Monday: Arrive at 9am. The entire day is given
over to meeting writers and offering advice. The first person to arrive is an
American gentlemen in
In the previous
literature brochure I gave my email
address and encouraged anyone who wanted advice to drop me a line. The next two days are packed with these
meetings. The discussions are stimulating and vibrant. You can tell a lot by a
person by one question – why do you write?
Why are
people here though? Most of the time it’s all about blocks. Writers write alone
so they are vulnerable to all the viruses that aloneness brings, whether that
is delusions of grandeur or a general belief in unworthyness. Both of these
states are aggressors to productivity and creativity. My advice is instinctive
and I expect another writer to have a totally different sense of advice. But a central tenant of mine concerning a
writers writing begins I can
not help you in your writing. Your writing is your writing and only you can
know.
It is the
same with a workshop. My job is to give permission to the attendees to
become conduits for their creativity. In
my belief we learn not to be creative in our everyday lives – it is learned behaviour.
We learn to cling to systems. All I do in a workshop is help open the
floodgates. I may ask questions of the
attendees work but at the end of the day
the decision to write in a particular way or voice is the writers. And there before my eyes I see the attendee
grasp the nature of their creative self. Think this is airy fairy and light?
No. Nothing gives results like hard work. It’s been a good day.
If it is
results that you are looking for, there are hardly any of my workshops that
don’t achieve high end results. But they are not my concern, the process is
everything. So how can I get results without telling people what to write or
how to write. You just have to be there
or read the work that comes out.