The Dark is Not a Place Where You See Nothing
A rich and revelatory conversation for writers and everyone else with a life story
Hi, Friends!
I have been looking forward to sharing this dynamic and passionate one-hour conversation with the amazing
in which we discuss:
The metaphor of “writing in the dark” (the dark is not a place where you “see nothing”)
The birth of Writing in the Dark as a pandemic panic response, and the actual heart of writing in the dark
The vulnerability of publishing and the profound impact of being seeing in our writing
What it means to write toward the story—that is, the story we’re trying to tell versus the story that’s trying to be told, and the negotiation between the two, especially when writing about your own life
The difference between “what happened” and what is true
Writing for money
The several books I published before my first book
Academic acculturation to “writing something up” rather than “writing your way into” something
The idea of how writing = thinking
The magical impact of ruthlessly cutting words
How and why to make your writing sound like a human being speaking in a straightforward way
Writing hard stories in ways that help us heal versus drag us down deeper
The risks of journaling
Much more!
You can watch/listen here:
Also, we offered a facilitated writing workshop for paid members of Writing in the Dark and Helen’s WriteSPACE members, and that, too, was recorded.
In this workshop, I lead writers through one of my favorite and most absolutely magical writing exercises, which you, too, can write along to. This one exercise may be responsible for more of the published work born in Writing in the Dark—which we gather in our big, beautiful, incomplete Born in WITD directory—than any other single exercise I teach.
In this recording, you can also hear the incredible work that the other writers in the workshop created from it as well.
If you do write to the exercise, we’d love for you to share in the comments!