Truth and Secrets in Memoir Writing
When you’re nine years old, Aunt Jessie presses her powdered face to yours and whispers, “Now don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw. Your mother would just die.”
This is a scary thing to a child—to be entrusted with a secret that has so much power if could kill someone. Aunt Jessie probably didn’t mean to scare you like that, but words have power. Silence in the face of wrong has power. And when we begin to write our memoirs, we can get caught up in the webs of the past. Sometimes these webs are so tangled that we stop writing.
Memoirists struggle with the issue of revealing secrets as they search how to tell their own powerful, and sometimes shameful, truths. Secrets maintain a great power over us, and we are diminished by them. We become co-conspirators to the family dynamics that we don’t agree with and want to break away from. So we get caught in a conflict—to speak or not to speak. To remain closed and complicit, or to open up and take the risk of losing friends and family or shamed once again into submission. These conflicts haunt people all their lives, solidifying the silence. The way out of being trapped in the past is to write our own truths, but first it helps to get clear about the program that lives in our head. Read the Rest of This Article »
5 Insider Secrets For Writing With Confidence
I’m a professional writer. I work for blogs and the occasional magazine, and in the past I’ve written for clients who wanted website copy. My fiction has also been published, including a couple of competition prizes. Small successes, perhaps; but even these wouldn’t have happened without a strong level of writing confidence.
Since I write for a number of blogs, I often get questions from would-be writers. Something which crops up frequently is a lack of confidence. Many (surprisingly good) writers never send pieces to an editor, or agonise over every post they write on their own blog.
It doesn’t need to be that way. Good writing isn’t the preserve of a few lucky individuals – after all, none of us were born able to write! And, in the 21st century, many stifling grammatical “rules” no longer apply. You’re free to write in your own voice and your own style … and you can enjoy it. Here’s how: Read the Rest of This Article »
Harnessing Your Competitive Spirit to Spur Your Goals
In many situations in life – especially within a company or within a family – co-operation is a much more powerful principle than competition.
We all have a competitive instinct or drive, though, and many games make the most of this to ramp up the level of fun, excitement and involvement. (Sports, multi-player computer games, and board games all have “winners” and “losers”.)
As well as enjoying being competitive in game and play situations, we can use our natural competitive bent to give ourselves an edge when we’re trying to make gains in our personal life.
I’m going to give just three examples, but I’m sure you can come up with more areas of your life to apply this to (let’s hear them in the comments!) Read the Rest of This Article »
5 Reasons Your Life Will Improve Through Writing
Before I began to write, I didn’t fully understand the effects of the past on the present. Instead, for years, the past appeared in my mind’s eye like faded black-and-white photographs, in which no one, especially me, seemed to be fully alive.
Growing up, I lived a double life. On the face of it, we seemed like a normal, happy family: My father had an important career. We lived in nice houses and wore pretty clothes. But all this seeming perfection was a veneer, masking the reality that my father sexually molested me, a reality never spoken aloud. Read the Rest of This Article »
7 Steps To Compel Creativity
It is said that art imitates life. To be able to express oneself creatively is both powerful and fulfilling. True creativity resides within all of us, but because of the power of creativity those that aren’t ‘naturally gifted’ feel intimidated to even try. By breaking down the fundamental layers of creativity, we see that the process of creating art is not only simple, but can be applied to all activities of your life – whether you are organizing a file cabinet or painting a self portrait, these 7 steps will help you find art in all that you do in life. Read the Rest of This Article »
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