But why write stories at all?

To hear our own voices. The writing voice is different from the voice inside your head, different even from the one that you use when you talk. Writing brings to consciousness more of the unconscious.

To recognise stories. Is everything a story? Many things are and when you understand stories by having created them you undertsand the creation of the myths of the world. It becomes easier to see when stories are being told, when a punchline is being delivered. This does not mean that one stops believing the stories but it helps unravel the too-neat truths.

To be published / for others to read our stories. Writing what others want to read is a joy multiplied. It also requires that one harmonises with the zeitgeist a little so that there is a way for other readers to enter the story too.

How do we write?

We all tell stories, we know what a story looks like, how to pause and how much to tell. We write existing stories or stories that we see happen around us or the story that we imagine is behind a chance remark overheard at the prescription counter at Boots. Stories are everywhere. We see things happen. The small red car takes a corner near a school and a huge bus comes the other way and they are too close to one another and crash and the drivers start to argue and curse. We tell these stories and we imagine the rest and writing is simply that act of telling, when one sits down and pieces of stories flow from the pen or the computer keyboard.

Grab one of these stories by the tail. Write it down. Simply write it to write it and be astonished. Feel the joy, because there is usually more on the page than you would have thought was in your head. Read what you have written, see what has emerged. Some of this unpredictable stream we want to share with others, and some not.

Is there some small part of us that wishes that we still took turns telling stories around the fire? Some fanciful, some instructive, some religious, some scatological.

Why train as a writer?

A runner trains by running, a writer trains by writing. Writing is both easier and harder than you might imagine. Easier: as soon as you start (and often only then) big knots of words inside your head start clmouring that they want to come out. Harder: until your inner critic is trained to take care of the technical stuff – like story shape, word order and your own personalised list of common mistakes – that old critic drones on. Easier: we have stories to tell, we have stories that float in our heads all the time; stories that explain the way people treat other people, how flowers grow. Harder: it’s a skill like any other that needs practice, needs doing and can be helped with guidance but truly, you can be your own trainer.

Lucille’s rules about writing fiction?

The story is the most important part of the equation. More important than grammar, or spelling or character development. Some of these can be worked on later, if you want, but if the story is there, the rest is easy.

Complete the story. Finish it, write it through until the end.

Then you can share it. With friends or someone who can bounce back ideas about shape and character and metaphors…

Start another story.

Stop Believing in Yourself

Believing in yourself in a specific way is a limitation… your thinking – even your imagination – is based on your memory and past experience; and your spirit is the source of the truly new.  Give up believing in yourself.

How does an acorn know that it must become a tree?  They are so different; the one small, hard skinned, portable and shiny, and the other is fixed in the ground, enormous and many-limbed.  For the transition to occur the acorn must really and completely stop believing that it is a seed; for a perfect moment the acorn stops believing in itself.  And then it changes as though by a miracle.

When you are able to meditate – a sitting meditation or an active one, where you live completely inside a moment – then you are not your intentions, or your visualisations, or your expectations.  What re-patterning awaits you?  What happens if you stop believing in yourself for that moment?

From 18 April until 11 May Mercury is retrograde in Taurus.  This brings the usual slowdown, missed appointments and lost keys.  Make sure that you have backups of all your documentation and computer programs.  Don’t buy a computer or any device that enables communication, because it may just do the opposite.

We are rivers.

Today I walked by a stream that tumbled like a weak baby-child, giggling and slipping over pebbles, inviting me come and play.  A short while later, that same river roared and blustered, passionate and carelessly splashing and gouging the riverbed, I would not dare set a foot in there.  That same river.  Has it truly changed its ways?  And is it for the better?

The chemical composition of the river changes because of the earth and rocks and plants between and over which it flows and the sky, the climate under which it flows.  This is its nature.

Then there are dams on the rivers, some are made by those outside the river – people or animals – but sometimes the river tries to dam itself by picking stones off the riverbed in one place and dropping them in another.  The river will flow over the dam wall when the dam is full and the flow will be a smooth silver sheet or a flooding breaking storm!  Because this is not its nature.  Or is it?

All rivers end.  They split and divide and lose themselves in the sea.  They sink into sand.  Disappear.

Accepting, understanding and enjoying, working, channelling: these are all good and fruitful when the river understands its own nature.  Then it naturally shares its abundance with birds, its tumbling with canoeists and its drench with the thirsty.