by Jon Rappoport
July 8, 2022
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.
One day in the 1980s, I started reading Harlan Ellison. His stories and his essays. This was a man who had muscles and balls in his brain, along with an unending stream of original thoughts. He shot killer poisoned arrows at his enemies and never backed down. He also had the capacity to tell you something you wanted to know while promoting and advertising himself. One of his undying messages: have courage, my friends. Ellison was and is a tonic, a unique tonic. He destroys and lifts up all at once. Where else are you going to get that?
This is what I mean. 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.”
To read more, go here.
— Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
