COMING UP - A CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN

CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP 

INTRODUCTION

The next ten*** questions or prompts I'll be posting over the next few months as part of this WRITING WORKSHOP are intended to spark your FREE WRITING creativity. 

WHAT IS FREE-WRITING?  Usually this term refers to the FREEDOM to WRITE spontaneously and with the editor shut off in your head.  I believe in this process.

You use your pen - preferable one that flows easily with ink - though I know some of you have never even learned to write cursively or are used to typing on a keyboard or computer.  Whatever is comfortable to you.  But here's the thing about using a flowing pen.  It's best if you barely lift it off the paper.  Just keep going and flowing with the ink. 

The proofreader in you is in the distant future.  So is the analysis that goes on in your head that questions every word as you tend to do when writing papers in college.  It is not genre specific. The results don't have to be useful. You can get off topic. It's OK if you "go against" the assignment.  You don't have to keep your work though I think it's a good idea to read it over or put it away for three months and then read it over again.  You may reread it then and think it was a nice experience but pitch it or decide you're a genius after all!

When I ran a WRITERS ROUND TABLE years ago - before I went to college and studied creative writing - all our exercises were free-writing ones and that turned out to be mostly fun, though sometimes writers ventured into dark areas too.  In groups you must have comfort and be nonjudgmental.  You are not concerned about rules, results, where it's going, a grade, or how to please your professor - or me.

If you are new to this you may want to use an egg timer or stop watch or cell phone timer.  Start with 9 minutes, go to 15, eventually you may be able to free write for hours.  I know I can.  And as a result YOU WILL NOT EXPERIENCE BLOCK because you will learn that you can truly write about ANYTHING ANYWHERE.  (One ex student of mine told me he wrote while laid up with a broken body after an accident.  He turned it into a screenplay and sold it.)  Ultimately, once you are IN FLOW - a state you will experience as different than ordinary life - longer periods of writing time are not only entirely possible but inevitable.

I'm self taught in flow.  I know it came through first being an artist/painter/designer and all those hours I focused on canvas or paper and forgot where I was or what time it was.  Sometimes I think I experience the present as well as the past or future when I work.  Since I wasn't taught how to in a classroom, I know you can teach yourself too.

 Author Stephen King says that writing is HYPNOSIS and having experienced HYPNOSIS I agree.  In FLOW your brain is definitely functioning differently.  Flow happens in all the arts - music (I'm one to think that back in the day Led Zeppelin was in flow in concert.) - painting - crocheting - it seems to me to be tied into the use of the body, particularly the hands but also DANCE.  I suspect that using your LEFT HAND may increase your RIGHT BRAIN abilities.  One thing that happens to me when I'm crocheting is that my thoughts are operating on more than one level at a time; I'm paying attention to what my hands are creating, but sometimes memories bubble up or I have intuitions or some mundane ideas.

Avoid interruptions such as cell phone calls and notifications.  Find a lovely spot, a distant corner in the library, or a circle of friends.  You can share - or not.

If you go through a time of your life in which you are too busy, physically tired, fighting illness, working two jobs, tearing around with the children, this can effect flow. Never the less, once you've learned how to reactivating the state will be easier to get back into after some time away. 

At various book signings and readings and classes I've attended, students often ask the writer about their habits to get a book done.  I've heard every sort of advice, including regular schedules, talking the work aloud while showering,  writing while the children sleep, and writing so many words - a page or word count - every day, which sounds like labor to me. But whatever time you have to write is enhanced by FLOW.

Christine Trzyna
C 2018-2021  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

*** More exercises have been posted.

HE CRIED ABOUT HIS DEAD CAT - AND HE'S BRITISH - TALKING TO STRANGERS

I was walking with my dog one morning recently, and though she is getting older, and sometimes doesn't want to take a long walk, she is still cute.  A man was standing there and reach down to pet her.  She looked in his eyes and he burst into tears!"  I mean this man was sobbing.

"My cat just had to be put down!"  he cried.

Turned out that he had come to Los Angeles with his girlfriend, a local California girl, and his cat had been in the hospital a week when the decision had been made back in Britain.  His cat was only four years old.  So he had the expectation of it living a longer life and that he would see it again.

We talked as the tears kept coming.

"Well I said, you just proved the stereotype of the British with stiff upper lips is wrong!"

His girlfriend smiled.  So did he, still through tears.

The death of a pet usually is felt strongly by those who love them.

I asked him if he ever heard of Sylvia Browne, the now deceased psychic who wrote a lot of books and appeared lots on the old Montel Williams show.  He had not.  She was once well known, though towards the end of her life she took some criticism for a very wrong prediction.  Browne wrote about pets and heaven.  She assured everyone that when we go through the tunnel to the light at the other end ALL our pets are waiting.

Well, I feel really guilty about a couple goldfish,a turtle, and a hamster I killed not knowing any better.  I.E. don't make the goldfish bowl too clean, a turtle really does need a sun lamp and a companion, and do not feed a hamster a whole leaf of lettuce, which it will eat and then die of the shits over.

I hope these creatures have forgiven me. 

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG with LINDA BIRD FRANCKE : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT
C 1998 Diane Von Furstenberg Simon and Shuster Publishers

page 39-40

As a small child I immersed myself in books, trading places with the characters of the Comtesse de Segur. My mother added poetry, insisting that I memorize and recite to her the seventeenth-century fables of La Fontaine, such as "Le Corbeau et le Renard" and "La Cigale et la Fourmi." She was a young mother, and until I was about eight she treated me like her toy, alternately playing with me and torturing me with her demands. I was relieved when my brother, Phillippe, was born... I didn't particularly enjoy being a child, though my childhood was perfectly happy. I wanted to be older than I was and never liked people who patronized me because I was a child. I never played with toys or dolls. When I wasn't reading, I was talking to myself in the mirror and pretending I was in the theater. I played make- believe, but it was somehow always about plain real life. I couldn't wait to grow up. After my own children were born, I would always make a pointy of treating them with respect as individuals and encouraging them to grow up within the realities of the world.

MUSES WITH WORSE PROBLEMS THAN MINE - TALKING TO STRANGERS

Talking to strangers seems natural to me and it's helped me when I need to interview someone or take a poll.  I'm not a snob about it.  I talk to people from all walks of life.  I wasn't always at ease like this but I think it started when I was in sales and I grew in confidence also when I went back to college and loved classroom discussions. Walking my dog, I've been part of many conversations that start on the basis of dogs and expand out.

In recent weeks I've had a number of encounters that left me feeling personally "What Problems Do I Have?'

First there was the lady I met in a thrift store.  I'm not really into thrift stores like some people are.  I rarely go to them but I like to find art supplies in them.  There was a woman looking through clothes and holding dresses up to her body.  She asked me what I thought of a dress and we got to talking.  Soon the conversation went like this.

"Do you notice that I'm pregnant?  Five months.  And I'm 38 years old."
"Yes  you are!" I said, noticing her prominent belly.
"I had a bad day yesterday.  I went to the hospital.  They heard no heart beat.  My baby's dead."
The woman threw her arms around me hugged me and began to weep, huge tears running down her face.
I hugged her back and asked God to protect her.
I wondered where the father was.
She needed to be held and to cry.
"They weren't nice about it.  They didn't know I lost another baby just six months ago.  They told me to go home and wait to miscarry.  But I think I felt something this morning - a flutter.  Maybe the test was wrong."

***

I was hot and tired.  I had my dog with me on the bus in her wheeled carrier that's like a suitcase.  The air was polluted by the fires.  I was having trouble breathing.  I'd taken her into an air-conditioned office with me for the day. I was so allergy sick I was dull. I wasn't looking forward to sticking to the mattress all night.  We need a HEALTHY and HAPPY living environment, I was thinking.  We needed that Yesterday!

The driver said, "You've got to have FAITH in God."
I said, "I can only try to have faith."
She said, "No you must TRUST God,  You must BELIEVE.  You must KNOW that he's going to come through for you."
I simply cannot make myself think or feel this way.  I need proof.  My ideas about God are that there is this Intelligence to the Universe but I don't think He cares so much about me, even if i do things His way. So I didn't lie to her.  But I didn't want to put her much stronger spirituality through any tests.

Then she said, "I've got a situation.  There's just me and my two kids.  My husband disappeared months ago. He flew into Atlanta.  He went to Tennessee.  The last anyone saw him. he was there.  Me and the kids - we have dreams of him.  I KNOW he is alive.  I KNOW he is out there."

I don't know that he's not.

I've seen too many TV shows.

"Have you done everything?

"Yes, on TV, everything!"

A few days later I waited for this particular bus driver to go past, even though I wasn't getting on.
I handed her a note that said, "David Paulidis Missing 411."  "Look this guy up on the Internet - on YouTube - Don't Freak! - Big Foot I almost whispered.  He's an ex cop and maybe he can make sure for you that they did everything right in the investigation."

She took the note.

And I have not seen her driving that bus since.

***
She got told about the huge number of photocopies she was making and that her copies seemed to be jamming the printer.  She was a lady with obviously dyed hair and clothes 10 (or more) years too young for her. She meant to be nice.  She offered to bring her own paper.  The place closed and so we headed out the door at the same time.  She was in there looking for work.  Verbally she gave me her resume.  She had done a lot of physical labor - painting.  I tried to relate with a story about how I once hung wallpaper - three clients before I quit.  I didn't know anyone hiring.  I respected that she'd once contracted with a huge apartment building.  She told me she used a toothbrush on the light switches.

"You need a ride home?" she asked.

"Well...  I only have a half hour walk and it is a beautiful day. I was going to stop and get my dog some food at the market."

"Get in.  I'll drive you there."

So I did get into the car she was living in.  Not obviously.  She drove me first to check in with her friend living in his van.  In the five minutes to the market, told me tomorrow was going to be an even better day.
Her boyfriend was coming out of prison.

***
All three of these people are muses, each in their own way, and not on purpose.  But don't judge me on how or why.

C 2018  Christine Trzyna

WARREN BEATTY - STAR by PETER BISKIND : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

I don't normally review books that I wouldn't give one star, but there is a purpose in not recommended this book and that is the whys I hated it. 


This book was so unbalanced a star bio of Beatty (whose film REDS is one of my favorites) that it's as if a personal vendetta got the backing of a publisher.  (Shame!  Shame!)  One half step above the trashing typical of a Darwin Porter book, Biskind's entire effort is - cringe worthy. I kept listening in hopes that I would finally come to some redemption.  Unbelievable to me is that so many hateful people would be willing to be quoted and so few loving.  My guess is that the loving wouldn't speak to the author out of their respect for Beatty, that is if the author tried to talk to them.  Attacked so, its no wonder Beatty and many other stars are hell bent on guarding their private lives and personally refuse to cooperate with a memoirist or biographer, even refuse to defend themselves or comment.  Pretty much deemed a failure by the author, I come to the defense of Beatty in that if he is a failure, he is a failure who kept on trying, and how many of us would love to fail as well as he has!  Funny how so very many people undoubtedly heard of the difficulties of working with him but kept signing on.  OK, I know everyone is desperate to make a living, but still.  Beatty has managed to hire a great number of talent people in his years as a film maker.
Biskind also suppose that it's Beatty's reputation as a sex symbol and seducer that makes him famous. He implies the star only married and had children after becoming a washed up old man.  In a ridiculous attempt to compare Beatty's career accomplishments, he brings up Clint Eastwood!  Excuse me but are we comparing road warrior movies that include a pet chimp with the Russian Revolution?!


And so this book reminds me that a friend always sees the best in you and an enemy always sees the worst.  As a writer involved in memoir or biography, aim for the truth, but keep mean spirited analysis and bullshit psychobabble out of it. 


Enough said.


C 2018  All Rights Reserved   Christine Trzyna.