I was listening to NPR the other day to an interview with Eve Ensler who in 1996 wrote the Vagina Monologues. The monologues led to the development of V-Day, a global non-profit movement that has raised millions for women’s anti-violence groups around the world.

Ensler was being interviewed on On Point, discussing her new book “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World“ about the years she’s spent traveling the world performing the Vagina Monologues, in the Congo, India, etc. She opened with a monologue on women’s intuitive/emotional power and made an impassioned plea against the rape and mutilation happening to girls and women all over the world.

When she’d finished, I could tell that host Tom Ashbrook felt she’d gone too far. I could tell he thought she was exagerating the pain women feel. I could tell he felt the world SHOULD be a safe place for girls, that in his experience it WAS a safe place, so why can’t we all just say it’s a safe place and be done with it. Later, Ashbrook through a caller’s question confronted Ensler about being too “negative” about what women have to go through.

Listening to the program had a profound affect on me. I’d personlly witnessed that kind of denial before.

I flashed back to when I moved back to the States in 1993 from London. I’d been a journalist abroad for years, editing for Tokyo newspapers, working as a travel writer for a year through Asia and finally as a journalist and editor in London. When I came back to the US, when I moved to Seattle, I noticed immediately that people wanted to put a politically correct spin on any difficult story I had to tell. These weren’t difficult stories about me, but tales about what I’d seen happen to women in the Orient, Asia and Europe. Everybody seemed to want to clean the stories up. If they listened at all, they’d retell the story after I’d finished, and revise them to make them more palatable. Soon I started to shut down. I became the smiling quiet girl in the corner of the table. I couldn’t compete with the white wall of smiling happiness that seemed to preclude any real dialogue around world issues.

I went on a date with a well-educated liberal man, who seemed on the surface to be fit and sane. When I discussed women’s plight in the 3rd world, he shut me down, said women had it better than men anywhere in the world, that he knew that from experience, his experience being having never lived anywhere but Seattle.

I stared at him across the table at the Greek restaurant in the Fremont district. What would it take to reach over and puncture the bubble he’d put himself into? Why was he, and so many people in America putting themselves into smiling happy bubbles?

There’s a short story I love, whose name and author escape me at the moment, where the whole town is smiling and happy, and you discover that they keep one “crazy person” in a locked room across town. The town inhabitants go to stare at the person. The moral being that if we don’t own the crazy, if we lock it away, the whole town goes deeply mad.

I know there’s a lot of bad news out there. I was a newsroom journalist – I know firsthand how toxic and horrific these stories can feel. But I also worry about what happens to us when we protect ourselves from the truth, from the suffering that people go through, from the 13-year old girl gang-raped in the Congo to the person sitting across from me on the bus in downtown Boston.

What danger is there in denying the ugly? When I refuse to see others’ pain, what sort of lopsided scary world am I creating? How can we possibly be full-fledged writers or artists? Won’t our work suffer? Won’t such denial turn our novels and memoir sickly sweet like a bad bottle of wine? Can’t we own the ugly and weave the texture of ALL of humanity’s experience into the pages?

I just know that I’m exhausted with sitting around smiling and nodding.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation, www.artofstorytellingonline.com

In July of this year, I underwent surgery for a total thyroidectomy. It wasn’t cancer, just a thyroid that was profoundly overactive, speeding up my metabolism so fast that I went down four sizes in less than three months. Luckily, I enjoy Romney-care in Massachusetts, and my health insurance covered everything. The surgery went seamlessly. I bounced back quickly, and was writing, coaching and painting again on a regular schedule within 10 days.

What doctors didn’t tell me was that three months after the surgery my hair would fall out. I did research and found that it happens to many people, lasts a few months, and about eight months to a year later, all the hair does grow back. What I couldn’t believe was how much fell out. Every day, handfuls of my hair ended up on my sheets, in corners of the room, clumped down the back of my jacket. I started collecting great wads of it in plastic bags to show to my doctors, to prove how bad it’d become. I had a massage recently, and the massage therapist spoke about all the hair left on the massage table afterwards. It’s still falling out. I needn’t have worried about collecting the hair; the bald patches on my head have become proof enough. It’s gotten so bad, I’ve had to purchase wide headbands and wear them every time I go out in public.

Conversely, I WAS warned about the dark circles and bags beneath the eyes brought on by thyroid problems, but my endocrinologist thought we’d caught it in time and I wouldn’t have much of a problem.

Wrong! While my hair fell out in shocking quantities, the deep dark bags under my eyes lengthened and deepened. It wasn’t stress. I have a certain look when I’m stressed and this was different, puffier, darker, uglier.

Week after week, I grew uglier and uglier. Every notion I had about myself and my looks came into question. I could no longer flip my long blonde hair a certain way when standing next to a handsome man and expect a response. I could barely even appear in public.

I made a deep commitment to owning the ugly, decided I would look weird, odd, even like a post-chemo patient and not worry about it. I still wear the headbands, and I now have a thick black rimmed pair of glasses, but I do not bow my head down. I walk with my head held high, in long passionate strides. I’m excited to be alive.

It has been transformational owning the ugly. Never have I felt so good. I decided I could panic or I could accept it all with grace. Every night as I went to sleep, I said to myself: My spirit is bigger than my hair falling out. I am bigger than this hair. I am a big soul and I am beautiful. I did meditations where I surrounded my head with love and light. After all this meditation, my sister called to say she’d found some headbands for me and she was beading them with glorious scrumptuous beads. She sent me a picture via email, and the headbands were beautiful. How had owning the ugly transformed into such beauty?

Ever since I’ve owned the ugly, I’ve had more dimensional conversations with friends and strangers than I’ve had in years. Friends keep telling me how good I am. Not necessarily how good I look, but how good I AM. I feel great. I don’t have to care what anybody thinks about me. That I did care so much before owning the ugly has been a profound insight.

What does this have to do with writing? My writing and my visual art seems to be exploding with this owning the ugly. It’s all about the not caring what other people think. Who are these other people anyway? Just figments of my imagination. Somehow, without even being conscious of it, I was writing my novel and doing my paintings with too much care about what others would think of me. Now that I’m letting that go, it’s as if latent talents are tripping over each other to have a say. Somehow owning the ugly has paradoxically profoundly shifted my self esteem.

Can you own the ugly? Can you think of a way that you’re holding yourself back so that you’re more attractive to the opposite sex (or the same sex depending on your preference)? I promise you, if you let it all go, you’ll be more “attractive” than you could ever imagine, and your work will flourish.

I’m a writing coach. Contact me for a free initial consultation. www.artofstorytellingonline.com.

Evolving ourselves, owning our authentic voice, our authentic selves, may be the most important aspect of becoming a great writer. It may be more important than studying plot, characterization, setting or theme. It may be more crucial than a master’s degree, more relevant than any workshop or online course you can take.

Five years ago, Lisa Sharpe Jones (www.artoflivinghappy.com), stopped our coaching relationship. For many months, we’d been working together on her memoir about her husband’s death from cancer and her subsequent spiritual transformation. In the years since the death, she’d remarried. She and her new husband had just found the house of their dreams. She stopped coaching, stopped working on her memoir because she said she felt that a new life had begun, and she needed to move away from this old life that was so full of pain.

It’s not unusual for clients to want to stop a project in the middle, so I wasn’t too worried. I knew Lisa would get back to the book when she was ready, whether or not she worked with me.

Last month, Lisa contacted me again, ready to revisit the book that she hadn’t worked on for five full years. She was excited, and dove in with passion. We discussed the first chapter from so many years ago and decided what needed to be done. Lisa took on the revision and several days later emailed me the updates.

I sat at my laptop awed and amazed at how far her writing had come. What I read was raw, real, powerful and professional. What I read was the work of a professional writer. What had happened to her writing in those five years?

I found out Lisa hadn’t taken courses on writing. She hadn’t even really practiced writing. What had happened was she spent the time evolving spiritually. Besides practicing disciplines like yoga, she did regular personal meditations and took courses in spiritual development. She did whatever she could to connect with herself and with her higher self.

I think the most important thing that Lisa did was accept herself. This seemed to happen on many levels, and showed itself most powerfully in the fact that Lisa accepted her gift as a psychic channeler. She’d long ago quit her corporate job at a hedge fund to follow this path. Still, at first, even when I knew her five years ago, she was shy, shakey about this new role. How could she go from corporate to metaphysical and be taken seriously? Could she take herself seriously? It can be a difficult transition. I left journalism to follow my path as an artist/writer, so I can fully understand. In the past five years, she’d come to fully own her power, and I think to fully open herself to a universal power — a process that is at once humbling and at the same time empowering. She now openly called herself a channeler and has started making money doing this powerful work.

Today, Lisa channels for large groups, and she’s so accepting of who she truly is, that recently she discovered it was fine for her to go back to the hedge fund part-time. It no longer defined her.

As I spoke to Lisa in our next session about the power of her writing, I thought about my visual art. I have often said that my art gets better as I deepen myself. I don’t particularly need art courses. I thought about art school, but kept getting the message I didn’t need it. I just needed to own the power of my soul. That’s easier said than done, and I’m sure Lisa will attest to this, it’s a lifetime process.

If you want to progress as a writer, start evolving yourself spiritually, align to your highest power. Start now. Don’t wait. It can be a long process. If you do this and the connection feels politically correct, you’re doing it wrong. True alignment translates as quirky, passionate, sexy, wild and sometimes even a bit crazy. Authentic voice is the real you you’re no longer hiding. You’ll know you’ve hit the vein of gold when you look at your writing and your art and you know this is the you that you knew you always could be.

I cannot stress enough how powerfully this connection translates to the page, how it both deepens and ratchets up your short stories, screenplays, novels or memoirs, how it turns you from an amateur to a true professional.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation. www.artofstorytellingonline.com, artofstorytelling@gmail.com.

I stood at the second story window, looking out, waiting for him. It was so cold. There was no way to heat yourself this late at night. The house was made of wood and rice paper, with gaps between the slats in the walls. The freezing air hit me through the cracks. I pulled the yukata tight over my breasts. I was expected to wait. I didn’t have a choice but to wait.

All the other girls in the house were asleep. My visitor was the only one who came this late. I wore a yukata, a robe. They thought the yukata was sexy. In the corner, a plain screen. Behind the screen a bowl filled with water, for washing up. Afterwards. We were not of the highest house. Our possessions were plain. But it was a good house. We were not abused. We were well taken care of.

My mother put me here when I was 13. I had a father who adored me, and I adored him, but he died suddenly. She needed the money. My brother had to have schooling. I told myself that I would not have met Etsuko if she hadn’t put me here. I relieve myself with that thought.

If he would just come, the business would be over and I could climb into my futon and warm up. I could rest, just have some rest.

Finally, I saw him turn the corner. All the buildings were made of wood and rice paper, and all were quiet at this hour. The roads were muddy just a week ago, but the cold had hardened them and they were now easy to walk on. He came briskly toward the building. I was ready and didn’t need to do any preparation. I was expected to be ready.

I heard him at the door, heard him speak to the Mama-san, heard him climb the ladder. He opened the door to my room. He gruffly said a greeting and I, in high pitched voice, responded. “Good evening. How are you?” “I am well, and you?” He sat on the tatami. He wore a male kimono. I helped him off with his footwear. It was always this way.

He was on top of me, his weight like a resignation. I tried not to whine. This was my profession, but it still made me fuss. They did not know me, just saw the young girl with long black hair, wanted only the flesh not the soul. I mixed the whines in with fake moans, but still I could hear my discontent; I worried he could hear it, too. Nothing, though, seemed to stop them from coming back.

Afterwards, I went behind the screen. I took a towel, dipped it in the icy water, washed between my legs. The man dressed himself.

A sudden disturbance downstairs. An angry voice. Fear shot up my spine. I ran from around the screen. The man was crouched and looking at the door. The door burst open. A young man screamed, wielded a sword. Behind him and below, the other women were screaming. He was a new customer. I had been with him only twice. He was handsome, young, headstrong. Sometimes this happened. They thought they were in love with me. They knew only the flesh, and fooled themselves that it was love.

My yukata hung open. He looked from me to the man. It was too late. He scanned my body with rage, lunged forward, grabbed my hair and pushed me to my knees. He swung back his arm, and with one move, arched the sword expertly across my throat. I fell to the floor, blood flowing, arm stretched in useless pleading.

I left the body. I floated above the body. I was dead. I could think only of a few of the other girls in the house. Etsuko especially. My friend. She knew me for who I was and loved me. I loved her, too. The Mama-san ran into the room, wailed over my bleeding flesh. All I saw was the love. I knew Etsuko would have a terrible time with my death and asked the spirits to help her, to pour love into her soul. Then, I was gone.

I’ve recently discovered past-life regression. What a joy for a fiction writer to enter the soul of people from the past, to enter our other lives. I can hypnotise myself and become characters from different eras of history. I can feel the feelings, touch the surroundings, smell places I’d never be able to visit. It’s transforming my fiction and transforming my life. Here’s more.

It was medieval Eruope, the Dark Ages. I walked the narrow dirt roads, bent over, wearing black. So much anger and fighting on the streets. It scared me. I could not understand how the world had gotten so violent. I walked along the dirt roads, out of the city toward my small cottage. I tried to keep to myself.

My cottage was ramshackle, poor. Inside, herbs hung everywhere. I had a strong connection to the plants. People came to me for healings.

I had a profoud understanding of why people were sick. I understood it emotionally. It was the emotions that made them sick. But the people liked to see me administer polstices, so I did this, to reassure them, calm them..

Someone showed up with a baby, six months old. The girl had a stomach blockage and was not eating. I knew the mother was kicked in the stomach when she was pregnant. She was kicked because she couldn’t stomach how she got pregnant. I knew the child had taken this on and it resulted in a stomach blockage. I was able to unblock her.

I treated a lot of people, successfully. But at some point, someone I treated died. Men came to my cabin with torches. It was night. I opened the door and stood in the doorway. I was old and tired and used the doorframe like a crutch.

“You have killed my son,” a man said, his face lost in the darkness.

“And if your son had not visited me and had died anyway, who would have killed him then?” I asked.

I looked at the group of men. I knew the head of the group. I helped to heal his daughter. I could see he felt horrible that had to come to me like this. I recognized another man. He too was ashamed. I helped to heal his wife.

“I have no choice,” the leader of the group said. “The man has filed a complaint. We have to take you.”

We walked as a group deep into the dark woods.

I stayed in the jail a long time. By the time they had the trial, I was filthy, my hair was a mess, my clothes disasterous. This was what the people in the courtroom saw. A witch. It confirmed all of their judgments.

The Prosecuter said, pointing at me, his voice high and whiny: “She is against the church and against Jesus.”

I sat there perplexed. It was just not true. He kept hammering that I was against Jesus. All I could think was that Jesus was a healer too. I am just like Jesus. I held onto the bench because I feared I would pass out.

It was the Defense’s turn. The man was fat, bent over, his facial hair scraggly. “No,” he said. “The prosecution is wrong. She’s just a simple healer.” He pointed around the room. “Many people have been healed by her. Many of those sitting hear have known her healing.” People duck and look down, trying to avoid his finger.

The verdict was quick and sharp. They decided I was to be killed. They set a date. When the day came, they chopped my head off.

If you’re interested in past life regression, try reading Brian Weiss’ many books, from Many Lives to Many Masters to Messages of the Masters. I cannot stress enough how much it has enlivened and deepened my novels.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation, www.artofstorytellingonline.com, artofstorytelling@gmail.com

I had a dream last night. A new writer stood on a cliff in a vast landscape, just at the edge of a crevasse. What a vista she had standing there, the land full of wild rock formations, dramatic cloud shadows. The cliff she stood on faced another land mass just mere feet away. I understood finally that she was too afraid to jump. It was an easy leap for any relatively fit adult, but fear trembled her, locked her knees. In the dream, I was told that this is the dilemma for the new writer, young and old. They have epic, dimensional ideas for a book, they may have even penned some of their poetic soul into an existing novel or memoir or short story, but then they somehow became stuck. All they need to do is make the leap over that crevasse, but they just can’t.

What I do as a coach is help writers over this crevasse. This is not just an issue of the technicalities of writing, but an emotional and sometimes spiritual issue. What is this fear that’s stopping you from leaping?

I’m introducing a Take-the-Leap Package to make the coaching process more viable for many people. Instead of having to sign up for ongoing coaching, you can buy this one-time package to jump-start your writing and help you fly over the crevasse and continue on your path as a writer.

The Take-the-Leap Package is a one month consultation. For $495, I will read your work, provide written feedback and speak to you on the telephone (or Skype) to anywhere in the world.

Here’s what you’ll get:
• Before you sign up, we will have a one-hour free phone call where we discuss your writing and how I work. This free consultation will help you see if I’m the right fit for you.
• When you sign, I’ll read your writing and you’ll receive professional writing feedback on all aspects of your fiction, memoir and nonfiction writing: organizing chapters; writing vivid description; building characters; exploring plot; deepening setting; and understanding theme.
• If you do not have writing to show me, but you have a deep, almost primal, desire to write, we’ll focus our sessions on providing you with the tools to help you write.
• Meanwhile, I provide other kinds of support – emotional, intellectual, spiritual – on what might be hindering your progress. I have vast experience helping many artists understand their blocks and break through them.
• You’ll also get practical advice on where to go with your writing. What week-to-week discipline can you engage to finish your book? What is a weak area that you might study further through workshops or how-to-write books? What how-to-write books would best serve you? What emotional or spiritual area of your creative development might you focus on?

I’m passionate about helping people open up and progress rapidly in their creative process. You won’t be disappointed on how much you get out of this month-long package. Read the testimonials on my website to see what others have to say. It all starts with a free consultation, so please do not hesitate to contact me. Feel the fear, as they say, and do it anyway.

I also bring deep personal experience to coaching. While growing up on a subsistence farm with parents who only had a 3rd grade education, I became passionate about people having the right to tell their truths. It seemed to me that poor uneducated people weren’t allowed the power that the rich and educated had to express themselves. The voices of the poor seemed to be dismissed. After years of training at the best journalism school in the country, I worked as a journalist all over the world, helping the voiceless to be heard. I write novels now, and as a coach, I am profoundly committed to helping anyone who wants to express their truth to have the tools to do so. We can ALL feel the poverty of soul expression; I have learned that expressing ourselves is not just an issue of financial status. So far, one client has had her novel published, with many more on the way. My first novel Earth, about growing up in Missouri, is currently being sent out to publishers.

What story do you have to tell? Let me help you develop the tools you need to tell it, to express your passion, your poetry, to the world.

Contact
Caroline Allen
Writing Coach/Creative Consultant
www.artofstorytellingonline.com
www.artofstorytelling.wordpress.com
artofstorytelling@gmail.com
+1 978.228.6617

I had a good friend in London in the early 1990s, Celia Goodyear, who worked with children with severe cerebral palsy. Most of the kids had no control of their bodies whatsoever and could only move their eyes. A common issue with such profoundly handicapped kids is they don’t detach from their mothers. Because the mother has to do everything for him, the child doesn’t recognize that he’s separate from her. The child can’t develop, and the mother becomes utterly exhausted.

Celia came up with an idea. She hired a musician, a pianist, to sit in the therapy room and play an upright piano. Celia sat as the child lay flat on the floor. The mother was not in the room. While the pianist played, Celia intuited how the child wanted to move to the music. She would sway the child’s arm, move his leg, dance his body. Some of the moves were small, some sweeping. After weeks of such dancing therapy, she and the mother started to notice that the child seemed more aware. It seemed that it had started to dawn on the child that he was a separate individual, that he was a person, and his mother was a person, that they were two and not one.

The consequences were profound for the child. He was happier, more content, less frantic, cried less. Meanwhile, an interesting side effect happened to the mother. So used to having the child so dependent upon her, looking to her so profoundly, that this new separation was hard for her. She wanted to go back to the old way. Celia and I joked that she needed to dance the mothers around the therapy room, too!

I did an article on Celia and her work for a glossy London magazine. This was before the magazine printed the articles on the internet, so I cannot link it here, though I so wish I could.

Why do I tell this story as a writer?

I sometimes find that my deepest creativity is severely handicapped, and I must listen closely with my intuition to how the creative soul wants to move, and I have to slowly, painstakingly jiggle my fingers, rotate my wrist, swing my elbow, arch my back…I find I have to learn how to dance myself across the room.

I sometimes find that I am so embedded in what society expects of me, generations of expectations that go back beyond my lifetime, that this soul desire to move is latent and hidden, and when it starts to rise up, it doesn’t know how or where or when to move. So, I say softly to the arm of my poetry, to the foot of my plot, which way would the soul like to dance? And I must move, despite the apathy, the resistance, the years of training to be a good, caretaking little woman. Despite the terror embedded in me that artists are poor and will become homeless, despite my bag lady fear, I have to, I WANT to, dance the soul. I must dance to separate myself from the mainstream, to see myself as an individual, to individuate. To be happy, content, less cranky. To cry less.

I sometimes find that I use Celia’s technique as a coach. I can feel the way a client’s soul wants to move, and I suggest a movement, a step. With each movement, my hope is the eyes grow ever more clear. With each step, I hope the client learns: Oh this is what I was meant to be!

And then as a side effect, clients have to deal with other people’s reaction to their newfound soulful freedom. Friends worry we’ll abandon them. Lovers stress that we’re outgrowing them. Keep dancing the soul! Sooner or later, friends and family will see, and they’ll notice their own arm moving, their own hips sashaying. They’ll look in the mirror and see their own eyes clearing.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation, www.artofstorytellingonline.com

I have an art studio at the base of the apartment building where I live. It has windows to the street. A local artist called, said she saw my art in the windows, and was curating a show for outsider artists. Could she come into my studio and see what I had, to see what might work for the show?

I thought I was going to puke! I’ve written a lot about art and writing and self esteem, and I can tell you when it comes to my visual art I have a vortex, a black hole, where my self esteem should be. All afternoon, every possible scenario flew through my head of how she was going to come into my studio, laugh, spit, kick my paintings, guffaw at my lack of talent, degrade me. I imagined her screaming at me about how bad my art was.

Seriously! I was holding my stomach and rocking back and forth like a victim of trauma (which I guess I am).

Dear Lord! If this is what happens to me when someone has a positive interest in my art, how am I ever going to take art critics?

At any rate, at the time of the appointment, she showed up, and she loved my art. She chose so many pieces for the show that I will have very little left to put in my own window. She reviewed some pieces in a way that helped me fathom what I was doing as an artist. She loved the despair of some of the pieces and said it echoed the despair of America. I wanted to tell her it echoed the despair of the world. I’ve traveled a lot and I carry the despair in my soul.

I’d displayed all my work in an array for her around the studio. She chose from this group, then went around the studio, picking up pieces hidden behind tables, half peaking from beneath the loveseat. She particularly liked the picture above, Screaming Me, which she found in a pile of cardboard. It was a goofy thing I did with my friend, artist Leah Kohlenberg (www.leahkolenberg.com). She called me from Zagreb last year, and said she was in a foul mood. So was I. I said: “Let’s both paint our foulness at the same time. Go!”

Screaming Me was the result.The painting is more “me” than a lot of the more professional looking pieces. When the curator chose it, it blew me away. It reminded me of what I’m always preaching, that if we find our authentic voice, it’ll resonate far and wide.

What’s the lesson here? Feel the fear and do it anyway? Maybe it’s find your authentic voice, write and paint and draw and dance with real passion, and that voice will echo and resonate far and wide. Just be you! It’s harder than it seems — to that I can attest!

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation, www.artofstorytellingonline.com.

Seattle healer Ellen Newhouse (www.ellennewhouse.com) and I were working on a chapter of her memoir called Loner. She was describing how she liked to church hop when she was just a young girl. She was Jewish and adored Temple, but also went with friends to Catholic Mass, even took a catechism class.

She was writing about attending a Baptist Church, and wrote that the women at the service were “beautiful”.

As a writing coach, a former journalist, and now a novelist, I have an aversion to descriptive words like “beautiful”. Physical description is always better than using an adjective like beautiful.

“But, Carrie, they were beautiful!” Ellen cried. When I work with clients, I’m passionate about them finding their own voice, and Ellen knew if she liked something she could argue me out of my position. Still, I can’t stand the word “beatiful” and I argued back.

“What was beautiful about them?”

They were just…just…beautiful!” Ellen cried.

I said: “Ok, OK, you can use the word beautiful if you also tell me what made them beautiful.”

“They were fecund. Rotund.”

“Bingo!” I cried.

“Oh. Oh. Fecund. Rotund. Oh yeah. I don’t need to use the word beautiful at all.”

“Exactly.”

This is what voice is all about. I would’ve described their perfumed smell, their cinched waists, and the mascara on their eyelashes. Ellen described their luxurious flesh. The difference in the choice of description is one thing that defines the difference in our artistic “voice”.

In professional writing, remember, beautiful is never beautiful.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation, www.artofstorytellingonline.com.

I’ve been working for the past two days in my studio on the above painting. I still have a lot to learn about visual art. Where you place the shadows can make or break a painting. You can have a moody powerful piece or a face that looks like it’s caving in.

Particularly on this painting, I found the placement and gradation of shadows, too dark here or too light there, had a profound affect on the success of the work.

As I was in my studio today, I thought about shadows, specifically writing and shadows. I sometimes work with writing clients who want their characters to be “nice”. I cannot tell you what a buzz kill “nice” characters are.

We all have shadows. A character without shadows is not a character at all. In fact, I sometimes suggest clients START with the character’s shadow (and this is what I do with painting, start with the shadows) and from that shadow see what develops in the light.

Here’s an example: Your character has a violent streak. Let’s say, she was around a lot of animal butchering when she was a child, and it embedded in her psyche. She’s not cruel to animals, but every once in a while she loses her temper and breaks things. How would that shadow translate into light? What if the character loves flowers, delicate and gentle and the opposite of violence. Or what if another character happens to find out that your protagonist givs a hefty chunk of her paycheck to an animal shelter? Or what if the character saves broken animals, and when a new boyfriend visits her apartment, he finds cages of animals with broken wings and frail legs. I like this last one the best because it’s a direct reflection of her early childhood brutality where first the shadow embedded itself.

This is how you’ll know your character is too nice: in sections on dialogue she will have nothing to say. You can use the “nice” as the shadow too. Perhaps your character is too nice, and it drives the other characters crazy. What if her boyfriend breaks up with her because she refuses to be anything but “nice”?

I can tell you from all my years as a writing coach that the killer to any novel is a cardboard cut-out nice character. Have you developed the shadows of all of your characters? If you’re not writing a dark novel, you don’t have to have characters always act out of their shadow, but let the darkness rear its ugly head upon occassion. Find the light in the character as a direct relation to this shadow — you’ll find your character gains dimension and texture and has a lot more to say.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation. www.artofstorytellingonline.com

I’ve been working with Julie for four years. She’s writing a fascinating novel, where half of the novel is set in Medieval Wales and the other half in modern times. The protagonist has lived both lifetimes. Read more about Julie, as well as an excerpt here. http://www.artofstorytellingonline.com/#!__site/case-studies

Because Julie has based some of the events in the novel on her own life, as many first time novelists do, she has had trouble capturing her protagonist in the modern day story line. After several chapters, I still felt Julie was pulling the punches with the protagonist. The story had shifted enough that the character was sort of like Julie, but not like Julie fundamentally.

She’d already done a characterization sheet years before, but it wasn’t really resonating. So, in one of the chapters, Julie was writing backstory about the protagonist as a teenager taking care of an invalid mother. I had Julie stop, open a new document and spend a few days and even weeks developing this backstory. Still, even when we did this, I couldn’t quite grasp the protagonist. I couldn’t really “feel” her. I didn’t care enough about her. I know a protagonist is well-developed when I can feel the character standing beside me in the room.

Finally, in a recent session, Julie said: “Oh it’s just like being an actress.” She’d been involved in the theatre when she was younger. “It’s like method acting. You enter the character and become them.”

Bingo! That was exactly it. The next rewrite of the backstory after this turned out to be wonderful, visceral, real, compelling, emotional, complex! I could feel the protagonist standing beside me as I read. Julie had done it!

It’s a tough market for new novels. One hope a new novelist has is an exceptionally compelling protagonist. Can you enter the psyche, embed in the flesh, feel the soul of your main character? It may in the end be the difference that gets your novel noticed and published.

I’m a writing coach and offer a free initial consultation. www.artofstorytellingonline.com