Moving to Substack!

You can find more of me here: https://goldmansherman.substack.com/

I hope you’ll join me there! You can subscribe for free, or subscribe and pay me. Either way you will get the same content since I don’t believe in creating hierarchies. I appreciate money like everyone else, but many people are struggling, and I don’t want to only sell what I have to offer. I am happy to offer it for free for those who can’t afford to pay me anything.

I will be writing about Creativity and Wholeness. I will offer a prompt in every newsletter. And a healing tip from my practice as a somatic/parts work coach, something that works for me.

See you at substack!

Is Your Writing Constipated?

Considering we are in the middle of submission season, you might need to take some time to write those Artistic Statements. Or maybe you’re dealing with how to address those Developmental Opportunities. Writing about your self or your work is different from doing your work. This might seem like un-creative work, but it’s not! Brave Space is a great place to figure that out! 

These days many of us are using our time in Brave Space to fill out applications. That might seem like dry, busy-work, but not if you’re a Brave Space writer! We know that the best applications come with a sense of our authentic selves in the essay answers. Instead of business-speak, most creative opps want to hear from our creative selves in our creative voices. Freewriting to find out what we really have to say is a great way to get started with whatever application you're filling out. 

I’m not saying you should use a freewrite in/on your big important application. The freewriting mess you end up with is step one in a process. If you use freewriting in small bursts, you can generate enough fresh, alive language from your heart and soul. You will be able to edit this spillage to capture the hearts and minds of the judges. 

Once you've generated the messy answer, you can pick and choose how to present yourself on the page. But at least you will have something real and fresh to revise. 

It's up to you! You can choose to write word by word, straining for meaning and matter. I call this the Constipation Method. Little bits at a time. It’s hard. You’re probably dehydrated.

Or - after a tall glass of filtered water - you can choose the messier, faster, spilling out model of free writing! Yes, you'll get a lot of who-knows-what! But there's way more you can do with what spills out. You can't revise nothing! 

If you've been taught not to write it til it's perfect, you're going to have to adjust those settings and learn to get comfortable with spillage and mess. Brave Space specializes in helping you do that. But once you adjust those settings, once you can enter the zone freely, the world is yours! 

Onward, and happy submitting!

Emma

Happy New Year, Brave Creatives! (more on trust)

It is my greatest joy to witness my Brave Space regulars learning to really trust themselves and their processes. I want to brag a little bit about it! Like watching the tight buds of flowers open; even their faces lift a bit, and their eyes reflect more light. 

I am taking this moment, the evening of the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) to think back on my vision for Brave Space when I first began in 2019, an online offering before the pandemic when I had to teach people individually how to use zoom. 

I had an inkling of what I wanted to do, but no real plan, and no idea if it would work or not. And I don't mean just getting some people to write or make art online. I mean I truly wondered if people who were struggling to write or make art would come. I wondered if those who came would (through a very gentle, non-teachy process) learn to trust themselves to allow their work to move through them. And they did! And they do! And I've been able to expand my own writing practice and my own ability to trust myself more too! 

I want to thank you all for showing up! Some of you participate in Brave Space with me, just the two of us. I'm always surprised that more people don't come. But sometimes that's what happens. It's me and 1 other Brave soul. Other days it's many more, a crowd full of creative faces on the screen. 

Many of us imagine that everyone else is making great work while we plod along, and the truth is we are all making great work. Work-in-progress is hard to live with in a culture that only values finished products. Long term projects need vision and many layers of revision. Brave Space has kept me going through my 65K word Middle Grade novel that is each day closer to being a finished first draft and much more. 

The truth is, before Brave Space, I was a binge writer. I'd write on long weekends (before I had a family). I didn't write in the early years of family life -- I couldn't figure out how! I made myself sick with the ache to write and no idea how to begin. I ended up w/4 autoimmune diseases culminating in a 3 week hospital stay refusing chemo. 

After living through that, I promised myself I'd write again. And I did, but I'd still do it fast and furious, afraid of what might come out! I had to put up post-its that said things like, no one ever has to read it! I had to invent the courage to write the truths I was afraid to put on the page. And I healed. And I created Brave Space so we all don't have to write alone. 

The more we open ourselves up to the process of Brave Space, the better we get at trusting ourselves. I hope you will join me at least once this new year. Try it! You might enjoy the process. 

This week we meet Monday 12pm ET; Tuesday 11am ET; Wednesday 12pm ET; Thursday 10am ET; Friday 12pm ET . Email me HERE with when you want to show up for yourself!

Building Trust in Yourself

I'm in the enviable position of getting to watch lightbulbs go off over people's heads in Brave Space when they begin to understand that sometimes they can allow themselves to flow in the creative space and do the work they dream of doing. Suddenly their characters are speaking to them, or they are aware of all the sensory experiences of a scene they've been stuck on in a way that allows the scene to flow easily from their fingers. Or they can see the deep structure like a sunken ship they are finally able to explore well below the surface of whatever they are making. 

Usually after the surprise and the joy, people want to know how this can happen again. Will this ever happen again? Was it a fluke? How can we repeat this? Well, we all know no one steps into the same river twice, but getting into the flow of creativity is a habit we can make room for and practice. Setting up times to do this can be hard (hence Brave Space, just show up!). But the truly difficult part is to develop within ourselves the permission to trust ourselves. 

Trusting ourselves is rarely taught or even discussed, but trusting ourselves is an essential part to a fruitful practice for creating anything you want to create. 

Raised female and living a nonbinary life, I was taught to put myself on hold for the culture at large, for men, and even beyond men to make myself silent and small. (Good thing I didn't always listen.) How many of us are trying to be smaller, quieter and less noticeable on a regular basis? 

Trusting ourselves is rarely on the lists of ways to improve our lives, and yet it is a vital part of learning to stand up for ourselves, speak up for ourselves, value our instincts and intuitions and feelings, and to develop and use greater agency, take risks, and to create anything! 

How can we trust ourselves? For writers/creatives, we build trust by showing up for ourselves on a regular basis. We build trust by doing the exploratory, messy work that doesn't necessarily lead anywhere on a regular basis. 

So many of us have no "regular basis" time or ways to practice that. But you will develop a growing habit of trust for yourself if you set your goal to be something you can actually do, and then do it. When I was starting to write, I set very low standards that I could meet. 5 minutes of focused writing time a day. I set an alarm. I rewarded myself for doing it. 

Even now I write with a timer in Brave Space or without Brave Space on my own for an hour by the clock every morning and with negotiated alarmed times from 5 to 50 minutes at other times of the day. This has helped me see that I am reliably working on my goals (even if my goal is to find out what my next goal is). This builds trust. 

Come to Brave Space to write or make stuff (or journal, or fill out that application you've put off) and learn more about trust! 

This week Brave Space meets this week:

Monday at 12 pm ET

Wednesday at 12 pm  ET

Thursday at 10 am ET

Friday at 3 pm ET (note different time this week on Friday!) 

Set an intention to show up for yourself. TELL ME HERE and I’ll send you a link.

On the morning of the session, you’ll get the link again and the prompt and lots of support during the session, an optional discussion of process afterwards, and an exit email detailing the takeaways.

For a pay-what-you-can fee, suggested $5-20 via Venmo @Emma-Goldman-Sherman (8102 if they ask) or Zelle (to Barbara Goldman-Sherman at emmagoldmansherman [at] gmail … )

COACHING: If you are trying to move forward with your regular therapist and feel stuck, consider my Brave Coaching Group! My coaching clients report it is a great boost to their therapy! One of the primary goals in our group is to learn to create a lived sense of safety, (boosts our ability to trust ourselves). This lived sense of safety we're building can really help therapeutic work move forward. Somatic work and parts work can be done in addition to your regular therapy, and I am offering this work at very affordable rates! Sliding scale of $20-35/group session based on what you can afford. Starts Tuesday 9/12 at 230 ET for 90 minutes on Zoom. MORE INFO 2 spots left! 

Onward,

Emma

The Discovery Draft!

I finished the Discovery Draft of my Middle Grade novel this week! (Just under 60K words) This means that I was making discoveries right up to the end, and taking notes about how to incorporate those discoveries, so that my first draft can be less about me discovering on the page and more about the story, with the writer, me, more in charge and control of the story I'm telling. 

I created the idea of a Discovery Draft from years of working as a dramaturg on new play development. I realized early on that some scripts (most scripts) were mostly the writer making discoveries as they went along, and these weren't really what I'd call "first draft status." It isn't until we've made all the discoveries that we can really write the first draft. 

As a pantser, I want to give myself as much freedom to discover as possible, and I think the ideas I form about what a piece of writing wants to be can be very limiting to discovery and the creative process. For example, one of my early ideas was to write the story of the first year in the life of my protagonist. I tossed out 80,000 words when I realized I was only going to make the book about the 1st 9 days from the inciting incident forward. But that discovery fueled the pacing of the book in a very exciting way. (I saved those 80K words for later. Sequels? I got enough for 4 actually.) 

Talking to dramaturgy clients about their scripts as acts of discovery helped them understand that this is a stage in the writing process that is extremely valuable but it also means there is work to be done to fully incorporate these discoveries. 

And of course I take my own advice! So I have my very own Discovery Draft now. Yes, I wrote it mostly in Brave Space over the past almost 2 years. I didn't push myself to write it every single day, but I found out soon enough that my best days were days I wrote. 

I also realized that the more often I worked, even for a little bit each day, the easier the work became. It was easier to drop into the work the next day. And then the next. Most days, truth be told, I worked less than an hour a day on it. 

I hope to deal with my notes about incorporating all of my discoveries into the draft to create a first draft to send to beta readers for feedback by mid-to-late August. Let me know if you'd like to read it!

Letters to My Dead Mother (working title) is about 9 days in the life of Brynna, a hyperlexic 12 year old. (Yep, it's all told in letters. But the letters are action-packed full of scenes...) Because I want young people to feel less alone in their grief. 

If you want support around your own writing practice, or any artistic practice that could benefit from a new process, join me in Brave Space. Send me an email HERE and I'll send you a link! 

Onward,

Emma

Brave Space Confusions

Hello Brave Creatives, I just wanted to make sure that people aren't confused. Maybe I was confused too, so this is a good way to make things clearer for all of us! 

I created Brave Space in 2019 on zoom (way before anyone knew how to zoom - maybe I taught you?) as a way to help people tell their stories, whatever their stories wanted to be, all genres, even abstract art as expression is a story to me, so Brave Space has served artists and all kinds of writers, all marginalized voices, because I wanted to offer the support I didn't have when I wrote FUKT (my autobiographical play about healing from trauma). And sometimes I held trauma-focused Brave Space sessions. 

But I didn't really know how to frame those sessions and create enough safety to really manage those sessions, so I started to train to do that. In the meantime, Brave Space evolved to become a safe space for anyone (female-identified or nonbinary) to generate creative work (and yes, sometimes people work on other things too, like applications, submissions and grants). 

Along with already being a certified holistic health coach, after several additional years of training, I started coaching privately and with groups. I taught some classes, and this week is the final week of a month-long coaching class I offered about the nervous system and how to manage it with somatic exercises and parts work. It has been amazing! I am very proud of the work I've done to create and lead this class and the work being done in the class. 

So is Brave Space only for people with trauma? No. Brave Space is a trauma-informed support space for writers and artists of all kinds, but you don't need to have been traumatized or actually be in crisis to take part. You are welcome as you are! 

The trauma-informed nature of Brave Space means that it IS a safe space informed by safer practices I've been learning and developing to offer you all a safer journey so that you can take the risks you need to take as the artist and creative you are. 

And the beautiful thing about creating safe space is that it allows us all to learn and grow and make more stories, novels, poems, plays, flash fiction, cnf, hybrid forms and art (and write more grants)! 

Because safety is the best way for our nervous system to shift into a parasympathetic state where we can tend and befriend, rest and digest, mate and create! Creating a calm, alive state of safety in our cells and through our nervous system allows us to engage with the work we dream of doing. It's actually easier in Brave Space. 

And if you do want to talk to me about private trauma-informed coaching to help you deal with your Inner Critic or your nervous system or any Part of you that might be giving you a hard time, please email me. 

This week Brave Space happens Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 12pm ET via Zoom. If you want to join me, LET ME KNOW, and I'll send a link! 

Any questions, please ask! 

Onward,

Emma

The Frankenstein Analogy (on structure)

When I was pregnant with my son, I didn't know who/what I was having. My body busied itself with the making process, and what was going to come out was not up to me. 

When he was born, I couldn't tell if he might be nonbinary or gay or straight or whatever until who he was became revealed as he grew and matured. I wasn't going to try to mold him into what I wanted him to be. I didn't argue with him over who he wanted to be. 

I know how dented I feel from the molding my parents did with me! I think this kind of manipulation is painful and hard. It takes longer to be oneself if one is being molded. I'd much rather learn what it is I'm creating as it becomes what it wants to become.

 A manuscript or a painting is not a person, but they are all, in the process of creation, becoming. 

Often we start projects not really knowing what we're making. Often we don't even know if we can accomplish the faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that we think we might be birthing. That is the frustration and the wonder of the creative process. It takes patience and strength to live with the unknowing. 

But it's much easier if we are in it together! Let me know when you want to come to Brave Space! 

Again with the Self-Compassion...

People who come to Brave Space (occasionally or regularly) notice it is a space filled with compassion. As a trauma survivor, I didn't always have a compassion practice. I spent the bulk of my life being really harsh with myself, pushing through, and carrying on in spite of overwhelming needs to go slow, to take better care of myself, and to notice my own suffering. 

I have lived with endometriosis and ulcerative colitis, migraines and celiac disease. I also have other medical issues like chronic pain and exhaustion that I never even bothered to find diagnoses for because of all the shame doled out by most of the doctors I saw. I just went on. Illness eventually stopped me in my tracks, and I spent 20 days at Allen Pavilion Hospital in 2014 finally seeing how sick I was and deciding to do something about it. 

Even when I started studying trauma coaching with Dr. Aimie Apigian last year, for the first few months, I refused her suggestion that I support myself at my desk with a pillow. Why bother? Isn't that just for people who need it? I'm better now! I don't need all that paraphernalia... But when I eventually decided to just try the pillow, got up and got the pillow, what a difference I felt in my body! 

“Oh!” many of my parts noticed, you're taking us seriously now! 

Softening couldn’t happen til I let it. Healing couldn't move forward until I let it. I was frozen in a suck-it-up attitude. Yes, years ago, but also weeks ago! Our habits are habits!

I am trying to say that self-compassion is a practice that we work on. Resistance is a part of each of us. We can learn to befriend it and work with it as a part. But we don’t get very far unless we can come from an open place of curiosity and kindness. Right attitude is necessary for shift. And when we're tensed up trying to protect ourselves from further harm, it's hard to find the path of curiosity and kindness. 

Toward that, I'll be teaching a Writing & Trauma Class on Saturday March 18th from 4-530pm ET for anyone interested. It's not only about self-compassion; it's about hands-on somatic practices to help regulate our systems. 

I hope you'll join me!  

New Year's Resolutions (OH NO!)

There’s a mythical Harvard study that found that those who set goals and wrote down plans to achieve them actually went on to much greater success. Even if it doesn’t exist, it makes a lot of sense! If we don't create goals, we won't achieve them. It also makes sense that if we have no plan, we can't carry it out! (We also can’t fail at it, cause we never tried.)

But all of this can feel like a lot of pressure to achieve. That causes terror! The flip side of achievement might be failure. Cue the scary music here!

In reality I think failure is underrated. I think failure is just a critical and judgmental way of saying I put myself out there; I tried. Many of us are terrified of that. Very few people want to start the year with that kind of burden. Most of us might have an idea of what we might be doing, but we don't want to live with the stress of failing or falling short! Most of us would rather quiet the voice that says, you have stories to tell... than let that voice rule over us. 

But for those of us who don't want to keep pushing that voice away, Joyce Carol Oates suggests starting small which is ironic considering her output. I think she's right. The truth is I am working on something that I might call a book one day. Right now I think of it in terms of 750 words each day. (3 double-spaced pages.) That's something I can actually do in a Brave Space session, even when I'm sending out quarterly chat prompts and helping participants with their questions. 

If you are dreaming of writing a play or short stories or a memoir or novel or any kind of book of creative nonfiction or poems, you can use Brave Space as an anchor. Even if you only come once a week and share once a month, you can build a practice from that. 

Don't let that voice stress you out with the thing it wants to do; set some boundaries around how much of your time and effort you are willing to give it. Then do just that much. 

I'll be offering more one-off classes on skills for those of you who are interested in learning more about structure, creating higher stakes, free-writing, image-systems, and using metaphors and setting to inform character and story. You'll be able to come in with your questions and needs or send them before we meet, so I can really tailor the classes to you! And you are free to participate as much or as little as you want.

Brave Space is for people who aren’t interested in making a huge commitment with their time. You can drop in once a week. You can drop in once a month. What are you creative needs? What are you looking to make in the New Year? What will you let yourself dream of doing? Brave Space is here for you.

Creativity Hacks for Unsticking Yourself

We all know that creativity includes being able to combine different things in new ways, but are you using this to your own benefit? When you are stuck in a scene is this a technique that you go to? How can you use this creativity hack to unstick yourself?

Identify what the scene is about and find something in the world of the scene or the world at large today that is the opposite (or different) from your theme. So if you're stuck on a scene where a parent needs to have a talk with a child about something hard, what happens if you add ice cream (something soft and sweet)?

If you are having trouble with a character not wanting to go where you want them to go, or do what you want them to do, and you can't find the next moment/action, try to identify a character trait in the character that is the opposite of what you think will help them, something hidden about them, something they haven't yet shown you. If your character has an inner conflict, can you let the other side of the conflict do the heavy lifting for a change?

If you are working on your art - whatever it is - in a smooth way, what if you add a rough or jagged element? If you are creating something small and tight, what happens when you introduce something huge and wild? How can you change the scale or the temperature or the pacing to create more energy and pull us in?

What are you trying to do? What is calling to you? Let Brave Space be a part of your process! Brave Space is a great way to unstick yourself and get back to creating in flow!

The Neurobiology of Safety With An Exercise

Dear Brave Ones, Tonight is the last show of the current run of FUKT. Afterwards, I’ll be creating a new schedule for new Brave Spaces. If you want times/days/nights, please reach out and suggest what you want - I am trying to serve you and your needs!

I am aswirl with emotion today, trying to manage the last show and the strike (putting all the stuff away) and letting go. We've had a great run! I have felt so much support from so many of you, I am very grateful. And I am ready to shift my energy toward Brave Space, teaching classes and other projects (after a breather).

Have I been writing? Not much. Besides my regular brain-dump writing, I've done little bits here and there, mostly poetry. The show has been my priority, and staying healthy for the show... so I haven't been upset with myself for not writing.

I have a pretty good relationship with myself these days. I hope you can all say the same or will soon. Until we are in the habit of treating ourselves like we would treat our good friends, we need a compassion practice or a way to pause and be kind to ourselves even if it feels strange at first. We all deserve kindness and compassion.

All the things I used to feel bad about, things that held me back from giving myself the compassion I deserve, I had to let them go. I looked at how these things helped me survive. They were coping mechanisms so I wouldn't have to face my own feelings. Now neurobiologists know how to help us all regulate our systems, so our feelings aren't so difficult to feel. Simple exercises can help us all feel safe.

When I started Brave Space, I didn't even believe in the possibility of safety; that's why the space is called brave! So I think neurobiology and the ability to reset the nervous system is revolutionary.

Give it a try: see if you can ground yourself with your feet supported on a pillow. (See if it helps to support your arches. Find what works for you.) Take a deep breath in and let it out on the sound voo. (Any note is fine.) This will vibrate between your vocal chords and your esophagus, enlivening your vagus nerve. Then make something: a paragraph, a poem, a painting, whatever you make. See how you feel doing it. See what comes up.

Be well,

Emma

Ways to Achieve More FLOW

One of the great things about Brave Space is how it provokes a state of FLOW in participants. One way it does this is by creating pressure on each of us to move into a state of intense CONCENTRATION. This is why setting a timer works. This is why writing in groups works. Because we see others and think, competitively, in a good way, they will do it, so we should too. So we concentrate. We put on blinders. We focus better than when we're alone.

Another way Brave Space helps us create FLOW is that we tend to use the pressure we feel in Brave Space to SET A CLEAR GOAL. Clear goal-setting is important for FLOW, and by doing it at the start of any creative session, you are helping yourself reach a state of FLOW.

Brave Space also creates a sense of HIGH CONSEQUENCES - as if something bad will happen if we don't achieve during the session. I guess I intimidate people into being creative! But that sense of High Consequences helps push us into FLOW.

The best thing about Brave Space is that it gets participants used to being in FLOW which makes it easier to FLOW when you're not in Brave Space. The consequences of attending Brave Space manifest as more creativity in every part of your life!

Checking In With Yourself

In Brave Space, I talk a lot about self-compassion. I think it's important to help battle the resistance and doubt that often arise when I write. But how do I know when I need self-compassion?

Often I will struggle without realizing I am suffering. And if I'm not aware of my suffering, I can't stop to soothe myself. If I just thrash internally, beating myself up with doubt or fear, I can do a lot of damage before I start to realize what's going on.

One of the reasons I love being creative is how I’ve trained myself to check in with myself while I'm creating. This check-in is a way to be mindful. I'll ask myself, "How are you doing? What's going on?" I create a moment to notice if I'm suffering so that I can offer myself compassion.

I like to put my hand on my heart to literally feel as if I am in touch with myself. I will often acknowledge to myself that I am suffering. I might name the emotion or whatever is going on, fear, jealousy, unmet needs, physical pain, etc.

Once it's named, much of its power is diminished. After a few deep breaths imagining sending myself compassion or love, I can move back into my work refreshed with a new attitude. Or I can figure out how to fix whatever problem has come up.

The ability to figure things out happens because I’ve calmed myself and shifted from fight/flight to the ventral vagal state often called rest/digest. This brings my brain back “online” so I can use it.

By creating a moment of connection to myself, I’m giving myself permission to connect to my creative work. This is why I feel as if I “must” create which, if I’m being really truthful, has limited my life in many ways. Now I'm trying to check in with myself even when I'm not being creative, as a kind of life practice!

I hope you can check in with yourself often to assess your needs (whether in the midst of creating or not) and send yourself some compassion or love.

Process Over Perfection

One thing that has helped keep me writing and sending my work into the world is learning to be less of a perfectionist and more of a process person. I have purposefully made myself be imperfect in silly little ways (like not matching my shoes to my bag - hey, it might sound stupid now, but back in the ‘80s, this was hard!) Practicing imperfection has helped me to manage my frustration along the way to creating anything.

As a recovering perfectionist, learning to live with imperfection doesn't make me a slob. It doesn't mean I've got low standards. It means I know that there is a process, and so much of the process is creating placeholders for the work that I dream of, for the scene I love, for the timing of the lines and the way the punchline functions. So much of recovering from perfectionism is about holding the flawed work with respect. Knowing I will improve it on the next pass. And offering myself kindness along the way.

In some ways being a creative person means being saddled with unlimited ideas that always feel far off and better than any real creation. I can spin a lot of nonsense in my mind. This is where writing things down or sketching things out can be really helpful. But when I get bit by the Comparison Monster, nothing I do feels worthwhile. This is where - again - writing my way into something new, some kind of puzzle that will give me a feeling of possibility again helps!

It's the process that matters. When you let the process matter, the product will happen. Practice doesn't ever make perfect; practice makes process!

I like to think of writing as creating a series of layers that continue to deepen the work. I ask a lot of questions to help myself get to the core of whatever it is I'm doing. I guess this is necessary since I allow a lot of my process to be unconscious, without direction, allowing whatever arises to change the piece I'm working on in an intuitive way. I'm not saying it is the only way to work. It is merely the way I work, my process.

Knowing your own process is important. Understanding how you work or even how you work on this particular material, whatever it is, is this process. A process can change depending on the piece you are working on.

When you are creating, what makes it a good day for you? How do you feel about the work you do? What matters to you? What gives you joy? What makes you want to keep on creating? What stops you? How can you get back into it?

After we write or create in Brave Space, we talk about process: how it went, the rhythm of the process, what worked, what didn’t work, and what we learned. This articulation - which I write down and send in an exit email after each session - helps us all see processes. We inspire each other! We learn from each other! The process of spending time in Brave Space can help us all be more aware of process as a thing. And we can all benefit from this.

Try This At Home

If you want to create a Brave Space for yourself while I’m on hiatus, here are a few things you could do to make the process of creating easier!

1) Invite a friend. If you make a "Date to Create" with someone else, you will show up for them! Funny how we have a harder time showing up for ourselves. This also plays out in how we talk to our actual friends v. how we sometimes talk to ourselves. Why I am always trying to remind us to be kinder to ourselves... So if you don't want to invite a friend, make friends with yourself.

2) Set a timer! Whether or not you make a date to create with a friend, you can still set up a timer for yourself. This takes the pressure off to write for an hour or a half day or an endless period of time that is not realistic, even if you wish it was. Whether you work for 20 minutes or 5 minutes, you will be exercising the muscles you want to exercise. It will make a difference! Being able to achieve a goal, even a small, purposefully do-able goal, will give you a dopamine rush and a sense of accomplishment. This is important, especially if your overall goal is large.

3) Be kind to yourself. Yes, I'm repeating myself, but when I think of the most important ways to be able to create on a consistent basis, kindness is IT! Change your relationship to your Inner Critics. Not by shutting them down by force, but by getting to know them. Offer them some respect (not if they are actively being mean to you, but when they are quiet, draw them out and thank them for trying to help you. Yes, they might do it in difficult, hurtful, ways, but they have good intentions created when you were young. Work a bit to gain their trust, and it will help you in the long run. If you want a session or two about how to do this, I am not on a desert isle without wifi. I am dealing with a construction project. (I'm afraid to travel right now, so I'm re-doing the bathroom and living in an apartment down the hall.) I am available for private sessions!

4) Allow what arises. The more you are able to practice kindness, the more you will be able to allow what arises. Even if it feels like the same old stuff is arising, and you've been this way before, trust there is more there now to understand. Life is like a mountain climb. The road isn't flat; it spirals upward. So if you've seen this view already, you're seeing it from a new altitude now. You will have a new perspective. You don't necessarily know what that is, but the reason old stuff keeps knocking on your heart to be voiced is so that you can discover - in a Discovery Draft - what you need to know.

5) There is more to your work than the surface idea that may have started it. Okay, I get this is really part B to number 4. This is why it's important to allow the impulse to arise. This is why it's important to notice it and to let it shape whatever you are making. Onward!

A Few Keys toward Revisions

I've been thinking a lot about revision. It's my favorite part of writing. When I've got a big mess of a discovery draft, I have to figure out what this mess wants to be. So I tend to ask a lot of questions to aid my revision process. Here are a few of the questions I like to ask. I hope they inspire you with your own revisions. And I hope you create some questions of your own that will serve you and whatever you are revising.

The very first thing I usually want to know is, are we grounded in a place? To me, grounding is essential. What I mean is, does the place affect the story or the characters and specifically how? More than just, where are we, grounding your narrative in a place can illuminate character and solve a lot of problems. Grounding your narrative means knowing everything that is there, so that you can that use it to make more meaning. How does the audience/reader know where we are? What is essential there? What are we aware of and what haven't we used that is there in that place? Can what is there, even the stuff in the drawers and hidden places, be used? Whose place is it and are these part of the power dynamics in the story/scene/book/play? How concrete is what's happening? How many specifics do you have and do they help us access the interior life of the characters? 

How many senses are you using? Sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound are the important ways we connect to the characters. How are you using these senses? What about other senses? Interiority? Pain, hunger, thirst, etc. How does feeling matter? What is unexpected? What is inevitable?

What are the events of the scene? Are there enough of them? How do the events forward the action? How have they ratcheted up the stakes? What is revealed? Is there a more dramatic way to reveal it? What is decided? How is that decision made? Are the steps clear? 

Where is the shift? What transforms the character or the world? What happens to allow the shift to occur? Is there a moment of recognition, and how does it push the scene forward? What or who is transformed and how? Is there a visual component to the transformation? Are there other sensory components to the transformation? Where is a place in the narrative where you could expand it? Is there a way to give a character a monologue or a dramatic moment or a comic moment that supports the action of the scene? What could someone do to make it funnier, darker, sillier, stranger, however you wish it could be? 

What's missing? If you wrote the blurb to it, what would it be? Is the blurb better than what you wrote and how can you improve on what you wrote to match the blurb? What do you most want the audience to remember? How do you want the audience to feel? What can you do to increase the odds that your audience will never forget it? Does the piece have emotional resonance? If not, where can you revise to create some? 

While this is not all I think about in terms of revising, these are a few key elements. The other thing that helps me a lot is time. Allowing myself time away from my work helps me return with fresh eyes. It also allows me to pace myself, be kinder with myself, and kindness always helps!

Creativity as a Way through Grief

Dear Brave Ones, Tuesday is the 37th anniversary of my mother's death. I have been using writing to grieve for her since the very beginning, when I was 19. Even before she died, when I was pre-grieving and anticipating her death, writing helped. And it still helps!

Writing gives me a way to make meaning out of the random tragedies of the world. Writing allows us all to make meaning even when we can't make sense of things. And beyond writing, I am certain that painting and drawing and dancing and composing music and singing and sculpting and many creative endeavors also work to help us process what happens to us in this world.

Creativity helps us take back our agency so that we become the do-er and the maker instead of the one being done to or the one without control. Creativity provides me with a great sense of accomplishment and agency. Even a tiny thing like making up a tongue twister makes me feel better about my life and my losses!

"The soldier's shoulder shouldered the soldier, but they sold the soldier's shoulder for a sou."

What helps you? Come to Brave Space and find out!

This week there are 3 Brave Spaces! With Sharing too on Thursday night for all humans! Wednesday and Friday regular Brave Space at 12pm ET.

7/28 and 8/4 Thursday nights at 6pm Brave Space for All Humans. At 730pm We will Share whatever you want to share!

I am offering these extra Brave Spaces with Sharing as part of my fundraising efforts for FUKT, my play that is a memoir about traumatic memories and the reason I created Brave Space to support creative people. Please come!

Donations to FUKT can be tax deductible at:

https://www.andtheatrecompany.org/general-5 and note on your donation “for FUKT”

I also take Venmo @Emma-Goldman-Sherman (8102 if they ask) or Zelle to Barbara Goldman-Sherman at this email. Or go to Indiegogo and give there and get perks! https://igg.me/at/letsgetfukt

Thank you!

The Ability to Live with Discomfort

“Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.” ― Twyla Tharp

Dear Brave Ones, I did an interview for a podcast recently, Out of Grief Comes Art. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grief-dialogues-out-of-grief-comes-art-podcast-series/id1511213826

They were particularly taken with the idea that one could exercise and increase one's ability to feel uncomfortable. I have been doing this since I was young. 

I was so inundated with rules about how to exist in public, what to wear and how to act, and I was so overwhelmed by it all, I decided to see if the sky would fall in if I broke these rules. I started with simple things like not matching my shoes to my bag or my belt. After ruining quite a number of nice outfits, little by little, I felt freer to live in the world without relying on a strong set of regulations devised by my family. They seemed to think that these rules would keep us from some kind of ruin! 

I went from not matching to listening to and honoring my impulses in my acting training to doing this in my writing! Eventually I broke narrative structures and invented my own. Whether you want to do these things or not, I am happy to help with feedback, coaching and classes. But you may merely want to stop being hounded by your Inner Critic(s). 

The trick with Inner Critics is not to push them away, but to welcome them and try to find out what it is they are afraid of, try to understand them and what they are trying to do. Usually you will discover that they are trying to protect you. Putting your frustration on hold while you work to create a better relationship with your Inner Critic will go a long way. 

So start a dialogue. Introduce yourself - your critics may not know who you are or how accomplished you are. Let them know. They may be quite exhausted working to keep you safe all these years. See if they want to take a vacation. Let me know how it goes! 

Any creative activity can put us in an uncomfortable place if we let ourselves go there, and some of us feel that it's too dangerous to try. But how long are we willing to work on the edges of our discomfort? Brave Space is all about getting more comfortable with the discomfort of creation! So please come to Brave Space! 

In addition to Brave Space Wednesday and Friday, this week I will be hosting Brave Sharing on Thursday night 7/21! For $20 to raise funds for my show! Anyone can come and write from 6-7pm ET, talk about process til 730pm and then we’ll have sharing til 9pm. Let me know if you will join me! (Yes, you can just come for the part you want to come for.)

Why Use Prompts

Sometimes prompts are exactly what we need because there is something inside us wanting to be known, and we aren't sure how to shake it loose. A prompt comes from outside of us. In a sense it's a kind of magnet. It draws something out of us that has been inside of us wanting to be known. And we don't have to be aware of it. We don't have to form an idea of it first. We can allow it based on an internal freedom we are granting ourself by accepting the challenge of the prompt.

This is how Maria Irene Fornes taught me to write. To specifically embody myself, to arrive in presence, and then to listen to what she was providing as a prompt, and to use it! She would provide prompts throughout the writing time in her workshop, interrupting us at intervals to give us a line of dialogue or a stage direction to incorporate. She even gave us lines from her own plays sometimes. This freed us to learn to allow shift, to allow the strange, to allow anything to change things up, to be loose with the work instead of hunched over it defensively, to see what would happen if there was a change in the weather all of a sudden. Because life doesn't make sense. And stories don't have to be linear or iterative. I fell in love with prompts and the feeling of not knowing what I was about to write.

When I signed up for Aaron Sawyer's Red Theatre in Chicago Prompt-a-Day for November 2017, I didn't know I would write a full-length play called FUKT. I followed the prompt: self as villain, break the fourth wall.

While writing FUKT I didn't have to worry about what my play was about or how to fulfill some idea I had about what I wanted to write. All I had to do was respond to the prompt. The first draft was written in 7 days and read in public on the 9th of November. I subsequently revised the play to make it more of what I felt it wanted to be, but it was mostly a lesson for me in listening and responding.

I couldn't have written FUKT if I had set out to write it. I couldn't have written it if I tried. Like Yoda says, "there is no try." A play is about doing, why they call the do-ers "actors."

If you are stuck in a story with your writing, whether it's a stage play or any other kind of writing, if you can write the action, what happens next, you can unstick yourself. Action has a way of leading to another action.

I don't mean activity. A mom and a daughter can bake a cake together, but the action of the scene is to reveal something to mom without upsetting her because the daughter wants her support. The activity is cake-baking. The action is to get support. The making of the cake can become a metaphor for the action. But it isn't the action itself which comes from the needs of the characters.

Of course there is the risk of failure. And it's fascinating to watch a character try and fail. Actions don't need to succeed. But in the writing, it's the doing, the ongoing act of trusting oneself to keep on putting marks on the blank page that wins the day every day. Because you can't revise nothing.

Come to Brave Space for prompts that will meet you where you are.

Raising Our Voices

Dear Brave Ones, It is time to raise our voices. Even if you're not personally writing about what this government is doing to women or the environment or the Native Americans, it is time to write! It is time to create! It is time to respond!

It is time to work with more intention to say what it is you are here to say even if you don't yet truly know all of what that is. It is time to try.

If the call to create is freaking you out, please reach out and say so! I will be teaching an Inner Critic Course to help you create a new relationship with your Inner Critic. I’d be happy to add you to the class list. I’m designing it now and trying to find the right time to offer it, so if you want to be a part of it, let me know.

It is time to find out what is inside of you hoping to be heard. Even if it's only for your own eyes. We must not ignore or deny this moment. We must not hide from each other or -- most importantly -- we must not hide from ourselves.

What are you dreaming about? Can you envision a better future? Can you tell a story that helps us out of this? Can you write a song or a poem to shift things along? Can you refer us back to a bleak time in the past and show us how you got through that?

Can you help us move forward? Can you give us hope? Can you light the way? Who among us has something to say? In words or images. In verse or prose.

It is all already in you. We are born creative. We are here to make the future. Start today. Begin in Brave Space. Join me!