Tag Archives: creativity

‘Talent is not at all unusual, my dear…’

January 18, 2012 Jenny Alexander 19 Comments

When I was first trying to establish myself as an author, I came upon a quotation from the theatrical agent, Peggy Ramsay, which I copied out and stuck on my study wall. She said that talent was not at all unusual; what was unusual was having the character to develop it.

I was really struck by that, because the biggest struggles of my early career were not in developing my writing skills – I had been writing about pretty much everything that happened in my life since I was six – diaries, poems, stories – and my voice and style were already quite well-developed.

But the process of moving from being someone who loved writing to someone who could earn their living from it was very character-building for me. Here are five qualities I had to develop in myself.

1 – Self-belief, aka a thick skin

You won’t last five minutes in this business if you’re sensitive to criticism or can’t take rejection. Way back when I was starting out, one of the agents I approached with a sample of my writing replied, ‘I regret to inform you that we only accept clients who either have some writing ability or something interesting to say.’ See what I mean?

2 – Patience

The wheels of publishing move exceeding slow. Nuff said.

3 – Flexibility

If you can’t sell an idea in one form, you may be able to sell it in another. Most of the ideas I couldn’t sell have turned out to be recyclable in the fulness of time (patience again!)

4 – Trust

Lots of writers have to learn to trust their creative process, but that’s never been an issue for me. Tapping into dreams every night makes you aware of the abundance of stories going on all the time beneath the surface, which can never dry up. However, I have found it challenging to trust I’ll stay solvent on such a haphazard and sporadic income.

5 – Luck

You might say, what’s luck got to do with character? It’s random, right? But you make your own luck, to some extent. You have to be able to create and spot opportunities, and willing to consider any door that opens up, even if it’s not one you might have considered before.

I know from my workshops that talent is not unusual. Everybody has a unique voice, and an interesting story to tell. I feel really humbled by some of the writing people produce in half an hour, round my kitchen table.

Trying to make a career of it is different. Not everyone who loves writing will want to embark on that path. If you have done so, what qualities did you have to find in yourself? If you are trying to, what qualities do you think you will need?

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

Book Review: Poetry in the Making

January 11, 2012 Jenny Alexander 13 Comments

Poetry in the making, by Ted Hughes

Written for young people, this has to be the most beautiful and insightful book I’ve ever read about the magical process of creating writing.

As you would expect, the author uses metaphors from nature to express his ideas about where poetry comes from, and what attitudes and skills a poet needs to develop in himself in order to be able to capture it.

He talks about the inner life, which seems equivalent to what I call the dream-world in these pages. It’s the world of imagination, memory and emotion, stories and images, which goes on all the time beneath the surface, ‘like the heart beat.’ We may be aware of it, or we may not. We may become aware of it through dream-recalling or any creative pursuit.

Hughes compares this inner world with a pond, saying that if we don’t learn the focus, patience and stealth to break into it ‘our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.’

He says you have to care about what you are writing, and if an idea gets stalled it will be because you don’t care enough. You shouldn’t worry about the words, but cleave to the imagination and emotion in your idea, then the words will follow in an organic way.

The review from the Times Literary Supplement, quoted on the back cover, says, ‘He makes the whole venture seem enjoyable, and somehow urgent.’

That’s exactly what the book conveys to me – the sense of venture, pleasure and also the importance of this inner journey, which takes you to the heart of who you are, and what life is.

Like most writers, I love reading about writing. Have you got a favourite book on writing that you’d like to recommend?

Creativity, Writing

More people want to write than to read – why?

November 29, 2011 Jenny Alexander 19 Comments

First of all, I must confess I can’t remember where I read that there are more would-be writers than readers, so it’s more of an eye-catching title than a statistical fact. But having said that, it doesn’t sound too preposterous to me.

004 — My kitchen table - ready for a writing group

Writing courses are springing up all over the country, from major universities to my kitchen table; online writers’ resources are increasing daily, and in National Novel Writing Month alone participants have already produced a staggering 2,755,787,833 words this year, and counting http://nanowrimo.org/

You would think the main reason why so many people are interested in writing is because they’d like to be published, perhaps with a view to changing career, or to making a fortune out of a single best-selling book and going to live in the Seychelles. This is certainly true for some.

But I think for a lot of people who want to write, being published is not the main driver. It’s something more primitive and profound. People come to writing because they want to discover and tell their stories, not necessarily to the world, but to each other, like tribal elders gathered under a tree, or children making up games in the playground.

I think there’s a yearning also, in such a material world, to connect with deeper layers of the self, and explore the mysteries of the inner world.

What creative activities of every kind offer is an experience of total absorption and flow, and an opportunity for spiritual experience and community in a very secular world.

I’d love to hear your views, if you’re a teacher or participant in creative writing courses.

Creativity, Dreams

I don’t know what it means…

September 7, 2011 Jenny Alexander 6 Comments

Whenever I mention I’m writing a book on dreams, people always tell me about a dream they’ve had. Then they almost invariably add, ‘But I don’t know what it means.’

The only way we value dreams in mainstream Western culture is as a psychological resource – if we can’t analyse them, we don’t know what to do with them. But interpreting dreams in this psychological way is problematic.

I’m not saying we can’t interpret dreams at all. Sometimes we will wake up thinking, ‘I know what that dream was about,’ and when that happens, we will almost certainly be right. But if the meaning doesn’t jump out at you, any interpretation can be misguided.

The interpretative approach also inhibits us from talking about dreams. We worry our dream might be saying something about us we can’t see, but someone else will spot straight away.

But the biggest problem with the psychological approach is that it keeps us centred in the dayworld, rather than allowing us to fully enter the house of dreams.

Creative dreaming is about letting go of all links between dreaming and waking life, and treating them as different kinds of experience for the self. Tessa, in last week’s comments, told us she dreamt about nine black cats brooding huge beautiful black-cat eggs. What an amazing experience! We don’t have to ask what it means, any more than we would ask what it meant if she had told us she had pancakes for breakfast.

We can hear each other’s dream experiences exactly as we would hear the stories of waking life, and value them in the same way, for their interest and colour, their emotion and energy. For the imaginative experience they spark in us, vicariously.

If you want to remember more of your dreams, start talking about them. Make them part of your normal life, not in a piecemeal, conditional way, only keeping the ones you think you can understand and dismissing the rest as ‘meaningless.’

I’ve put some pointers about creative dream-sharing on the ‘Tips’ page today. You could start by sharing a dream with us here. Notice how different it feels to be telling and listening to dreams when no-one is trying to understand what they mean.

Next week, we’ll be on safari in your dreamworld, and guest blogger Scotti Cohn will be telling us about ‘the wolf dream.’

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

I had this amazing dream!

August 31, 2011 Jenny Alexander 21 Comments

At the end of the first series of creative dreaming-and-writing workshops I did, my favourite feedback was from someone who said she felt as if she had been walking past the same opening in the hedge every day of her life, but never stopped to look over the gate. Now she had looked, she was astonished to find there was a whole new world on the other side to explore, which had been there all the time, unobserved.

The world of the unconscious mind on the other side of the gate is a treasure-trove for writers, and many do get ideas and inspiration from their dreams. (If you’re a writer with a dream story please get in touch – I’ll be inviting guest bloggers to share ‘The dream that sparked the book’)

But even people who value dreams and get inspiration from them usually do it in a fairly random way, rather than deliberately and consistently using their dream-life as part of their writing practice.

Creative dreaming and writing are both ways of opening to the hidden places of the psyche. You can use one to magnify the other. In my writing life, I use dreams for gathering material and for finding structures that work. I harness the currents of imagination and emotion at work in my unconscious mind in the moment to energise my writing.

In my dreamlife, I use creative writing to further explore and enhance my experience of dreaming.

This approach works brilliantly for me. I love sharing it in workshops and now I want to share it with readers too. I’m working on a book called, ‘Writing in the House of Dreams – creative dreaming for writers, creative writing for dreamers,’ which should be on publishers’ desks by the end of the year.

At parties or the pub, when I tell people I’m writing a book about dreams, they always say, ‘I had this amazing/weird/hilarious/alarming dream…’ And then they go on to recount it. I love that!

If you’ve had a memorable dream, please share!

Next week, I’ll be blogging about the thing people always say when they have finished telling their dream, ‘I don’t know what it means…’

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