought that.” It feels good to grasp the deeper threads of meaning in our lives. Writing helps us to form connections with what is going on inside us and with others, allowing us to understand who we are and where and why we do the things we do. It can help us gain a new perspective on habitual behaviors and subconscious patterns that get in the way of living our full potential. Writing can help us to get clear and make the constructive changes in our lives.

There are lots of different ways to use writing for healing and self discovery. You can start by writing about a specific event or situation or relationship. Or begin by writing a letter (that does not get sent) to a person you are having a conflict with in order to more deeply understand what you are really feeling about the situation. Or try writing a dialogue with a pain in your body and ask it what it needs from you as way to tapping the body’s natural ability to heal.

You need to write freely without censoring or worrying about punctuation, spelling or grammar or even how it sounds. Write for ten to twenty minutes without stopping. Don’t edit. Simply write and see what comes out. By allowing what wants to be written without trying to consciously control the flow, you tap into the wisdom of the unconscious and open yourself to the healing power within.

All you do is simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes. If you get stuck you keep writing “Keep the pen moving” until you break free. Sometimes you will produce good writing, sometimes you will produce garbage. The point is to keep writing. The goal is in the process, not the product. It is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all around practice in writing that I know. Freewriting gives practice in focusing, but-not-trying; it helps the conscious self to stand out of the way and let the words be chosen by the sequence of the words themselves or the thought. The benefits are many: it helps with the existential difficulty of facing the blank piece of paper; it is best way to learn to separate the creative process from the editorial process; it’s a good warm up; it helps you to learn to write when you don’t feel like writing; it teaches you to write without thinking; it’s a good outlet for clearing away preoccupations; it’s good for brainstorming; and it improves your writing by leading you to tap a true voice

I started teaching writing workshops almost twenty years ago, where we freewrite for ten minutes and then share what we’ve written in a completely safe and supportive environment. Group members respond to what touches them, what rings true, what they want to hear more about or by parroting back a line that really strike them; all as a way of mirroring the writer’s voice and the potential of the piece. Freewriting allows you to write a tad faster than you can think which gives you access to the unconscious mind. When you have finished you rarely have any idea what you have written and your conscious mind armed with the critic and censor leads you to believe it’s no good. So receiving feedback on what is working in your first draft helps you to learn how to do that for yourself. I write and share with the group because I feel it only works if I’m willing to feel the same vulnerability as everyone else. I’m amazed year after year at the fine writing that emerges from all the different people who come to the workshops and how I can hear a writer’s voice evolve as they continue to work with this process.

About fifteen years ago while attending the poetry workshop at the writer’s conference at Port Townsend, Washington, I had a chance to talk to Robert Olen Butler who was teaching the fiction workshop. While sitting on the grassy knoll above the Puget Sound, he spoke of his time in Vietnam, when he served as military attache in Saigon, where he became fluent in the language. He loved the Vietnamese and would sit on a stoop in the middle of the night engaged in conversation. At the time of the conference, though he had a reputation as a fine writer and a dedicated teacher, all his books were out of print. A few months later, his new collection of short stories, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain won the Pulitzer Prize. The stories, which all involve characters that are Vietnamese, reflect the importance the people and the culture played in Butler’s life and imagination.

Recently I came upon a book of his, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, in which he really emphasizes the importance of writing from the unconscious, the dream mind. He does a beautiful job of describing the difficulties involved as well as the importance of letting go of your linear mind and engaging your sensory and sensual experiences in order to fully tap the creative process.

In my own writing classes I start with a short meditation designed to quiet the mind and drop us all down into the heart mind, making it easier to access the imagination and creative flow. We then work with exercises to help in letting go, trusting the process and allowing what wants to be born out of the well of the subconscious to flow out on to the page. Another key element I learned from Butler in a talk he gave at the conference, is that good writing was full of moment by moment sensual detail. Focusing on the felt sense of an experience, learning to let go and then writing about things that are really important you are key ingredients in developing the art of writing.

Implements: People often ask me when they sign up for one of my writing classes, whether it is best to write with a pen or a computer. The answer, of course, is to find what works best for you.. Some people like the feel of the pen moving across the page. Others, who are fast on the keyboard, sense they can keep up with the flow of ideas more easily that way. If you write with a pen chances are you will find a favorite and stick with it. I write all my first drafts with a rolling ball pen with black ink and a good grip and then revise on the computer.

Ritual: Writing calls for us to enter a different state of mind than our everyday way of thinking, so it helps to use some kind of ritual to signal to the muse or the subconscious that a shift is called for. The most elaborate ritual I’ve heard of came from a poet who wrote only in the mid to late afternoon, in an easy chair, in his pajamas with one cat on his lap. Mine is more simple. I write first thing in the morning before I do anything else, except make my ritual single cup of coffee. I then sit down with it along with my favorite pen to see what want my attention.

Location: I used to have to leave the house and go out for coffee in order to write because I found it easier to face the blank page free from the phone calls that needed to be returned or the toilet bowl that called out for cleaning. Writing is an inherently isolated activity and I like to feel of being part of the world when I do it. I find comfort in the bustel of a cafe that seems to keep my more critical mind occupied while I slip beneath the radar into the creative mind. Other people need complete quiet. It can also be help to set up space in your home just for writing. If you don’t have a room, how about a corner of the bedroom or some other room where you are unlikely to interrupted.

Time: A lot of people write first thing in the morning before they do anything else, while their mind is still close to the dream state and can more easily tap the creative flow which has a similar feel. Doing it first thing makes your creativity a priority. It’s easier to show up for it before you get caught up in the events of the day. Still if you are not a morning person, figure out which part of the day works best. I suggest you write the time in your day planner and get in the habit of showing up on a regular basis, even if it’s only for twenty minutes, even on the days you feel resistance or uninspired. Inspiration often only comes after you have started writing.