Editing can be far more creative than standard vacuuming for errors.  I read a text like it’s a book I’ve chosen to read and then I think if the characters are what I want them to be.  I trail them and decide on what basis I like or dislike them.  Are their actions interesting?  Can I really believe in them, for even fantasy can win us into belief?  Would I recommend this to a friend and why or why not?  Do transitions easily move the text along and are the paragraphs divided in a way as to make it effortless reading?  Is this paragraph boring the heck out of you?

Some fixes are easy enough, such as alternating the voicing between active and passive or changing from narrator to third person.  But these will cause the author to do a lot of rewriting.  Although this might be resisted, my services (paid or not) are to help this person get a read from a publisher.  I sent my suggestions to the writer and they were accepted.

As for editing transcriptions, this is a totally different way of thinking for me.  The speaker is not meant to be fictional and, in this case, English is not their first language.  So  I had a lot of creative license to use.  This would have been harder for me  had I not known this person’s work.  But it’s not that difficult to imagine what a person means, so I just pretended I did and figured they would correct me if I’m wrong.

My task was to take one talk and make it into two articles.  Two themes were interwoven and I teased them apart  by doing a lot of cut and paste into a second screen.  Then I found opening and closing remarks from their talk.  I created smooth transitions.  I then did a another edit with an eye to making the two balanced in length.  I left it for 2 days, read it again and found a couple of errors and then I was done.  It was accepted.

Two questions I asked myself.  Why did this feel creative to me?  Because, to participate in another’s thoughts, I moved outside of my own and stretched.  It was akin to taking a slate that was already in progress and then adding to it.  I was doing my own writing.  Secondly, why do this? Because editing has helped me be aware of how others might view my own writing.  Even when I’m writing for myself I’m thinking out loud and sloppiness does not encourage beauty in thinking.  Some philosophers say there is another self watching us.  The watcher is a good editor.

Conscious, creative, editing, writing, fiction, newsletter, transcription

From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Science unlocks secrets of our deepest love
The mystery of what drives us to offer unconditional love is being unravelled
Jonathan Leake

THE secrets of unconditional love, one of the most mysterious emotions, are being uncovered by scientists tracing the unique brain activity it creates.

They have found that the emotion, experienced as a desire to care for another person without any thought of reward, emerges from a complex interplay between seven separate areas of the brain.

Such brain activity has only limited overlap with the cerebral impulses seen in romantic or sexual love, suggesting it should be seen as an entirely separate emotion.

Professor Mario Beauregard, of Montreal University’s centre for research into neurophysiology and cognition, who led the study, said: “Unconditional love, extended to others without exception, is considered to be one of the highest expressions of spirituality. “ However, nothing has been known regarding its neural underpinnings until now.”

Scientists are interested in unconditional love as evolutionary theory suggests we should feel such emotions only for people who help us pass our genes to future generations, such as spouses and children.

Our fascination with the many forms of love is reflected by Hollywood, with films such as War of the Worlds, where Tom Cruise’s character risks his life to save his estranged daughter. The unconditional love he displays contrasts with the obsessive sexual emotions in films such as Basic Instinct or the romantic love portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the epic Australia.

In the real world, however, unconditional love is often experienced towards people with whom there is no connection. The question is: why? To carry out the study, Beauregard recruited subjects with a proven ability to feel strong unconditional love: low-paid assistants looking after people with learning difficulties. Beauregard asked them to evoke feelings of unconditional love and hold them in their minds while they had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

Of the seven brain areas that became active, three were similar to those of romantic love. The others were different, suggesting a separate kind of love.

Beauregard’s discoveries showed that some of the areas activated when experiencing unconditional love were also involved in releasing dopamine. This chemical is deeply involved in sensing pleasure, with rising levels strongly linked to feelings of reward and even euphoria.

In a research paper in an academic journal, he said: “The rewarding nature of unconditional love facilitates the creation of strong emotional links. Such robust bonds may critically contribute to the survival of the human species.”

Additional reporting: John Harlow

Even though I had been writing for my own pleasure for years, I felt that I made more progress when I found a book about writing from the right side of the brain.  I now know that there’s more to it than that, but it was quite helpful for me.  This article is not meant to be the definitive word on this subject, but I share just a morsel.

I started with an exercise to brainstorm in a free associative style.  I then grouped the words or phrases together.  Allowing myself to go the next step of plucking a group and playing with it in sentences and paragraphs, was an easy one since the sluice gate had been opened.  At this point I usually wrote poetry, which was easier for me to bridge with free association.  My poems often became songs.  The music writing style actually evolved from the previous process.

When the writing didn’t become a poem, it often became an article which stills stands as one of my primary styles.  I find that once I know what my subject is, it’s usually easy to write about it.  For example, if a magazine was running a theme of mothers I could quickly find that in myself, since I’m a mother.  If it was living in community, been there done that.  If it was a subject I had not lived, I might have read about it or observed someone else doing so.

There is also a method that I developed, although I’m sure it’s not original.  One night I woke up having had a strange and remarkable dream.  It was about a tiger on a pyramid.  I decided to use the free associative method to see if I could dredge something up.  When I did, I wrote a poem about it.  Because of this I was able to recognize the situation when it appeared in my life.  It was precognitive!

I’m not going to pretend that writing has always been easy for me.  I go long periods without doing it and I don’t depend on it for my living.  I’ve often felt the sense that I would start to really write when I am in my older years.  I haven’t wanted to write if I have nothing terribly useful to say, although I’ve filled notebooks with many processes I’ve used to grow.  Teaching writing to students has at times felt like the best use of the gift, although I never know…

I think it pretty well understood what creative writing is so I’ll discuss the conscious part of it.  How is it that ideas come to us?  Much has been said about ways to work up your way to thinking and how to overcome blocks. But what is thinking?  I believe it is a marriage of mental and emotional intelligence.  By using the mental we use understood processes to carry an idea forward.  By using the emotional we loose a little understood part of us to sieve our experience and let surface whatever carries the strongest charge for us.

There are two ideas here that I like to air; linearity and process.  Linearity in writing is the way that actually putting thoughts down helps us to shut out all but one idea at a time.  There may be several cueing up, but we choose which to put on the page.  This can be a great exercise of meditative-like clarity.  Any activity that gives practice in choosing is good for increasing confidence, but practice it must be.

Process is the way we let ideas unfold over time.  By writing regularly, we get to see from day-to-day how the subject with the most charge shifts or gets bumped by something else.  If you are writing about seeking guidance on a career, for example, it might be difficult to decide in one moment or even one day, but your true muse can emerge through the process of putting it down day by day.  Once you know what you want to do, this method can give daily ideas about how to refine the path to your goal.

Therefore, emotional intelligence gives the intuition and mental intelligence guides the process.

In conscious creative writing we are writing toward a goal, one of mining our own consciousness.  If you come to this activity with a question in mind then the aim is to answer it.  If you come to it with a desire to be fulfilled then the aim is to unleash forces in the realm of unseen activity.  This may sound pretty vague and esoteric, but anyone who has engaged in this process can attest to the very real results.  An analogy might be made with the internet.  You may be sitting in your living room using social software such as Facebook or Twitter and evolving relationships with people on the other side of the planet, people you can see on the screen.  Or you can be playing video games with people in  same manner.  To people alive when the New Thought movement began, this would seem hard to even imagine.  Remember, you have not walked over to see this person.  The most physical thing you have done is probably just sitting and using the computer.  This is a very good marriage of mental and emotional intelligence with a real world effect; the development of relationships.

I believe we are on the cusp of living in contact with other unseen forces that are just as real.  Most of us would be pressed to imagine the activity that brings us to internet.  It might as well be an unseen force, although we’re sure it’s quite scientific.  The same forces and atoms that order our lives can bring new ideas into form.  They always have.  People are always creating new uses for them. Whatever forces, realms, objects, or experiences may be available will emerge when we have the foresight to ask for them.

If we have a failure of imagination, it can be due to a lack of continuity of approach.  It is easy to give up after a few attempts when trying a new skill.  People have differing fields of expression.  For those of us with utility in writing, this might just be a good way to work  out of a trapped life.  You might not need rocket science, just a new direction.

As I learned in my youth, there is nothing so intimate as an insult and by that measure the protagonist  is one loveable guy.  Luckily for us this is the start of a trilogy.  I truly wonder what it must be like to be as talented as Caldwell.  Have I whetted your appetite?  Then get to it!

Books, Irish, Joseph Caldwell, Pigs

Recycling

Will we find the source, the end without being in the river?  The river cold and full of various turnings.  But life is in it and with that, freedom and direction.

The republic of the window, happy to live on a solar-diet.  They turn, turn as dervish-sprites, their world always connected to something that seems beyond them.  And yet the sun lives in them.

A Frame for Her

My Kitchen Elves.   They stand in attendance and sway to the sounds of beeping steamer and whistling kettle.

Quince, Apple Blossoms

Flowers order my life.  When I meet one I find out what it wants from me, and if I can, I give it.  I can’t outgive them.  I respect them as one does a lover that has its season.