A good interview calls forth the best from an interviewee, and I am pleased that I have had such opportunities to articulate the thoughts and experiences that shaped me as a writer and writing teacher.  Here are answers I’ve reread recenting and find worth repeating to others as well as to myself:

I was honored when Robert Yehling, founder of Wordjournies.com, wrote that I was good at “finding particular words or phrases” to convey “visits to deep inner sanctum places.” He asked how I might encourage writers to “crack open their deepest heart, their deepest secrets”  and “hang in there and get it on paper when it really gets tough and painful.”

I answered:

When I teach and offer students exercises that work (similar to the ones in all of my books on writing), I am fond of saying,  “Do this without a lot of investment.” What I mean is, do the exercise and flow with it. Don’t get hung up on the importance of what you are writing about and conjuring up. Once you notice the importance, you are likely to start judging your writing as not up to the task and then you will become diverted from your best writing. In my in-person classes, students write for 20 minutes using exercises. They just keep writing and when I call time, they are amazed at what they have written about. When they read, tears often flow, both from them and their audience. This is writing from the deep voice and deep places. If you are writing well, the tears come after the writing, I think. Sometimes lately, I have been overwhelmed for days by the emotions my writing brings up, but that feeling of being overwhelmed didn’t happen while I was writing. When I was writing, I was “just” writing. I think I invite this upon myself because I know that to constantly grow and evolve and mature I must bring my feelings forward and live them through vivid reflection on experience.

Toni Reese of the Get inspired project asked me to elaborate on what I said about writing A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief. She reminded me, “…you talked about how difficult it was for you to find the permission and self-confidence to do what you knew you needed to do, which was to write.” 

I explained:

But now that it’s out there, I get notes from people all the time telling me how much it’s meant to them and what it’s allowed them to do emotionally in their lives.  So that’s been really inspiring to me, to know that a well-written personal story, where the author’s really working to find something out, has resonance for lots of people.

Marcia Peterson of WOW: Women on Writing interviewed me on ways to connect to “your inner writer.” She asked me for my advice on putting together a great journal.

I answered this way:

I really do encourage everyone to recognize how they feel comfortable writing and recognize whatever it is as a valid journaling experience. I once had a retired male botany professor in a journaling class. He complained that he wasn’t disciplined enough as a writer now that he was retired and his wife made him escort her to the mall. I asked what he did there and he said, “I sit on a bench and watch people. I love to do that. I am used to being in the field and taking notes on what I see.”

“And what did you take notes on in the field?” I asked him. He answered that he used three-by-five note cards he kept in his breast pocket. I suggested that he put those cards in his pocket the next time he went to the mall. He came back to class with lots of journal entries.

We all have some discipline, but we think it doesn’t count. It does!

“What if someone thinks they don’t have anything important to write about on a given day?” Marcia followed up.

I answered:

It’s not about writing what it is important. It’s about writing. If you allow yourself to write each day or several times a week, you are going to interest yourself at some point. It is hard not to find something of interest when you allow yourself to have some fun writing and don’t feel that you have to write about only “important” things or even make sense.

The best writing comes when we “tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson advised. Our emotional undercurrent is always there. When we don’t try to directly describe something emotional in our lives, but just describe what’s in front of us, our emotional view of the world comes out, making what we are saying interesting.

 Marcia said:

Just keep writing—that’s always the answer, isn’t it? The book recommendations sound very interesting, too. Sheila, you’ve come up with hundreds of journaling exercises that are included in some of your books and classes. Are there certain prompts that seem to bring out especially interesting material from your students? 

I replied:

Yes, I think a prompt I have about eating alone and eating with others, and one about being a stranger at a dinner table all facilitate amazing writing. So does a prompt about whistling—remembering how you learned or whose whistle meant something to you works especially well. So does addressing a letter to an instrument you no longer play and explaining what happened. Then, the instrument gets to write back to you!

Marcia asked for more of my favorite journaling exercises.

I replied with another one:

Sit at your window and describe what you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Then, imagine someone walking into the scene with something to say to you. This works especially well if you imagine that someone to be a person who really can’t walk into the scene because they have died or are very far away or completely out of touch.

Poet Elizabeth Austen asked me to answer a question about personal writing versus private writing as a guest on her blog.  She wanted to know what I thought about where and how to draw the line.

My thoughts were these:

I believe the more deeply we write from the experiences of our lives, the more universal and significant our writing is to others. This significance, however, comes only if, as writers, we find fresh insight through our words’ journeys, insight we realize only after following our words to wisdom we would not have if we hadn’t shaped our experience in reflection.

But how do we do that using personal writing without making readers uncomfortable in their voyeuristic role?  By making sure we are pursuing a question that will become the reader’s question, too, so the reader is not an observer and judge of the writer’s life, but actually on a quest along with the writer.

My hope is that reading these questions and my answers sparks recognition in you about attributes of the task those who write, especially those who write poetry, personal essay and memoir, have taken on. Use the comment/reply box below to share some of your thoughts on writing. We can not hear the messages enough. When we write, we are casting our line for companionship; we don’t know where the currents take that line, only that we must cast and cast again if we are to learn and to grow and facilitate that in others.