Writing from Within: The Next Generation

Introduction

Writing from Within: The Next Generation presented me with a unique opportunity to update the work I have done exploring and teaching personal writing. The previous editions of my book Writing from Within (1984, 1988, 1998) had done well in the marketplace, and Kiran Rana, publisher of Hunter House, asked me to consider revising the book again. A great deal of the writing from within process is as relevant today as when I described it in the 3rd (1998) edition. Some of the material from that book, however, was either dated or I had expanded upon it considerably in the years since.

As a result, Kiran and I decided it would be appropriate to publish three new books. The first, Writing from Deeper Within, is a volume devoted to the work I had done between 1998 and 2013, and is for those who have already purchased Writing from Within, 3rd edition, and want to know more. The book has a significant appeal to those who desire perspectives on screen, novel, and short story writing, especially writing in a deeper, more intimate way in these different mediums.

The second book, Writing from Within Workbook, describes the writing from within process in an even more thorough and compelling way. The intent of this workbook is to breakdown each step of the process into several writing and rewriting tasks, appropriate for fourth graders to senior populations.

The third book is the book you are holding in your hands. Writing from Within: The Next Generation (I love the Star Treky name!) is an update of Writing from Within, 3rd edition, with the addition of the work I have done over the past fifteen years. Yes, it is a melding of Writing from Within and Writing from Deeper Within. But it is also more.

Writing from Within: The Next Generation is a skeletal outline of my own journey as a writer. Unlike so many writers who know from an early age that they want to express themselves through writing, I did not know that writing would be part of my life’s journey. Oh, I had always done well with academic writing in school, beginning with a research paper I had written on the United States Navy in the 10th grade, (an effort my father applauded in no uncertain terms. Yay!) However, my few fledgling efforts to write creatively, in my early twenties, went nowhere and my later efforts in creative writing, when I attended UCLA’s film school, were a disaster. I immediately began to direct documentary films and later short fiction films, staying as far away from writing screenplays as I could.

This defect, lacuna, empty space in my resume eventually came back to bite me in the rump, big time. In learning to work with actors imaginatively, I had discovered a part of myself that seemed to be highly creative, a part that could connect to other imaginative people on a high level of creativity. But although I was able to direct cinematically, I was unable to write creatively, I couldn’t come up with the screenplay that would enable me to launch a film career.

Depressed about life, work, self-worth, finances, and the future, I returned to academic teaching with my tail between my legs...hurting deeply. (World, please, just give me a @#$%^ job!) I still felt I had the potential to contribute a great deal to the world around me, but I didn’t see a path to realizing that potential.

As life would have it, the answer appeared in front of me, as if it were an apparition. Despite my deep hurt and sense of purposelessness, I had done two things well: loved my sons and befriended my former wives. Gail (ex-wife #1) suggested I go to a consciousness-raising workshop—Life Spring. The workshop turned out to be less frightening than I thought it would be. A door cracked open. Then a friend suggested I explore the work of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist. The door cracked open a little more. Following that, the principal of an adult school where I worked suggested I teach a course for senior citizens in writing life stories.

This will be dull work, I thought. It wasn’t. In fact, all of the work I had done learning about storytelling and working with the imagination of actors came pouring out of me as I worked with these older folks who desperately wanted to be able to pass along their life experiences to the generations to follow—the very thing I had wanted from my father who died when I was so young. Bingo. The door opened far enough for me to see where my energies and my desire to contribute to a better world could come together.

What I couldn’t see at the time was that my own path to writing creatively, which I had sought for such a long time, was also opening up. During my first year of teaching life-story writing, I simply noted all the things that worked in the stories my students wrote. They liked the way I analyzed their work and compared their efforts to those of the major writers whom I had studied and whose works I had taught at various universities. When they had difficulties,  such as hearing a critical voice within themselves that brought them to a halt, I had answers for them, answers that actually illuminated my own difficulties with writing.

Then I saw it. The root of my difficulties. My highly educated father (two PhDs and an MD) stood out in my fantasy life as a figure that said, this isn’t good enough. In an effort to do better I had always tried to make my writing more objective, more impersonal, more clinical—more like his writing. Exposed to the very interesting lives of my students, I began to see that the kind of writing toward which I gravitated was quite different: Simpler stories seemed to be the most powerful. The more childlike the stories of youthful experience, the better they seemed to me and to my students.

When I tried writing in this way, many of my problems in writing creatively disappeared. I freed myself of the need to be intellectual and smart. I could create strong pictures with very simple language, and so could my students. I could grasp subtle nuances of relationship and get them on paper. I could articulate my long suppressed inner life and get these thoughts and feelings on paper. (Yay!)

I started to enjoy writing. And so I began to write a book about writing—a fifteen-year journey exploring how one learns to write creatively. Writing from Within. Perhaps, more importantly, I began exploring how I could learn to use my own personal writing as a means to looking at myself and, in viewing myself differently, I could change the way I related to myself and others: Writing from Within and Character Consciousness.

My lifelong dream—suppressed and inarticulate for a quarter of a century—became visible. The door opened so fully that I began to see my path as much broader than I ever imagined. I saw that I was, and always had been, a creative person. Yes, I could make films, if I chose. I could parent as I had, and teach, as I had. And make music, as I had. But more importantly, I could create, as a writer.

In this way, my long nurtured desire to write books about the Italian Renaissance crept into my consciousness. From the time I had studied art history in college, I had always been transported to the past by studying the history of art and artists. I loved history as much as my worldly father had—my father who took me to visit every Civil War battlefield from Charleston to Gettysburg. My father who drove the two of us thousands of miles to see old trains. My father, who took me to the Museum of Natural History in Washington and recited poems about old fossils: said the little Eohippus, I’m going to be a horse and on my middle fingernail, I’ll run my earthly course.

I took trips to Italy over some ten years and photographed castles, villas, and haunts in Northern Italy where my fictional and actual characters sailed and stumbled through life. Then I began to write. But the central character, the Duke of Milan in the late fifteenth century, just wouldn’t come into focus. He remained too elusive.

In frustration, I asked myself, Who would you be if you had lived back then? The answer came immediately. I would be me. Well, at least the me I would have wanted to be: a musician. The son of a doctor. A man who loved women. Whose loves always got him in trouble. A man with such talents that every level of society welcomed him...and wanted something from him. So he became an acclaimed musician. And a beloved figure at the courts of Italy. And a spy.

Little by little, the novels became finished works. I wrote screenplays—and I was able to write them, develop them, and complete them in weeks, not months and years. Yes, I was able to say to myself at last, you are a writer.

And of course the shape of my own path as a writer became reflected in the shape of the paths that I opened up with and for my writing students. Many who had been with me for years had written elegant statements of life experience. And many of them wanted to experience more: to write novels and screenplays and short stories—fictional work, based on life stories already written. And they wanted to explore deeper levels of experience in their writing, whether fictional or nonfiction. So, together, we went to those places. That is the work to be found in Writing from Deeper Within.

However, Writing from Within: The Next Generation represents a larger step in my journey as a writer and as a creative person. It encompasses my journey from a certainty that I could never write creatively to realizing that I could turn out work that transported people to another time and place and provided them with insights and connections to things they had glimpsed but not thought about, a resonance that often existed within themselves, unseen and unknown.

The details of my particular journey are, of course, my own. But the general nature of my gradual understanding of the obstacles that lay before me, and my strong desire to move past them, are not unlike the journeys many who write and create must face. Thus, within the pages of Writing from Within: The Next Generation, you will find strong support for your own journey, from crawling out of the slime of ignorance to standing erect on a path of knowing and creating.

This path to creating and producing is not unlike the path outlined in Joseph Campell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Parsival-like person who sets out with great ambitions, hopes, dreams (or perhaps with none of the above) encounters various teachers whose significance may remain unseen at the time, descends into a kind of catatonic state of depression and mindless self-flagellation, and finally emerges revived, reinvigorated, reinvented, and reborn—ready to create. This is the path of Writing from Within: The Next Generation.

The following paragraphs, which form the introduction to Writing from Within, 3rd edition (1998), refer to Part I of this book and are taken directly from the Introduction of Writing from Within, 3rd edition.

In the years after World War II, America saw an unprecedented rootlessness developing. Easterners moved west, Southerners moved north, corporate Americans moved everywhere. But in the years since Alex Haley’s Roots (and more recently, the popular television show Who Do You Think You Are?) entered the consciousness of American society, we have seen a distinct shift toward respect for roots. And with it, we have witnessed an increasing respect for the wit and wisdom of those who have gotten us where we are—our parents and grandparents. For a writer and teacher who works with mature adults, this is a welcome change.

This volume, derived from the life-story writing classes and workshops I taught between 1982 and 1998 is written for those who wish to inform their children and grandchildren about the life path that they, the writers, have followed. It is also a self-help text for those who wish to use this writing as a means toward greater self-understanding.

Some of you may wish to read this book through from beginning to end before starting to write. In that case, you may wish to jot down notes as ideas, incidents, and people from the past come to mind.

I encourage you to work in a leisurely manner; there is no need to rush. It may take weeks or even months to move from one chapter to the next. That is to be expected. How many stories you write while developing the techniques presented in each chapter is very much up to you. You may well take six months to a year or longer to work through the book.

In the first few weeks and months, you will be spending a great deal of time rewriting, time that you might prefer to spend on the next recollection. To achieve the intimacy and depth of feeling and observation that are possible using the techniques described in the book, allow yourself the extra time and effort. Reread the book several times, and you will gradually make the techniques you have read and thought about a part of you. Using them will begin to feel comfortable—and you will be happy with the results.

At the end of several sections on composing, I include a short personal note. These notes are intended to guide you into the actual writing, for I do urge you to begin writing when I say now. Don’t bother fussing, worrying, or protesting. Whatever comes out is a first draft, which can be revised later. If you wish to read through the whole book before beginning to write, that is fine. But do allow the book to help you get down to the task of writing, not thinking about writing.

I am often asked, Should I write my stories chronologically, or should I write as my inner urge dictates? By all means, write as that urge dictates. Your stories ought, generally, to be arranged in chronological order if you print or publish them, but you, as the writer, need feel no compulsion to write them in that order. The vivid memories are the ones most likely to pop out at you at any time of the day or night.

I do suggest that you write several early memories first, learning to write from the child’s point of view before skipping around and writing about different phases of your life. Writing a number of early memories enables you to start with simpler memories and to discover the power of writing authentically, that is, writing in a voice that is consistent with the age of the person you were. By getting back to that person, you will discover much of your past that you have forgotten or remembered inaccurately.

The style you will be developing will be forceful, immediate, and intimate. It will be full of dialogue and your inner thoughts and feelings. You will be developing your own authentic writer’s voice, while you learn how to write from within.

The next paragraphs refer primarily to Part II of this volume, and also appear in Writing from Deeper Within.

Your Writing Process

A great many people who want to write have deep concerns about whether they actually can write. They wonder, Will I be able to find an audience, get an agent, solicit a publisher, overcome writing blocks, and perhaps make a living at writing—all in the same lifetime?

The answer: Who knows? But one thing is certain: Anyone intending to write seriously has to find a way of doing things that feels right and yields results. Everyone wonders whether they have talent. But the larger question is: Do you have what it takes to assume that you have talent and just go do the work? If you can get over that hurdle of doubt (which will return each time you experience a setback), then the next question is: Do you have the discipline and confidence to find your way through the maze of obstacles to create a body of work? Discipline and confidence are important, as is the belief that you have talent.

Five other clear and distinct concerns become visible in the labyrinth that is writing, each worth attending to:

Do you believe that a path exists that will get you through the maze of obstacles to completing a work?

Do you have a consistent, reliable plan for creating whatever you need to create?

Have you foreseen and dealt with the emotional obstacles to completing your work?

Are you willing to do the ruthless self-examination that writers must go through to complete their work?

Have you truly understood the messages that lie beneath the writing instruction that I will be outlining in subsequent chapters?

The Path

A small percentage of people know their talents at a very young age. The majority of us know what we would like to do but seldom know that the talent for doing so exists within. Discovering what your best qualities are (a process outlined in Chapter 22) is a big part of gaining belief in your talents and abilities to write. Writing well in school almost doesn’t count, because academic writing is logical and analytical, and rarely creative. If you have an engaging way of presenting this information, that’s fine, but it has little to do with becoming a writer.

The writer inside us sees the world in a fresh and perhaps different way. This side of a person finds itself fascinated by human relationships, not as described in texts by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, but in the way relationships unfold, as they do in the works of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Billy Wilder, and Jean Giraudoux. Psychologists want to know why things happen concerning human nature. Writers want to know how things happen—how people act in certain circumstances.

To make the leap from being an observer of the human condition to becoming a writer about that condition, you must believe a path exists for you to follow, one that will yield a finished work. If you don’t have that belief, then you must assume that you will find that path as you go along. And you will. But this path is your path, no one else’s.

In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the path of the transcendent hero, be he a person who crossed the face of this earth at some point in time or a philosopher’s invention, a writer’s creation, or a theologian’s supposition. That path looks remarkably similar for all heroes: A naïve young person starts out on a quest, receives a talisman or charm, fails badly in some way, struggles to right himself, fails again, and falls into a pit of despair, loneliness, and confused direction. This pit becomes a spiritual death from which the hero emerges transformed and better armed to meet the challenges ahead. Usually this transformation includes a softening of the self and the ego that drives a young person and accompanies a new way of seeing things—often an ability to see into the hearts of those around him.

Campbell’s path of the hero looks very much like that of many artists, musicians, and writers. To bring something into being, one must make mistakes and take false steps. In a labyrinth, a turn unexplored is a turn where light may exist just around an unseen corner. Exploring all of ones options takes time.

The Plan—Your Personal Mantra for Writing

The plan unfolds as a natural by-product of, belief in, and willingness to follow the path. The plan is usually simple. The first part is adopting a workable code or mantra to live by. Your plan may be, I will not take at face value anything that I am told. Such a code enabled George Orwell to endure bureaucratic oppression and poverty and see through Fascist, Communist, and Colonialist propaganda. Another code may be, I will do more than my father. This code drives many people forward. My own code seems quite simple: Play when others work; work when others play. Your mantra, in whatever form it takes, provides you with ample time and space to work on your craft while making as many mistakes as necessary.

The second part of the plan is understanding your audience fully, knowing what it needs and expects and trusting its responses without trusting its reasoning. This means that early in your creative life as a writer, you will need to be willing to make your work visible to the outside world. You do not have to do what your audience tells you to do. It only means that you understand what it needs and expects. It remains your choice whether or not to give it the expected.

It also means you will seek out mentors who can see where your work wants to go, as well as enlist the energies of others who want you to succeed in your artistic endeavors. One of the more effective creative people I have met in my lifetime, jazz great Buddy Colette, used to say, We are all trying to get to the same place; let’s go there together.

The third part of the plan is articulating your beliefs about the fundamental nature of man and the universe in your writing. Is man, at heart, good? If so, how do you explain the mistakes he makes, the dilemmas he creates for himself and others? Or is he ultimately bad? If this is the case, must he be trained and thus forced to conform to a moral order? But what happens if he rebels? Is there no hope for him? One aspect of your plan must be to investigate this question as you see it playing out in all the arenas of your experience. The characters you create (and observe) must all have their own take on this issue (and the universe that surrounds them), for this attitude will ultimately drive their quests, their goals, their obsessions, and how they decide to proceed.

Emotional Obstacles

Many obstacles stand in the way of anyone who wants to write (or create) in a serious way. Some are practical concerns—paying the rent, having significant relationships, fulfilling obligations. Often, however, you face less tangible concerns, ones that you hardly know exist—a backstory to your life that may include loss, abuse, neglect, and the like. These concerns may take a toll on your commitment to the craft and art of writing unless you pay attention. Like soldiers going into battle, you must train yourself for the battle ahead, while knowing your strengths and weaknesses and fine-tuning your mechanism for understanding the world around you.

Because obstacles do exist, you can best help yourself by learning early on what character qualities you have and what kinds of talents lie within you. If you function with a clear head, these obstacles, character qualities, and talents may even become a part of what you write about, in one way or the other. Having been a musician all my life, it came as no surprise to me that, in beginning my first novel, I focused on the life of a young musician. My father, a doctor, became the model for this character’s father—a fifteenth-century physician.

Often you have to clear away or surmount emotional obstacles before you can write in an energetic way. When my film career stumbled, I spent years getting clear about what I wanted and what was stopping me. Finally, the path became clearer—I had defined myself in a narrow way that had held me back. Once I defined myself not merely as a filmmaker but as a creative person, many opportunities opened up, including my path to writing creatively.

Another obstacle facing many people is the question, How do I incorporate others into my ‘writer’s life,’ a life that can be quite lonely? One answer is that at every turn of the road, you will need people to help you, and you will meet people you can help. A writer—in fact people in all walks of life—needs a strong support system which includes family (wife, ex-wife, parents, brothers, sisters, and children) and friends. Creative people function poorly if they try to exist/live/work in complete isolation. You also need to find people who are doing what you do (write) and find groups in which to exchange feedback about your work. Putting effort into finding people who give quality feedback (insightful but not hurtful) to your work is something you continuously need to do, and you will find it worth all the energy you put into it.

Self-Examination

Many creative people find the work of C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Abraham Maslow helpful in their personal quests for identity and support. Why? Unlike Freud and those who followed him, Jung investigated the human condition without a preconceived agenda. That is, he made no assumption about whether man’s fundamental nature was evil or good. He saw people in the same way that his contemporaries Ibsen, Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov saw them—as fascinating creatures acting and reacting to the world around them, intent on surviving. Campbell, the editor of much of Jung’s work, saw mankind operating in the same way, although his fascination lay in uncovering common threads in the footprints of stellar individuals through civilizations. Maslow saw nothing but enormous possibilities in human beings and believed that everyone needs to do what they can to live up to their potential.

As a creative person, the time you spend pondering the lives of individuals such as Jung, Campbell, and Maslow as well as their arcs (the beginning, middle, and ends of their concerns about the human condition) will give you strength and determination to see what others do not see, to uncover what others prefer to ignore, and to make visible what others find invisible.

The complete stories by many of the writers mentioned in this book may be found in Part III of this book or at www.WritingFromWithin-Stories.com.

If you would like to follow a step-by-step guide with exercises in order to complete the first fourteen steps of the writing from within process, I suggest you obtain the Writing from Within Workbook from Hunter House Publishers.

For those who wish to know more about setting up a helpful, noninvasive feedback group, please see the Appendix at the back of the book.

To observe the ways in which another group of creative people—filmmakers—answer many of the questions posed in this book, please look at my book, The Art of Seeing: Motion Pictures as an Art Form and as a Business.

Writing from Within: The Basic Approach and Techniques

The first part of Writing from Within: The Next Generation contains five units. Part I, Unit I, Acquiring the Basic Techniques of ‘Writing from Within,’ looks at the basic techniques of life-story writing. Unit II, Amplifying the Basic Steps in ‘Writing from Within’: Narrative, Dialogue, and Inner Thoughts and Feelings, explores a few of these basic techniques more deeply. Unit III, Using the Basic Techniques with Challenging Subject Matter, applies these techniques to unusual subject matter. Unit IV, Writing Family Histories, examines different approaches to writing stories of a family’s past history. Unit V, Expanding and Managing Your Creativity, looks into some of the problems encountered when making the effort to be creative.

Part II, Unit I, Advanced Perspectives in Writing Creatively, explores a host of techniques that allow for the creation of a more sophisticated, more complex, and more intimate story. Unit II, Exploring Character Through Rewriting suggests ways to reveal character and character qualities by sharing a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings and describing character qualities through actions and details. Unit III, Leaping into Longer Work presents an opportunity to see how these techniques can move a story from sketch (short story or life story) to a full-length novel, screenplay, or play. Unit IV, For the Future, imagines other uses for the techniques of life-story writing to understand ourselves and to provide a richer experience of writing in school systems across the country.

Unit I

Acquiring the Basic Techniques of Writing from Within

As I walk up the steps to the second floor of the Musicians Union in Los Angeles, I wonder what this class will be like. For years I have been teaching people to write their life stories in classes and workshops around California, and I have been a musician since I was twelve years old. Now I hope to combine these two passions by helping musicians—mostly older, both male and female, black, white, latin, and Asian—gather together to share their stories of life on the road and in the studios with bands big and small.

The first session, which we had last week, was fun. I had moved another class to this location in order to include these musicians, and the members of the old class welcomed the musicians with a lot of warmth. The new members did a short exercise in which each shared his or her earliest memory out loud. Then I showed them how to tell their memories again in a way that would bring the stories to life. In this session we will find out how their writing is coming along.

Good morning, Herr Professor. Dave Schwartz, a highly respected, retired violist gives me a wry smile as I open the door.

Hello, Dave, how are you? I’ve come to see that Dave, who is pushing eighty and looks sixty, is not only one of the class wits, but a very sharp-minded man.

Hey, Bernard, Eddie White greets me. How’s it going? His shy smile lights up the room. A small, kindly man with snow white hair, Eddie has been with me several months now and has shown over and over again remarkable storytelling gifts.

Hey there, Edward, you got a good one for us? I ask.

It better be good, laughs Buddy Collette, the great sax, clarinet, and flute player who, with Charlie Mingus, Britt Woodman, and Chico Hamilton, formed the first postbebop band after World War II. He called me at three o’clock this morning to read it to me. We all laugh.

Well, I sort of lost track of time, Eddie chuckles. The smile never leaves his face.

Eddie’s always had a problem with time. Jack Burger, a long-time drummer in the Hollywood studios, laughs.

Yeah, sometimes I play three beats to a measure and you guys are playing four. Eddie enjoys poking fun at himself. That’s why I hardly ever play in public.

You’re lucky. You played music because you loved it. Jack leans back in his chair. The rest of us were cursed with talent and had to earn a living at it.

Dave nods toward Jack, a little smile on his face. Not all of us who earned a living at it were cursed with talent, Jack.

I laugh with them while other members of the class, the nonmusicians like Doris Argoud and Roz Goldstein from the earlier class, settle into their seats. Listening to musicians trade stories and gentle barbs is one of the highlights of my week, as it is for Roz and Doris.

Buddy has a story, says Eddie. I asked him to read it to me, but he wanted to wait for your comments, Bernard.

Well, let’s hear it, says Doris, a whimsical, supportive woman in her late forties. I’m dying to know his earliest memory.

This is just a first draft, you know, replies Buddy. Tall and distinguished, a true elder statesman of jazz, he takes several sheets of paper from his briefcase and puts on his glasses. As he reads, I reflect on what I know of him: A superb musician, Buddy is (and has been for a long time) a force in the creative community of Los Angeles, conducting workshops, concerts, and performances for kids in schools. In the early 1950s, he was instrumental in bringing the black and white musicians’ unions together to form a single, integrated union. He later became the first black musician to break into the studios. Thanks to him, our class is now held at the union building.

I’ve known Buddy for several months, after a chance meeting brought him to the class in which Roz and Doris were students. Right away, he invited relatives and friends, including Eddie, to join the group. These new, creative storytellers have brought a wonderful energy to the class, and I’m impressed with Buddy’s philosophy: We’re all moving forward, so let’s move forward together. I find myself wondering, What has enabled Buddy to become so positive and forward-looking, able to ease past obstacles that would stop another man?

In this first story for our combined class, he writes about a time when, at two years old, he sees something on the other side of the street and runs across the street to get it. A Model T Ford runs him down, and Buddy disappears under the wheels. Buddy’s mother hurries to the scene and sees only the scarf in the spokes of the wheel. My baby... she whispers. A few moments later Buddy is pulled from under the car, stunned but alive.

As I listen, I imagine Buddy’s mother growing hysterical and angry, as I imagine most parents becoming...as I myself became when my younger son ran out in the street.

But no, Buddy’s mother sweeps him up in her arms, saying, Oh, my little darling, I’m so glad you’re all right.

How intriguing, I think to myself, as I listen to Buddy describe the little tests his father devised to teach him independence and resourcefulness. His parents’ attitude seems to be, If you want to do it, it must be worth doing.

I begin to reflect on the nature of parenting. From noncritical, supportive parents comes a sense of wholeness to our lives, the kind of wholeness I also see in creativity such as Buddy’s. But for most of us, I think to myself, loving, attentive, supportive elders are, like wholeness and creativity, something for which we yearn, but seldom get. I feel a little sad.

Unlike Buddy, I grew up with a sense of something missing in my life. What is it? I kept asking myself all through high school. What’s missing? I wonder whether it had anything to do with my parents, though they were pretty normal. Dad was my hero, a successful, highly educated psychiatrist who survived a serious heart attack when I was eight and who coped with my mom’s emotional illnesses.

Of course, Dad was not always my hero. Highly critical, with a mind as sharp as a razor, he absorbed book knowledge with ease. The unspoken rule of the house was read books, do well in school, win Dad’s approval. As I looked around our library at home, I was intrigued and overwhelmed. How could I ever hope to read all those books? I became quite critical of myself, and Dad’s occasional dark rages that he directed at me added a whole lower octave to the voices of my inner thoughts: You won’t be able to do that. You don’t deserve to get that. You won’t finish that. You’ve reached a plateau, and that’s where you’ll stay.

I reflect that my experience with my parents was probably not much different from that of most people: one parent highly critical, the other more supportive but often afraid to interfere. Ah, that demonic inner critic, so ready to devour us. How sad, I think to myself. How sad.

What a wonderful story, Buddy, says Doris. It gives us a lot of insight into you.

My mother was a great lady, murmurs Buddy. She gave a lot of thought to everything...like the music lessons we all got.

I glance around the room. Dave’s face has a bit of a frown. Dave, you have a question, I think?

I’ve always wanted to write about playing with Toscanini, Leopold Stowkowski, and Glenn Miller. But it just sounds like bragging. ‘Big important me.’ I get frustrated and stop writing.

What voice is that? I ask, expecting that those who have been with me a while will recognize it immediately.

The voice of the critic, answers good-natured Roz. Dave still looks puzzled. The voice that’s telling you not to write or is finding fault with what you do...that’s the voice of the critic.

Dave turns to me. Is that right, Bernard?

Dave, when we were small, most of us were playful and we created endlessly...in the sandbox or at the beach, right? The others nod their heads. But too often our strongly critical mind—our ‘critic’—simply overwhelms our ‘creator’ side. It makes it very difficult for us to see our deep-seated creativity and keep it going.

So the perfectionist in me makes it impossible even to start writing, Dave muses. Roz and Doris nod their heads in agreement. Very interesting...the conflict between my self-critic and my creativity is what’s holding me back? Then how do I get unstuck?

In the course of writing our stories, we will often find these two sides of the mind fighting with each other. When this happens, we need to calm ourselves, to drain away emotions, particularly frustration—to allow our creative side to regain momentum. Dave stares at me intently. I do a couple of things: I put a play-along jazz album on the turntable, pick up my clarinet, and accompany it. This calms me down, and I return more focused. Or I lie down and doze off. My mind calms itself down.

You actually let yourself go to sleep? asks Dave.

He fell asleep during a story I wrote last year, laughs Roz.

And he woke up and gave a great critique, adds Doris, racing to my defense.

This balancing process has a very positive effect on the stories we write, I continue, if we let it happen.

It’s had a positive effect on my life, too, adds Doris. Jack frowns at her. Really, Jack. It’s allowed a lot of my feelings to come out. Feelings that were buried for a long time.

I was just thinking that nothing can help Dave put his life in balance, Jack chuckles. He spends all his time carrying residuals to the bank.

Don’t I wish, laughs Dave. But that does remind me of a story...anyway, go ahead Bernard.

Already I notice the men in the room becoming uncomfortable, joking and laughing as soon as we begin talking about feelings. This is not unusual. Buddy and Eddie are exceptions; Eddie’s stories of growing up in the South are rich with feelings (see his story Blind Lemon Jefferson Sings the Blues).

You know, when I was just starting to write, Doris offers, "I would sometimes get really emotional. A part of me would say, Don’t write this. It’s too personal. It took me a while to get up the courage just to go on and see where the story wanted to take me, what it would show me that I had forgotten."

Writing isn’t like playing the viola where I can just practice harder, is it? Dave muses.

Or listening to a record and stealing from the great artists, Jack smirks.

Oh, Dave would never steal someone else’s interpretation, adds Eddie with a sly grin. He would make it his own.

Don’t bet on it, Dave laughs.

Go ahead, Bernard, Buddy urges. You were talking about feelings and writing?

Let me put it this way, I say. When we are young, many things come along that hurt, embarrass, or frustrate us, yes?