Write for Yourself or Write to Get Published?

In most writing circles there are only two ways to go, or so “they say”. Write for Yourself, or Write to Get Published. There is also the battle between self-publishing and traditional publishing. But even the self-publishers hope that one day they’ll be picked up by a New York agent. Today, the dream to be famous as a writer has stolen the art of writing. What makes a great writer? What is the art of writing? Is it great plot, character, imagination, imagery and metaphor, or perfect grammar, spelling and a dynamite opening line? Is it all subjective? Is the bottom line of publishing what will sell to the general public? Is it all hit or miss? Does anyone really know what the general public wants? Or has the general public been told so long what it is supposed to want that it has lost its way? No offense to the general public whoever you are.

What writer doesn't want to get published? I haven't a clue...and what writer doesn't write for themselves? I don't know why this myth has circulated, but it is part of the Mad Hatters journey in the writing world. Jump into Alice's Writing Universe and Write the Wave; fall into the maze of dos, don'ts, have-to's and your opening line just doesn't grab me. "They say," even Hemmingway wouldn't get published today. "They say," If you master a genre, know the formula then you’ve secured both your guns in the holster and can shoot your way into an agent's heart. Maybe. But don't stray from the path of the known guys. Don’t write anything that is channeled or crazy, like dancing violins that have no plot, or characters that stumble around on a LSD trip with no beginning, middle and end. If you do anything outside of the lines or make anyone too uncomfortable you might get a pie in your face. In order to get published you BETTER know the craft of writing, which can take the rest of your life to learn, and then some. Everyone has an opinion about what makes you a crafted and talented writer. One editor loved a prologue I wrote and another advised me to ditch it. Another editor told me my writing is too dark, and wouldn't edit it (even though I was willing to pay her $1,400 for her services) because the story was about abuse. Most of the agents who requested a submission rejected me and said, I am a good writer, but they are not compelled by the story, or they wouldn't know how to sell the story because it was unusual. What is so unusual about a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, abused by her mother who talks to Mary Magdalene throughout her life and rejects her higher guidance? I don't know? And aren't main characters in novels supposed to be unusual?

There are literally hundreds of "experts" who want to sell you on how to be get published, craft a breakthrough novel and follow a step by step approach to building the plot and character. “They say,” pay your dues, be tough, and don’t take it personally. In writer’s groups the theory is write something new, move on, just keep going and don’t look back. It is true that persistence, patience and deep belief is all part of the being a writer, but do I have to become a writing machine, hard as nails? How does this nourish ones’ heart and soul as an artist? Regardless, Ruby, keeps calling to me. She is main protagonist in every novel. Only her name changes; Her name was Sasha in my first draft living in Russian/Poland; Samara was her name in my second draft living during ancient Mesopotamia times. She has traveled many lives teaching me many things. Presently, she is Ruby a Jewish rebel, born in Brooklyn during the 1950's, scarred by a borderline mother and influenced by the onset of sex-drugs and lies. She never leaves me alone. Maybe I am writing sequels, a saga, or maybe I am just nuts. Didn’t J.K Rowling write seven novels about one boy called Harry Potter?

I taught six years in the educational system when it suddenly became fixated on standardized scores. How much information could a student memorize or spit back. Education wasn't about love of learning or even teaching a student to think for themselves. It was about achieving the right number to prove that you learned the necessary work, and then get into a good college, get a good job and make tons of money. The writing business has taken a similar approach to writing a good novel, get the right scores (craft or formula) and you too can win the heart of an agent/ publisher and wind up a best seller. Maybe. I am not saying there aren't great novels out there. I am reading one right now, Pat Conroy's Beach Music. I am just trying to figure this whole game out.

When my daughter was in the third grade she came home with a ditto of different pictures. The assignment was to recognize the beginning consonant of each picture. She would have had a perfect score if it wasn't for the picture of the rabbit. My daughter thought it was a bunny and wrote B for the beginning consonant. There was a big red X stamped across the letter. I made an appointment to conference with the teacher and she said that the right answer was R because it is a rabbit. I complained back pointing out, “There isn't always one right answer, aren't you teaching children how to think?" She replied. "No I'm teaching them to get high scores on the standardized tests." Moral? You figure it out. What does this have to do with writing? I agree that it is mandatory to learn the craft of writing, but that is only the beginning. Do I learn the craft for publishing reasons and write the R for rabbit. Or do I write a B for bunny and break rules because of my love of writing? Will that somehow lead me to an audience or an agent that loves my writing as well? I am not sure which comes first anymore, the chicken or the egg. Like they say, "too much information" I am leaving to go to my right brain now, where there are no lines to color in, only a blank slate.

Today I am going to write about Ruby's hair, so I won't tear out my own. Will I ever get published? Or will any of you out there respond to me and want to get to know Ruby as much as I do? By the way, I’ve decided to get closer to Ruby. I have been writing her story in third person personal. I felt detached from Ruby in this POV. I wanted more intimacy with her. So now, I am writing from first person point of view. Am I co-dependent with Ruby? Could be. Oh, that was another rule I was told, as a first time novelist don't write in first person or multiple points of view. However, my need to feel and breathe through Ruby far surpasses that warning. I am going to dive even deeper into her thoughts and feelings and I can only do that in first person. At some point I'll give you a sample of both POV's and you can tell me what you think. Thanks to anyone who is listening. I will also be continuing my writer's prayer journey and you will dive deeper into my subconscious...I'm past all shame.

Ruby’s hair
Where do I start to tell her story?

The process of writing is intimate and sensual. It is a marriage between the heart, soul and imagination.

Mounds of curls, circle around her neck and shoulders like vines twisting around an Oak.

The sun hits the tips and it absorbs the heat so the smell of sun sprays through it.

She wants to tame this wild tigress of hair, and when she does it is thick, shiny and full like a tulip bulb. It hugs her cheeks and shoulders and she barely sees through the wall of bangs that touch her eyelids

She pulls it up, tightens it in a knot, ties it in a pony when she runs, but it always falls out of the band, its sleek thickness fights the conservative way it constricts movement, and her hair wants to fly free in the wind.

Its flaming dark night hues explodes with wisps of auburn and draws you. you want touch it ever so gently in fear that it will bite off your fingers….it has a life of its own….its own direction, its own thought, a multi-dimensional maze layered with ringlets and bounce.

At times it is too much trouble to wash and the smell of dried apricots with a tint of grease emanates from her scalp. She doesn’t care if it looks like a ball of waxy frizz and allows it to create a jungle of broken bumps of hair that only a strong steel brush can wack its way through.

I love Ruby's hair... but she thinks it is the hair from hell.

Two unnamed pieces by Marta Luzim

Prompt: First line of Evan Boland’s poem Pomegranate
"The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell”

Hell of Blood Kin
Hell greater than the fire and brimstone of Satan's hell
The real hell. I want to vomit
I won't find the tenderness in the thorn of self-hatred
that is hell
I feel my stomach cringe, shutting out all the sick, dark, shit.
I'm not supposed to feel ever again.
bury it under the stench sweat and pretty smiles and laughter
Who will Save me?
What is it like to be saved from hell?
Do I just travel on tip toe around the grime
I swim in the sea of the devil
No one cares about a person's hell
No one wants to know that there is a hell
After all isn't God only love?
I had to fight my way out of hell
a fallen angel, Lucifer's handmaiden
Even when love came knocking at my at my door
I spit at it.
Hell was so much more juicy, honest and silky
What makes hell seem so intoxicating, inviting
than the love of kindness?
and yet, kindness is exactly what hell needs
To knife and slit my wrists
and for the blood to be caught
on butterflies wings
It makes no sense the attraction of love and hate
immoral and moral
too many paradoxes


Prompt: First line of Rainer Marie Rilke's poem The First Elegy
“Who if I cried out would hear me among the angelic order”

It's a lie
all a lie
This world of lost nirvana
Where are the angels?
Their wings flapping against the wind
I hate this ethereal poetic upliftment of music, dance
A frenzy that shakes and screams.
I kick it, Shut UP!
I don't want to hear this
My stomach is sick from listening to angels talk of Love
Love like a Norman Rockwell fairytale
two children, two car garage, dogs playing on the lawn, peeing
What is that kind of love?
It is a lie
a picture, a snapshot
and yet, to love the guts of another
the real belly love that melts the heart
and wobbles the knees
not this dysfunctional, caretaking, knotted up love that
fills the void of nothingness
a nothingness that has to be broken
into tiny pieces to find the one spark of true love
what are the angels anyway?
sitting high on their self-righteous thrones
watching this stupid human race run after their tails
trying to find this elusive love in Malls and supermarkets
this Love can only be found in the dehydrated body of a lost soul
in the middle of a desert
screaming to be saved from herself.

Heaven and Hell

My journey to find my voice, my Source of my writing has reached a place where my resistance is a wall of abyss. I want to run from this dark place that reminds me of all the pain in the world. I wander inside of my heart and beg on all fours, praying to know what to do with my novel. The challenge of struggling through the unknown, the place where we know nothing…where we question everything is like diving into the waterfall. Splash! Down below the void. Why do I want to go there?

Journey Into The Jungle Part 4: What is my Source?

The writing journey continues…..

N in class termed our writing “community of the vulnerable.” This trek through the mountains to find the true voice of my writer needs this tender village of souls who write from a place that births souls. I am struggling with my first book, Feet Above Her Head. Ruby, the young psychic child, her mother the mad woman who tries to kill herself and her children, her father a loving chauvinist who Ruby hates and adores, and then there are her visions of Mary Magdalena, disguised through her mind’s eye as various apparitions that tries to teach her to love. Ruby has fallen between the cracks. She is screaming to be resurrected. I can’t find her voice. She has been rejected by so many and yet, she is vigilante to live; to be heard and seen. But, she has to have a hook that will make agents like her, no love her. Her whole life, she was to told to fit in, be perfect, follow the rules. But Ruby doesn’t know how to follow the rules…she only knows how to be Ruby; a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, who talks inside her own head to Mary. She walks crooked lines, searches for lost roads and untraveled terrain. There is no end to it all; this love thing and the need to be recognized. One editor wouldn’t edit Ruby’s story because she did not edit any novels that talked about abuse. Another editor thought she needed a BIG epiphany because she was visionary, a dreamer. Ruby is never good enough, and that is what she has always believed. But she can feel and see YOUR soul, and can see beyond the physical, and she is not crazy, although she thinks she is. Ruby is a survivor of hell and back. Is that not a story to tell? People are searching for peace every day. Peace and Love. “What is peace and love?” Ruby asks every day. For Ruby it is in the moment of despair and acknowledgement of that angst when love seeps through her veins. Ruby is so sad. Help Ruby. Someone help! Will anyone save Ruby from extinction? I must save her. But how? I want to feel her heart beating in me again. I feel her crawling around in my belly, scratching at my uterus lining. Why aren’t I good enough? What do I have to do? From above she shouts down at me, “LET ME LIVE.”

Journey Into The Jungle Part 3: Blue, River, Woman

Continued search on my writer prayer journey, finding my blue heart, woman… what is her voice saying. Who is she?

Blue heart
The river of woman flows
So big, alive with the sky, the heaven
That floats above us as we raise our hands
Reaching toward the Goddess of All things
Blue and serene, passionate, river flow, blue waters stream
Through me as a woman connected to everyone’s inner silence
Raging tides of ecstasy that we repress, afraid of the Blue River Woman
Who swims upstream against the tide surrounded by myths that
No longer serve the Soul of Woman
Flow river, river flow the life-force, the energy
Of all that shines and pulses
No longer afraid to breathe air that is polluted
With grief and toxic waste.
The river blue flows like a woman’s blood
Down from her uterus, flowing down thighs
Into the earth cleansing all the mountains, hills, oceans and villages
Of ancient sacrifices that chased love away and force terror to reign supreme
The Blue Woman
The Blue River
The Woman
Blue
River
River, storms, wash up and floods us with your tender words and primal
Roar, I hear singing for me to awaken and cry no more, birth anew and whole.

The Muse Who Stands Over my Shoulder

Sarah, the Hebrew Priestess
A headdress of purple cloth
Gold earrings jingle
A blast of dust stamps the arid place where she stands
She is alone, calling, reaching to be seen and heard
Her voice buried under sand dunes of time
She’s been hung from crosses and burnt at the stake
She is resurrected with a prayer
The mourner’s prayer, candles eternally lit
Her soul rises and walks clouds toward the Moon
She breathes life into her breasts
Her milk spills across the galaxy
And pours secrets that were buried alive
Sarah haunts me, my lineage cries out to me and she floats
Like a Chagall angel that sings the song of ancestry
My muse Sarah rocks me, wakes me and stands solid

Character Study – Marta Luzim

When the artist's mind and soul is at work, where does it go? Follow the uncharted road on this journey of the one year writing prayer. It is a drop-dead dive into Alice's wonderland. You never know who you will meet. Help, I'm falling down the hole. Where am I?

Rena - Fascination with a Borderline Personality Home Grown by G-D

Rena, the devil in disguise. Her hair, light red, streaked with gold, blue eyes, tiny yet curvy body. Her stunning beauty hid the sickness inside. A gorgeous face that whitewashed her insanity, air-brushed her darkness, hypnotized whoever laid eyes upon her. But once she spoke, once her words hit your ears, and it only took once, she would crash and destroy every healthy brain cell in a person’s mind. Rena hated everyone, which spoke volumes on how she felt about herself. She hated people who didn’t wear the right color socks, who played canasta too slow, who ate their food too loud. How this hatred began, how it grew, how it maintained itself…was a mystery. Oh, one could psychoanalyze her as a border-line personality, as narcissistic, paranoid, manic-depressive, in other words insane. But, why? Really! Why?

Money was god to Rena. Green, slick and seductive. It gave her a reason to live.

Money and hid her insanity. Where is G-d in Rena? Were her ancestors just as crazy? Let's investigate to find the thread of her genetic lineage. We'll pick up on Rena later. She is busy on a shopping spree, the piranha is on the lose. Other characters to be introduced who know Rena. Testimonials to come.

Plot Whisperer Martha Alderson

Martha Alderson, www.blockbusterplots.com is coach extraordinarre, writer, friend and spiritual warrior. Her love, devotion and guidance has been a source of unending food for me as a writer, woman and human being. I will be posting her teachings on my blog from time to time along with my own writing. Enjoy!

Plot Whisperer for Writers and Readers

The Importance of Character

A dear, dear friend asked me what I thought of an editor's comments regarding her latest book. Having been told that the book did not have a wide enough appeal to a general audience but rather more valued by family and friends who could fill in the gaps, my friend turned to me.

First let me say that my friend has had / is having an amazing life and that she is a terrific writer -- she has a wonderful way with words and, though this latest book comes closer to a true story than her first book -- a collection of non-fiction vignettes-- I agree with the editor.

Without having dropped the veil on her own personal story and the deeper story of her relationships, the reader never has a chance to see how she is changed by the journey she undertakes in the story. Instead of more closely concentrating on her inner evolution, she focused on the outside. And, by keeping herself at a distance, the reader in the end is robbed of the true joy of reading -- identification.

Universal appeal comes through the character -- the inner plot, not though the dramatic action -- the outer plot. The protagonist (in a memoir, that means you, the author) drives the story and the allows for an emotional involvement on the part of the reader.

Yes, my friend wrote herself in such a way that she comes across strong and both empathetic and sympathetic. However, without a clear goal and an clearly identified inner problem that gets solved, the reader is left to fill in the gaps.

Key elements in the character inner plot:

1) The protagonist must grow throughout the story in a believable and meaningful way.

2) Protagonist goal = must be specific. The goal is what motivates the character and is what allows the reader to gauge when the character comes closer to goal and when she is thrust further away. What does the character want and why?

2) The character must reveal themselves to the reader. This can be accomplished through dialogue and descriptions, and through the actions she takes. In whichever way the writer finds to "show" the character, the character's emotion must be included = Character Emotional Development.

3) The secondary and minor characters act as real people who offer comparisons and contrasts to the main character, thus expanding the readers' understanding of the protagonist and of the overall theme itself.

4) Is the character struggling against herself and an external antagonist? Whether an inner demon or flaw and / or an external antagonist, we must understand the obstacles in the way of the protagonist achieving her goal to more fully appreciate the growth she ultimately makes.

For a simple questionnaire to help develop your protagonist's inner and outer plot, fill out the Character Emotional Development Profile.

Journey Into The Jungle Part 2: Prayer to my writing

This is an invocation to raise myself from the dead into the living word.

Deeper into the darkness of the jungle.

I pray I can hear the messages of my story

The flow of words and voices

I pray that the sad emptiness can pour onto the page and find it's way into my characters

like a possession without an exorcism

I will learn to understand their lives so that they will teach me my own

I pray to share myself fully, and not just a pinch of myself to my writing

I pray that I can see beyond the page into the entire universe that revolves throughout the story

I pray that I will be good enough to channel the craft, the plots and subplots that roam around in my mind

I pray for time

I pray for space

I pray that I even understand why I want to write

Although I know it is my soulmate, my heart, my mind, my best friend

I pray that the loneliness of the search will give me a clue

and my stories will birth something in me that has meaning

and will make me want to live

Journey Into The Jungle Part 1: My writing sustains me.

This is my first trip into the jungle of my writer's mind.

It is the source of my very essence

The core of my truth

My victory over ambivalence

My healing of anger, hurt and grief

It is the inner eye that sees into every person's eye

It is the way into G-d

The way to answering questions and having conversations that I would never have with anyone except myself

It soothes my longing

It fills my cup

The curve of the words, the seduction of the images, the arousal of my libido

It's my sixth sense, my outrage, my judgment and my compassion

It frees me from my own captivity

Write, Pray, Live

Debora Seidman, www.writingtheprayer.com, writer, playwright, poet and guide to the soul of the creative voice, along with two other adventurous writers, plus ME, are embarking on a year long safari into the depth of our artist's soul. We will commune with our writing as our "Beloved." as Deborah terms it.

From time to time we'll jump into the jeep and take in the scenery of my psyche and the unraveling of my writing expedition. I don't know where it will go, or what I will find, but I am thrilled to be diving into the underworld to explode this birth process. It is a behind the scenes look, the planting of seeds to future books, poems, plays and whatever else comes from the belly of the whale. My first entries follow.

A commitment to share my art

Artist (n.) - Someone who chooses to express their creative spirit, revealing the call of their soul, through artistic passions and authentic approaches to living life. Someone who is not afraid to share his or her true self with others.

-Jill Badonsky, author of The Nine Modern Day Muses

www.themuseisin.com