| To order my mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.
Yes, I believe my collection, Power Outside The Matrix can help people who want to become writers or much better writers.
I want more writers in the world—journalists, poets, novelists, playwrights—because they create narratives. New ones.
And this is important, because people, faced with what’s going on around them, have an incurable habit of listening to inner brain narratives of anxiety, impending trouble, and doom. Whether they know it not.
Writers outdistance and outflank that habit. A writer un-traps himself and his readers from that habit.
During my 75 years or so of reading, I’ve jumped into all sorts of writers. For a 10-year span, it was crime and spy fiction. Ian Fleming, John D MacDonald, James M Cain, Donald Hamilton, John Buchan, and finally and great and underappreciated Philip Atlee and his series of Joe Gall secret agent novels. I read and reread Atlee’s books. I learned so much about writing it was ridiculous. He was a great teacher without ever intending to be.
These books fortified me. They built wave after wave of new stories in my mind. New possibilities. New thoughts. New thoughts that spawned other thoughts. So…why bother with automatic narratives that groveled and crawled in the direction of gloom Fate? No need for that.
Writers liberate everybody.
Writing is abundance.
Automatic narratives in the mind are appointed bureaucrats of scarcity.
Science fiction—another decade or so of reading. Ray Bradbury, Heinlein, Philip Dick, AE Van Vogt, Norman Spinrad, and a host of nameless pulp authors who took me to other galaxies in the words of their opening paragraphs. BANG. You travel to those places, and when you come back, you’re refreshed. You’re emerging from a five star spa of mind and soul. You don’t need the old stories your brain is blabbering in its nursing home address on the edge of town.
There was a period in my teens and early 20s when I read the authors I was supposed to. Herman Hesse, Poe, DH Lawrence, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Eric Hoffer, Henry Miller, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs. But “supposed to” dissolved. I was leaping into and out of all sorts of different kinds of fire. I KNEW all bets were off. ALL narratives were up for grabs. I could go ANYWHERE.
This is a good thing to know.
This is one of the best things to know.
Believing in freedom is one thing. Feeling free is quite another. Writing (doing it or reading it) gives you the feeling.
It gives you a platform on which to stand. A stage. A new stage.
In Power Outside The Matrix, my Writer’s Tutorial—my instructions to writers, aren’t a cage you climb into.
Don’t think about writing as a cage.
You’re outside, not inside.
That should be why you’re a writer.
So in my tutorial, I’m not laying down hard and fast rules. I’m not asking for obedience. I give you tools, but you decide how to use them. And you never become a slave to your tools.
If you do opt for slavery, your writing is going to strike the ear in an artificial way. It won’t ring bells. It’ll clang. It’ll come across as trumped-up.
I aim to liberate writers, not pin them down.
Once you feel free and write free, you can shape your work in all sorts of different ways. If you start out trying to shape your work, you’ll stall and dead end.
You’re not aiming to be a trained monkey.
We already have far too many of those.
And let me say something about the craft of writing. You know where you pick that up? From reading other writers. It comes through to you by osmosis. It’s the way a child learns to speak. He listens to people speaking, and he grasps what’s happening.
It’s wholesale, not retail.
Faith, self-belief, and determination are wellsprings of a writer. And when faith falters, determination is the key. You’re going to write, no matter what, come hell or high water.
That works.
In Power Outside The Matrix, my goal is to transmit the electricity of being a writer. In all my discussions, I come back to that.
Because, you see, being a writer is a LIFE.
It’s not just a career. The career comes out of the life.
Far too many people in this world opt for a career and then try to make a life out of it. That’s normal. That’s standard. That’s a long street that narrows and turns into an alley that ends at a blank wall.
If I loaded you down with tips and tricks and rules, I’d be directing you to that alley. I’d never do that.
If you order Power Outside The Matrix, dive into it. My aim is bringing out the writer in you—bringing out the life of the writer, so you see it and see it as your own and nobody else’s.
Writers give us what we need.
And one more thing for now. Writers say to us, “You can sit there and pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can pretend you’re dumb, but I know something is getting through. And whatever that something is, it’s ESSENTIAL. It makes all the difference. It’s a glimpse of what you really want.”
Here are the full contents of my mega-collection Power Outside The Matrix. You can order it here: |
