Sage Cohen's Blog, page 7

Productivity closes the gap between vision and realization

We come to writing because we have something to say. And most of us spend the rest of our lives learning how to say it. In this quick video, Ira Glass talks about the gap between the impulse to create and the ability to realize our vision. He shares an insight that he says he wishes he knew at the beginning of his journey: everyone who eventually makes great creative work spends many years making mediocre work first. Everyone.

The most important thing you can do for your craft, says Glass, is to create a huge volume of work. Just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. It’s the only way to close the gap. I agree with him completely.

Understanding that honing our craft is a lifelong discipline is a valuable point of orientation. But I think this insight is not enough to keep us writing. We need to be very clear about our motivation, and to call ourselves back to that motivation when we get discouraged, lost, afraid.

If you think your motivation is to get published, I invite you to dig deeper. Publishing may happen at some point on the trajectory. But the validation of the outer world is unstable ground on which to construct our writing practice.

I started writing as a teenager because it felt like my life depended on it. And I continued writing because the quest to translate experience into insight became a kind of obsession. Finding the right language to liberate truth has been my primary quest in life.

Why do you write? How is writing essential to your happiness? How is it fundamental to your survival? I invite you to name and claim your deepest and truest and most vulnerable motivation. Write down your answers and keep them close at hand as you write. Living and writing by these truths will fortify your inner writer over the years. And it can help ensure that your writing practice is so essential to you that the obvious choice will be to keep writing and writing and writing. No matter what.

When you’re writing from the inside out, the act of writing will become its own reward. You’ll find the resources to commit to your practice for the long term. And as you see the gap between vision and realization close over time, you may find that your evolution as a writer gives you a kind of satisfaction that you once believed could only come from publishing.

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If you’d like a little extra support clarifying your motivation and sustaining momentum in your writing life and you live in the Portland, Oregon area, join us for the Finding Your Stride workshop!  Christi Krug, guest Laura Stanfill and I will be sharing our best strategies to help you make 2014 your most potent writing year yet! Classes start March 4. Learn more and register. 

Master the Margin: Top 10 Tips for Micro Writing

I was talking to a client of mine–a naturopath–about how he was going to make time to do some of the marketing writing assignments I’d given him. He was considering seeing patients one less day a week so he’d have a stretch of time for writing. This seemed at odds with his goal of growing his business–the reason we were doing these writing assignments in the first place.

I asked him if he ever ended up with free time between seeing patients. He thought about this and realized that though some days were entirely full, on many others he could end up with anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours free. I challenged him to sit down during every in-between time and do his homework then. I explained that it might actually be easier to tackle this work in small chunks over the course of his week. Sometimes a big chunk of time can overwhelm us and shut us down.

I know from working with writers and working with myself for the past 20 years that it’s easy to waste a full day set aside for writing. And it can be less confronting to actually fit writing into the margins we already have. This can help us get a foothold into those wider expanses of time, should we be so fortunate to eventually create such opportunities.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I’ve come to see sour grapes as wine. I believe that what most writers are struggling with–having only small slivers of writing time–can actually be the most efficient way to arrive at the whole pie. Because the less time we have, the more compelled we often are to make every minute count. Not sure this could work for you? I have a few suggestions:

Waiting makes the writing grow fonder. Standing in line? Made it early to your appointment? Kids delayed after school? Make waiting time writing time.
Insomnia happens. Barbara Kingsolver wrote her first book entirely in the middle of the night while having pregnancy-induced insomnia. I did, too. I’m not recommending sleeplessness as a life strategy, but when it happens, it could be because you have something important to say that’s trying to come through. Or it could be because you’re pregnant. But that’s another story.
Love the lulls. No matter how hard you’re working at your job, there are always spaces in between the work. Whether it’s lunch break or you’re on the road to meet a client or the computers go down for ten minutes, make that time writing time.
Set the alarm 15 minutes earlier. Yep, that’s it. Just 15 minutes. Protect that time with your life (or at least your pen) and write like mad. Before you do anything else.
Quit something. Whether it’s a committee, a regular social hour, or something you do around the house that someone else could be doing, renegotiate that commitment. Put yourself first. Use those two hours a week for you.
Multitask. I have been walking dogs for the past 15 years. I could look at it as taking time away from my writing life. Instead, I consider that time my most precious idea-generation time. The ideas and images that bubble up grow into blog posts, poems, classes, books. When you’re in the shower, washing dishes, on the treadmill at the gym–pay attention to what moves through you. And make sure you get it down!
Lean into the discomfort. When something is happening that you’re uncomfortable with, put your writer self at the helm. Be curious about the pain, the rage, the blame–whatever it is that’s happening. This gives you a way of transforming the moment into something useful, and sourcing some of the grit of life for your writing.
Make writing your baby. When the baby cries, you don’t tell it, “I promised so-and-so I’d do such-and-such. I’ll be with you in about 15 minutes.” You drop what you’re doing, figure out what the baby needs, and then you do it. What if your writing were that important? What if you sprinted toward an index card every time a powerful image presented itself to you, then took 30 seconds to write it down, no matter how inconvenient it might be?
Be faithful to your muse. This tip completes the thought I started in #8. Once you know you can count on yourself to make space for what’s coming through (and your muse knows it, too), ideas and inspiration will flow more freely. When you have a practice of being accountable to your writing, you can trust yourself and relax into the moment.
Appreciate yourself. No one but you will know how hard you’re working to carve out writing space. So it’s your job to appreciate every sliver of writing time you claim for yourself. Make a chart and give yourself stars, take yourself out for a drink, call your mother and brag–whatever works for you to take a step back and say, “Hey! My actions are in line with my values! I’m discovering ways to write in life’s margins on a regular basis!”

Sometimes, having a bit of structure, good company, and some powerful tools for keeping yourself on track can make the difference between writing and not writing. This is why I teach! If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, I invite you to join me for a productivity workshop I’ll be offering with literary leaders Christi Krug and (special guest) Laura Stanfill. We’re very excited to help you find—and keep—your writing momentum! Classes meet Tuesday evenings in March. Learn more and register.

 

The Poetics of Prose: 10 Crossover Truths for Fierce Writing

Language is the current that story travels on. It is the scaffolding of story. It is the engine. It needs to support the house. It needs to flow into the big waters. It needs to provide the most efficient transportation for where you want your reader to go. I taught a workshop last weekend called “Fierce on the Page” as part of Jessica Morrell’s fabulous Making it in Changing Times conference. Together, some very astute writers and I contemplated how the craft of poetry can inform fierce prose that reaches and transforms the reader. The distillation of our hour and a half together is this top-10 list:

SHOW AND TELL: Make imagery and explanation work powerfully together to evoke vivid scenes and instruct the reader about their meaning.
LET VOICE BE AUTHENTIC: Use words that express the narrator’s / characters’ temperament and predicament.
MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT: Seek maximum potency in the language you choose. Consider whether there’s a more impactful way to convey the same thought, feeling or idea. Can passive verbs become active? Can modifiers be cut? Should “dropped” be changed to “plummeted”?
BRING IN THE BODY: Engage the reader’s senses by crafting a tangible world for them to taste, feel, see and hear.
GROUND IT WITH SOUND: Create tones that echo the story’s emotions and action. Repeating sounds can create unity and music.
OWN THE PACING: Construct the rhythm of language and pacing of sentences and paragraphs to control the reader’s movement through the story.
LET THE WORLD IN: Illuminate the emotional world of your characters with the physical world and its lighting, weather and street noise.
TELL THE TRUTH: Discover what is emotionally true (not necessarily literally true) in your writing and strive to let it rise like steam from your well-prepared feast.
SHAKE THINGS UP: Never stop experimenting with ways to make language serve your story.
FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY: The fierce writer persists. 

What makes your prose fierce? How have you employed strategies on this list? If you write both poetry and prose, how has one influenced the other? Is there anything you disagree with here?

Who were you before you were a writer?

Just as an acorn contains the destiny of the oak, our little pre-K or elementary-school selves knew everything we needed to know about who we are, what we love, and the lives we are best suited to live. But unlike the oak, we have a lot of influences throughout our lives that can drastically confuse the matter. By the time we’re adults, we’ve likely left behind the hula hoop or the hacky sack that occupied most of our childhood weekends. It can be tricky to translate such obsessions to a career path or family.

When I declared somewhat spontaneously a few weeks ago that I was going to choose a Song of the Year and make up a dance routine to go with it, something woke up in me. My heart started singing and dancing. Within days, my friend Lane sent me this 24 hour music video. And I’ve been dancing along ever since.

Before I was a writer, I was a very serious visual artist. And before painting and drawing came into my life, singing and dancing were my passions. By specializing in writing eventually, I left behind these joyous and vital parts of myself. As the New Year approached, I asked myself: how might my heart and my writing expand if I invited these parts of me back to center stage? Mind you, I didn’t waste one second on the fact that I barely have the space to write, let alone paint, draw, sing and dance. That would shut me right down. Instead, I opened myself up to the daydream of delight.

And because over-committing is one of my adult specialties, I very quickly upped the ante of my promise to myself this year. This is what I decided.

I won’t just choose a song of the year. I will write and record one. And I won’t just make up a dance routine, I will record a dance video. This video won’t just be a record my dance routine, I will be a weave of as many dance routines as I can possibly record. And this won’t just be any song and dance. It will be an anthem to the triumph of the heart over lost love and divided family. It will be a video of single parents dancing our broken-hearted butts off.

Will I actually be able to pull this off in 2014—or ever? I don’t know. But simply having a specific and joyful vision of how I could weave together my passions for transforming the losses of divorce into powerful medicine with the many forms of creative expression I love most has completely liberated my sense of possibility. It has let me off of my accomplishment-because-I-have-to hook and set me up for a very different kind of expectation for this year.

How might you make the stage of your life bigger, more playful, and more committed to the causes and the work that matter most to you by making space for your childhood passions? Showing up to write requires that we reach deep into every cell for the wisdom of the words that await us there. Who were you before you were a writer, and what does that person bring to the page? What is the hula hoop waiting to say? And who’s going to star in your dance video?

 

 

Craft and productivity workshops

Happy New Year! I’m very excited to be launching 2014 with two learning opportunities. If you’d like to increase the potency of your language or build momentum in your writing life, I hope you’ll join me!

Making It in Changing Times Writing Conference

WORKSHOP: Fierce on the Page: Increase the Potency and Impact of Your Language

Fierce writers create a direct channel to the reader’s nervous system and blood stream. We do this by choosing the language that most effectively propels the story or essay or poem on its unique trajectory. This workshop invites you to be fierce on the page with a series of exercises designed to invigorate your range of language. Together, we will reach deep into our own perceptions, emotions and voice to craft vivid imagery that surprises us. We will awaken our instincts for making powerful word choices that provoke feeling, elevate sound and evoke meaning.

Saturday, January 25 // 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (my workshop happens at 9:15 a.m.)

Tabor Space

5441 SE Belmont

Portland, OR

Learn more and register

Finding Your Stride: How to Build Momentum in Your Writing Life

Workshop Series with Sage Cohen, Laura Stanfill and Christi Krug

Writers of every genre and level of experience struggle to find balance and keep moving toward their goals. Three literary leaders offer their most effective tools and strategies to help you rekindle faith in yourself and your work. You’ll get practical support and encouraging guidance to renew your sense of direction and give you unstoppable momentum.

Get 2014 off to a powerful start with Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic and The Productive Writer, Laura Stanfill, trailblazing publisher at Forest Avenue Press and editor of Brave on the Page, and Christi Krug, writing coach and author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough.

Tuesdays: February 4, 11, 18, 25

6:45 – 9:00 p.m.

Rouse Portland

2512 SE Gladstone St

Portland, OR 97202

Learn more and register

The gift you give yourself

Happy holidays to you! I hope this finds you warm and well, steeped in the company and traditions that delight you most.

I want to propose that we all give a very special gift to ourselves this holiday season. One that is hard to know how to identify and even harder to know how to give.

Permission.

Permission to be who we are. To write what we write. To live how we live. And to come even more authentically into balance with the constellation of desire and demand by which we live our lives.

Historically, I have chosen a word for the year. But the parting of ways with 2013 seemed to call for something a bit more substantial. As I stand at the threshold of 2014, I have chosen instead a mantra: I am allowed.

Even in the past week as I’ve started saying this to myself, I’ve surfaced stories I’ve lived by—about how being pleasing to others makes me a good person. About how keeping certain secrets keeps everyone safe. But I am a writer. And telling my truths will not be pleasing to everyone. And secrets are the opposite of safe. I am allowed to write my way through it all to whatever stories await me in that untravelled territory of self. And you are allowed, too.

Somehow, this new sense of permission has surfaced several childhood passions that once gave me ballast and great joy. As a little girl, I spent endless hours in my pink bedroom playing Donna Summer songs on my handheld tape recorder and making up endless dance routines embellished with leotards and baton twirls. I’ve given this practice up along the way as adult life has required greater and greater specialization and left me smaller and smaller margins for play.

I am calling this primary passion back to the stage of my life this year. I will choose a Song of the Year and make up a dance routine to go with it. Maybe I will invite friends to help me choreograph it. Or maybe they’ll dance their own “I am allowed” dances. We’ll do a dance performance. Maybe it will be in someone’s bedroom. Maybe it will be on a stage. All I know is: It will be. I will dance. I am allowed.

What will you give yourself permission to do in 2014, and what mantra will you live or dance or write by?

Bite the monkey

I live with a 10-year old German Shepherd mix named Hamachi. A large dog with a large mouth, Machi gets mouthy when she’s very excited. At walk time, for example, she will have a friendly nosh on anything in reach–my ankles, her leash, my butt–while yowling and leaping around.

Years ago, I learned to intercept this behavior by giving Machi a job to do when she is excited. Now she has a stuffed monkey that we keep by the door. When it’s walk time, I say in my firm voice, “Bite the monkey, Machi,” and that’s exactly what she does. All of her enthusiasm is channelled into biting and shaking that monkey. So I can get myself dressed for the outdoors without fear of friendly fire.

When I turned 44 this week, I asked myself what I know now that I didn’t know earlier in my life. The answer came immediately and simply: I know how to get out of my own way. In teaching Machi to bite the monkey, it appears I have learned to do the same. I think this might be the absolute most important life strategy. Because though there are certainly plenty of obstacles “out there” in the world, we can make things so much harder for ourselves by creating a whole range of obstacles “in here.”  Our behaviors and our attitudes are often our greatest limitations. The good news is that we are in charge of these. And as we learn to make different choices, our range of possibilities can dramatically expand.

Some of my “bite the monkey” practices over the years have included: Making detailed schedules that I may or may not follow — primarily because it gives me the illusion of control and order — and also because it helps me see that there actually IS enough time to make all of my goals happen. I make detailed to-do lists for similar reasons. When I find myself thinking self-defeating thoughts, I will often write them down so I can see clearly what stories have power over me. Often, I will make two columns–the first of which says “I once believed” and the second says “Now I believe.” Here I might rejigger, “I am not perfect enough to ever publish anything,” to say instead: “I will do my best, and I will let editors/publishers decide if my work is worth publishing.” I will also let myself bounce around on social media for a good 10-15 minutes when I first sit down at my desk, because it lets me spin out some of my nervous energy before settling down to real work.

For me, biting the monkey means finding a way to satisfy the rebellious or fearful or inexperienced/undeveloped part of me with some meaningful activity that lets me keep the rest of my energy focused on my forward momentum.

How do you bite the monkey? What strategies work to get you beyond your own interference—and a bit closer to your goals?

Sometimes you just have to leave a tiger behind

After my panel at Wordstock last Sunday, I had a conversation with a writer that touched on some themes we all struggle with in some way. This particular writer was feeling uncertain about how much time she had left on earth and therefore panicked about how much writing might go undone.

I have such compassion for this writer, and for all of us. We all stand with the enormity of the unwritten at our backs as we blaze our small glimmer of words onto the page in the small allotment of hours we are given–or we take–in these wildly unpredictable lives we live. I think of this tension as a kind of chiaroscuro–the unwritten as negative space giving shape to the words that come forward in the light of our writing. We need both the shadow and the light to find our way.

A few years ago when I decided to give up a business I had spent 15 years building and become an employee at a marketing agency, my agreement with myself was that my creative writing life would go on hold. All of it. The teaching, the blogging, the authoring of books, the poem writing. This felt in a way like telling my heart to stop beating. But I looked at it as a kind of hibernation–a wintering of a part of my life so that I’d have my resources available for another primary part. My priorities were very clear. I let go.

Which brings me to the Queen of Wands–the card I am almost always presented with when I pull tarot cards. We pull the Queen of Wands to teach us about transformation. Her story is one of shedding selves. With each wave of reclaimed self, the Queen of Wands changes hair color and companion animal. She goes from blond to brunette to redhead and is accompanied by panther then cougar then tiger. When she makes her final crossing of identity, her companion animal can not change with her. She must leave it behind to remind her of where she’s been, that when we embrace the new, we must let go of the old.

I distill the Queen of Wands’ story (and all of ours) to this one simple truth: Sometimes we have to leave a tiger behind. This is what the courageous writing life demands of us. We will not get it all done. We will not end up the person or writer we thought we were becoming. We will lose hair and friends along the way. We will accept what comes. We will release what is leaving. And we will write our small flicker of light into that darkness because it is what we are here to do.

I can feel that tiger pacing the water’s edge, the Queen’s hair blowing back in the wind.

This summer I quit my job, resumed my business, and committed to a new path of writing and teaching work that is taking me deeper than I have ever traveled.

I miss the tiger. I bless the tiger. I trust it to its destiny, and myself to mine. I write.

See you in October?

Hello! It’s been a while. I hope this finds you doing great! Over here, it seems I’ve been between skins forever. And at long last, I am emerging from the chrysalis. I have a few upcoming events that I wanted to let you know about. And a range of poems, essays and interviews to share. Soon I’ll be revealing details about several new learning experiences starting early in 2014. I can’t wait to start learning with you again. What are you most excited about in your writing life these days? I’d love to hear.

JOIN ME! 

Sunday, October 6, 2013 // 1:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Writing Guides: Help and Inspiration for Your Journey

Panel with the magnificent Christi Krug and Laura Stanfill

Wordstock 

Portland, OR

Sunday, October 13, 2013 // 5:00 p.m.

Rattle Reading Series

Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse

1010 Foothill Boulevard

La Canada, CA  91011

RECENT PUBLICATIONS!

“How to Increase Your Odds of Publication” and “Why Poets Need Platforms” in Poet’s Market 2014

“How to Pray” in Rattle #41 single parents issue, Fall 2013

“Sadness is Boring” in Virginia Quarterly Review, July 2013

“What’s Wrong With” live online with audio in Rattle (from Rattle #38 Winter 2012 issue)

“Dear Luna,” in Stirring: A Literary Collection, May 2013

“Make More Time for Your Writing”, in Writer’s Digest, April 2013

Two articles and the poem “Dear Fritz Guest House,” in Poet’s Market 2013

“Repurposing Writing for Platform and Profit” in Writer’s Market 2013

Oregonian News Network Interview with Cornelius Swart

Leap and the Net May or May Not Appear

I’m a leaper. For better or worse (often for worse), I trust my instincts completely, and when my gut say leap, there I am–groundless, in love with whatever it is I’ve given myself over to in that moment, and on my way to quickly and indelibly finding out if that thing loves me back.

There are times when I’ve felt ashamed of this. When I’ve made terrible choices that have hurt me, come to conclusions that perhaps I would not have made if walking or crawling instead of leaping. I’ve envied the slow deciders. The cautious and careful. The reasonable. Surely, they didn’t get up on stage to sing and screw it all up. Or take the wrong job. Or marry the wrong guy and end up alone with a two year old. Surely, they don’t follow their intuition all over creation just to land back home where they started. The slow movers must certainly arrive somewhere significant and well planned, mustn’t they?

In the last few months, I’ve taken a new position on my leaping tendencies. I’ve decided to accept that this is the way I am. It doesn’t really matter where the slow movers net out, because this is not my speed and it’s not the way I’m going to move through life, no matter how much I might appreciate its advantages.

For better or for worse, my passions are huge, my movements are often big, and I trust this way of being because it is my most natural way. My job, as a leaper, is to also accept that risks are, well, risky. The net may or may not appear when I am in full-throttle forward. I could beat myself up about the fact that I’m free-falling in unknown territory, or I can do what I can to cultivate my landing skills.

For me, the mandatory landing skills are: gratitude, forgiveness, reckoning, and recommitment. Freedom is my primary value, and courage is the transportation of my choosing. If I am willing to make mistakes, get hurt, look stupid, disappoint myself and others, I will be liberated to love and give and aspire and try and fail.

The older I get, the more I wonder if the net is even the right thing to be wishing for. When we are moving at the speed that is most true for us, we will live into the opportunities and learn the lessons that are most aligned with who we are. Every landing is the one that we needed, no matter how clumsy or difficult or ecstatic it might be.