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    Write Your Self
    Write Your Self
    Write Your Self
    Ebook203 pages2 hours

    Write Your Self

    By Stephen Wade

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    About this ebook

    We live in an age of information, but very little of this is about the individual. Too often we communicate in no more than ready-made clichés. But now more than ever there is a need to know ourselves and to discover more about our own profound resources for imagination and creativity. Write Your Self has been written with this in mind: you will keep a journal, but it is structured and directed, and all the writing leads to more understanding of you. Whether you simply treat this book as a different kind of journal, or whether you use it as a basis for creative writing, the result will be a new access to your own words and to your personal development as an individual.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMX Publishing
    Release dateJan 22, 2018
    ISBN9781787051935
    Write Your Self
    Author

    Stephen Wade

    Stephen Wade is a biographer and social historian, usually associated with crime and law, but here he turns his attention to a place he has known for forty years, as he has lived and worked in Scunthorpe all that time. His most recent books have been "Going to Extremes", "The Justice Women" and three volumes in the "Your Town in the Great War" series (all Pen & Sword), and :No More Soldiering" (Amberley).

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      Book preview

      Write Your Self - Stephen Wade

      Write Your Self

      A comprehensive guide to using writing techniques for developing a new understanding of yourself

      Stephen Wade

      2017 digital version converted and published by

      Andrews UK Limited

      www.andrewsuk.com

      First published in 2017

      © Copyright 2017 Stephen Wade

      The right of Stephen Wade to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

      All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

      Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

      Although every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this guide as of the date of publication, nothing herein should be construed as giving specific treatment advice. This publication is intended to provide general information pertaining to developing these skills.

      Originally published in the UK by MX Publishing, 335, Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX

      www.mxpublishing.co.uk

      Cover design by Brian Belanger

      List of Illustrations

      1 Your reader biography

      2 A created profile

      3 Map of imagination

      4 Page of a poet’s notebook

      5 Example of a metanarrative

      Introduction

      Understanding Creativity in Your Life

      I rhyme to set the darkness echoing... I rhyme to see myself

      Seamus Heaney: North.

      We make ourselves through words, and we change ourselves through more words. These words are individuated; we access them in our search for the richness of our life-experience and for the sustenance of our being in the world. As a writer and teacher, I have come to see that many people need help and guidance in the effort to understand that stock of words which lies dormant and which we call upon when we desire to explain who we are and what we want.

      This book is not a magical spell for transforming blandness and discontent into something rich and strange. It is about how you can work creative thinking into your life in a way that will give a spiritual, instinctual quality to your life; it is concerned with the ways in which language is your most powerful tool for working out change and renewal. There are no formulae, but there are methods of cultivating what is there, dormant in you and in us all.

      In my years as a teacher of creative writing and as a tutor for mature students, I have seen that a desire to get an education, to ‘learn everything’ as Willy Russell’s Rita says, is often no more than something else in disguise: a lack of acceptance of what we are. This society instils in us a culture of success. We are told to look beautiful, to move gracefully, to perform so that we do well in interviews; we are told that certain body-shapes are acceptable, and that well-being is central to all quality of living.

      There is nothing wrong with all this. It’s just that something fundamental is overlooked. This is that element in being human which keeps us content and fulfilled even with the meanest, least materially successful life. This is the pool of silent, latent and perhaps infinite creative pleasure in our imaginations. How do we access this? Is it possible to live without recognising this, and if we try to do so, what are the penalties? People tend to think in terms of potential negativity, yet in fact, the search for those words which will enlighten ourselves with regard to our creative heart is actually fun. The word ‘light-hearted’ is a simple but accurate definition of the right attitude in this.

      What can your words do to change your life?

      The words you will use in the course of this book will be your own. They will be words packed with vibrancy and power, maybe latent, waiting to be used because you have not yet made space for them in your life.

      They can heal, often by making you stand back and see a problem for what it is

      They can fulfil your deepest needs for expression

      They can communicate the deepest feelings

      They can make sense of your own world and selfhood

      I have seen a look of pleasure and joy on the face of a student of seventy who has just written her first poem in a class. I have watched a group of people work on a film script and discover that they have ideas to offer and that they can command language to influence others. I have seen people learn to trust their words, to feel their way towards seeing the sheer potency of eloquence in a situation. Words heal, words build and words persuade. They can lie and they can steal, but used rightly, words may give us the joy of self-expression and of releasing the knots of complexity which trouble us.

      Research has shown that writing about the self and expressing our imagination can reduce stress. People who keep diaries or journals have often recorded how much the ‘friend’ (the diary page) is like a silent listener, another part of their self, quiet and receptive to certain truths which cannot be uttered in a normal day.

      Write Your Self is a manual for encouraging that pool of creativity inside you. If you feel a sense of restlessness, even within a supposedly successful career or in a materialistic lifestyle, you may be certain that there is something else - something inside you like a place that you have known about and heard of but never visited. This manual is an itinerary of that place and a map directing you to a purposeful visit.

      You will be asked to start a certain range of habits, all based on self-reflection and on logging aspects of yourself that perhaps you always took for granted. The renewals offered are like those feelings you have on holiday, when you discover a new, fascinating culture and you never want to leave and return to routine. Being truly creative can mean that you have no need of strategies against boredom, because you make a life that leaves no window for boredom. Thomas Gray, the poet, said that to be happy is to be perpetually employed. This means being active in all the best, fun-centred senses. Creativity is play. It means re-visiting not just a place but a playground.

      To grasp the real potential of this book, do three things. These are the fundamentals of my course:

      Write a journal.

      Cultivate the poet in your spirit

      Talk about, and write about, the narratories in your life.

      The concept of the narratory is central to the book. This concept is a term which describes all the story-making that has made you what you are, from bedtime stories when you were a child to your dream-fantasies as an adult. What I call a narratory is an assemblage of all these as a profile of yourself.

      When you have finished the fun tasks in this manual, you will have met a stranger - a likeable stranger. That person will be you.

      Finally, what will this book actually do to enrich your life?

      It will provide you with tools for shaping a better self-understanding

      It will show you how language makes sense of the world.

      It will shine a torch into the dark cave of your creative self

      It will empower you as a person in your social or business roles

      It will be fun to do, if you follow the exercises and feedback

      1. Taking Stock of the Raw Data

      The public enemy number one of creativity is your dislike of yourself

      Seeing your present creative potential

      You are a human being and therefore your purposes here on earth are unknown, and there is no general rule about happiness. But your first duty is to be happy in your own way. You make your contentment by knowing yourself. As Socrates said, hundreds of years B.C., the beginning of wisdom is to admit that we know nothing. We might know nothing, but we feel thousands of things every day.

      Creative thinking is about how we use and access these fragmentary senses of what we might have been, how we might have acted, what identities we might take up. You need to start at the point of liking yourself, and playing with your inner sense of the child. A useful first step is to ask yourself these questions:

      Do you make time for play - board-games, party-games, sport etc.

      Do you day-dream - and if so, do you see this as being silly?

      Do you often feel that you are not living the life you meant to live?

      Are you attracted to stories, soaps, novels, films etc. whenever you can make time?

      If you feel that most of these apply to you, then consider the meanings of such habits. Notice how often people at work try to introduce playfulness - such as jokes, fooling around or talking about their children. Talk about holidays is often full of longing, as if work is merely an intermission between the holidays - which represent the real meaning of living. ‘Purposes’ in life, maybe expressed as ‘aims and objectives’ surprisingly tend to arrive most convincingly into our awareness when least expected. Hence the fascination of the moment of realization, the epiphany (in a non-religious sense) when your own truth opens up in the light, to be understood like never before.

      Shaking off failure

      Often, these habits reflect a deep need to play, to experiment and to revisit the mental landscapes of your childhood. It is the burden of failure which most inhibits this frustrated state of being, where you are stuck in a routine you have made in the false perception that it is what adults do, or it was considered ‘‘ good job.’’ The failure you might be feeling is mainly a failure to live in the fullest sense. Modern work-patterns allow us to use only a minute part of our vast human capabilities.

      If you see your lifestyle as a failure because you have no time to express other aspects of yourself, how do you escape this feeling? You re-introduce playtime into your life. The coffee-break crossword is not enough. That poet in your spirit wants to sing, to celebrate life by smashing the ordered, the rational, the everyday patterns of imposed life.

      Poetry is a way of showing us the beautiful truths in an ugly world. Creative living is using words to celebrate, to look at fragments as well as complete systems. We can all be poets because we all have a sense of what is beautiful for us.

      Starting your journal

      Now you are to start the most important part of what should be an energising force for your life. This is your personal journal. The habit of journaling is based on no specific formula or layout. The important thing is to reflect on yourself each day, monitoring progress in understanding and creativity. A good journal has three main positive effects:

      It forces you to reflect on habits and actions

      It helps you to understand your ambitions, frustrations and abilities.

      It provides a space for the ‘other you’ - the quiet self who remains the same beneath all the trials and demands of life your social self has to encounter.

      Your commitment for the course

      For this course, your journaling will be sufficient if you have two pages a day filled in, with these headings every time:

      Random responses to life

      Reflections on myself with others

      Notes on my new life

      Your journaling will begin with this simple approach. After a few weeks, the material in your journal will also become to basis of the writing exercises in each chapter.

      Random responses

      Reader into Writer

      But first you need to reflect on yourself as a creative being who has the potential to write well, with excitement and passion, with honesty and a genuine confrontation with the personal as well as the universal. Research has shown that all our reading, from being early readers as children, through to the random but often demanding reading of everyday adult lives, establishes our personal style. I would go further, and say that these habits make our responses to the world. Thinking and writing go together. Your reading shows you how to formulate those social discourses which make up the person that the world sees.

      How do you access this reader in you, in order that you will better understand the growing writer, the manipulator of the words that will make your new life? The first step is to understand that so much in life flashes by in a blur, and that stopping to look properly, and to revise the past, is a huge asset in effecting the right kind of change.

      A reader biography

      A simple way to do this is to map out your biography as a reader. The summary on the following page shows you the processes of these questions. But first consider the ways in which you read and why you read. This is the basis of your contact with language used creatively. Your history as a reader provides the best clues to your potential talent as a writer. When you read, do you notice features of style and vocabulary? Do you find that really striking phrases and images will lodge in your mind and clamour for some attention?

      Reading in our culture is often an oppositional process; it may even be stressful. There are always hurdles such as tests, set books and having to read very dull texts. You may associate reading with either very pleasant or very unpleasant experiences. For you, it may always have been an escape from reality rather than a way to understand it. This is all powerful potential material for the writer in you.

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