What seems like much more than twelve years ago I penned the following sentence to a book I ended up writing entitled The Tin Prayer: Words of the Wolverine. “Each morning I reach into the earth and pinch a small amount of always constant clay from the ground. Roll this pinch of earth into a bead, place this bead of clay on my tongue and swallow. Starting each morning with a dosage of wild rosary.” My goal then, as it is now, is to explore and reveal the deepness of the language of the wild.
I believe the wild and creativity to be much the same. I see the need to reveal and hunt for secrets as a way of probing the calmness, the hollow, the sometimes sorrow-filled place we call silence. To produce good writing, to find yourself a publisher, digging deep and finding hidden truths is essential.
One tip, which you’ve probably heard before, is that an author needs to reveal their deepest thoughts and secrets in order to tell their best stories. This requires digging deep into your thoughts and opinions and by no means remaining quiet. You must not hold back, you must open up and engage with the rumour mill of your mind. An authentic story is your goal, something all yours, something that comes from the single, deep, silent soul of your mind. Revealing deep secrets from silence make writing “real” not “fake.”
What separates the real story from the fake story is the common versus the mysterious. A reader wants to be surprised and engaged in new ways when they read. We all know that when you come across the phrase, “the sunset was like a reddish, orange, and purple water-color painting…” that no one is particularly captured by this description because we’ve all read something like this before.
You have to go deeper, into what you most feel about a sunset to describe it best. For instance, maybe the colored air has an odor that you remember coming from your grandmother’s bread recipe when you were six years old which then reminds you of the shade tree in her backyard, which leads to more and more thoughts which then turn the sunset before you into a rich and unique secret being revealed for the first time. The best of all stories are when you surprise yourself. Surprise is a good measure for a story, finding moments that were once deep in the silent recesses of your brain is rewarding for both reader and writer.
So, as the Taoist saying goes, “The way is easy, strive hard.” Breaking the silence is mostly having the confidence to reveal what you most fully believe to be true and then being willing to share these thoughts with others. Easy and difficult all at once.