In his book Literature and the Brain, Professor Norman N. Holland details how we may respond so deeply in both creating and experiencing literature – novels, plays, poems, tv and movies – and the neuropsychology underlying our often intense engagement with stories and characters.

See a video below.

He writes of one iconic film: “The cute blond starlet, looking for her missing friend, opens a creaking door. She walks down a dark hall. And we’re thinking, Don’t go there! Don’t go there!

“And then the maniac in the hockey mask lunges out from a dark corner, brandishing a chain saw. You jump and I jump and all the people around us jump.

“Yet you and I and all of us know deep down that the blond and the maniac are just light flickering on a screen. We still jump—why?”

[The photo is Jessica Biel in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). Another actor in the film, Erica Leerhsen, had an interesting comment: "My biggest fear would be life... or definitely, myself. I think that's at the core of most horror movies or even movies like The Wizard of Oz. You think you have to go through this thing, but you end up having to face yourself."]

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Her first book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, has sold more than a million copies in ten languages.

In an interview, Natalie Goldberg talked about writing to access your energy and creative intuition :

A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises.

The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in.

I consider writing an athletic activity: the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator.

The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s no good.” But when you have to keep the hand moving, it’s an opportunity for the creator to have a say.

All the other rules of writing practice support that primary rule of keeping your hand moving. The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in.

Because that’s where the energy is. That’s where the alive, fresh vision is, before society, which we’ve internalized, takes over and teaches us to be polite and censor ourselves.

Another way of putting it is that you need to trust what intuitively comes through you, rather than what you think you should be writing. What comes through you arises from a much larger place than that of the editor, the critic, or society.

From interview article Keep The Hand Moving, Genie Zeiger The Sun.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg  (Paperback)

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – audiobook

Natalie Goldberg audio clip below is from Writing Down the Bones [speech]

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Dennis Palumbo, MFT, is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues. This is from an interview for Shrink Rap Radio:

Initially, when you start writing, or at least when I started writing, you think the reward is, wow! It’ll be so great to see my words on screen, to see my name on screen…

I think what happens over time when, because you’re a writer – especially once I became a screenwriter – you’re very powerless as a screenwriter.

And what happens – and it’s a subtle change, but I think it’s the one that most mature writers go through – is the gratification becomes personal… the process of writing becomes its own reward… you tell the story the way you want to tell the story, and then hope for the best…

The frustration, I think, boils down to the fact that I believe screenwriters are the most crucial aspect of a movie, and they’re the ones with the least power and the least control.

Continued in article Therapist to the Hollywood Stars.
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writers inner life, dennis palumbo, screenwriters challenges, psychology of writers

NOTE – The last TeleSummit is over but you can still purchase recordings of the sessions.

Eric Maisel – Author, Creativity Coach and Co-Founder of TeleSummits.com
John Dillon & Vivian Nesbitt – hosts and moderators

September 4th through September 7th, 2008. 24 great sessions. 6 one-hour sessions over four days, conveniently scheduled to suit your needs whether you live on the East Coast, the West Coast, or anywhere in between. (And if you live elsewhere in the world: all sessions are recorded!)

Presentations:

* The Odyssey of the First Novel
* The Odyssey of the Memoir
* Writing and Selling the Romance Novel
* Writing and Selling the Contemporary Novel
* Writing and Selling the Mystery Series
* Writing and Selling the Children’s Book
* Writing and Selling the Nonfiction Book
* Writing and Selling the Interview Book
* Writing and Selling the Self-Help Book
* Writing and Selling the Illustrated Book
* Writing and Selling the Travel Memoir
* Writing and Selling the Nature Book
* Writing for the Niche Market
* How to Turn Your Expertise into a Bestselling Book
* The Fundamentals of Screenwriting
* The Art of the Spiritual Book
* The Nonfiction Collaboration
* Literary Agent Basics
* Finding the Right Literary Agent
* What Editors Want
* How to Handle Rejection
* Book Publicity Basics
* Branding, Positioning, and Self-Promoting
* Internet Strategies for Writers

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learning writing, writing teleseminars, writing resources, Eric Maisel

From essay: Let me entertain you, By Michael Chabon

Entertainment has come to mean junk. But its definition also should include everything pleasurable that arises from an encounter with literature.

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.

It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade.

Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation.

It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs.

Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.

The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

From longer essay: Let me entertain you, By Michael Chabon, LA Times

Excerpted from his book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands [image].
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Michael Chabon, entertainment psychology, reading for entertainment

Diablo Cody’s script Juno earned her an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In some interviews and her own writing before the Oscar win, she talked about keeping her work real.

From Diablo Cody’s Tips for Blogging Your Way to Hollywood Success, By John Scott Lewinski, Wired magazine site:

“One of my teachers told me that I was lazy,” Cody explained. “He said, ‘I think you’re the best writer I’ve ever taught. But I’ll never hear from you again because you have no ambition.’

“I never intended to get my writing out there. I always thought of published writers as honor roll students — the real overachiever types. I never intended my work as a springboard to anything else. I write because I’m addicted to it. It’s my confessional.”

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