July 14, 2008 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

GILFORD, NH - Q: What would you get if you crossed the adventurous spirit of Indiana Jones with the creative writing and storytelling skills of J.K. Rowling?

A: The 2008 Wild Quills Writing Camp at the Gilford Public Library!

Monday July 21st through Friday July 25th, from 9am to 12pm, 9-14 year olds have the opportunity to learn how to be fearless, daring, and utterly amazing, using writing tools and talents they may not typically use during the regular school year.

“Get out your bullwhips and fedoras, ‘cuz it’s Stunt Writing Week,” says camp leader and Chief Scribbler Lani Voivod, who’s led campers through their own heroic journeys, full-body improv exercises, and buckets of spaghetti with their bare feet in past writing workshops and camps at the Library.

According to Voivod, her brave Stunt Writers will be “immersing themselves in unique experiences in order to gain greater insight into them – more than they would if they were simply ‘objective reporters.’ That’s what Stunt Writing’s all about.”

This popular summer brain booster is open to “young writers, journal jockeys, poets, scribes, and reckless scribblers in search of fun and creative adventure,” says Voivod. There are still a few slots left open, but space is limited. The admission price is $50, and “all rides and attractions are included,” Voivod adds with a wink.

To reserve your spot now, call the Library at 603-524-6042, or email Tasha LeRoux at tasha@gilfordlibrary.org.

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January 21, 2008 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

Here’s a decidedly “ballsy” article by “rock star” muse Sandy Grason. Enjoy! -LV 

*******************

Last week I was having coffee with a new acquaintance, “Jen” who just happens to be one of the most successful business women I’ve ever met. I was sharing one of my crazy manifesting stories when Jen leaned into me, as if she was about to share some juicy bit of gossip and said; “Sandy, you have got such big balls.”

Ahhhhhh! I fell backward, mouth wide open and began to laugh hysterically. “What are you talking about?!”

The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Jen said and wondering “What does it mean to have ‘balls’?” Is that even a good thing?

When I really stopped to look at some of the amazing and FUN things that I’ve experienced in my life, I noticed that often times ‘it’ required me to step out of my comfort zone- sometimes in a major way.

So I came up with these tips and inspirations gleaned from my new favorite compliment. I hope, in some way, you’ll feel more empowered to step out of your comfort zone today and find your B.A.L.L.S.

 B = Belief
You must have unshakeable belief in yourself and the World around you. It starts with a vision, and you have to believe that you wouldn’t have this vision if you didn’t already have everything you need to make it a reality.

A = Authenticity
You must be willing to authentically express yourself, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Be Big, be the Rock Star, do not make yourself small in order to make others like you or to fit in. When you allow yourself to shine in your Fabulousness, it will spill over onto those around you and lift them up.

L = Let’s Get Loud
These are the lyrics to Jennifer Lopez’s song “let’s get loud”, “You want to live your life, you got to live it all the way and don’t you waste it. There’s a feeling that could be so very sweet you gotta taste it. You gotta do it your way, you gotta prove it, you gotta mean what you say- you know what we’re here for! Let’s Get Loud”. Words to Live, Love and Laugh by.

L = Licious-ness
This is that Unique-ness that is only YOU. When you are clear in your Unique Essence - There is no competition. There is only one of you. You must express your most Delicious & Fabulous Self in every moment! (If you need support in discovering what makes YOU so Unique, send Debbie@SandyGrason.com an email for more information about my Rock Star Coaching Programs.

S = Super-Hero
You must be The Super-Hero of your life. There is no knight-in-shining-armor coming to save you. Imagine that your life is a movie and YOU are the hero, the Super-Hero. Your life is waiting to be written, you might as well make it a blockbuster hit! BE that which you desire. Starting now…… Go!

Have a Faabulous Day!

Peace and Love,

Sandy

Sandy Grason is an Int’l Speaker, Founder and “Rock Star Author” of the bestselling book, JOURNALUTION: Journaling to Awaken Your Inner Voice, Heal Your Life and Manifest Your Dreams. Sandy defines the word JOURNALUTION as the act of revealing your inner wisdom through writing. Get some Free Gifts including “Top Ten Tips for Starting & Keeping a Journal” article *and* 30+ FREE journaling prompts now at www.SandyGrason.com

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December 12, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

(Note: This comes from my hubby and fellow scribbler Allen Voivod, from a writer’s newsletter he wrote back in 2005 - still useful today!)

I’ve read (or tried to read) more than a few books on writing, and most of them don’t do a thing for me. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way works for me, but only on an annual basis at best. But some of us - yes, me included - need help on a day-to-day basis, and there’s only one book that’s worked for me, and it’s one you might not have heard of.

I got Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art as a gift back in 2002 - a pre-publication version, actually, from a guy who picked up copies for everyone in our Artist’s Way group when he went to the big annual L.A. Times book fair at UCLA. The hardcover version is also the coolest looking writing book you’ll ever see. It’s mostly about identifying and combating your internal resistance to create, and that’s as much as I’ll say about it. Head to your local library and take it for a test spin.

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November 11, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

(Note: This comes from my hubby and fellow scribbler Allen Voivod, from a writer’s newsletter he wrote back in 2006 - still useful today!)

When I asked myself, “What could I use?” recently, two answers sprung forth: 1) I could always use a little inspiration, and 2) I could always use a little less junk in my email Inbox. So I looked at everything coming in on a regular basis, and started unsubscribing like crazy.

What a difference a month makes! I cut down my emails by over a third, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, and I don’t feel the sense of dread while watching the popping of envelope icons in my System Tray (sorry, Mac users, I don’t know the relevant analogy for you - and that’s the general “you”).

So that covered #2. But what about #1? Ironically, it involved subscribing to an email newsletter. The Writer’s Almanac is linked to Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame, and I must admit I’ve never once listened to Keillor. It’s not that I don’t like him - I’ve just never been motivated enough to find out whether I would or wouldn’t. Based on the Almanac, though, I’ll probably give him a sympathetic listen whenever the first time occurs.

The daily contents of each email are a poem and a this-date-in-history thing with a literary focus. What’s surprised me recently is how many satirists are showing up - Vonnegut, O’Rourke and Atwood, to name three in November alone. What’s surprised me even more are the poems, which I initially dismissed as irrelevant. In fact, the more I read them, the more I get that sort of “ping” in the soul, the feeling of how powerful words are, and of the insight they can deliver.

I’ve begun making it a ritual to open this email before any other in the day. If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link to sign up.

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October 9, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

(Note: This comes from my hubby and fellow scribbler Allen Voivod, from a writer’s newsletter he wrote back in 2006 - still useful today!) 

It’s weird to see something you’ve advocated for years, and never heard anyone anywhere else say, suddenly appear as a tip on your Day Runner desk calendar. That’s what happened to me recently with this month’s tool for proofreading your content: read backward.

There’s no more efficient manual spell-checking technique I’ve found than the backward method. It’s not totally backward, since your mind will automatically try to restart you going forward. And THAT reflex is particularly useful for catching your/you’re and their/there/they’re mistakes.

The one downside: it’s somewhat time-consuming. But it can’t be beat for sending anything upon which your reputation may depend. Assuming you placed in the top 10% of your childhood spelling bees, of course. Otherwise, it’s off to Dictionary.com with you.

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September 8, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

Last fall I was in our town’s public library. An unlikely magazine cover jumped out at me.

It was the cover of the October/November 2006 issue of Scientific American Mind, and it hailed the following innards:

• “Flashes of insight in a BRAINSTORM”
• “Tap Your Creative Powers”

And the feature article…

• “AHA! The Eureka Moment” !!!!!!!

As the co-owner of Epiphanies, Inc. – a content strategy team powered by a mission, logo, and tagline that says, “A-Ha Yourself!” – such innards are priceless.

The article kicks off with Einstein flipping the concept of time and space with one of his bold flashes. Though we non-genius types may fall short of such humanity-shaking breakthroughs, we DO have mega-important insights that rock our own worlds, creative journeys, personal missions, and businesses.

As authors Buenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger put it:

“We all know how it feels for a solution to a tough problem to suddenly appear in our mind. The chips fall into place, the lightbulb goes on - and the answer seems so obvious that we are amazed we had not noticed it sooner, which is what creates the ‘Aha!’ feeling.”

Want more breakthrough moments in your life or business? Here’s how…

SLEEP! That’s right. Cat nap, power nap, meditative shutdown, or the deep, eight-hour bed flop. Such time outs are prime playgrounds for churning ideas and problems, and restructuring them to create solutions you may have missed in the harsh light of the waking world.

GET FRUSTRATED! Often, our mightiest “Aha!” moments come after we face a challenge using our previous know-how to no avail. Our stale smarts have us running in circles, wasting time “reapplying methods we already know to be futile.” The upswing? “This mounting failure is precisely what drives us to restructure a problem. The increasingly tense stalemate initiates unconscious processes that change our mental representation of the problem…Suddenly, novel possibilities emerge.”

DUMB IT DOWN! Ever heard of “TMI”? It stands for “Too Much Information.” Ironically, TMI in your field or niche is a threat to your “Aha!” moments. When you’re steeped deep in your own info, “habitual use of familiar objects and problem-solving strategies limits the ways [you] employ them.” So while a certain level of education or experience is vital to your success, finding ways to get out of your own head is key to busting through mental blocks.

PERK UP! Wander. Meander. Break away and lift your spirits. The authors suggest a good ol’ ping pong game, or an ice cream cone - something simple that’ll boost you out of flat-lining emotions and thinking. Give your brain a break from its toils. “Plenty of research has shown that a positive attitude helps the unconscious brain look at a problem from a different angle, improving your chances of solving it.”

Remember, the best “Aha!” moments ultimately lead to the all-powerful “A-Ha!” - bold insight PLUS joy-filled action - that fertile birthing ground for novels, monuments, scripts, businesses, paradigm shifts, theories of relativity…and your next inspired creative venture.

Increase the number of “Aha!” moments in your life, and the chance for the “A-Ha!” that rocks your creative life, business, writing, and/or artistic recovery increases exponentially.

Eureka!

(c) 2007 Epiphanies, Inc.

Psst! Wanna use the above article on your own website, blog, ezine, or newsletter? Please do! Simply include this blurb with it:

As the founders of Epiphanies Inc., Lani and Allen Voivod, help lifestyle entrepreneurs and small biz dynamos “A-Ha Themselves” in fun and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies, sign up for their “Inciter” ezine at www.EpiphaniesInc.com!

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August 29, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

“Writing is easy. It’s putting one word in front of the other and not being stupid about it.”

-Wise words shared by one of my very favorite writers of all time: My LOVE, my business partner, my inspiration, and the father of my boys…Allen Voivod.

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August 23, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

(An abridged essay by cultural columnist Michael Ventura, originally published in LA Weekly May 21-27, 1993.)

This essay in its entirety is powerful, yet it pulls no punches about writing as a lifelong, full-time endeavor. Because my goal with this ezine is to inspire you and not scare or intimidate the dickens out of you, I’ve pared the original 1800+ word essay to less than 500 words. Now the choice to go deeper is yours, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. As always, the bolding below is mine – sort of like an act of public service for the Wild Quills audience.

Writing is something you do alone in a room.

Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there’s no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact. It’s the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer. Writing is something you do alone in a room.

Before any issues of style, content or form can be addressed, the fundamental questions are: How long can you stay in that room? How many hours a day? How do you behave in that room? How often can you go back to it? How much fear (and, for that matter, how much elation) can you endure by yourself? How many years—how many years—can you remain alone in a room?

…Nobody can teach you how you, in particular, are going to behave when you’re alone for hours a day over long periods of time trying to deal with unknown quantities: what you have to express, what experience your expression draws on, how that experience relates to the solitude necessary for its expression, the form in which it comes out (which is never quite the form you planned on), how that form changes as it progresses, and, most important, who you are—all these are just a few of the unknown quantities that are locked up with you in your room.

…The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been in the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.

Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations as raw material, and deciding, each time, how much or little you’re going to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll stake, what are the odds, just how far are you going to go—that’s called being a writer. And you do it alone in a room.

-Michael Ventura, excerpted from his essay, “The Talent of the Room.” Like to read some of Mr. Ventura’s work? You’ll find a great archive of his essays (more than 170 of them!) right here.

Teacher, writer, and Wild Quills charter member Sandy LaRochelle brought this Ventura piece to a Wild Quills meeting. Thanks, Sandy!

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August 22, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

The following is an article by Marcia Yudkin, a prolific writer, author, speaker, and marketing guru I’ve been following (and learning from!) since the turn of the century.

Marcia sends out a free weekly email newsletter called “The Marketing Minute.” I highly recommend it - for both its information and its style. Marcia knows how to pack brief anecdotes, stats, opinions, and guidance in less than 200 words. She’s really in her own league.

I’m sharing this particular article because I, too, am always amazed by how many writers leave their writing talent in the hands of others’ opinions, as if their talent and potential is a finite and one-time-only quantifiable measurement set in stone.

If you’re one of those people, please….STOP THAT RIGHT NOW! Write regularly for a stint - whether it’s once a week for three months, or once a week for a year, or every day for 60 days - and experiment with different styles, writing exercises, techniques, etc. Read a few good books on writing. (Check out the resources in the “A Muse U Can Use” and “Craft Caddy” categories of this blog for some recommendations.)

At the end of your stint, set an Artist’s Date for yourself and re-read what you’ve done. I’ll bet you $100 you’ll notice you’ve “magically attracted” more talent to your work!

“TALENT SCHMALENT!”

by Marcia Yudkin

Over the years, many people have asked me to look at their writing. “I need to know, do I have talent or not,” they say.Their request is seriously flawed, I’d reply. Anyone can become a better writer. When I taught English 101 at various colleges, I saw proof of this. Students with hackneyed, half-dead writing turned in lively, interesting essays by the end of the semester.

According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, I was right to question the query about talent. Dweck’s book, Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success, reports research showing that in education, the arts and business, people who believe talent is fixed and inborn do not fully develop their potential and do not recover easily from setbacks.

Those who believe talent can be developed, regardless of apparent starting point, not only achieve more but also prompt greater achievement in their children and staff.

Her best news: You can change your mind-set about talent or intelligence. In only two months, kids who were taught that the brain, like a muscle, improves with exercise saw their math scores rocket from F’s to B’s.

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August 11, 2007 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

“Creative work is…a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

-Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art

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