Carol's Blog

Illustrated Dream Journal

January 26, 2007

Over the past year or so I’ve started illustrating my dream journal. I record the dream on the right hand side of the page and draw the illustration on the facing page. (I use an unlined journal with fairly heavy paper.) I am not an artist. Sometimes my drawings look OK. I’m proud of a […]

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Freewriting and Rewriting

January 14, 2007

I love to freewrite and am always recommending the activity to thewriters I work with. Freewrite with a place, I’ll say, or a character, a mood, a story.See what you turn up.We often seem to feel that we should “know” what’sgoing to happen next or that we should understand a complex characterin one swipe. Freewriting […]

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The Perils of Perfectionism

January 8, 2007

Author of The Artist’s Way and many other books on writing, Julia Cameron, has just published a new memoir, Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir. She talks about her struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction as well as the pull of madness–electricity becomes dangerously charged, trees vibrate, melodies overwhelm her consciousness. She stops sleeping and eating […]

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The Rapture of Being Alive

November 20, 2006

People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. Joseph Campbell When the desire to write shrivels and threatens to die, try sitting […]

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Writing Sweet

November 1, 2006

Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others, and many other books as well as the founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists method, suggests that the discipline of writing does not arise best out of obligation but will always arise best out of love. p. 51. “Rather,” she says, “than thinking of going […]

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On the page dreaming

October 4, 2006

A student gave me a journal that has gold stars on a dark blue cover. It isunlined–a necessity for me–and small, good for packing and keeping by the bed. I use it as my dream journal. And now I leave the left side ofthe page blank for drawings. I draw and then watercolor a dream […]

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Insomnia

September 22, 2006

Write about how it feels to be awake at 3 AM and unable to get back to sleep. Write from your senses, in present tense. I’ve just started an “Insomnia Journal.” It won’t be about dreams because I keep a separate dream journal. For my insomnia journal, I bought watercolors, stamps, ink pads, tape, pens, […]

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Stealing

September 20, 2006

Write about a time when you stole something–and when someone stole from you.

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From As Good As It Gets

September 19, 2006

Jack Nicholson says he’s been “suckered in, set up, and pushed around” by his neighbor Simon’s art agent who forces Jack to take care of Simon’s little dog–verdell. Simon is in the hospital, having been beaten up by a male model. Nicholson, a rich OCD author named Melvin Udall–who compulsively locks and unlocks his door, […]

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