I found this video online a few weeks ago, shared by the lovely Jeanne Male.

In sharing it she wrote:

A wonderful example of emotional contagion. Notice how your attitude shifts during this brief video.

And I know it’s Monday, and I know watching videos might take a whole few minutes…

But if you do happen to have a few minutes to spare, please do watch it, and see what happens…

(If you can’t see the video in the feed / your e-mail version please do pop over to the site to watch and enjoy.)

It got me thinking: that’s it’s not just emotions that are contagious. Not just music that’s infectious.

Words and writing too can have an emotionally contagious effect.

That doesn’t mean we all need to start writing happiness and sunshine.

There are lots of other positive emotional states that could be infectious, contagious:

• Words from the dark places of the imagination, sparking stories, creativity, desire
• Words that evoke curiosity, possibility, the beginnings of a sense of wonderment
• Words that are written to provoke, to get us thinking, to stir the sluggish parts of the old grey matter
• Words that come from the heart, a little slice of humanity, humbly offered, to touch the heart of another
• Words that are infused with compassion, pulsing with the music of kindness you’ll be itching to pass on
• Words that are dripping with the jewels of poetry: rhythm, beauty, meaning, nonsense
• Words that truth-tell quietly, reminding us of who we are

Words that ask simple questions:

When you think of words going viral, what is it that you’re hoping to pass on?

Sometimes the big picture can be enjoyable to look at, inspiring to watch.

Sometimes looking at things in a big scale: global, universal, internet-sized, can be daunting.

Intimidating even.

Rather than fretting about how to live up to the demands of the bigger picture you might find it easier to shift perspective and reduce the size of your frame.

We’re using frames all the time, even if you’re not consciously aware of so doing.

You use a frame when you’re taking a photo of an image, a person, a place, a moment.

A blog post works in the same kind of way: a frame around an idea, a set of thoughts, a story, an incident, something you want to package up, share, organise, and yes, frame.

(More on blog posts and framing here: 10 ways to frame your words.)

A blog site is another kind of frame again: a container for a whole series of thoughts, stories, questions, provocations, conversations and reflections, organised, however loosely around a theme or organising principle, even if that’s simply: you.

That frame can be adjusted.

If you feel your scope is too small, if your writing is getting constricted: you can make the frame bigger. I suspect this happens fairly naturally for most of us – it’s something you can and will do organically, over time.

There might be other times though when the scope seems too big and then, like I said, just a bit too difficult to handle, too hard to get your teeth into.

I realised that I’d fallen foul of this same trap myself.

In working my way back into this site I’d set up the writing task – the writing frame  - in too big a way to be meaningful, too daunting to be doable.

This is one of those occasions when I’m glad to have a healthy blog archive: I knew I’d find the answer in there somewhere

I figured that the best way to generate more ideas for writing that would be interesting and enjoyable both for me and (hopefully) for you was to follow my own advice and reduce the frame. Pick one or two aspects of the big task, and focus on them, and see what opens up. (The answer: lots.)

So I’ve reduced the frame here to a focus back on what I used to write about a lot, and have always enjoyed exploring:

Writing on the web.

Which includes blogging, but also other forms of social media (status updates, tweeting); writing static content in a way that’s interesting and engaging; and other aspects of the online writing and reading experience, including how we consume material, pass it on, and share it.

And I’ve worked in a value base too, since my blogging always goes awry if I don’t root what I’m doing in a set of values.

Plus the creation of a double frame – writing on the web, and writing with kindness, clarity, confidence and compassion – generates the kind of creative tension that my blogging muse loves to play with.

So, the frame and the focus for the next chapter is:

kindness, clarity, confidence and compassion: watchwords for writing on the web

It feels like a manageable and intriguing frame for me, and I hope it’ll provide some interesting and useful stuff for you too.

A few other bits of housekeeping:

I will still be sharing my more reflective, poetic and photographic material at The Art of Everyday Wonder.

I think, hope, the two sites make a good complement for each other, at least in my head

Maybe one day I’ll achieve the nirvana of one fully integrated site, but I’m a long way from that just now. Perhaps my personality just isn’t suited to it anyway.

I’m also re-opening comments as it felt odd blogging without them. I’ll be reflecting on the pros / cons of switching comments on and off sometime in the next few weeks.

Thanks for bearing with me while I worked my way to here. It’s much appreciated.

Photo Credits: Joanna Paterson – frames at Broughton House, Kirkcudbright

Dreams are eluding me.

Not the night time sort, wild fragments of story-telling from my beautiful sub-conscious mind.

No, I mean the daytime sort of dreams, those that come clearly defined and neatly delineated, the things others talk of dreaming about, dreaming of, planning for, working to make happen.

I go to that place in my mind, in my heart, where I think the dreams might be, and there is nothing. Silence. A blank screen.

I write, to myself, and some others whom I trust, that I feel lost without dreams, disconnected from the world of dreamers, puzzled by their dreaming, disconcerted by the absence of my own.

Then it occurs to me, with a jolt, that I do have dreams.

They are just stored in a different place, playing to a different kind of soundtrack.

I dream of a world where compassion is the currency of everyday life.

Where random acts of kindness form the soft, sweet tokens of daily exchange.

I dream of a world where poems are left at bus stops, in railway carriages, in the hospital toilets where people stand, weeping, falling apart, desperate for a fragment of comfort.

I dream of a world where we go slowly enough to listen, and notice, and care.

I dream of a world where we have time, where we make time, for those who do not fit, and speak slowly, and have trouble articulating their words.

I dream of a world where we gather in response, with poetry, kindness and care, to those who are suffering, to those who are mentally ill, to those who are suffering the anguish of mental ill health, coupled with the belief, the insidious belief, that it is somehow all their fault.

I dream of a world where dragons roam, and unicorns dance with delight.

I dream of a world where copies of the poems of Hafiz are sent scattering through the sky, like poetry confetti.

I dream of a world that is softened and shaped by compassion and kindness.

I do not know how to help make this world, how to help birth this dream other than:

the practice of kindness,

the sharing of poetry,

the commitment to writing with the language of kindness, compassion and gratitude,

the belief that the sharing of fragments of our stories, our worlds, our lives can help us learn to be kinder, less judgemental and more compassionate,

the determined holding on to the belief that  tiny ripples, of compassion, kindness, poetry and care can help to birth a dream.

~~~

First drafted in response to reflections on the absence of my new year dreams; brought into being through these posts written on Martin Luther King Day: Patti Digh at 37 Days: Because I too have a dream and Susan Piver: I have a dream, what is yours?

37 things you might find as you write your way to the finding of your writing voice:
Comfort in your own skin
Awkwardness
Flow
Impossible stuckness
Pride
Embarrassment
Fear
Unstoppable confidence
Dull, cliched, weighted sentences
Orchestras of music playing in your words
Understanding
Confusion. The collapse of all understanding
Remembrance
Forgetfulness
Recognition, from others. Recognition, from yourself
Unrecognisable patterns, fragments of meaning
The desire to share
The need to hide
An audience, supporters, your tribe
The understanding that you need to write beyond them, ignoring them, for you and only you
The ache to grow
The wish to shrink
The love of writing practice
The request to put down the pen, please
The possibilities of language
The need to express beyond words
The onslaughts of the most vicious inner critic
The learning how to write, anyway
The need for poetry
The return to prose
A clear path ahead
The walls of the maze
The longing for significance, to do great work
The song of your words, quiet, ordinary, everyday
The desire to write, more, harder, hungrier, where you are.
The realisation that you need a bigger container. Or different containers. Or a new medium. Or two.
Your voice. Your self. Your voice.

~~~

Inspired by the launch of Patti Digh’s site: 37 Days, and all she teaches there.

It is so often the next thing that gets in the way.

Not the declaration or the affirmation.

Not the clearing away and beginning again.

Not the liberation that comes with jumping off into the unknown

Not the delight in the feedback that follows when you share a piece of your world, a glimpse of your vulnerability, a slice of your humanity, a fragment of your dreams.

No, it is the next thing that’s the stumbling block: searching for the words, the actions, the evidence to match the grandeur of the leap.

Perhaps there’s nothing for it but to begin again,

and again,

clearing, jumping, falling every day,

breathing through the doubts of your own most tangled fears,

writing past the taunts of your own most fearsome critic,

knowing the next thing will always be the hardest part,

the biggest stumbling block,

trusting there is nothing for it but to keep on taking off another layer of the heart,

sharing another piece of your world,

a glimpse of your vulnerability,

a slice of your humanity,

a fragment of your dreams.

What if you could find the soul dimension, the zen dimension, the imperfect way, the humble way, the soul way?
What if you said that writing too was an art, and not think it has to be visual or musical to count as art?
What if words too were beautiful, could be beautiful, you knew, know, have always known that words were beautiful?
What if they too could be soft and dripping with honey, healing hearts?
What if writing could be like the most soulful of photography, not seeing harshly, but writing with the eyes of the heart, how would that be?
What if you could find a way to talk about all of it, the things you have found, about sweetness, imperfection, the soft gaze, of love?
What if you could work poetry into that?
What if confidence was really about allowing the work to be imperfect as it was?
What if it was simply about finding the way to write about the things that matter?
(Journal notes to self)

Words can trip us up, and set us free.

Getting Tangled, and Untangled

I got a little tangled up in my own words for a while.

The word confident sometimes sounds too cold and analytical to my ears. It is a word that sometimes whispers fraud to me, when I feel anything but confident, just another human being, trying to find the right words to say what I mean, to show you what I’ve found.

Sometimes the word writing too trips me up, as something in me protests (and indeed knows) that I am not nor do I wish to be a Writer, just someone who writes, every day, as part of what it means to be alive.

And of course it is that act of writing, every day, as part of what it means to be alive, that brings me to back to writing, and the need to pass it on, to show others, to teach what I have found, including my unassailable conviction in your own right to write, my desire to tell you that you, too, can trust in the power of your own words, can have and should have confidence in them.

Getting tripped up and tangled demanded that I go away for a while, and leave this puzzle. Also offered the possibility (I think inevitably so), of returning, with a different voice.

The possibility that you have also, every day: to begin again, with a different voice.

And although writing a blog for four and a half years can sometimes make you feel boxed in by what you have said before, or what you know your readers would enjoy, or how you have explained things or defined things, or the social media identity you have built up, or the followers you have, it also offers the possibility to begin, again, at the same place.

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T.S. Eliot

Reclaiming Your Voice

You can change what you bring to the foreground, what you highlight, what you talk more of. You can change the way a site looks, sounds, reads and feels – not least to yourself.

It is possible, even if it is sometimes hard, to reclaim a site as your own, and allow yourself to fully inhabit it once again.

You can find new words to talk about what you are trying to say.

Three words came bursting into my mind the other day, on the back of those journal notes:

imperfect, brilliant, lifeworthy*

and it was enough, it was a key to allow me to refind and reconfigure this site, this blog, this work I want to do, this teaching I am ready to begin, even if it feels like going back to the beginning, and starting again.

Particularly if it feels like going back to the beginning, and starting again.

The Turning Point of the Year

This turning point of a year is a time when things can feel less than totally easy, trying to look back without regrets, trying to look forward to things we believe, we know, are possible, despite or because of the knowledge of past failures.

Yet it is also a time that offers a sense of possibility, of changing the words we use, the language we use, the stories we tell, the voice we use, not least to ourselves, in particular to ourselves.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. ~ T.S. Eliot

I am ready to begin again, imperfect, brilliant, lifeworthy.

I wish you the same delight of imperfect, brilliant, lifeworthy language for the year ahead, and a very happy new year when it comes.

~~~

* lifeworthy is a word found in this most astonishing article from Joseph Campbell on the Hero’s Journey, a piece I have quoted from many times before.

The words you speak become the house you live in ~ Hafiz

Language shapes the world you live in.

It’s just a thought, as part of the frenzy of list making and intention setting and goal declaring, to think about the words you want to use in the year that’s coming.

This might be choices about what you want to write about.

Since what you focus on increases: what would you like to see more of?

It might not just be the words in themselves, but also the way that you use them, shape them, mould them, carve them, play with them.

It might be the way you treat your words after they have been written. With kindness, or compassion, or gratitude, or absence of apology.

It might be the way that you write, editing and reshaping your work so it better expresses the language of gratitude, or compassion, or possibility, or absence of apology until that form of language becomes engrained, a part of you, until that practice of gratitude, or compassion, or possibility or absence of apology starts to feature not just in your words, but in your daily life.

Just a thought.

Just playing with words, in case they shape the world we live in.

Take a deep breath.

Yes, it is a fact that the net teems with words: crafted, polished, witty, worthy. Wise, and true.

Yes, it is the case that the idea you had for the book that would change the shape of things for ever, has already been written.

Yes, it is true that googling of your topic reveals experts and authority, authorship and expertise that you can only dream to fashion.

Yes, there are books being kindled every day.

Yes, there are poems flowing, freely, through the links of soft exchange.

Yes, there are words, astonishing in all their brilliance, whichever way you turn.

Still.

Still the words lie curled inside, waiting to be born.

Still the words burn with a pent up energy, like a child cooped up after days of illness, or bad weather, itching to get outside again, to run and play, to dance and sing.

Still your words want to tumble, to cartwheel, to arc across the sky, carving poems, painting stories, opening hearts.

Not least, your own.

Still your words do not care what such-and-such has published. What so-and-so has said with all their kindness, truth and wisdom.

Still your words want to run, flying free, outside.

So:

Take a deep breath.

And write.

It is possible that the last chapter is simply the beginning, the entrance, to something else.

It is possible that you can dip your pen into the inkwell of poetry, earthflow, wonder, truth, and know there are things that must still be written about writing, and how it changes things. How it changes you.

It is possible that you can claim back the space of a blog, ignoring rules, defying conventions, challenging and changing your own, previous, practice.

It is possible that you can write without inviting conversation, simply focused on the words.

It is possible that you can still listen, or listen more, or listen differently, without hearing the reaction, the response, the feedback, to each and every word.

It is possible that when you get used to the sound of your writing voice your words will start to echo with a different sound.

Longer, shorter. Clearer, more opaque. More poetic, more to the point. Some or all of those. More like the orchestra of words, playing in your head (heart, mind’s eye).

It is possible that you can start again, less like your old voice, more like yourself.

Yes, it is possible that the last chapter is simply the beginning, the entrance, to something else.

the trick of finding what you didn’t lose
(existing’s tricky: but to live’s a gift)
the teachable imposture of always
arriving at the place you never left…
~ e.e. cummings

Looking for the Words to Leave, and Arrive

I’ve been trying to write this post for more than a long time now, but I couldn’t quite find the words, or the frame, or the suredness that it was the right thing to do and to write.

I’d been thinking a lot about writing voice, and what you need to do when you find it (use it: yes, of course).

And I’d been wondering if having found what feels like my writing voice (which comes out half the time in images, and fragments of poetry, and is strewn with flower petals, at least I hope it is ) meant that it was time to stop splitting my attention and simply: use it.

And I’d been trying to write something about reasons it was time for me to stop blogging here because I’d found my writing voice, and I needed to head off and yes, use it.

But the post wouldn’t come and the words wouldn’t flow.  I couldn’t quite find the key that would allow me to write this post (after some 764 other posts, 27 categories, 66 tags, and 10, 303 comments).

It’s Not Voice that Really Matters, But What You Write About

Then I realised, suddenly, although with one of those realisations so obvious you must have known it all along, that it is not voice that is the end of our searching at all: voice is rather a means to an end of finding other things that we want to find, and come home to.

And I realised, finally, that I have written myself into a different home.

One that is full of images as well as words, and one that is rooted in content (the most rooted content I can think of, learning from connection with the earth).

And I realised, with one of those delicious ahas that arrive oh so rarely (but are so good when they arrive):

that I need now to be writing and blogging about content, rather than process or practice.

The End of a Chapter

Which means it is time for me to bring this chapter of Confident Writing round to its close (which is of course, a beginning, and the start of something new, emerging).

I’m glad that the archive is sorted and updated (yes, of course, that was part of the reason I took the time to do it), because it makes it a lot easier now to say there’s a cap on new material coming out, and the site can change from one which is streamed, and constantly updated, to (I hope) a library of resources for those who want to start a writing practice, or drop the apologies from their writing, or get unstuck when they’re stuck in the middle of blogging.

The other things, the bits that can’t get archived, tagged, categorised or interlinked…

Well, the ideas, the learning, the reflections… I get to carry all of that with me (you can too, if you like)

The other things again, the really important stuff: the interwoven words, the stories shared, the sense of connection, the learning through writing… all of that endures, and goes with us.

And the working together bits, the support networks and the friendships: all of that goes with me, yes, all of it, of course, all of it, yes.

Thank You

I couldn’t close this looong chapter without some words of thank you:

To all of you who have read, followed, linked, liked, subscribed, and borne with me through a creative journey into voice finding, and what happens when you commit to writing practice

To everyone who has commented: your words were always what made this place special and meaningful for me, and I am deeply grateful to the relationships and friendships that have been forged on the back of it

To those of you who helped me with design work at different stages of the incarnation of Confident Writing: a huge thanks, especially to Cat

I’d also like to say a particular thanks to Robert Hruzek, Brad Shorr, and Karen Swim whose words, good humour, friendship and kindness are inexorably woven into the mood and spirit of this site.

Where You’ll Find me

If you wish to follow me on the next step of the journey, I will be writing, thinking aloud, sharing poetry fragments and photographs of moments of everyday wonder, found, primarily in the natural world, at:

The Art of Everyday Wonder

You can get the RSS feed here, or the email version here.

You’ll also find me at least several times a week on Twitter, @joannapaterson

If you know what you want is simply writing tips and advice: please do continue to delve into the archives here, and have fun exploring the world of writing blogs on the internet – there is so much good stuff out there, there’s no need to go hungry.

And Finally

It’s funny, I always thought I’d get a bit teary when I got to this end point but I don’t actually feel sad at all.

I feel ready, and happy to be working in a way that I know that really suits me, on content and material that is dear to my heart, and that pulls me ever closer to a sense of:

home.

Please know that I send good wishes to you on your writing journey, wherever it might take you – not necessarily a grand adventure or rip-roaring block-busting success, but simply what this site has always been about, for me:

the confidence to express quiet truths, and share them.