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Writing from the Deeper Self
"Bringing Your Inner Treasures
to the Outer World . . ."
Book Development
with Naomi Rose
September 2008 Newsletter
1. Introduction: "Shifting from a Book-Product
to a Book-Process Orientation"
2. Feature: "Writing a Book as a Quest"
Introduction:
Shifting
from a Book-Product to a Book-Process Orientation
“The world itself becomes a scripture or book to the soul.”—Hazrat
Inayat Khan
Growing up in a family of writers, whose bookshelves were lined with all
the bound dreams and ideas of the world, I came to believe that books
were more important than the people who had written them, and more authoritative
than the small inner voice within. And so much of my personal healing
journey, over the decades, has been to find ways in which to hear that
“still small voice” which is the real Author of our lives,
and also to honor books for the deep healing forces and repositories through
the ages they can be.
When I first began my career in the publishing world, many years ago,
I “fell into” a job as an editor. My job was to make marks
all over the papers I was handed, so that everything read well and sounded
authoritative. Eventually I worked for publishers directly, where I was
handed manuscripts (usually nonfiction) written by (usually) non-writers
and told, “Make this work!” And, over time, I learned how
to do just that.
But all the time I wondered about the people who had written these manuscripts;
who they were behind their titles, what their process of writing had been,
where, in the somewhat obfuscating verbiage (two words an editor would
certainly strike out) their hearts lay. And finally, after going through
a major writer’s block of my own, I realized that the remedy lay
not in more writing techniques but in the healing of the human heart,
in our relationship to the Divine. What Martin Buber called the “I-Thou”
orientation would do well to enter into our relationship with ourselves
when we even think about writing books. Then it would be true that “the
world itself becomes a scripture or book to the soul.”
I believe we are all suffering from an overly “product” orientation—a
rather materialist view of life that judges the tangible thing one can
hold in one’s hand to be superior to the human being from whom that
“product” emerged as a process, and superior also to the invisible
source from which the desire and the unfolding process comes. This product
orientation takes many forms--from the hyperbolic efforts to boost book
sales at Amazon.com to, more regretfully, how we view ourselves as human
beings seeking to create something of value. “Who needs another
book on the bookstore shelves?” is a frequent self-doubting complaint.
But it’s not a matter of how many books there are on a shelf. It’s
a matter of coming to know that you are being called to impart that small
window of light that only you possess, that the rest of humanity will
be helped towards completion by. Seeing writing a book as the deepest
spiritual service, towards yourself as well as your readers, changes everything.
Suddenly, the path is open, and the destination is bright.
In these newsletters, I will draw on my experience as a Book Developer
and writer, as well as a student of healing, to enlighten and encourage
you to write—or consider writing—the book of your heart. To
that end, you’ll find here articles, tips, news of helpful products,
and inspiration. You can also find archives of previous newsletters on
my website, www.essentialwriting.com/webnbrochures.html.
—Naomi Rose
Feature Article:
WRITING A BOOK AS A QUEST
Sometimes, Not Knowing Is the Best Thing That Happens to You
When people think about writing a book ~ if they allow themselves to ~
most often, they think in terms of writing about what they know. Being
an expert is really big in the book field, these days. You don't even
have to be a writer to be an author who is an expert in something. You
just have to put forth your expertise. And conventionally, this means
some kind of formula, some kind of "10 steps to health," or
"The seven keys to wealth," or some such thing. There's nothing
wrong with this; it has its place; and certainly, we are all experts in
something. We could all, if we needed to, write some kind of book in this
way.
But there is another way of writing, almost the opposite way, that provides
both less certainty, to start with, and more deep fulfillment ~ and even,
at the end, more expertise. It is the way of writing a book as a quest.
Once you hear
the word "quest," you know you are in a different realm than
the recitation of facts, or the laying out of already-known answers.You
are not even in the realm, necessarily, of ordinary consciousness. You
are in the realm of spirit and soul.
This means that your conscious mind will not have the answers, to start
with. Indeed, your conscious mind may be relegated to the role of witness,
as that which seeks within you takes the lead.
This is both a humbling position, and a vastly empowering one. To start
out on a quest with only a seeking, a question (and even that question
may not, in the very beginning, be fully formed), and be concentrated
enough, be dedicated enough, to be present with what you find, to weather
detours and wrong turns, and to develop a "sixth sense" about
your nearness to what it is you seek ~ kind of sniffing its presence,
making your way through the forest in search of its traces, recognizing
its recent footprints quickly fading on the path ~ is to devote yourself
to a larger truth: a truth that you hope will, once encountered, illuminate
your life, the path you have taken to find it, and all that you went through
leading up to the decision (if it was a conscious decision) to go on the
quest in the first place. A quest is not an assignment, not a "career
move" (though it can have that effect after the fact), not an opportunity
to be an expert. A quest is a journey demanded by your soul.
I'm sure that
many books have been written in this way, whether the author thought of
the process as a quest or not. Some that come to mind include Robert Pirsig's
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I'm pretty sure he
didn't write it to become a best-seller, although it did); Jacob Needleman's
Money and the Meaning of Life; Ann Patchett's Truth &
Beauty: A Friendship; and many other books that started with a need
to set out and find something precious, often the writers initially knowing
not what.
There is a special joy to writing a quest, in that you don't know what
is around the bend until you get there; you don't know which direction
your inner compass will take you until you find your foot on that soil;
you don't know what it is that you will discover, nor do you know ~ until
you discover it ~ what its larger significance is, what patterns it reveals,
what light it casts on your deeper being and journey to that point, and
beyond. I say, "a special joy"; but clearly, a sometimes quite
uncomfortable joy, not to know for that length of time, not to be sure
that you are on the right path, or even exactly what you seek. And yet
joy it is, because to be even in sensing distance, even far-flung sniffing
distance, of whatever is to you, in the time frame of your writing, your
holy grail, is to give such meaning to your efforts, such wings under
your feet, that you would go longer and further and round more and more
bends if it got you any closer to what it is that you are seeking.
As we all know
somewhere in our hearts ~ at least from watching reruns of "The Wizard
of Oz," if from nowhere else ~ what we are seeking has been in us
all along. We need to travel way outside the familiar pathways, the conditioning
that makes us believe we are only a product of our circumstances, environment,
family, and so on, in order to approach the holy of holies, the most intimate
sanctuary of our own heart. Once we are there, we find that we are everywhere;
there is no place closed to us, no one we cannot understand, no one or
place or thing outside us. We contain the universe. And we had to leave
the known in order to learn what was always here, always true.
This is a universal quest. We read of it in myth and religious lore, and
perhaps think it belongs to other people, times, and ages. But it is perennial,
and it is in us, as well. So to allow ourselves an awareness of our longing,
even if we don't have a particular form or name to give to it, is to awaken
the willingness to make the journey.
And I personally know of few better ways ~ other than through relationship,
through deep self-examination and healing, and of course actual external
travel ~ than to write a book.
Although some
of my books were written from the relative standpoint of expertise ~ wisdom
gained through experience, which I was happy to share (as in my book,
Starting Your Book: A Guide to Navigating the Blank Page by Attending
to What’s Inside You), those that gave me the most transforming
experience through the writing, the most internal change of horizon, were
those that began as a quest.
My first book that was consciously a quest was The Blessings Ledger: A
Quest to Find the Union of Money and Compassion. When I began it, over
ten years ago, there was no title, there wasn’t even a clear internal
landscape to traverse. There was only the quest ~ and I would say, a desperate
quest, at that point ~ to find something that did not seem to exist, either
in the world as I knew it or in ordinary consciousness: how to bring together
the world of money and the world of the most intimate, vulnerable, inner
heart. That I eventually found what I was seeking, through the very act
of writing, is the great news that I get to report, ten years later. What
did not feel so great, starting out, however, was the incredible loneliness,
self-doubt, shame, and despair that accompanied me through the early phases
of the journey. I was setting out to find something that did not seem
to exist, that other people did not talk about, and that I knew, from
the place I then was, I had to find in order to go on. A tall order, at
a time when I felt quite small, actually. I was newly divorced, in debt,
without funds for the future, and too occupied grieving the loss of the
dream of true marriage to galvanize myself, bright and cheery, into the
workforce.
Looking back, I can see the great value of feeling called to make this
quest by writing a book. Being a writer ~ and feeling that writing is
one of the most deep and intimate recourses I have for knowing myself,
for invoking understanding, for giving a kind of gracious, lingering attention
to parts of my life that have been neglected (whether due to shame, indifference
at the time, or neglect by others) ~ writing a book to find what I was
seeking turned out to be just the way to weave cast-out and disparate
parts of myself together, to learn to trust the depth of feeling encased
in specific memories and hopes, and to find the courage to trust that
what I found within myself had value for the world, not only for me.
I came to know
that, very gradually, because as a result of my quest to find the union
of money and compassion, I did. I did find ways in which the human heart,
softening in the face of another person’s need, changed how money
was viewed and used. I did find ways of becoming compassionate to myself
about money, ceasing to berate myself for my supposed failures to have
reached a certain financial level and expertise by a certain age, and
through the heart-connections that this writing quest opened up, actually
learn to have money, to get out of debt, to manage my finances, and so
on. In short, I was able to do almost all the things that the “expert”
books talk about in purely financial terms, not through the door of financial
acumen, but through the door of compassion. I got there anyway; only,
in a way that was doable for me, and ultimately meaningful to me. And,
it being a book, not a tape recording or a journal or something else too
private to share, it would then become available to the world.
This book, actually, is still in progress. Others have come onto center
stage in the meanwhile, temporarily putting it on hold. But it was the
Great Mother of my quests, and the books that followed really followed
in its footsteps. MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to Money. The Portable
Blessings Ledger: A Way to Keep Track of Your Financces and Bring Meaning
and Heart into Your Dealings with Money. A recent article called “The
Almighty and the Dollar: How Paying Attention to Our Inner Lives and Bringing
Compassion to Our Dealings with Money Can Bring Us Closer to God.”
See, there is a series now: a series of books about “Money and the
Inner Life.” I never set out to write a series. I set out to find
something that my soul required in order to go on. The process of finding
it was writing that first book. And, having found what I was seeking,
the whole story, all its traces, all the not knowing and the finding,
were there in the book for others to read, footprints in the forest, as
I myself had been seeking.
So perhaps there is something that you seek. It probably is already in
you: but sometimes we have to make a far journey ~ far in depth and range,
if not in actual geographical travel ~ in order to gain perspective about
what was in us all along.
If this rings a bell for you, if some longing to find something that may
not yet have a name is whispering to you from inside your chest as you
read my words, then maybe you have a quest to make, yourself. And if you
make it in the form of writing a book, you will get not only to find your
way, but also to leave your traces and treasures behind for others who
will want to make that same journey.
This is a seed. If it grows, you can contact me. And we can begin our
work together.