Winter of 2022 — Writing Advice

[What] all members of the human family need and deserve.   ~~Michael Larsen

Making Every Day a Holiday  

Written by Michael Larsen

Now retired, Michael Larsen, PhD is the co-founder of the Larsen/Pomada Literary Agency in San Francisco, California. He speaks and teaches around the country on writing, agenting and the publishing industry. In addition he’s one of the founders of the San Francisco Writers Conference. In the article below he offers advice for living a good life. Following it will make you a better author. 

 

Many thanks for letting me share gifts that I hope you enjoy every day, and that all members of the human family need and deserve:

 

The Basics

 

• Life: the miraculous opportunity to experience the wonders and potential of being alive

 

• Health: the mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing to fulfill your potential

 

• Home: a welcoming refuge and oasis filled with calm, beauty, love, and renewal that you enjoy sharing with visitors

 

• Sustainability: being able to meet your needs while minimizing unjustified suffering and your impact on the environment

 

• Luck: being in the United States. Its people’s love, creativity, intelligence, diversity, generosity, spirit of community, capacity for change, entrepreneurial spirit, and limitless potential–along with the country’s unique ability to help itself and the world create a better future–make it the best place to be at the most exciting time in history.

 

• Purpose: challenging short and long-term goals that inspire you to create and commit to a plan to achieve them

 

• Work: a labor of love that makes you come alive and gives your life meaning

 

For Your Best Self

 

• Love: different kinds and levels of affection for the people (and pets) you care about and who care about you

 

• Friendship: warm personal and professional relationships with the people in your life

 

• Gratitude: feeling and expressing what you are grateful for every day

 

• Service: helping individuals, communities, and causes you care about

 

• Freedom: the ability to think and act according to your values

 

• Harmony: aligning what you think, say, and do

 

• Serenity: spiritual beliefs and practices that bring you peace of mind

 

For Your Most Productive Life

 

• Creativity: what only you can bring to your life to make it more enjoyable and fulfilling

 

• Flexibility: being able to respond to growing uncertainty and accelerating change

 

• Learning: the lifelong quest for what you need to know to work, live, and create

 

• Simplicity: keeping your life as simple as you can

 

• Renewal: taking the time to renew your relationships and yourself so you can keep doing your best

 

In Community

 

• Communities: the groups of people that help make your life worthwhile

 

• Empathy: a compassionate understanding of others’ needs and challenges

 

• Truth: Shared realities that enable the world to function

 

• Trust: faith in each other’s words and actions

 

• Cooperation: collaborating for the common good

 

• Service: helping people and the causes you believe in

 

• Charity: supporting individuals, organizations, and causes you care about

 

• Generosity: giving what you can

 

For the World

 

• Unity: the binding force based on the belief that the needs and desires that unite the human family are more important than the forces that divide it

 

• Optimism: believing that the love, ability, and cooperation that have enabled humanity to meet past challenges have let us to the most creative, innovative decade in history.

We have been entrusted with the greatest opportunity the human family has ever had: building a just, sustainable, fulfilling civilization. The best hope for future of the Earth Community is people who fulfill their highest potential by sharing what is best in themselves.

 

• Citizenship: doing what you can for your community, country, and the world

 

Thanks for letting me know if there are gifts I should add. I hope this imperfect, incomplete wish list will help you and those you care about make every day a holiday.

• Mike Larsen
• larsenpoma@aol.com     

You can learn more about the author, who has a great deal to offer writers, on his website.

 

“Put the grief in the background.”   –Lisa Dailey

The Power Of Writing About Loss

 

I’m delighted to share an article by Lisa Dailey, the author of Square Up.

 

Ever wanted to put the past behind you? Lisa Dailey did after she lost her judgmental mother, so she and her family went away for a year. It was their opportunity to explore other countries and let the new experiences heal her from a trying relationship which strained her self image. Square Up is about the importance of letting go of old issues and moving forward with grace and dignity.

 

The trip starts at Travis Air Force Base where the Dailey family waits for a plane to Hawaii where they will stay with friends. As a dentist in the Public Health Service, Lisa’s husband, Ray, qualified for flights on military planes. They were a budget saver although waiting for available space could be a trial. They continued on to Guam, Okinawa, Singapore, Hanoi, and ultimately wound up in India and finally Spain. So many cultures to absorb in one year. While the travels were interesting, it’s Lisa’s reflections about her family, loss, and the past that turn this from a travelogue into a memoir.

 

This is the story of how immersing herself in sight seeing, overcoming language barriers, and traveling on a budget with a husband and two young teens, helped the author to conquer her demons and come away with a fresh outlook on life. It’s the story of leaving bad memories behind and moving into new territories and new adventures. The author becomes a deeper, stronger, better human being as a result of this trip, and she gives her sons experiences that help shape them into global citizens.

 

In the article below, she talks about overcoming loss by writing about it. 

 

Ever wanted to put the past behind you? Lisa Dailey did after she lost her judgmental mother, so she and her family went away for a year. It was their opportunity to explore other countries and let the new experiences heal her from a trying relationship which strained her self image. Square Up is about the importance of letting go of old issues and moving forward with grace and dignity.

 

The trip starts at Travis Air Force Base where the Dailey family waits for a plane to Hawaii where they will stay with friends. As a dentist in the Public Health Service, Lisa’s husband, Ray, qualified for flights on military planes. They were a budget saver although waiting for available space could be a trial. They continued on to Guam, Okinawa, Singapore, Hanoi, and ultimately wound up in India and finally Spain. So many cultures to absorb in one year. While the travels were interesting, it’s Lisa’s reflections about her family, loss, and the past that turn this from a travelogue into a memoir.

 

This is the story of how immersing herself in sight seeing, overcoming language barriers, and traveling on a budget with a husband and two young teens, helped the author to conquer her demons and come away with a fresh outlook on life. It’s the story of leaving bad memories behind and moving into new territories and new adventures. The author becomes a deeper, stronger, better human being as a result of this trip, and she gives her sons experiences that help shape them into global citizens.

 

In the article below, she talks about overcoming loss by writing about it. 

The Power Of Writing About Loss

When my husband and I decided to take out two teenage boys out of school for a year and travel the world, I was relieved. Relieved to be stepping out of my life for an unknown period of time. Relieved I didn’t have to stay put and deal with the overwhelming grief of losing seven family members in five years. Relieved I wouldn’t have to suffer awkward conversations and glances from friends who no longer knew what to say to me. For seven months, we left our life behind to explore the world. And it seemed like during those days of travel, life got a little less heavy. My grief did retreat to the background of my thoughts for a while. Or so I thought.

When we returned to the U.S. I thought I would finally take some to write the novel I’d been thinking about for decades. I didn’t think I needed to process my grief any further. I didn’t think I needed to reflect on the trip and the meaning it held. But every time I sat down to work on the novel, my inner writer typed about the trip and the losses and what each location that we visited taught me about healing and forgiveness and moving forward in my life.

For the next several months, I took my blog posts about the trip and reviewed them one by one, taking a mental trip back to each location and thinking about what I was feeling at the time. At first, I saw that anxiety and grief were very much present and influenced my actions and behavior. But as time went on, I noticed how I had allowed myself to be present and truly feel a place. I was no longer shutting down painful emotions, but leaning into them, and questioning why I believed they still had such power over me.

For example, though I blogged about the beauty and majesty of the 1000 stupas of Indein, Myanmar, during the trip, it wasn’t until I sat and wrote about them that I discovered the patterns that had followed me throughout our journey. All through Southeast Asia, the message of purification kept coming into my consciousness. At the 1000 stupas I read about the “Stainless Beam” mantra, which states that all negative karma and obscurations are purified even by dreaming of a stupa, seeing one, hearing the sound of its bells, and, even for birds and flies, by being touched by its shadow. When I then wrote about this experience, I saw myself standing among the stupas, taking in the beauty of the structures and the surrounding landscape, and being touched by the shadows of the stupas. I hadn’t felt it at the time, but I knew in my reflection that I had changed in that moment. The grief was lessening. When I researched the stupas a little more an found that the four sides of a stupa represent love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, I knew that the stupas held an even more special place in my heart. I likened the four sides of the stupa to the four members of my family. We were a family square, each in balance, the base from which the rest of our lives would take shape. Though I may have faltered for a time and retreated into my grief, the three other sides held me up and were waiting for me to return to my place. This is in part where the title of my memoir Square Up comes from!

Not all recollections were as comforting as the stupas. My relationship with my mother had been troubled before her death and my relationship with my father somewhat estranged. Returning to the places in my mind where I thought about my parents and writing about the resultant emotions brought the grief right back to the surface. But now I was ready to deal with my feelings rather than stuffing them. Writing helped me work through some of the sadness and ease the conflict I still harbored. One cannot be at war with the deceased after all.

What I learned through the process of writing my memoir, Square Up, is that the trip did allow me to put the grief in the background, but it was never truly gone. Digging deeper into my blog posts and finding the emotion, I was able to connect the thoughts and feelings I had in those places to the experience and discover greater meaning and a greater sense of peace with in myself.

 

 

Wheels of Emotions

Sometimes visuals stimulate ideas. So do words, of course. What happens when the two come together? I found the chart below in a Facebook post and loved its potential for fixing that dreaded nemesis, Writer’s Block. 

Say a character is happy and you’ll bore your reader. Does she feel joyful or powerful? In both cases, you’re getting more specific images than happy, right? 

Let’s say she’s happy because she’s been feeling indifferent and a text makes her joyful. Is she liberated or ecstatic? Maybe the government made a mistake and she’s liberated from a tax debt. Then again, maybe the government sent her a bill she doesn’t have to pay and she’s ecstatic. It depends on who she is, what her back story is, what she wants, what she can do to get it, and what’s in her way. 

Of course she wants an end to the debt. What if she’s sick and can’t work and she’s about to lose the house she’s lived in for the last 12 years? Would she have the energy to be as ecstatic as a winner on The Price is Right, or is more joyous, mellow and filled with gratitude. We learn about her by the descriptions you use. 

If you use the chart below, we’d love to hear how it works for you. 

Too blurry to use? You can find this and many more wheels by Googling Wheels of Emotions. Or I can send you the .jpg if you write to me using the Contact box. It seems to be in the public domain. 

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