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Happy birthday, Sylvia Beach! I’m so glad you were born to be an inspiration to readers and writers across generations.
I devoted a dozen years of my life to writing a novel about Sylvia’s life. I wanted more people to know about this American heroine who founded the legendary Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company.
To honor Sylvia’s legacy, today, March 13th, the Kindle version of my novel is on sale for $1.99. Click here get your copy today. Enjoy this bookish Paris adventure!
At the end of February, there was a confluence of activity here at Original Impulse. I wrote a vulnerable article for you. My web site, that I’ve been working on since October, went live. That caused my email to go down. Also, an RSS feed for my blog got triggered and started sending out blog notices to people who hadn’t heard from the blog since 2014. It had an old image from 2010.
All of this vulnerability and technical glitches caused a profound mortification in me. You know the type, the visceral, “Where can I hide?” feeling.
Luckily, I had the good fortune to speak with a dear friend the day of the clusterfluff. She said, This is true imperfection. This is not you having an experience and writing about it later. It’s real time, real imperfection.
This was the best thing she could say to me. She asked what was I had imagined would happen or what would it mean if the world saw that I am not perfect.
In theory, I know I am not perfect. But in business, I seek to execute my actions at a high level of, well, perfection. No typos, no glitches. I do what I say I will do and seek to do it well.
But this need for perfection is a joy killer and a creativity crusher. In my writing groups, and with my clients, I help them wrestle down the need to be perfect. To write or say things perfectly. To make sure their work is ‘good enough’.
While I understand and share this hope for ‘good’, I also know that perfection is the enemy of beginning. We don’t start that essay because we know we don’t have the words figured out exactly. We don’t initiate that difficult conversation because we don’t know what to say. We don’t start our business because we don’t know how to do all the steps well.
The act of making anything is deeply humbling. We bump up against our limits. We face our ignorance – our not knowing how to do something. We find that we need help.
But isn’t that all the best? Dumping the idea of perfection allows us to tap into our truest and richest humanity. We become someone who is trying something – how cool is that?! Someone connected to everyone else who has braved something! Someone who embraces their humanness by reaching out and asking for help.
If you only dare something that you can do perfectly, I invite you to try anyway. Write that imperfect story. Have that messy conversation. Make that completely wonky drawing.
Use me if you’d like as a reminder that you can and will survive the imperfections. Even if you put it out there and omg make a mistake, you will survive. I survived my launch glitches, and was even able to laugh about it.
What about you? Have you survived imperfect creative efforts? Share your experience below.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
This is one of the true cornerstones for my life, writing and work. In it, Natalie popularised the concept of free-writing. This practice allows people to get their words out more easily. I have written every single thing using this method.
I’ve also taught this method to thousands of writers since 1996. Natalie’s writing is real, refreshing and a great example of how free-writing can release what’s good and true inside each of us.
I can’t find my original copy of Writing Down the Bones; I must have gifted it. This is a copy that also contains her book Wild Mind.
If you haven’t read Writing Down the Bones, and you want to get started writing your stories, this is the book to get you going.
Women’s History Month seems like the perfect time to begin my World-Changing Books by Women series. In March, I will share books by women I consider to be my creative ancestors. These books gave me the courage to access my creativity. I became a writer and an artist because of the books I will share this month.
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron This book truly changed my world in 1994. I was working at the bookstore, wondering how to live my most creative life.
This book, with its in-depth exercises, gave me permission to identify and go for my writing dreams. It’s a guide to getting to know your true self, and I’ve recommended it thousands of times.
A recent re-read of The Artist’s Way showed me how many of my beliefs about creating and writing come from this book. This book is one of my creative ancestors, and I salute Julia Cameron. She’s written many more books, but this is the best one.
Did The Artist’s Way change your world?
As a girl, every week I visited the library. My parents would drop me off and pick me up later. I’d come home loaded down with a stack of books that I would devour and chronicle in my book ledger.
Well, not much has changed! I still go to the library and bring home more books than I can read. In my twenties, I worked at a bookstore here in Denver where I got the best kind of graduate school education – real world lessons sprinkled through with bookish insights. I still love sharing books that matter to me.
[Read more…] about World-Changing Books by Women Book Review Series
Since I’ve stopped watching TV, I have been back to my original love: reading BOOKS! I’m launching a new series later this week, where I will share a world-changing book by women every Friday. More on that soon.
For now, here’s what I’m reading and enjoying.
The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. I read this memoir cover to cover. I relished how the author’s experiment in letting life lead the way made for the most magnificent life. Instead of having his own ideas of how things should go, he surrendered to what life had in store for him.
Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds by Dr. Kelly Turner. A dear friend of mine has been clearing cancer from her body in the last nine months. She has been relentlessly positive, trying all kinds of modalities to return her health. She mentioned this book, describing the nine things that people who have reversed their health have done to bring about healing.
Only two of the practices are physical (diet, and herbs and supplements). The others all relate to a mental and emotional health and how important that is to healing. When De told me about it, I realized that I could work on things like releasing negative emotions and connecting to a sense of meaning now. Why wait until illness appears to focus more on my health?
Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness Ingrid Fetel Lee This is a pick in the Next Big Idea Book Club. I’ve been reading the chapter on magic and I love the author’s approach.
Exit West by Moshin Hamid I read this for my book group. It’s a story of a couple who flee their country for safety and become immigrants in London. There’s a bit of magical realism and a high dose of optimism. The writing is stellar and the story touching.
My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley – For next month’s book group. I’d heard about this last year on NPR. The commentator talked about how funny it is. So far, I’ve had a chuckle or two. Who doesn’t need a laugh?
If you’re like me, you enjoy a good film that moves you emotionally. I particularly like the ones that make me cry. There just aren’t enough opportunities to open up and bawl like a baby. A good flick can do that for you!
I also refer to movies a lot when coaching my writing clients. Movies are a great way to see story and drama writ large. This makes it easier to infuse our own writing with emotion and depth.
I posted a note on Facebook recently asking friends for their suggestions of good ‘sobbers’. I compiled them into a document.
Download the list here and add the movies to your queue. Next time you’re feeling moody, check one of these out.
What movies move you to tears? Feel free to add them in the comments below. I won’t be able to amend the list but would love to see more titles if you’ve got them!
In The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book, I talk about how to commit to a monogamous relationship with your book while writing it. Framing it as a relationship seems to help my clients.
We all know how exciting and fun the initial phases of a project is. Early ideation is thrilling. There’s often such a sense of rightness, of things clicking into place in our minds. It’s almost like we can see and feel the whole thing. Like the book already exists and our job is to pull it into form, one word, one sentence at a time.
These early days are heady, and the sense of possibility is intoxicating. This thrill is something we come to expect as the norm. But like any relationship, the honeymoon phase does end.
Drafting the book turns into revising the book. And here’s where it gets a little less fun. Editing is a different process than drafting. We confront our limitations as writers. We bump into confusion, and feel awkward as we wend our way toward clarity. Doubt seeps into the process, turning something we loved into something we may dread.
I remember this roller coaster of love for every book I have written. I remember being in the tub at the time I was writing my first book, thinking, oh, I need to put that thing in the book. But when I went to the manuscript, I had already put that in there. All the ideas I wanted to share felt like a swirly, jumbled mess.
Writing my novel took twelve years and seventeen drafts. It wasn’t all love and roses. It was humbling as I learned how to write a novel by actually doing it.
What I have learned, and what I teach my clients, is to look for the love in all the phases of the process. What’s to love about getting feedback and realizing there’s more work to do than you anticipated? Where’s the love in revising something so it truly speaks to what and how you want to communicate?
These phases of the process call us forth. They challenge is. It might not feel as thrilling as the initial idea, but there’s plenty to love there. When you find yourself bumping up against your limitations, ask yourself this: What’s to love here?
What helps you keep the love alive throughout all the phases of a project? Share your thoughts below.
We’ve heard the usual advice: write a certain amount of words daily. Keep a notebook to capture your ideas in one place. Write what you know. But what if some of the simplest things made for the best writing practice?
All this is good advice. And over time, I’ve seen that it’s the simplest practices that help make writing easy. I have used these myself and have witness students in my classes feel great success with these simple approaches.
Always apply my Adopt/Adapt approach. Adopt my suggestions and adapt them to suit you. If it’s not working, drop it and try something else.
Set a timer. You have probably sat down to write and found yourself bopping all around your email and the internet. A timer is the simplest thing of all but the best way to hold your focus. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes to get focused bursts of writing in.
Use a reflection process. At the end of each writing session, jot three words to describe your experience of writing. Don’t overthink it; just free-associate your experience quickly and briefly. Keep a list of these to see what your writing gives to you.
Give your words critical distance. After you’ve written something, set it aside for a day or so. Give it space to breathe and for you to step out of writing mode and into reader mode. You will see much more with space between you and the writing.
Write early. We all have our biorhythms that work for us. Knowing when to do things is key, as Dan Pink describes in his book When. No matter what your preferred time of day, I suggest getting your writing in as early as possible. Most of the people I work with report that they have more focus and energy earlier in the day. The later in the day the writing happens, the more it feels like a chore. Do your writing early in the day and enjoy the victorious feeling that gives you all day long.
Keep it together. If you haven’t already, create a container for your writing. It could be a notebook or a digital file. Gather notes, drafts, ideas and images in one place for easy reference. It doesn’t matter how messy the contents are, just that you have one container for your work. Ideally, it will be portable so you can access it everywhere.
You can also use the notebook as a progress log or way to capture your process. Sometimes we need to hash out our thoughts about our process or record information about our writing sessions—yay, gold star! Or add up our word count. We can log our ups and downs and have a record of what works and what doesn’t for the next book we write.
I prefer to use a notebook, and one of my favorites is the Diary Flex by Hahnemühle, which is refillable. There is also the cool Make My Notebook, which allows you to customize your cover and interior pages, seen above.
This is excerpted from my book, The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book. Subscribe to Impulses for sneak peeks and insider insights.
Join me and Denver authors Eleanor Brown and Cynthia Swanson for the League of Women Voters of Jefferson County Authors’ Luncheon. I’ll be sharing stories about a passion for reading and writing books. This is going to be fun!
The event is on Saturday, February 23rd; tickets available here through February 18th. Reserve your spot today here.
Want to write but have a hard time capturing your ideas and knowing where to start? Make it easy peasy to free-write from your own prompts with a mind map.
I’ve got just the thing! My class the Devoted Writer will empower you to get your words out easily.
We start February 1st! Reserve your seat here.
Here’s a mini workshop on how to design your own writing practice so you can write what you want, when you want.
I call on you to step up fully to honor your impulse to write. I invite you to ask yourself not will you write but what will you write.
What if you lived as if writing were not optional, but a daily tonic, a balm to your spirit? What if you finally took your writing impulses seriously and wrote something, anything, every single day?
What will you write today?
What will spring from your heart
leaping to marry with your mind
and beg your body to
sit still enough
to bring it all together
onto the page?
You, revealed.
You, shared.
You, trusting.
You, giving what must be
written
so your day
and your life
are spoken.
What will you write today?
You have probably heard me say that consumerism is the weakest form of creativity. Sure, it’s fun and creative to choose art supplies. But the real payoff is in using them. Like many people, I am seeking more simplicity and clarity with ‘stuff’. My friend Courtney Carver’s book Soulful Simplicity has inspired me to shed my extra stuff. That said, some things do make a huge difference in our lives. I am all for having the right tools.
My guess is you worked hard this year, and that you could use a little treat. What if you got or did something that honors the writer you? The artist in you? Maybe one of my favorite things will soon become your favorite, too.
There were a few things I got this year that I really loved and want everyone to know about. Perhaps one of these treats will be the right gift for the writer or artist in you. 
Hahnemühle is one of my favorite notebook and paper companies. I love the high quality and design aesthetics. This German company won my heart. They are an in-kind sponsor of my year-long Atelier program. Atelier members receive one of the Diary Flex notebooks, one of my favorites for easily and elegantly capturing all my ideas. They have a new cappuccino notebook that they sent me along with some coffee and a cool mug. Get your Diary Flex here.
Rancho Gordo My friend Gigia told me about this company. I checked them out and thought, oh, they’re a little expensive, I am economizing now. But when I went back to their site, I was lured in by the gift section. I could get myself beans as a gift.
What could be more practical and more luxurious at the same time? I splurged on the 20-bean box ($119 includes shipping). When they arrived, I nearly cried. The abundance! The beauty! The possibilities!
Get yer beans here.
Scott eVest
Speaking of cozy, I have started wearing a vest around. Now, it’s not your ordinary vest. We call it the Spy Vest. My friend Lisa Sonora was wearing one when we were in Paris together, and of course I wanted one.
This vest has many, many pockets. So many, the vest could replace a carry-on if you’re traveling light. I love the vest, with its many pockets and its hood. I never thought this would be my style. But I am with a Colorado dude through and through and I think the rugged look is starting to rub off on me.
You need one of these vests. Just think about the supplies you could tuck in here for a sketch crawl.
HaikuBags is another in-kind sponsor. This year they came out with the Trailblazer backpack. I am not much of a backpack person, but I love all of Haiku’s products, so I got one. And, surprise, surprise, it’s as fabulous as all the other Haiku bags I have had.
I call it my Portable Author Office. When I am going to a cafe to write, I easily put everything into the backpack. The weight distribution is great – no back pain! As always Haiku knows me well and has designed a bag with pocket for everything. This was a great surprise – the bag I didn’t know I needed.
Treat yourself to an eco-friendly, gorgeous and functional bag for those artist and writer’s dates.
Crystal Journey candles Speaking of my dear husband, when Steve came to my first Solstice party three years ago, he brought two gifts: a Crystal Journey candle (Joy) and a bouquet of flowers. This guy had my number right away. Now, we treat ourselves to these gorgeous candles. In the winter, they are in almost every room.
Light up your world with more love and candles.
BOOKS
I didn’t read as many books as I would have liked this year. I checked a lot of them out of the library, but only a few made it into my brain. I’ve included a range of my favorites from 2018 here.
Your Story Is Your Power by Elle Luna and Susie Herrick I loved this book so much, I hosted a book group discussion about it. Just go get it. It will inspire you to be more you, more authentic and more creative.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee Such a good novel. I had the luxury of reading this on vacation, which meant I was immersed in two strange worlds. Pachinko is set in Japan and shows the hard lives of the Korean people who migrated there. Told through the stories of one family, this is an epic and compelling adventure.
Calypso David Sedaris David Sedaris has long been a writing role model for me. His wit, insight and tenderness for his family compel me to be a better writer. In this book, we get to hear more about his family. A quick and easy read that doesn’t hesitate to pull the reader in deeply.
Green-light Your Book : How Writers Can Succeed in the New Era of Publishing by Brooke Warner If you are considering self-publishing a book, this is a great resource for all the ins and outs of the publishing process.
Favorite Pen
My favorite pen to gift people. If I were giving you a gift, I’d get one of Pilot’s Metropolitan fountain pens. I give everyone this pen, because it’s fancy and fabulous but not too expensive. I’d get you one in turquoise or purple or my favorite, gold. (See my pen at left with my Diary Flex notebook.)
This pen was gifted to me and turned me into a fountain pen lover. I use the refills and changing the Namiki ink is easy peasy.
Maya matches, tiny but mighty. Here’s something odd about me you may not know. I am a match fiend. I love matches and have a collection I bought in a jar at a yard sale. It’s stuffed with Denver restaurant matchbooks from decades past.
When I travel, I like to go to grocery stores and prowl the houseware section. The matches are always interesting, always local and always cheap. They make a great souvenir. I love my matches from Amsterdam and France. My suitcase always has a stash of matches upon return.
Recently, in Cozumel, we went to the local grocery store. It’s always the first thing I do when I go somewhere. I know, it’s weird. Why go on a mundane errand? Didn’t I leave home to get away from those errands? Well, I must procure almond milk for my coffee and while there, might as well get some matches. 
I bought a set of 6 Maya matches. Cerillos in Spanish. On the back of each yellow box is a picture of a Mexican site. These are some of my favorite matches ever. There’s a tab on the box, making it extra easy to open. The matches are tiny, flimsy little things. But they light like magic and are better than some of the sturdier wooden matches. I can’t wait to go back to get more.
What was a favorite treat for your writer or artist? Share the goods in a comment below.
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