Your Unconscious is Not a Terrorist. You Are Allowed to Negotiate.

Preservation of life is your unconscious mind’s primary function. Beyond breath and hunger it uses another tool to keep you alive: alertness to danger.

Because your unconscious is an ethereal non-physical entity, non-physical threats weigh the same as the physical. Whether the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train or a painful memory, the instinctive response is avoidance. Run from danger; that’s what your unconscious does. Most of the time, it’s a good bodyguard.

You’ve seen it in a movie or TV show: protected VIP convinces overzealous bodyguard to allow some latitude, provided safeguards are in place. Sure, kid, you can go to the zoo, but we’ll have a tracking device in your shoe and men in black at every gate.

Your unconscious is a bodyguard trying to protect you, not a terrorist trying to take you down.

[image: a conversation with your unconscious]

What if you could negotiate some free time, give your bodyguard the morning off so you could write from your heart, pouring it all out, wheat and chaff together, spilling some of that internal truth onto the page? What if, for a little while, you made your unconscious feel safe, so it would stay out of the way while you go on a hot date with a great scene for your novel?

You can. Here’s how. (more…)

---

Basic Tools from “The Artist’s Way”

One of many free downloads from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” website is the section from her book (of the same name) on basic tools.

Two tools she talks about are morning pages (journaling every morning) and artist dates (spending quality time with your artistic self.) If you want to amp your creativity and help yourself commit to it download and read her comments. She describes each tool and explains why they’re vital.

---

Standards: Straight Jacket or Guide Posts?

I just read a blog post by an author claiming that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is overused, and explained how their novel avoided it so as not to sound formulaic.

Except the only difference was, their “hero” wasn’t traditionally heroic. Otherwise, the description was nothing more than an abbreviated version of the same story humans have been telling themselves for millennia.

Being “different” by

1. calling yourself different
2. pretending that how the human mind works doesn’t apply to you and/or
3. being ignorant of how language works (Campbell’s “hero” has nothing to do with heroism)

is loopy, wonky, misguided, and just plain wrong.
(more…)

---