All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.

The process of creation can be unpredictable and, in some way, similar to love: the brightest waves of inspiration may sometimes occur in wrong timing, wrong places, or even with wrong people.

Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.

A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.

Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature’s wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve.

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

As so often happens in my strange writing process, after weeks of distraction; of not thinking about the book at all; yesterday I started writing before the sun was up, or coffee was made. Whipped out a whole chapter of probably six or seven separate scenes in less than two hours. Now today, the whole story has slipped into a deeper level of knowing and connections than has (as far as I know, anyway) ever really been written about before. This is much as my experience was with Ailana, when I kept slipping into deeper and deeper gears. Bringing forth insights I myself had never learned or suspected.

After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learned over the years, this ain’t so.As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier just been little more than a sequence of events.On the 3rd run through, the characters stand tall. Some break free of my earlier concepts of what they were all about, what they wanted, how they related to each other, and where they were going.From then on, THEY set the pace, and I do my best to honor them in becoming what THEY choose to be.From then on, my friends; we have a story!By the end of the 3rd draft, I have enough of an idea of where the characters are going, and how their passions empower the story, or tear it apart, that I can start cutting away, and cutting away, anything that isn’t that.Until we reach the point where there is not a single word left anywhere in the book, that isn’t a vital, dynamic, organic contributor to the living whole.

An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.

Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.

By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

If you don’t write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.