Writing to Heal

Writing as catharsis -- as well as to uncover one's innate joyful Self -- is nothing new. John Lee and I talked about this extensively in Writing from the Body. Getting to the "grammar of the gut" and saying what needs to be said isn't as easy as it sounds, so we served up our favorite insights, experiences, and writing exercises for healing the fear-stricken Inner Writer and silencing the Inner Critic.

What is new (to me) is the healing phenomenon called expressive writing, now backed up by real live research. It's the result of some smarties with a lot of chutzpah sticking their scientific necks out. While others peer into microscopes hoping to discover the final cure, these folks care enough about those in treatment Right Now to study how writing about your life can positively affect a cancer patient's outlook and boost the healing process.

The patients themselves -- jotting poetry and memoir in their journals through chemo-sickness and fistfuls of hair -- make these ballsy scientists look feeble. I don't know what it is that makes you pick up a pen and paper, or type or text about the crappiness that is cancer treatment, but these people do it. They gather up the precious energy they have, and they do it. I admire them.
As a book editor, I've heard enough whining about how hard it is to write (pause to lay hand upon brow) to last my lifetime, however long or short it may be. And I can tell you: Writing is a lot about showing up when you don't feel like it.

So to you who are feeling like hell and writing about the dark places and the light places, I bow deeply. To you who keep showing up in your communities, who just get out there damnit and walk around and pet dogs and speak to children, I bow. Because by showing yourselves to us in sickness as in health, you teach us. We learn what it is to be human, to be in need, to be brave enough to live as you are -- in all seasons.

Somewhere right now there are men and women sitting in a writing circle for cancer patients. One of their members is reading a poem as the others listen intently, nodding their heads. Living in a body that seems hell-bent on erasing itself, where do you find the energy and willingness to write, much less to share those writings?

Now we know that writing heals. Even those of us who demand proof now concede that writing "from the body" brings us into communication with every part of ourselves. We touch levels of pain-fear-confusion-shadow that lead us, counterintuitively, into the unbearably light and simple true nature of ourselves.

So thank you, scientists for proving that writing heals. Thank you, patients willing to reveal your most personal writings for the sake of others who may later suffer as you've suffered. Just knowing you're out there, just knowing how tough you have to be to get so soft and vulnerable in the midst of cancer's craziness, gives me more than hope. It gives me courage.


Ceci Miller is founder and president of CeciBooks.com, an editorial and publishing consultancy that empowers authors to write, publish, and market irresistible books that uplift and inspire. A long-ago graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ceci has written, co-authored, and edited books with bestselling authors and experts since 1988. See book credits.

Does Your Book Have That ZING?

People are always asking me what makes a paper sandwich deliciously original. If you're going to self-publish, in particular (I prefer "indie publish") you've gotta pack ZING into every layer of your book. Cuz it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that.

If your book is now in the hands of a major publisher, well, yikes. Pray hard. The New Yorker expressed the current publisher attitude toward authors extremely succinctly in a cartoon that ran last December (the winter of our discontent?) Actually this attitude first emerged sometime in the mid 90s, but it's only now that it's getting decent airplay. The cartoon would be a lot funnier if I hadn't seen the scenario it describes befall numerous worthy books in the last ten or so years. Egad, and alas. It's what made me, an author published more than once by kind editors at once-decent-but-now-usurious publishing houses, turn away in disgust. It also inspired me to become an uncompromising champion of indie publishers.

But I had a point, and it has to do with Quality and Honor as practiced by the best of writers.

First, you've gotta love what you’re saying. This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people set out to write a book merely because they think it'll sell. This is a terrible reason to write anything. Don't do it.

Second, honor the people who said it first. Then offer the reader a message they haven’t seen before -- or at least one they haven’t seen recently.

Yes We Love It, but No, It’s Not New!
Every book is not Homer’s Odyssey. We can all be grateful for that, given our shrinking free time. But however humble the work may be, it pays to acknowledge the sources that nudged forth your own genius. Writing about bagels? Remember to mention the authors of Bagels of the Cretaceous and The Bittersweet Bagel Diaries. However, as my friend Amanda Lorenzo Famous Author says, it’s all a matter of proportion.

Of course, feel free not to credit helpful but brief-ish pamphlets such as Test Your Child’s Bagel Quotient, unless you quote it in full in your own brief-ish pamphlet!

Acknowledge the Source!
All authors I’ve read have in some way enlarged my wealth of knowledge; however, listing each deserving one would make one’s bibliography as thick as a deep-dish lasagna. And it’s honor we’re talking about here, not weight. Somewhere among your textual musings, there should be evidence that you, as author, are aware that others have trod parts of this path before you. Your mention may be a still, small voice at the end of your Introduction, or a hyperbolic passage acknowledging your debt to the author of Whither Goes My Bagel?
Whether it’s a teeny, tiny tenderness or a big bold bang, thanking our predecessors and literary influences reminds us, at the very least, that we are not alone.

Ceci Miller is founder and president of CeciBooks.com, an editorial and publishing consultancy that empowers authors to write, publish, and market irresistible books that uplift and inspire. A long-ago graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ceci has written, co-authored, and edited books with bestselling authors and experts since 1988. See book credits.

Flying by the Seat of Your Pencil

It’s amazing how amply jazzed you can get if you allow yourself to remember some especially resonant event and then let it expand onto the page. This process elicits written wonders you could never have thought up. Seriously. I call it “flying by the seat of your pencil.” The key is being willing to jump off the Cliff of Your Own Imagination, with nothing whatever but your pencil beneath you á la Harry Potter on his Nimbus 2000, and go whisking through the skies of your psyche, dodging dragons while in hot pursuit of whatever shiny things (images, characters, or finding out what happens next) make you want to keep flying.

You write as if streaking through the sky––not in that 70s way, but rather keeping your clothes on––toward an uncertain destination. Only once you have reached it will you know, where you are headed. You will have landed, of course, in the dangerous heart of the imagination. Its pulse steady, reassuring, almost obvious. And yet now and then it wanders, slightly offbeat, and you remember its unpredictability. Later you will revise and craft a bit so that the piece holds its own, if not calmly or with readily perceptible order, as a whole.

For now, while you fly by the seat of your pencil, your only desire is to report whatever is whizzing through the mind's intrepid weather: a mocking branch, the crackle of leaves suggesting footfall, the color and movement of a phantom in the mist about to reveal itself. Keep flying, and you’ll meet it face to face! This, dear friends, is writing. And the culmination of many such journeys, interwoven in a way that deeply satisfies, sometimes earns the name of Book.

A Writing Exercise
To do this you must be willing to engage in the physical act of writing – with a pencil, on a piece of paper. Antiquarian, I know, but bear with me. Start by describing anything at all: a hairpin, a soggy sock plastered to the sidewalk, or (if your taste runs to the cheery) a bowl of vivid berries with their dainty green leaves still attached. Keep writing until the cherries or the hairpin or the sock are not themselves, but have begun morphing into some wildly tenuous Other.

At this point you are now Flying By the Seat of Your Pencil! Keep flying. If the soggy sock has acquired a foot, let it run with abandon– keep laying down those rows and rows of graphite. Do not allow the sock to stop running -- kersplatch! kasquish! kasplotch! -- until it has arrived somewhere entirely astonishing. Alternatively, if the cherries in your bowl have begun emitting the sounds of bees, permit the insects to explode into harmonics, or swarm into kaleidoscopic formations. Give them all names like "Hootch" and "Tigerbomb". But wherever the ride takes you, Keep Your Seat Firmly Attached to Your Pencil. It’s your anchor. The only rule is: Everything onto the page! Thundercats are go! . . . Let each image/sound/event unfold, and write it down.

Above all, don't think.

But how will I know when to stop?? you ask (beads of sweat forming on your upper lip).
Just stop when you’re done.


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Ceci Miller is an author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See books here.

Writing and Revising . . . or When Is a Do-Over Overdone?

Every writer must revise. It's an icky fact of life. It's where perspiration meets inspiration. It's what separates the tough guys from the talkers and posers. I'm a tough guy when I fearlessly excise redundancies from my prose. Not always a breeze. But as one of my friends' dads used to say, "Nothing hard is ever easy." This is especially true of writing. Writing is hard. Revision is hard. An exquisite piece of writing, like a wooden sailboat, not only means the ability to sail clear and true to an intended destination, it's also a testament to the love of the craft.

Good writing isn't accomplished in a single Saturday. It requires patience and forbearance, those bastions of character that are becoming rare as a pink pigeon these days. It means working doggedly to perfect a passage until you wish someone else had written it, so it would be their problem to solve! And it means letting go of the cute and clever, in service of the fluent and clear. Writing well means knowing how much is too much.


"Exaggerate nothing."

-- Michael Larsen, How to Write a Book Proposal


The Wisdom of Wishing for Wigwams . . .
and Other Perils Perpetrated at the Tip of a Pen
How fair and wondrous our words appear, when first they do pour out upon the page! Only two weeks later, however, the purple passages are evident as a roundly hammered thumb. Just the other day a writer friend was reading a first draft of mine (True friends share cold drafts, both the written kind and the fireside kind." And this draft was barely chilled; the ink still shone in the light, so eager was I that it be Seen. Perusing, my friend scratched his chin. "I just want to know one thing," he began. "When you described this character as a 'fickle fanatic,' did you really mean it?" Well no, I was just being clever, I admitted, pulling out my red pento mark the errant phrase.

A little later my friend paused again. "And did you really intend to say that tears 'pooled in her eyes like daunting dreams? How can dreams be daunting? And do they 'pool,' exactly? Pools are usually pretty big, too, you know. At least in Texas." I sighed. Such is the life of a writer, and of a writer's friend. One is always asking and answering such questions. Truth and fiction once again were clashing in the tireless interplay that makes writers wonder how a sentence -- any sentence at all -- manages to succeed in making literary sense.

When is a word or phrase overdone? When (after lying dormant for two weeks) it no longer sounds true and real. When it begs the question. When it sits like a limp in the middle of the sentence and says so little that if you removed it no one would notice. I took out the abovementioned passages, those my friend objected to, as well as one particularly juicy one in which I described a high school teacher as having "parted the seas of my young mind." It was, in fact, too much. I could see that. Even with a part running down the middle of my mind.

Try this right now.
My first creative writing teacher used to say, when she saw each new poem I handed over, "Ooohh, I love this. This is great." Or sometimes, "Aww. This is so sensitive and beautiful." Praise has its place, and I appreciate her to this day for saying nice things about my early efforts which were, at best innocently immature and at worst, exceedingly self-indulgent. But try this: Put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) for, say, two minutes, without stopping, and especially without hoping someone else will love it later. Have fun! Let those words tumble out and then . . .
Turn it into a portrait of someone. Removing all adjectives, tell a story about this person. Go on, it'll be great. Why pull out all the adjectives? Because they tend to stack up, like dishes in a Sunday sink. If you remove the adjectives before you begin to revise, you won't have to contend with sentences like, "Her arms were narrow, long, and white." If you toss out all adjectives, you'll also be forced to eradicate the verb "to be." And this (she said, breaking her own rule to make a point) is a very good thing. (See how sterile that sounded?) And if you eradicate little old "to be," exciting wonderments begin to arise, such as, "She bent near, and the fringe on the cuff of her jacket swept across his arm. A little shiver traveled with singular purpose all the way up to his earlobe." Okay, so I let a "little" adjective sneak in there. But you get the idea. Have fun now.

But when you return to this bit of writing later, with your red pen? Remember: enough is enough.


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Ceci Miller is an author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See books here.

On Writing and Perfection

Warning: This entry contains (somewhat hyperbolic) reminiscences about my offspring.

Recently I watched my son Matthew practicing martial arts. I stood amazed as with a steady gaze of almost spooky composure he executed a long series of complex movements in one fluid dance. Why was I amazed? Probably for the same reason I was stunned to behold the arc of his head just moments after his birth. Because perfection – real perfection, not the gnarly “ism” that nags you until you get it right, but the pure-flowing kind – always comes as a delightful surprise.
Why can’t we make perfection happen when we want it to? Because it’s the very serendipitous nature of things (Imagine! Once again a fresh new human being appears!) that makes us say, “Aahh, perfection.” If we could predict it, it wouldn’t be perfect.

Simply by being willing to be surprised – in the act of writing, as elsewhere in life – we throw open a doorway to the miraculous. Those superb moments of beauty and truth (Big “B”, Big “T”) that we know we couldn’t have hatched with a plan.
Yet if we’re ever to meet up with perfection – in our written work, in the martial arts, in the verdant rainforests of heart and mind – we instinctively know it’s going to mean giving up the desire to “do it well,” and giving in to speaking openly and baldly as we can about whatever matters most to us. Otherwise the Inner Critic will take hold of our writing and mash it to a pulp before its unplanned beauty ever has a chance to make its debut.

The snarly, gnarly truth
I can’t Want to write well and expect to write anything good. Years ago I gave up being “good,” on all counts. Now I write with abandon, with the intention to unveil whatever would like to be unveiled in myself and in life. I edit later, not until I reach the End of a first draft. Until that time comes, I keep on “applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,” as Hemingway said. Writing by the light of an intention to be as truthful as possible, at some point I may glimpse perfection.

Seeing the miraculous emerge from your own words, you’ll be as amazed as anyone. When it arises, you’ll sense its fragility. You won’t dare congratulate yourself. You’ll just read over the bit again and again, appreciating its tenuous beauty. You’ll feel a surpassing love, as though you’re holding a just-born infant. Because you are, kind of. And if at that moment you have any words at all to offer, they’ll probably assemble themselves into a seriously worn cliché: “Thank you.” But my advice is, say them anyway, or write them down, even if (or especially if) you’re all by yourself.

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Next up: Writing and Revising or . . . When Is a Do-Over Overdone?
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How to Get Nuggets Out of Your Noggin

First, a word about inspiration. I once believed I had all the time in the world to amaze and amuse myself and others. But that was long ago. I soon learned there are two approaches to inspiration.

Option A: wait for a bolt of brilliance to strike one unaware, or
Option B: make a practice of heightening one’s awareness so that wherever one goes, one is inspired by absolutely everything.

Option B is the same program we’re actively pursuing at ages two, three , and four – all quivering with wonder, because every single thing we see and feel is utterly fresh! So which approach – (a) or (b) – do I recommend? . . . You bet!

“I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish.”

--Elinor Wylie, from “Pretty Words”

High awareness
Not that kind! Geez. Heightening one’s awareness in the way that I’m talking about, well, it just doesn’t happen overnight. In our book Writing from the Body, John Lee and I waxed philosophical, poetic, and wildly passionate about the kind of attentiveness – body, mind, and soul – that allows a writer or the artist entrance into the hallowed halls of inspiration. Inspiration is a kind of mystical experience, and for that reason I put down my peanut butter sandwich and bow in the direction of the public library whenever I speak of it. How to come by this heightened awarenss that fuels inspiration?

Try this right now.
Stand up straight wherever you are, breathe deeply, and find something interesting in the room. Anything . . . the warm curve of a cup. Light reflected off a painted windowsill. On the floor, a stray computer wire forming a jagged hieroglyphic. Whatever you land on, focus on it. Keep watching until it becomes something else. The door handle curves and dances itself into a 1920s flapper gal who kicks up a little fringe-tossing flip of her skirt. The light on the windowsill begins to effervesce like Alka-Seltzer until out of the mist steps a critter from Planet Wynot with a message for all humankind. Meanwhile, on your desk, the circle of jagged wire evokes a child’s game of marbles: Shoot! Missed it . . . Line ‘em up again, Skeeter!

And that’s how it happens.
You begin by breathing deeply, and becoming aware. Follow a flight of fancy and it’s liable to take you clear to . . . Inspiration. Where truth spills out of innocent doors and windows like nobody’s business. And it is. Nobody’s but your own. Should you decide to share the wealth, remain aware. For as my Uncle Opie often says, once a nugget leaves your noggin, it gains the power to perform alchemy upon itself. Once it burns down to a fine glow, it may even become a good book. And that’s pure gold.

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<$Writers: How to Get Nuggets Out of Your Noggin$>
<$Two approaches to inspiration: (a) the bolt of brilliance and (b)the practice of heightening one’s awareness so that one is inspired by absolutely everything.$>