Wyn is an online magazine focused on providing resources and hope for mental and emotional healing. Each month’s issue has a specific theme that runs through all the articles. Articles and columns are published every-other-day or so throughout the month. To receive one email a week with the latest stories and news, sign up for the Wyn Weekly Newsletter in the upper right corner of the site.

The name Wyn is from the Old English rune that later became “w.” The word “wyn” means “joy/delight/pleasure” in Old English. The goal of Wyn Magazine is to help bring joy to women who have lost hope.

After Managing Editor Becky Castle Miller and Associate Editor Amy Jane Helmericks went through different experiences with depression, they talked about the resources they wished they’d had for themselves…and decided to create those for other women. The idea (and name) for Wyn came together in December 2011, starting a two-year project assembling a global team of writers, designers, and photographers. Wyn officially launched in June 2013.

Becky emailed me with great intensity (if you can accept that as a combination) toward the end of November 2011. Four hours ahead on the East Coast, she wanted to set up a mutually kidless time to talk about an idea.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m all about talking ideas, but we’re talking the end of November (days away from my third win in NaNoWriMo). I hesitated just enough for her to remember my near-goal and reschedule for December 1.

During that phone conversation we entered into hope and delight and concrete planning that tied to our strengths in a way that the world of dirty dishes and dirty diapers just couldn’t touch.

I don’t know about Becky, but for me the fit and the energy seemed too deep to be real. But there’s something true about speaking reality into life.

Becky and I talked about creation and consistency and content and sparked this hunger that we might have an opportunity to spare other women the confusion and isolation we experienced as we struggled for language and right-response to this unfamiliar entity called depression.

Becky’s years of traveling as a military kid and facility on the internet made her the hub of our writing and photography pool. My intensity, love for words, and impulse for instant-feedback (or maybe Becky can say the real reasons?) combined with hers to move us forward.

All the delight and hope-of-purpose suggested by our initial conversation has persisted. There is something ineffably rich about participating in a project so perfectly aligned with one’s natural gifts and natural brokenness.

Image courtesy of Sias van Schalkwyk via stock.xchng

That wasn’t exactly the question she asked me.

More it was, “He was awesome. How did that happen?!”

I didn’t really have time to research an answer, and part of me felt, Hey, I‘m not a teacher, how do I know?

But thankfully I was stopped by a phrase that popped instantly into my head.

Tonguepolishing.

Or should that be two words?

Tongue Polished.

The designation refers to old, old stories that are elegant in their simplicity, and may even contain absurdities that are so entrenched that that they are simply accepted without any attempt at explanation.

Folktales. My little corner of enjoyment in the esoteric.

Image courtesy of Ove Tøpfer via stock.xchng

In our own, more prosaic, lives, we still experience the tongue-polished story.  These are the stories that make up the Family Lexicon.

A Lexicon is like a dictionary (a collection of words), but more specialized. Linguistically it’s a catalog of a given language’s words. The way I use it here is just to give a name to that collection every family grows as it creates its own culture with specialized language, stories and lessons learned.

The longer a story’s been around, the longer it’s been told and re-told, the more streamlined it gets. Often it loses some of the random, irrelevant facts. Frequently the teller is no longer recalling the event itself, but rather the best words with which to describe it.

But that’s not the case, at first.

Something happens (Baby born before we get to the hospital!) and you talk about it because it’s extraordinary, an adventure. But what do you tell? what part did you play in the story? What words you use are not usually the main thing you’re focused on. In those first days, you’re only remembering.

It’s at this point you may begin to see there’s more to storytelling– and, therefore, writing– than most of us think about at first.

There are four levels of work involved in writing, and this, I believe, is part of what complicates the process of learning how to write. It’s this 4-step process, unidentified, that I think gets people in trouble.

1. 

   Image courtesy of D. Sharon Pruitt via stock.xchng

   Idea generation. You have to come up with something to write ABOUT.

2. Translation from idea into language.
3. Translation from head-language to language-on-the-page (this essentially means holding onto the words you’ve come up with long enough to get them onto the page).
4. The physical act of recording the words.

Some people get stuck at step-1, and that has almost the easiest solution. Even if you never know what to write about, you might be awesome once you get started.

If this is you, there are all sorts of books for sale and even free options on the internet to get you started: just Google writing prompts.

For step-2 (image into language), assume that time will be involved. Give yourself permission to make a few running jumps.  Throw some words at the idea (like spaghetti at a wall) and see what sticks. If you’re a natural talker, use that facility with language that you already have. Talk to a friend, talk to yourself or your pet. Talk into a recorder of some kind, and see if you like what it sounds like later.

This is what you do in that early stage of storytelling. You say what you remember. Other people remember it differently, or your listener has a question. The next time you tell the story you shape the transmission differently, based on what you learned from your earlier audiences.

You’re half-way through the process, and it’s something you’ve done all your life!

What is good to get into your mind from the start is that this is all part of the grand process I call writing.

Writing is like Growing. There’s not a meaningful before-and-after separate from existence.

In step-2, and sliding into step-3, you take your impressions, thoughts, intuitions, hopes, fears, dreams and delights and try to put them all, like fireflies, into a jar of language that won’t suffocate them.

Image courtesy of Horton Group via stock.xchng

Some people can’t do that. It feels wrong. It makes them sick to their stomach.

The act of capturing is inherently cruel and deadly, and even hearing me urge it leaves you feeling threatened.

Something I’m learning: Not everyone needs to write.

Some famous so’n'so once said,

“If you can keep yourself from writing, Please do.”

The point being that everyone is already wading through more information than any of us can adequately process. He’s saying Please don’t add to the noise.

But if you have to keep writing, DO.

We’ll keep working on the getting-better part. (Humility can be a great asset in this process.)

Why write if there’s already a gobzillion people out there writing, and a lot of them doing it better than you can?

I wish I could tell you the first place I saw this, but I’ve latched onto it, and it continues to provide meaning for my work.

People are still hurting.

That’s a real and legitimate reason to write.

People still seek delight, and beauty and words to describe the world, whether they see a gracious, nurturing world, or a dangerous, cut-throat sorta place. There is a security we humans feel when we are reminded we’re not alone.

Image courtesy of PLRANG Images for design via stock.xchng

All art does this. Sometimes I think that is the core reason for art– to draw us out of our individual foci and our isolated experience of the world.

Writing is just one form of this shared experience.

No one expects everyone to become a painter in watercolors, or a sculptor, or a violinist, but the fact that we’re all exposed to writing at an early age makes us feel a sort of obligation.

I do think we all need a basic comfort-level with writing, because there is a sort of mass or momentum to it.

It is “the common tongue.”

Not everyone understands modern dance or acrylic abstracts. That’s not a reason to abandon those things any more than Swahili or Gaelic, but a lot of people study French or English primarily because of momentum: more people already understand those languages.

This is the way I see writing’s function in general-use.

~ ~ ~

If step-3 (translation from language-in-the-head to language-on-the-page) is your sticking place, it probably looks like a reverse of the 3 a.m. epiphany.

Instead of having your mind unflatteringly blank at just the wrong time, only to have the *perfect* zinger at 3 a.m., this challenge looks like the confidence of *just* the right words slipping from your mind’s grasp or memory before you can pin them to the page.

This, like step-4, is a bit of a mechanics thing, and may require a mechanical solution.

There are a couple different exercises you can try.

Image courtesy of linusb4 via stock.xchng

First, try copying a poem, quote, scripture, or paragraph you haven’t memorized. Read a set of words and try to hold them in your mind while you write the whole set without looking again.

When that feels comfortable, or you’re ready for a different challenge, ask someone to read you chunks of text, then wait while you write it down (this might be easier or harder than the last exercise, and you can do either first, depending on your preference.)

Once you’ve gotten used to holding words “in your ear,” while you write them in silence, practice taking notes while somebody is speaking. Pretend you’re a reporter, if that helps. Again, your goal is to capture an entire quote or thought, but if you find that’s currently out of reach, pick something more manageable.

If you do this with a movie or TiVo, you’ll have the bonus option of checking your work, and seeing how accurate your capturing skills are.

This also works for song lyrics off the radio.

The goal is to learn how to hang on to a complete thought even while more ideas are coming at you. Often when you are translating ideas into words this is what you experience in your own head: the need to continually capture, without the new information overriding the earlier stuff you also want.

The faster you write, the easier this can become (because fewer ideas overlap), and this leads us naturally into:

Step-4 (the physical act of recording words).

This was my bottle-neck growing up. The physical act of handwriting was very hard for me. My handwriting was either poor or laborious and always slow. There was no way I could keep up with my thoughts, so I rarely tried to write them down.

It was only with the introduction of typing, and more-specifically word-processing (so stuff could be saved and moved around painlessly) that I began to really see writing as something I could do, and eventually enjoy.

It was always a hoot in my (voluntary) writing classes at University when the teacher would go around and have each student self-introduce with writing background.  Invariably everyone before me talked about “writing as long as I can remember” and “loving” to write and so on. I would always kill the rush with my, “I hated it.”

But I like to think of that as a nice hope-card for other folks who aren’t dialed in yet.

My biggest trouble was Step-4. I told stories with countless My-Little-Ponies for YEARS before I voluntarily put a story on paper. Without knowing it I was practicing Steps 1-3 all my life.

When it comes to improving Step-4, I have to give the bad news: this is all rote.

Image courtesy of A. Laczek via stock.xchng

Maybe a studied teacher can offer you some other answer, but in my experience nothing makes up for the act of putting down words– with a pen, pencil or keyboard.

I am a firm believer in good pens and good keyboards, though.

Step-4 is infinitely easier with the right equipment. Go to an office supply or university bookstore sometime.  Both these places, in my experience, have little scratch pads in the pen isle. You can try out some of the pens and find out what works for you.

I can’t say fixing your problems with these four steps will make you a good writer.

I can say that finding the places you get stuck, and fixing those, will make writing much more comfortable, and we all are more likely to spend time where we’re comfortable.

It’s that time spent that will give you a chance to answer the question, a very important question, about whether you want to go farther.

Image courtesy of Colin Brough via stock.xchng

It takes one kind of courage to look straight at  your life, compare where you are to where you want to be, and then dive into making your life the one you want to live.

It is another kind of courage (more in line with General Sherman’s definition) that has us look straight at the cost of something, and choose it anyway.

Both have been coming into play in this “year of courage” (as I labeled 2013).

I have had a string of successes and delights this spring.

1. I adopted a dog that was just what I wanted (still learning how to train him ;])
2. We had a family vacation in Hawaii that was almost completely stress-free and got me far enough into my novel that the momentum meant something.
3. I finished my first 10 speeches to achieve my “competent communicator” award in Toastmasters
4. I finished my novel last week, and am now letting my story-brain rest, working on non-fiction writing instead (blog, WynMag).
5. I’m wrapping up a last few editing of WynMag projects and the first issue will go live soon. (And I’m ahead on my submissions for the next issue).
6. I’ve got the children signed up in a homeschooling program for next year (that we will actually start this summer), so that we have more financial flexibility to explore and experiment with curricula to find what will work best for our family.
7. We’ve sold the rabbits (most of them, anyway), bringing us down to pet-levels.
8. Our second round of baby goats is due this week (and we know better what to DO this time, so the enjoyment level will be even higher).
9. The children will complete their first year of “away school” next week, and I won’t have to be the bad-guy, sending them on with empty hopes that people might change, and the slightly less-empty hope that there’s not many days left.

Image courtesy of Helene Souza via stock.xchng

These are all tied, in my mind, to the first type of courage.

Now comes the second kind.

In the process of getting healthy on a mental/emotional level, I’ve come to recognize a series of needs that I must not just balance or juggle, but meet.

• Writing
• Exercise
• Right eating
• Sleep

These are the non-negotiable for internal stability.

But having those covered allows me to see there’s a second tier that really enhances the first tier.

• Clean Space
• Calm companions
• Achievable, completable goals
• Spiritual pursuit (singular)

I suppose having spiritual pursuit in the second category is going to look bad to some people, but it’s true. Until I am stable physically and mentally, asking the hard questions and pushing in any realm that has Deep Meaning is simply asking too much.

One of my biggest problems, all through my mothering journey (I can’t remember much thinking about it before then), was an image of a robot changing its own batteries. That’s how I saw “self-care”.

Even assuming this robot was designed in a way that allowed it to unattach and reattach its source of power, this seemed like a painfully pointless way to live.

Even caring for my family seemed like an extension of this, because the family, on its own level, is a single organism, and what’s the value (I asked in the first place) of merely perpetuating an internal (perpetual) motion?

Can we say existential depression?

One of the “rules” (or offer me another word) of combating existential depression is to infuse things with meaning. ExDe is, at its core, a loss of motivation or impetus stemming from a loss of meaning.

So I back up.

I look at my identity.

I look at my own value.

There’s a great phrase in book I once read about Co-dependancy. The author speaks of the anticipation and excitement we have about a new baby. And what did this baby do to be the center of this excitement!?

She was BORN!

Something she had no control over. Something she herself didn’t do at all.

And that should be the picture of our value disconnected from our doing.

Sure we might be more-useful to some people by what we can do for them, but that just makes them evaluators, not arbiters.

This is the mental track I follow to work up to this truth: I need to take care of myself.

Other people get there faster and easier. Bully for you.

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My accomplishments and milestones mean a great deal to me: they are signposts the show I’m living the way I want to live. But if fighting depression has driven anything home to me, it’s that there really is a baseline of work that is all. about. me.

Few people object to the concept of need when it comes to sleep. Fewer still object to food.

I posit (and this is kind-of the point of my first Feature Article in Wyn) that there are other needs.

There’s actually a part of me that, even after I recognized the needs, I felt ashamed of them. Not because they emphasized my weakness (I was so over needing to be “strong” all the time), but because I knew people who didn’t have access or opportunity to meet those needs.

I was pained by the deep injustice of it.

Then a woman told me the story of how her anorexia and depression was seeded by the standard parental admonition to “Eat, because there are children in Africa who don’t have food.”

Her 8-year-old sense of justice, unable to do anything for the staving children, decided that she should just stop eating, too.

There are still children who don’t have food. Whole communities that don’t have safe water.

This doesn’t change their needs or mine. And my ignoring those needs won’t make things better for either of us.

So it comes back again to making meaning.

This is tacky in some circles, because some things are just supposed to be meaningful. But you still have to believe it to be true before it’s any use against ExDe.

So this second kind of courage comes into play now:

Image courtesy of Leonardini via stock.xchng

I have only named and begun to learn to meet these needs of mine since the children went off to Away-School.

I have not yet carried the full weight of all our needs, so I have no precedent or proof that I can.

Part of The-Life-I-Want-To-Live involves having my children around me and sharing life together. But their time Away has severely depleted them, and if there is a fear fighting for a foothold in my soul it’s that I’m not going to be enough (that old dragon) to satisfy all of them and continue to care for me.

General Sherman said courage involves a full awareness of the risk involved, and a willingness to endure that risk.

My first kind of courage didn’t demand so much, because all I had to lose was my fear. The risk, functionally, was minimal.

Now I look at the growth I’ve experienced over the last year, and pray it will be enough to guide the current transition.

The risk is huge: Depression is a dragon ready to eat me.  I’ve watched it reaching for my girls.

I don’t like putting things in terms of a life-and-death struggle.

But when you put it that way it sometimes makes other things easier to prioritize.

image courtesy of Sias van Schalkwyk via stock.xchng

Lindorm, Part One, is essentially a Beauty-and-the-Beast story, where the beauty is teenage single mom, and the beast is a dragon.

Short story writer Kurt Vonnegut says that every character needs to want something, “Even if it is only a glass of water.”

In a novel, that wanting, the characters’ goals, usually corresponds to the plot of the book, and those goals are what make the action happen, but in this series of lectures (sorry, I don’t remember which one) the teacher urged pre-existing goals for your characters.

This concept brought a much-needed life into my main characters.

For one thing, pre-existing goals let them be proactive, interesting, believably awesome people before they get yanked into Story-Action. They act instead of (just) reacting.

If the original goals conflict with the (newer, more-compelling/unavoidable) Story-Goals, there’s bonus points in terms of conflict.

My main characters are Linnea (the beauty) and the Lindorm (the beast).

Image courtesy of Lotus Head via stock.xchng

I found this one step– giving them preexisting goals– was huge for giving them depth and dimension.

All of my novels (so far) have been seeded by folk tales, which means I’m starting from archetypes, stereotypes and puppets.  People do things because they DO things. It’s not like they have a motivation all the time.

Now, I am particularly gifted in mind-reading, and I’ve said more than once that my super-power is Instant Extrapolation.

So this starting place really works for me.

I’m not so great at the what-if game out of reality (what if you were investigating a crime and found evidence your daughter might be guilty?), or out of the news (one of James Scott Bell’s suggestions for story mining is taking a headline/newspaper article and milking it 10 different ways). My main problem with this is that they’re all too close to home.

I could really imagine this stuff happening, completely wig myself out, and be useless the next few days till I got over it.

I’m still very tender in the depression department.

I have to be nice to myself, and recognize when to stop pushing or just take another road.

This is where having the solidity of old stories really anchors me.

This is a pattern. This isn’t anything that I could’ve foreseen and prevented, or anything that I made happen with my freakish brain-power.

It’s got magic and crazies and just enough underhanded predictability (GA! I should have known!) that I can just play and enjoy some blatant non-reality.

So here are my main characters, Linnea and Lindorm.

For the longest time (remember, I started this story in ’06) I didn’t even think in terms of motivation. Stuff just happened because it was supposed to happen.

When I started to be aware, I could find motivation for everyone but my main character. Or rather, her motivation was unbelievably mushy and non-specific:

I want to be safe! I want to be loved!

Which are completely legitimate feels and motivations (and God knows I was dripping with them at the time) but they weren’t really useful for getting specific actions out of my character. I hear you can write a story with an inactive main character, but it makes everything harder– like trying to dig a basement with a spork.

Turns out I don’t have enough energy for that sort of work, so I decided I needed a more-useful main character.

What I didn’t know at the time is that every first novel has the author in it. Usually the main character.

It’s not an exact representation (I was never abused, and Linnea pretty much lives in the wringer), but there is a tight parallel that made me look both at her and me differently as I learned new things about one of us.

When I woke last summer from my depression, and had all this amazing insight into Linnea, it didn’t take long for me to realize I found her because I’d started to find me.

I’d been fighting with myself over who ought to be the main character because I’d been fighting with the question of my own value (classic depression symptom, but that’s another post).

I’d assumed Linnea was dull, because I felt uninteresting.

Everyone else was better, more vibrant, more interesting by default, and I felt sure that if I didn’t make (say) Runa the real main character, everybody who read the story would say, “Hey, how come you focused so much on the weird cripple? I wanted to know more about the beautiful-funny-girl.”

Eventually I saw how I was in all my characters, and accepted that this was right and natural as a writing process, nothing to be ashamed of or to run from.

But Linnea was the main character, doggone it! She was the one who made things happen. She was sharp, brave, adaptable and had this conquering spirit that made me fall in love with her when her story was only 10 pages long and she didn’t even have a name.

If she could show that much character in a two-dimensional cardboard puppet, I sure wanted to keep her at least that awesome in my story.

Which meant, in turn, that Lindorm, since we all know they’ll end up together, has to be worthy of her.  They have to be equals.

So (to circle back to the title) before they do anything in the Story– before they even meet each other (in this Part One currently circulating)– they have things they want.

Linnea wants to rescue the youngest daughter of a local innkeeper.

This isn’t a spoiler, you learn it in the first chapter.

This is the point of pre-existing goals: you learn them right away so you know something about what makes this person tick.

Linnea is abused. She hides it well, in a socially acceptable way, but it makes her see what someone else is hiding, and drives her to action.

Lindorm wants to connect with the little boy whose life he saved.

This, by the way, is going to be “bonus material” here on the blog. I have whole chapters describing this rescue-backstory, but they really don’t fit in the story told by the novel, so I expect it will end up like those novellas/short-stories I’ve seen between books in a variety of fantasy series.

Both Linnea and Lindorm are interrupted and diverted from their driving goals by the arrival of The Story.

Image courtesy of OlkaCF via stock.xchng

Both kind of miss (or ignore) The Story at first, because they are so focused on their original goals.

Really, the path of this first novel is to engage their attention so that they can be fully engaged in Story Goals by the time Book Two opens.

Lets just say there’s not a lot of breathing room once that ball gets rolling.

It was digging back to find their driving force that gave this first story its backbone.

Yes, they’re going to grow and change, but they need a true starting place for that growth to have meaning.

Image courtesy of Wong Mei Teng via stock.xchng

The Lindorm Novel is once again making its rounds in the real world of real readers.

How did this finally happen? (You should ask.)

The last time I released LINDORM to betas was June 26, 2010.

(I know because I was so ecstatic about being done I had to try to dig up guilt at having no party ideas for my middle girl’s birthday.)

God provided so perfectly for that event that I felt its success as an extension of His pleasure in me, that I’d persisted in what he designed me to do.

That would be both momming AND writing.

Here was one glorious example of how I didn’t have to do everything, and God supplied for my deficiencies. *happy sigh*

She had a lovely, lovely 6th-birthday party with way more of what she wanted than if I’d put it together.

That was version 8.7.

Yesterday I released version 13.1, one paper copy and three kindle mailings. After Jay converts it to PDF, I have another four friends on the internets who will receive it for review. A couple more friends at church will get paper copies. This is the largest pool of beta readers I’ve yet had, so I’m excited, even though it is unknown how many will actually Finish & Respond.

Jay just started reading it this morning and came running out from wherever he was reading with a rushed, “You ready for feedback?”

And my skin crawled, but I said yes, and he said something really relevant and meaningful (translation: embarrassing to have someone else notice before me), and I reluctantly asked, “Should I correct that before you PDF and print it?”

He instantly went from intense to bland.

“It’s your book. Do whatever you want.”

GRRRR.

This is what I call emotional whiplash.

ETA: Jay clarified later– it wasn’t meant as emotional whiplash. There were more words than just that, and it was him challenging my response: Did I really want to change bits and pieces as feedback came in, or did I want to wait for the weight of everybody and make my decisions/revisions at that point.

It isn’t deadly, but sure as rain & taxes it’s disorienting.

This is what I experience when I get in (say) a stylistic or story-question debate with someone about a movie/book/television show, and it gets a little intense, diffuses, and then the person I was just as loggerheads with shrugs and says, It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter?

What were we just arguing about then?!

And I’m reminded that some people really do argue recreationally

(Jay’s not one of them, thank God, but this exchange reminded me of similar, less peaceful interactions).

Now, I enjoy a good argument– if it’s clear, and I think I can win, and I think it’s worth the effort– but part of what makes it worth the effort is that I actually care about the thing we’re discussing.

Anyway.

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I proof-read the first 35 pages of LINDORM after I printed out the whole thing, and in the 2nd chapter I found a bunch of pronouns that needed correcting.

I tried to continue the read-through after Page 37, but didn’t get far. I was just tired.

Then I figured, you know, I’m not publishing-publishing now. I’m doubtless going to make corrections/revisions in response to my Betas’ responses. So enough with the line-editing. Put it away. Let the ashes fall where they will.

And that felt really good.

One of my efforts at present is to be content with less-than-perfect.

Not strictly to celebrate sloppy (I don’t see that as any sort of need), but to keep things moving by accepting limitations.

This novel is being released now because I let some stuff go.

The second part of the story, to be specific. The Huge Second Part that refused to be wrestled into submission or structure or anything like coherence within acceptable word-counts.

Version 13.1 is 74,000 words.

Compared to version 8.7, it stops at chapter 21 of 45. Version 8.7 was 88,000 words.

All along this journey I’ve had people tell me I needed to break up the story, that it was too big for one book.  And I agreed, but I couldn’t give you two *whole* books out of this story, either.

“Whole” being defined as at least 65,000 words–  and that seemed short anyway.  I knew my genre, or the closest thing to it, and few of those books are tiny. I imagined the challenge it would be to connect with that type of reader when my book looked different from what was familiar.

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Revision #13 was going really well, and at some point I realized I was well past the natural break between the “set up” story (Modified Beauty & the Beast, where the Beauty is a single mom and the Beast is a dragon-sized serpent) and the *BIG* story of the second part.

I had already decided to indulge myself and “just see how the story flows” with word-count not a factor. With all the scenes left in.

I’ve also been reading (even re-reading!) a lot this year, and that added to the amalgam that has been my intense life over the last year. I saw things in this story I had only sensed before. I had words for feelings I’d never recognized.

And I put everything I could think of into my work.

The effectiveness of this new vision yet to be tested (figuratively biting my nails, waiting on reader responses), but my favorite addition to bulk/meaning in the story is the addition of non-story goals. Or, put a different way, Pre-Story Goals.

More on that tomorrow.

My library had it on CD, which meant that my laundry finally got folded.

Pressfield starts out by defining resistance by its action and power, tying it to our main difficulty in writing (okay, he actually is very careful to keep the talk about ART and whatever one’s contribution to the world is. But for me, that’s writing).

Problem #1: Getting Started

He has a whole series of specific examples of delays to beginning the work, but especially because of my experience with depression, and the upcoming launch of Wyn Magazine, I was intrigued by Pressfield’s comments about (and waiting for) healing as a tool of Resistance, to prevent the beginning of a Great Work.

Image courtesy of Mihai Tamasila via stock.xchng

According to Pressfield there are whole communities of people investing such effort and resources into getting well that they aren’t doing much else.

In his book he says some people feel they need to be healthy before they can do, or make their art.

I have felt this way in a vague sense, thinking that what I wanted to say would have more legitimacy or authority if I’d passed some point of competency, but the idea of doing nothing until that point is a straightjacket of terror.

Why ‘terror’? (That is a rather melodramatic word, but it’s the best I have just now.)

Because without my art I am locked in the long white corridors or darkened rooms of myself. There is no escape. And that is terrifying.

Writing is the walking.

One foot in front of the other to travel these endless hallways, and slow familiarity teaches what direction could be more useful, and I eventually see a door, and my momentum feeds itself until I slam into that crashbar and break into the open air.

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I’ve had encounters with others, or their words, who feel that they cannot produce art without the brokenness inside them.  Elyn Saks, in her Ted Talk quoted poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said, “Don’t chase my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”

I have wobbled on both sides of that line, and the perspective I find most-comforting is what Pressfield expresses in his book. He insists that healing is not a prerequisite, because the part that needs healing is completely separate from the part that is creating.

The experience of brokenness can make the creating part of you more useful, but somehow, in this one-way economy, that brokenness can only add depth to what already is.

I like this model, this container of words, because it suggests that the reasoning of second quote—about needing to keep the demons around—is misplaced.

What it makes me think of instead is a quote about taking responsibility– You need to claim the events of your life to make you your own. Florida Scott-Maxwell, a writer and psychologist said,

“When you truly possess all that you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”

There is a school of thought that tries to undermine reality.

I’ve never really understood why—maybe because its proponents don’t like reality?

They proceed in the childish vein of gathering allies to prove their truth through force of numbers when they have no better argument.

When we own our reality—what we know because we have lived it—there is a fierceness. You see the person denying it is really calling you a liar, and there is feeling that your sacred honor is at stake.

It makes me think of this Walt Whitman poem that starts out,

I am the poet of reality. I say that earth is not an echo, nor man and apparition, but all things seen are real.

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He goes on in the poem to point out it is the things we can see and touch that give witness to the realness of things we can’t—the intangibles: faith, hope, love. Things that add deep meaning to our lives.

If we cannot accept our tangible experience as real, how can we accept anything else?

And what if we’re wrong?

Well, what if we are wrong? It won’t be the last time, or the first. Plenty of people have made their mistakes on us, and that’s certainly not a reason to say things aren’t real– We have to live somehow, and maybe the best we can do is to learn from what really has happened.

Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

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There is a commonality to our brokenness.

This isn’t to diminish it, or say it’s not worth mentioning, or healing—this is to say it is an experience that doesn’t need to be crippling or render you mute while you wait to overcome it.

~ ~

I’ve always liked the image of journeyers along a winding road. I do not get the most help from people miles ahead of me. I get the most help from someone I know is just a bit in front.

They go around the bend, but I can still hear the shout of what to look out for, or a reassurance that it is safe. I gather more encouragement from that than from the guidebook written by the expert who passed that way 50 years ago.

The shape of the road may be the same, the map still valid, but the cartographer won’t know if there’s a mountain lion there today.

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And that is why writing through the pain, “playing hurt” has such value: even though it’s about me, even though I’m figuring out me, somehow I’m making that map for the person coming just a stone’s throw after me. It’s my experience of the road, but I am not the only one to walk it.

If she can see me wounded, but still walking, that could show her it’s possible. Which will let her show the people watching her.

So this speech (#7: “Research your topic”) when I kept hitting a wall, I took the easy road. I took an essay I wrote years ago to satisfy a three-points-and-a-conclusion Nazi. Then I upgraded it (to this version you’re about to see on the blog), then I cut it down to a 5-7 minute speech.

The whole thing felt horribly formulaic and “cheap,” and the points seemed so self-evident I wasn’t sure if it would count as “research,” but I got the job done, and it was even a job I could be proud of, so it all worked out in the end.

Maybe what I’m trying to learn is that easy doesn’t have to mean without value.

Maybe I could just call it straightforward.

Main critique of the speech: I need to be more aware of ambient noise in a room so I can try and match my volume to the needs of the space. This I appreciated. One of my goals is to teach more on specialized topics like these, so I’m glad when someone gets specific about presentation.

It tickled me to hear my evaluator say how I’d clearly researched my topic. I do suppose he’s right– it just happened so long ago it doesn’t feel like research any more :)

I began by reciting this section of Anderson’s The Nightingale in my best storytelling rhythm.

Death kept staring at the emperor out of the empty sockets in his skull; and the palace was still, so terrifyingly still.

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All at once the most beautiful song broke the silence. It was the nightingale who had heard of the emperor’s illness and torment. She sat on a branch outside his window and sang to bring him comfort and hope.

As she sang… the blood pulsed with greater force through the emperor’s weak body.

Death himself listened and said, “Please little nightingale, sing on!”

“Will you give me the golden saber? Will you give me the imperial banner? Will you give me the golden crown?”

Death gave each of his trophies for a song; and then the nightingale sang about the quiet churchyard, where white roses grow…and where the grass is green from the tears of those who come to mourn.

Death longed so much for his garden that he flew out of the window, like a white cold mist.

“Thank you, thank you, whispered the emperor, “you heavenly little bird, I remember you…. When you sang…Death himself left my heart. How shall I reward you?”

“You have rewarded me already,” said the nightingale. “I shall never forget that, the first time I sang for you, you gave me the tears from your eyes; and to a poet’s heart, those are jewels.”

There are as many different ways to tell stories as there are storytellers, but somehow we all know when we’ve heard a good one.

According to Albert Lavin, and English Teach and author, Stories, “are a way of organizing human response to reality…they are a fundamental aspect of the way we ‘process’ experience.”

A good story affects our feelings, our perspectives, sometimes even our world, if only for a blip of time. If it is a significant story, the change will be more permanent.

One desire of storytellers is to cause what is significant for the teller to become significant for a listener.

Flannery O’Connor, a famous short-story writer, observed, “A story is a way to say something that cannot be said any other way…. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”

With this goal in mind, of conveying significance, a good storyteller has many tools to help her. Elements that have been a part of telling as long as there has been language.

Three of these are establishing the setting, using repetition effectively, and knowing the audience. These are among the foundation-stones of effective storytelling. Once one has a story, these elements can bring life to it, both for the teller and the listeners.

First, the setting is a storyteller’s canvas. It may look as simple as a watercolor wash or be as complex as a many-layered oil painting.

Events and characters will be built upon it. However, it is (usually) only the background. The busier the background, the more sophisticated listeners will have to be to distinguish the action from the setting.

For younger listeners, especially, a highly detailed landscape can obscure the happenings of a story. This isn’t just because children are less sophisticated, however. In the words of William Kirkpatrick, Professor of Education at Boston College, “Children are deeply concerned with serious questions,” and simplicity should be only for clarity, not in order to dilute a story.

Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote what I just shared, was a master storyteller skilled in establishing setting.

He begins that story, The Nightingale with the words, “In China, as you know, the Emperor is Chinese, and so are his court and all his people.”

The audience is efficiently transported halfway around the world with only a few words.

The detailed description of the setting that follows can be simplified for fidgety ears or left complete.

The trick is to maintain the balance between the foreground and the background, providing a setting for the characters without distracting from what they do.

Another tool to make listeners more at home in the story is repetition, which can take on several forms.

For example, repetition can create a refrain. This is especially useful with young children. Many will eagerly join in singing with the ornery cookie, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!”

Such a refrain can create an expectation that may later be thwarted for great affect, which may also begin teaching the rudiments of irony.

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In the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, repetition comes in the sinister form of the hungry troll under the bridge. Repetition becomes the point of fear, and conflict. The cessation of that ominous repetition signals, especially to young listeners, that all is now well.

A more subtle form of repetition can be observed in The Nightingale.

Some details are revisited in a way that draws upon remembering the earlier occurrence. When the Emperor’s tears fall for the second time, in the excerpt earlier, their significance to the bird is explained.

A more mature reader or listener may already understand, but by revisiting the topic, Anderson makes sure everyone knows. Tidbits like these are a sort of reward for those who have been paying attention; each reference has meaning on its own, but gains greater significance when connected with the other events.

Another type of repetition used in stories is the type that just fits nicely into the cadence of speech. Often in sets of three, these sentences of parallel construction are used as spells, chants and turning points in many stories.

In The Nightingale, Death asks the little bird to sing again and the nightingale replies, “Will you give me the golden saber? Will you give me the imperial banner? Will you give me the golden crown?” and the bird reclaims the Emperor’s treasures with a song.
Like many good tales, The Nightingale is enjoyed by all ages, but how much each listener gleans depends on the way it is told.

The use of repetition and the setting in a telling both affect the way a particular audience will respond.

Sometimes, though it may grieve the teller, rich details must be left out. But in the end the point is to tell the story: a character is introduced, a conflict arises, and is resolved. The attack on cultural illiteracy continues. If nothing more, an appetite may be whetted for the real thing.

Storytellers must put the story on and tailor it to the needs of their audience– and the time.

The full text of The Nightingale takes nearly half an hour to read aloud.

This is doable for some adults, or with a child used to looking at one picture for an extended period, but is rather too long for inexperienced hearers. The slow pace of the story is not helpful for those not used to sitting and listening to one picture-less story that length of time.

Which elements are retained and how they are balanced depends on their purpose in a particular story.

In order to leave out a subtle repetition that explains something, the tears in The Nightingale for example, the audience must be mature enough to draw their own conclusions or the detail can’t matter.

Many details can be left out poetic tales without the storyline suffering, and so they often are. The text can go from plush velvet to practical denim as the details are taken away– still entirely functional, only less elegant.

The job of the storyteller is to take the tools available, including setting, repetition and understanding the audience, and make them serve the larger purpose of the story itself.

Anderson’s opening in The Nightingale goes on to say,

“This story happened a long, long time ago; and that is just the reason why you should hear it now, before it is forgotten.”

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Someday, a really hope that I write a serious essay on the existence (and/or definition) of magic.

For today I’ve settled for discussing the first on my mental list: Spells of Silence.

Let me begin here: Fairy tale silences are beginning to make a lot more sense to me.

How many people, today or at any time in history, have been trained to explain what they can’t explain?

I mean, I am one of the most articulate, word-ready people I know (Sorry if that sounds bad, it’s just true), and I have found myself mute in the face of certain circumstances.

This even comes after years of practice talking about how confused I am, or how I don’t have the words for something. In those situations I would keep talking (or journaling) until I reached some kind of coherence, or at least the next action point.

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But something changed with the depression. I wonder at times (in the present) if I would have had some kind of help–more help– if I had tried harder to say how broken I was.

For the most part I kept quiet, because I didn’t have any better ideas to give people to give me, and I was pretty sure that criticism without offering alternatives was shameful. That was complaining and it  recalled countless references over the years to “the children of Israel” after they’d been led out of Slavery in Egypt.

“Here they’d had so great a deliverance and now they were complaining about the food?”

I had little to give in terms of nurturing energy, and I imagined that I was caring for others by keeping the weight of my problems off of them.  It made me feel nobler or more generous in my loneliness and isolation.

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I’ve since learned that “Self-blame is a symptom of the disease [of depression].” That “people feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course [they do:] these feelings are symptoms of the disease.”

And these symptoms all go a long way to keeping us shut up.

There is a long standing tradition in Story that uses degrees or truth or falsehood to shape a tale’s complications.  I made a bit of a flow chart and ran a dozen folktales through it this evening.

Yeah, for fun. It’s called geeking out. I’ve limited myself here to the most accessible examples .

Here was the spectrum I started with, and its subsets:

Lie ——————- Truth
Believed — Not-believed ——– Partial — Full

I looked at stories in terms of progression of truth (in my values system this means left to right).

For example, Rumpelstiltskin.

Here is a story that begins with a blatant LIE that, astonishingly, is believed. The lie is perpetuated enough that the royal household is behaving as if the lie is true (filling rooms with straw to be spun into gold, etc). Fortunately someone doesn’t believe the maiden can do it (disbelieving the lie) and shows up to offer his services.

He offers a truth, one might even suggest it’s a full-truth, but I still keep it at the partial level, because the terrified girl didn’t know yet all she was getting into.

Ultimately, it is learning the full truth (Rumpelstiltskin’s name) that brings the story’s resolution.

Similarly we have Rapunzel:

She believes a lie– that she is living as she should, in full isolation with only one visitor.  She disbelieves, or at least disagrees with, the Lie when she meets her prince.

After they are discovered, Rapunzel moves into partial truth, learning how hard life is outside of her tower– birthing and raising twins alone in the wilderness.

It is when she reunited with her beloved they return together to his home (and, presumably, community life). Here she enters full(er) truth: life isn’t just hard.

In spells (or situations) of silence it often seems like the obvious question is never addressed.

1. Why didn’t the girl say her dad lied about her?
2. Why did she agree to give up her child?
3. Why did Rapunzel never ask why she lived in a tower?
4. Why didn’t the prince take her away when he had the chance (and two good eyes)?

But if we’re being gracious when we ask the questions that baldly, I think we’re looking at most of our answers.  These stories exist because they express familiar human experiences at a gut level.

1. We’re afraid our reputation will fall with our family’s. Or maybe we’re afraid we’ll be blamed or not believed.
2. How many times do we sacrifice our children because of our fear? (As a nation it’s happening in the millions, and that’s only taking it literally.)
3. If things are the way they’ve always been, what will make us question them? How does a fish learn the water’s wet?
4. When the way we’re doing things isn’t horrible (yet), why risk changing it?

In all the stories there has to come some catalyst. Some new reality enters the story and throws the orbit off, in order that it may travel in a new direction.

It’s the reason we have only just joined the story at this point: because something new is about to happen.

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In the stories with silence, that silence is eventually broken, but in the path of the story there is also the question of individual maturity.

What if life for the miller’s daughter was bad enough that bunking with a gold-obsessed king seemed safer? What if she rationalized that she might be able to protect both herself and her child better as queen?

It was true. In the end she had the resources to win the contest.  On a simple, physical level that was character growth. She could (literally) answer a question now that she could not answer before.

And in a similar way I have answers now. What-ifs from a year or two years ago– what I might have done differently– are no longer relevant, because this is where I am now.

I have words– names for things that have been elusive before.

Without exaggerating, these are the things that would try to steal my children; their joy and good natures.

I have a few rounds of both painful and relationship-healed experiences.

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I am doing my very best as I said before to Lift up my Voice and be not afraid. And I’m doing what I can to offer a safe place to speak, and a basket of words to choose from.

They are the gift I have to offer: the gold I’ve found in the burnt stubble of a painfully silent time.

~ ~ ~

This letter is a good start (in the sense that we all need to be reminded to do what we can, and quit expecting others to do it for us) but these words don’t provide what I needed as a teen, and that was personalized direction.

I was a KID. I was even one who didn’t claim to know everything. And I didn’t know on my own which way to go other than to “be good.” And that is WAY to vague for most kids.

I was a good kid by most standards, and this letter being given to me would have made me feel simultaneously furious and helpless.

He’s just told me to get out of his way and quit being vocal about the fact that I have needs I don’t know how to meet.

All my life I had a drive to “make a difference” and “be involved,” but I did not have the skill/know-how/authority to make much of anything happen on my own.

Weekly visits to the nursing home (at 13) were with an adult, who eased me into being unafraid. Joining worship team (at 17 or 18) and before that forming a youth version (when I was 15) required an adult sponsor to give us access to the stage and sound equipment.

Even now, in my 30s, I know the fastest, most efficient way to know how best to apply my talents comes from outside help.

Why do you think “life coaching” even exists as a profession? We want solid, reliable input. Wise people don’t want to be limited to their own experience.

It always feels good to tell off people who are making your life more complicated, and the writer was described as “a judge who regularly deals with youth.”

I guess most of the readers/repeaters are parents, and AMEN! because they feel similarly pressed.

These parents have been dealing with and giving, like the judge says, and yes it’s perfect for the youth to “accept some of the responsibility your parents have carried for years.”

But I for one was never the kid who could look at a mess, see what needs to be done, and “just do it.”

I am BARELY that kind of adult.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from becoming a grown-up, it’s that the growing. never. ends.

And parenting (best as I can tell) is a lot of inconvenience.

We’re allowed to gripe, and call it hard, like it is, but eventually we have to swallow the frog; reenter the inconvenience of life-as-parent ’cause, really, nothing gets done until we do.

We have to change that diaper, find a bandaid, teach a concept and (Lord-Willing) cultivate a sense of self that will allow that child to develop a personal vision and motivation that will equip him or her to finally accept everything in his letter as a reasonable expectation.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point, which means at its point of highest reality.

A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

–C.S. Lewis

In The Mystery of Courage, author William Ian Miller asserts courage is unique among the virtues because it is the only one where stories of its opposing vice are less gripping or tantalizing than stories of the virtue. ;}

This is a story of my rediscovering courage.

~

There are two kinds of courage: physical courage and moral courage.

Both types, as General William Sherman observed, involve a full awareness of the risk involved, and a willingness to endure that risk.

There is an additional, third element within moral courage, and that is a driving motivation of some deeply-held principle.

When, at the end of December, I designated 2013 as a “Year of Courage” for me, I was not looking at these definitions.

I could not tell you what danger I felt was arrayed against me, or the mental math that I undertook to decide what made the risk worthwhile, or even what risk I felt I was taking.

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What I could tell you is that months off of a two-year depression I was still a fearful person.  Not consciously, but pressed by a friend I admitted that I made most of my decisions primarily through the matrix of safety.

I did whatever I could to minimize every kind of risk, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, only claustrophobic.

Then, during Thanksgiving break, I read a blog post that made me ask, “What could I accomplish if safety wasn’t my primary objective?”

That paved the way for my decision to focus on (what I called) courage: to think about my goals first, and not (in the beginning) about cost or difficulty.

~

I was reading G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy through December, and he had this to say about the topic:

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book.

This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage.

A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.

He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.

He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

This, Chesterton says, is the Christian courage: a disdain of death.

I found these words inspiring. I was recovering from a long illness, didn’t have near enough strength to pick up any sword to join a fight, but I loved the fierceness of scorning death while I pursued life.

~

Shortly after Thanksgiving I got a call from the woman who organizes the local Sing-it-Yourself-Messiah.

I had just sung a special in church the week before, and when I reviewed the recording I was extremely disappointed, because my voice sounded so small and weak. I mentally dismissed the kind words of everyone who had thanked me for singing that piece.

I figured they didn’t know their music (I’m sorry! I keep telling you I wasn’t healthy!), or were reliving some personal connection I was happy to resurrect for them, but I didn’t find the quality I wanted.

The woman who called wanted to know if I could sing one of the solos, since the woman she’d expected to do it was out of town. She had no way of knowing, but the piece is my favorite solo in the whole oratorio. I started practicing. The text is taken a passage from the book of Isaiah in the Bible.

O Thou that tellest good tidings to Zion: get thee up into the high mountain. Lift up your voice, be not afraid. Say unto the cities of Judah: “Behold your God!”

There is something about singing that piece—from the words to the quality of the music—that make it impossible to do half-way.

“Lift up thy voice, with strength: lift it up; Be not afraid!”

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And the more I repeated it, the more excited I became. It really felt like I was coming alive again.

~

At this same time I was on-assignment for an infant publication.

I was supposed to produce material that talked about my depression. Something I hoped would help other women stuck where I was.

And I was buried in inadequacy.

When it comes to mental and emotional health, I’ve only got the education I’ve given myself: I haven’t studied under anyone to “check” my work or “approve” my discoveries.

This matters because I was still in recovery from the I’m-less-than-anyone brokenness of depression. To assert anything based primarily on my experience felt like dangerously thin ice daring me to step on it, just so I’d crash through to icy waters.

My experience felt so isolating and at times self-inflicted (or at least self-sustained) that the idea of offering counsel to broken, hurting  people… {sob} was overwhelming.

The weight of that responsibility made me feel like the character in my favorite novel, who couldn’t understand why she was the only one present to comfort an isolated friend. Over and over she wished that God had sent someone else. “Surely that’s the least God could have done for him!”

I decided I had enough on my plate, so I dropped my involvement in The Messiah.

But I kept practicing my favorite song, repeating over and over the admonition to speak and “Be not afraid!”

It shifted something in me.

My voice—the voice that can belt—grew stronger, my pitch stabilized, and my confidence started to peak out of the cave it’s been hiding in for the last few years.

I mean real confidence, the kind that says I’ve got as much right as anybody to stand here. Not the kind that just knows the right way to act. I’d been scraping by with the second kind, so I knew the difference.

There’s another song that came back to me at that time, with these words written as though God is speaking:

Don’t watch the waves that roll the sea
just focus your eyes on me.

And I will make you strong and then
your shattered courage I will mend.

I have felt shattered, felt like the pieces were stepped on by thoughtless people around me, and sometimes the most-sustaining hope I have comes from remembering—especially time of year— that Jesus was broken, too. He was  isolated, denied justice, and beaten down by people who, he said it himself, had no idea what they were doing.

It was Chesterton, this time speaking of Christ, who said,

The only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point— and does not break.

Rushworth M. Kidder, author of the book Moral Courage, lists five elements that provide the necessary strength to endure (that essential element of courage), and one of those is faith; trust & assurance in a power greater than one’s self.

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I can’t fully define what I endure (through or with) as I pursue courage in my life, but I know I’ve passed a breaking point, and though shattered, I’m not scattered. Somehow all the pieces have held together.

But it’s more than a “somehow.”

This Jesus who is my hope and example, He is described this way:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn over all creation.^[a]
For everything was created by Him,
in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—
all things have been created through Him and for Him.
He is before all things,
and by Him all things hold together.

I am being held together. On-purpose. For a purpose. And that purpose undergirds my growing courage.