"The Angel in the House"

When you are writing, nothing must stand between you and the writing you do everyday. You must do everything within your power to make sure you do it including murder according to the writer, Virginia Woolf. When I first read this statement, I remember feeling stunned. Then reading and thinking about it I realized how important this statement was.

What Woolf was referring to was killing the "The Angel in the House". I had checked out a book, "The Virginia Woolf Writers' Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing" by Danell Jones (Bantam: 2007). It had this reference at the beginning of the book. Kill an angel? Why? Was Woolf exaggerating? Was she referring to something that only existed in her time but not in mine? The answer became clear as I read on. I discovered to my horror that "The Angel in the House" was something I have been wrestling with all of my life although I did not know the name of this entity. Woolf said: "Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing."

The Angel of the House is what drives us all to self-sacrifice, to put our families ahead of our interests. This is our spouses, children and even the house. The more we do, the more this angel demands of us. It is never satisfied. I had a friend that I grew up with who got married right out of high school. She married a U.S. Navy man and for 30 years she sacrificed everything for him, his career in the service, her children and she died unexpectedly from a traffic accident when an alcoholic driving on a suspended driver's license drove into her car. Her husband had just retired and within a year he remarried. I saw them at a party and when he introduced me to his new wife he could not remember his first wife's name.

Many women would know first hand who "The Angel of the House" is, but some men know this spirit too. These are men who sacrificed their dreams for their families and bury their canvases and paints in the attic or put away their dreams of writing poetry and put long hours in the car plant so their kids can have the college education they were never able to have.

The Angel says the writing that is done never equals the importance of making sure the clothes are clean, the dry cleaning is picked up, the dinners are prepared, the dusting is done, the vacuuming is run on all of the floors and so forth. It is important to work a job that helps pay the bills and clean the house and be the helpmate to one's spouse. At the end of the day, there is no time to spend doing what the writer wants to do.

I used to sneak time to read a book from time to time when I was married and my then husband would get irritated when he caught me doing it. He wanted me to watch television with him. I would go to bed to catch a nap but read instead. At work, I wrote during my lunches and breaks. I would go someplace where I would not be disturbed and write. I carried a notebook with me at all times. I also ran to the library to check out books. It didn't help that he did not read. I felt guilty that I was doing something he did not do.

I wanted to watch certain television programs but couldn't as my husband thought they were boring; so I didn't. I never watched "Masterpiece Theater" or "American Experience". Having a VCR and videos that I could check out of the library was heaven sent as I could watch them when my spouse went out. I also learned to get up two hours earlier than anyone else, a habit that I still do now.

My spouse was not to blame for all that I described. I let him make all of those decisions for me as the Angel of the House demanded that I do. I sacrificed everything to make my family happy and was left with nothing but bitterness and the illness without a name, dissatisfaction. When I went to see the psychiatrists at the hospitals for my sadness, the male doctors told me that I did not trust my husband enough. I needed to do more which I did. My angel almost killed me too.

Nothing must stand between the writing a writer must do everyday. If murder is a necessity, then murder that Angel in the House although from experience I can tell you that you will need to kill it over and over again because it will rise from the ashes time and time again to haunt you.

Believe

"Believe nothing no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and heart."
-Buddha Gautama

One of the things I put down on this blog is that I follow the Buddhist path, so you would think that putting down one of the sayings of the Buddha would be what I would do from time to time. This quote is the single most important quote that I hold dear from the Buddha (Gautama) and you don't have to be a Buddhist to believe in its truth. You have to believe in your own truth no matter what your religion is or even if you believe in an organized religion or no religion at all. I am not here to press anyone to my religion. I don't think it is even important to have one to reach enlightenment. You can do it with meditation alone.

Writing teaches me what I believe in because I don't always know. Humankind know so little about the Universe and even the oceans and even less what is between their own ears. Carl Jung worked hard to know what was in his mind for over 80 years and his intellect was immense and he never reached its outer limits. Writing gives us a tool for learning what is in our minds and one never really knows even as we each pick up the pen and start to write.

We have all sorts of tools to discern this such as writing, dreams, art and other things. Meditation is an excellent way and I use writing meditation to do it. I also use a form of art meditation. You can look up the different ways on the Internet and in books. Or you can make up your own methods. I have done that. I have taken some methods and modified them to fit who I am. That has worked very well. I use a form of walking meditation that I modified from Buddhist masters. It works. I don't think we as human beings can exhaust the number of ways we can come up with different ways we can meditate. Beware of people who have hard and fast rules. I, myself, have no use for such methods but you might like such safe and easy ways of meditating. I don't. I like to make things up as I go along as far as meditating.

I have been a teacher from time to time. When I teach students they are their own teachers and that they should adjust their writing styles to match who they are they sometimes get angry. They think it should be harder than it is. It isn't. In Korea, English is taught first as grammar rules and then as a conversation. It is putting the cart in front of the horse way of learning a language. Children who learn language very easily never learn it this way. The language structure is learned first by internalizing the structure and allowing the self to ascertain what it is that needs to be learned. It almost makes me angry when I see people making writing and other things so much harder than it needs to be.

I like to make everything as much fun to do as I can and that includes writing. Life should be fun and when they put your ashes in a can or your body in the ground or whatever, you should feel if you could that you had one hell of a good time. There are things that might have given you some problems such as health or living in a place where you could not speak or write freely but under the circumstances you did the best you could do and had a great time at it. You should also feel that you used your heart as much as you could and that means loving lots of things including people, sunsets or whatever fit your style.

Writer's workshop

I went to a meeting of a local writer's club and it was a workshop run by a published poet. She was running it as a workshop for beginning writers who want to be published. She had the standard rules and resources which is in most blogs on the Internet. That probably fit with that writers' organization since most of them are not published other than self-published; however some have been published and they were sneaking out the door which is what I did at the first break.

The information was the exact same information that is given out in most books that are for sale out there and that are contained in many blogs. I saw many people jotting down the information. It was poetry based but she included other information that included all forms of writing freelance. The rules were for the most part based on common sense such as always follow the submission guidelines and keep your rejection slips so they you can burn them when you make your first sale. They were so much like other rules that I had suspected she got them from other sources that I had also read.

The workshop leader was a published poet trying to make a living because poetry does not pay. She had a helper who looked like he may have been a writer or poet doing the same. They just go from one workshop to another trying to make ends meet and submitting as they go along. There are a lot of people who want to say they are writers but don't put the time in and write everyday. These are the writers who go to the workshops and pay the fees that keep other writers and poets alive.

In Buddhism, it is said all of the knowledge necessary to reach enlightenment is within and if you meditate you will reach your goal. In some ways, writing is the same. You can take all of the classwork you want, get all of the degrees you want but all of the knowledge you need is gained from writing everyday and reading. Nothing replaces that. You just do the two in tandem and it will work. It seems almost too easy and most people think it is. It isn't really. You have to put the sweat in and the time in; or you can attend the workshops and listen to the silly simply rules instead of putting your fingers on the keys or your hand on the pen. Oh, yes and the pencil that does the editing. That is it. Even if you think you have nothing to write about you do it anyhow and you will.

Freedom

I know a writer who has several blogs and they have a huge following. He likes to read mine. He says I am lucky that I have so few right now because I am trying to form what it is I want to do. He can't do that. He wrote a book and it did very well and has been doing the same sort of book since. Every time, he tries to do something else his agent shoots it back at him and tells him that it isn't his bailiwick. The money looks good in his checking account and he has bills to pay; so he will continue in that direction at least for a while. I think he is being nice to me.

I change direction here and there. I read one writer who will give me some ideas and then read another who will give me other ideas and I am off and running. I am trying to put a positive spin on the lack of readers on my blog, but it gets me down at times. I do like the idea of change. I don't like what has happened to my friend or to Ted who can only write about his life in the form of memoirs. He does not have a blog or tweets but he does worry about running out of material. He is just a bit younger than me and one has just so many life experiences and he has this theory that his readers will be able to tell when he is lying. He says he invests his money and plans to change his pen name and do a different kind of writing.

I used to do more editing than I do now. I would get paid fairly well. I don't know how many times I would catch well-known writers lying in their biographies or memoirs about their lives. I could always tell. I figure if I could so could the readers. Usually, I would find a way to tell the writer not to put something in as it is not likely as it is written or it must have at another time when the object in question was invented or something silly like that. One man told a story about a wagon of kids rolling into a creek while he was looking for a way out of an Amazon jungle. He walked back and found the native kids drowned. He said he was just up the river and he escaped from that place alone. The whole story revolved around him and how the Gods made sure he would be safe. I explained that a wagon rolling into a creek full of kids who grew up in that area would have the smarts to jump out or at the very least scream for help. Why would they be sitting in a wagon in the first place in a jungle? Most kids from that area never traveled in a wagon. They walked. He had one improbable adventure after another and he had me removed as editor. Then it was discovered he never was in the Amazon in the first place. Big surprise.

What would have been worse would be for writers to have some of their books published and then have to live down the stuff that was in it. I have been published before and nothing out there is embarrassing. I know of other writers who have on contract writers who write for them and some use their graduate students to write their books for them. That has been embarrassing and they have been accused of plagiarism. Some of them are well known. I lose respect for writers like that.

There has been other writers who wrote successful first books but could not equal their successes in later books. Or one writer who wrote a huge successful book and could not write another. Oh there are lots of reasons, a writer can't write again. It is not a good idea to stop no matter the reason whether you are a smashing success, mid-listed writer or some one who just limps along. If you get out of practice, it starts to show.

Control

Looking over my life, I have thought people had complete control over what happened to me. They defined where my life was going and even what goals were possible except in my creative mind. I would stay there for long periods of time. I don't think as strongly as I did , but the left over echoes of those ideas are still with me. I fight constantly to overcome assumptions that are in my mind that started life with me many years ago. Many writers fight the urge that they can't write about certain subjects or write a certain and new way.

I have a writer friend who is writing about a woman whose mother was a prostitute, but the daughter has gotten scholarships and is now a doctor. When her mother visits her, my friend can't bring herself to write swear words in her novel although the mother is with others who also do. The doctor does not but she wants to compare and contrast and it is one tool of doing it in the novel. My friend was raised in a family where those words were not said. My friend is considered a mid-listed published writer and has a publisher who wants to publish the book and she really wants to write this book. My friend's father is still a Baptist preacher and the control is strong.

In writing, all of us carry the baggage of our "day lives" into our creative worlds. The stories that interest us most are those we take from the normal routines we experience. We take extracts that are the most interesting and use them. It feels that we are in control and not the other way around. My favorite vision of what life is, is of a river flowing with me on a raft and I observing what going on the banks.

In writing, I take those items of life and then play and move them around and see what happens. I have likes, dislikes, passions and so forth; but I never felt they matter all that much to others. I was convinced that no one really cared what I thought. It was a mindset that I inherited as a child when I had a family that was not interested what the children thought or felt.

Later, I was responsive to what my children were feeling and what others thought. I watched and observed; but for myself I thought no one was involved. I thought them not to care what I thought as their mother. Not good. However, as a writer, it did not matter because it was me who was putting the pieces together although the characters once created did their own thing.

I don't think I am such a nonentity anymore. However as a writer I am the center of my world, and yet I am not. I put the actors on the stage and then I record what they do. I describe the scenery so that the audience can see what is happening and give hints to the interior dialogue the actors might be experiencing if any. People often do not know what they are feeling or thinking and if that is the case, I put that in too. That is life and my inner creative world does resemble the outer world as it should.

I believe very strongly that life comes in many dimensions, the exact number is unknown. Each dimension is as true as the others. I also enjoy moving from one to the other as I believe we do in real life. Some of us rack up more frequent traveling miles than others going from one to another dimension.

I have written about control and how many people want to control others. This is unfortunate for the writers. I think writers exist and work best in environments that is free from such rules and regulations. It is best if we can work hard to get rid of the controls that have been instilled in our minds. Often, we helped put them there. Control never improves a writer but makes them a lesser one.