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Write for your life

What would you write about your life or your thoughts if you knew that no-one would ever read it? What would you write if grammar, spelling and punctuation didn’t matter? What would you write about if you knew that the words you put to the page could influence nature and humanity, or your own happiness in a positive way?

Practically speaking, we all learn the same writing skills in our primary school years. But something happens along with that. Somewhere in amongst the words, we pick up other messages about how good our words are, and often how good we are. Or not.

Years pass and we hear about people who define themselves as writers, and by definition, we feel that we are not.

But we are. We are all writers, we are all artists. Each and every one of us.

The loss to us as human beings when we don’t value our words is immense.

One of the most significant tools we have when healing the necessary woundings of life is writing in a journal.

For many, facing a blank page is a daunting experience. The voice inside that has kept us from writing is triggered. It says ‘what if someone ever reads this’ or ‘my thoughts and musing are not interesting enough’, or ‘as good as hers’, or are ‘just a pointless waste of time’.

Before we even start, we are limiting the possibility we have in each of us to write in a way that is meaningful for us and our healing.

I am also a therapist, and I vividly recall  a client who, for months, resisted the need she had to keep a personal journal. This was a forty-year-old woman who for most of her life had played a secondary role to the needs of others in her life. When we really sat with her inability to write for herself, a life-changing insight was revealed. Her resistance was part of a much grander theme in her life… her difficulty in making her mark on the world. Once she recognised that making marks on a page in a journal would be a step towards making a mark in her life, the real healing began. Her journal became her long-lost friend, as did her own soul’s longings.

What would you write if you believed that your own thoughts and ideas were of value? Could you sit and let the words pour out on to the page without seeking to make them right or acceptable? Could you let the truth in that moment be revealed in black and white, to be pondered or even transformed?

It does not require a special pen, an expensive leather bound journal that you are too frightened to ruin or a special place to write.  With mindful intention, even a humble exercise book can become a repository for your greatness.

Journals make for honest friends. Just finding the right word to express a thought or idea can be healing in its own right. And if the word doesn’t come then a symbol or image might. There is no requirement that a journal be about words and using colour and shape to convey meaning is often illuminating.

In fact, there are no rules to journal writing. Write upside down, in circles and spirals, in colour. Write words and not sentences, doodle, draw, paste in pictures you like – everything is of value.

Write when the urge captures you, in snatched moments or as a regular meditation practice. Don’t make it hard or yet another thing to do on a list of seemingly endless tasks. You cannot fail your journal, you just simply need to show up and be there from time to time.

Psychotherapist Carl Jung was an avid journaller. His most significant piece of work, only recently released, was his Red Book, a reproduction of his inner work and drawings over thirty years. This book has an energy all of its own. To page through it is to see the evolution of a man and his work, an insight into the way he came to his most important findings of what it is to be human, his dreams and his fears. There is a sense that without his journal, Jung’s life would have been very different. This may be true for us all.

A journal does not need to contain your life story, although it may evolve in this direction. A journal is more a stream of consciousness, a present moment collected and given space to breathe.

When we journal we do more than write. We decide to live.

We say, ‘I can make my mark. My words are of value…and so am I.’

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Finding a sweet spot to live

A little bit of good news. I’ve just successfully completed a Diploma (Level 5) of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)!

Building on my love for words, helping others and a passion for life long learning, this appealed as a beautiful extension of the part of me that is forever both a traveller and a self confessed word nerd.

In addition to proving to myself that I could do it, I hold this achievement as another step towards a return to my beloved Italy, where one day I will delight in teaching English, and living the life again while improving my own Italian speaking skills.

I don’t know how exactly this will unfold but…letting my dreams define my reality seems like a sweet place to start.

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Ghostwriting – outsource writing your book to a professional

Ghostwriting is all about getting your book written by a professional writer – think of It as your words or ideas, my labour. Your name as author on the cover, my name in invisible ink. I frequently chat to people who say they’ve never heard of ghostwriting but it is much more common that you might think. 

You may notice there are periods of time when I don’t really talk much about what work I am doing. These are times where I have contracts in place and I am head down, bum on seat writing.

And I love it.

I love the intensity of these writing projects.

I love that we start a process together with nothing and end up with a manuscript. There is a pride for both parties. Everyone wins… and the world wins because your thoughts have been captured to be shared with a wider audience. 

I get genuinely excited for the clients I work with.

I enjoy that we build a relationship for the time I am in your life, and I get to know my clients in a real way. I always need to get inside a clients’ voice so I can write in a way that reflects their uniqueness, and that is a challenge that I relish.

And the client always gets final say.

Each project is a little different – for some there are source materials and loads of research and interviews to be done. For other clients with a clear picture of what they want to say, or a personal story to tell, I am more like the conduit from verbal story to getting something on the page.  Usually content is nonfiction, memoir/biography – what I love most – but it can be anything.

Often I sign Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) so I can never talk about who I write for, but I can say this – most books written by ‘famous people’, most columns written in magazines or on blogs by celebrities will have the hand of a ghostwriter in their production.

And sometimes it’s just that people are busy. Writing is hard work. It requires dedicated hours (yes I’ve turned out 65,000 word manuscripts in 6 months) and a skill set that after years of practice I’ve managed to be proficient at. I’ve studied and I’ve honed my skills over decades. And I can tell you it is possible to be ‘writing fit’  – it takes time but it’s a game changer for productivity!

You may have realised there’s value in outsourcing all sorts of ‘life tasks’ to a professional – book writing is no exception.

 

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Support for writers – Why a writing coach can help

Writing is usually considered a solitary practice and there’s an unmistakable truth that sitting alone at a computer for hours is the only way to truly get those words down. But not all of us are designed for solitude and the rushing sounds of our own thoughts. It might be time to consider a writing coach.

Sometimes we need to speak out loud to drill into what we really want to say, to hear our thoughts and make sense of them, develop insights and truths in our writing that make whatever we are working on authentic and in our own voice.

Many writers seek out the support of writers’ groups, or a writerly friend, and this can be a significant act of self-care and support. But often the things we need support with as writers aren’t always clear, or aren’t always in the ‘scope of works’ of our trusted writerly friends.

When people abandon writing projects its usually or one of two reasons (sometimes it’s both).

  1. They lose confidence and tell themselves they lack the skills needed to keep going or even finish.
  2. They arrive at difficult material that is perhaps triggering, or they need help to make sense of.

This is particularly true for starting-out writers, and for people writing their own stories (memoir or autobiography).

There is a reason why writing a journal is considered an essential tool in the healing arts. The simple act of turning our swirling thoughts and timelines into words requires us to go further, dig deeper, find renewed honesty and to own our stuff.

Writing, like many other endeavours ­– creative or otherwise, cannot be taken for granted. The support of a professional can be a life-affirming, word-affirming choice that sees you to the project end with a measure of grace and perhaps even a better person for the process!

A writing coach can:

  1. Keep you accountable, and support you with check ins
  2. Provide editorial support and problem solving along the way
  3. Help you finetune your manuscript (for publication)
  4. Help you with tips for overcoming procrastination and other blocks along the way
  5. Be an important and independent sounding board for your ideas and developments
  6. and even more…

But when it comes to life story writing, a writing coach who has the appropriate training and skills can also support you on an emotional level as you process difficult memories, problematic relationships and all the other rumination that sometimes tries to derail us (hello Imposter Syndrome!).

The unique combination of writing coach for the words, but also for the emotions, is a space I have been developing for the past three decades.  And it feels like the heartland of what I am here to do. I help women (and men) tell their stories, and I do it from a place of empathy, wisdom and the belief that you have a life story that needs to be told. And I do it anywhere (virtual, face to face, hybrid) but I most love to have nature guide our way.

There’s a bunch of qualifications under my name [Grad Dip Arts (Writing), BComm (Marketing, Management), Dip Professional Writing and Editing, Dip Counselling, Dip Art Therapy, Equine Therapist] but I’ve learnt the most through lived experience and from the amazing clients that have trusted me along the way,

How can I help you? Send me an email so we can set a time for a complimentary, no obligation chat about your project and how we can work together.  I have capacity now.

Email lindy@lindyschneider.com.au

Lindy is an accredited Full member of Life Stories Australia 

 

 

 

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Meet Our Contributor – Lindy Schneider

Autumn Issue 2021 – Featuring Lindy Schneider

Yarra Valley and Ranges Country Life Magazine

Lindy Schneider is one of our well-known and much loved contributors who has been working with Yarra Valley and Ranges magazine for many, many years.

A highly respected and talented public speaker, Lindy is passionately involved with our regional community on many levels. Her words have been published widely; she’s a natural storyteller and intuitive creative, while having a background that informs her intelligence and understanding of the commercial needs of all her clients.

We love working with Lindy –  she’s hard-working, super reliable, unique in her style, and fun to be with. We are privileged to have her as part of the team. Elly Laughton asked her about her practice.

Read article here

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Why I hate marketing me

Social media’s incitement to celebrate everyone and everything is not the way for me as a solo freelancer

A little while ago, I retired one of my major clients because I wanted to step away from writing work that I knew wasn’t truly satisfying my soul needs and embrace more fully the writing that could. To create the opportunity for this to happen, I needed to first create the space.

So here I sit full of anticipation and delight at what might be, aware that attracting the right type of work is as simple and as complex as showing up and being very clear about what I will and won’t do.

But there is this little voice calling me from afar saying ‘you need to market yourself’ and it is this voice that fills me with revulsion. I can honestly say I hate marketing.

I am a person, complex and wonderful like any other. That, in this phase of my life, now 50 plus and with the sum experience of a 30 plus-year career (ironically much of it in marketing), I need to reduce myself to some sort of commodity that can be marketed is something I am finding very unpalatable.

Social media has done something equally wonderful and terrifying. The way everyday people can build an online persona is a type of freedom I couldn’t have imagined when I first started earning my own living. But this is also the problem. The persona is often another mask designed with the often not so subtle message of ‘pick me, pick me.’ I just can’t go there.

Flowing through my feed are the constructed images of ‘successful’ people telling me how wonderful their method or product is, sharing their ‘secret tactic’, convincing me  their call to action is limited and life changing, and it makes me despair. I take in the dozens of people in my feed alone who promise to share their secret sauce’ if only I register for their webinar RIGHT NOW or who in all their supposed realness do a piece to camera about themselves that is little more than yet another call to action.

I‘m sure I am not the only one whose BS radar is hyperactive.

Self-revelation seems to be the latest marketing tactic (sharing your story is fine but what is the intent?) but it’s not real honesty– it’s designed, it has a goal (usually financial), an expectation attached to it and this I think is at the core of my discomfort. The desired outcome is nothing more than a manipulation.

Build your platform, increase your likes, make videos starring yourself – these are all things we are told we must do to establish or grow our profiles. But what for the people who simply do not wish to turn their life and living into a series of posts? What about women like me who don’t want to be viewed and judged or commented on in such a public space, women (or men for that matter) who simply want to live quietly, with some sense of privacy and dignity about how much of their own personal world is offered to the public arena.

I don’t want to reduce myself to a series of dot points and marketable key points of difference. I don’t want to wake up each morning and have to think about what impressive post I can come up with today to make you all like me, or seek out what I have to offer. I don’t need to feel the adoration of like traffic to let me know I am ok today. I don’t want to treat the people I will write for one day as though those things matter to them, because I honestly believe that beyond the mediated experience of the online environment there are still people like me who value authenticity, not as a marketing touchpoint, but as a way to live held deeply in the heart.

What if we didn’t participate in all this constructed madness and the incessant need to up the ante? I have always said a real product doesn’t need to be marketed.

And I don’t think a real person needs to be either.

 

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A Suitcase of Hope

A movie made me pack my bags.

La vita e bella, January 1999. I finished one life and started another in less than a month.

I packed two pair of pants, one single breasted black jacket, one broken heart, one pair of black Italian leather boots, one red shirt, three spiral bound notebooks, and one Cesare Pavese poetry book. I barely said goodbye.

I first saw snow on that plane flight – my face pressed against the tiny oval window, the Apennines stretched out below, a wonderland in miniature.

There are two things I remember – I walked everywhere, and I wrote. More than 80,000 words of scratchy lines, blue pen against the brilliant lined white paper, page after page of exploring my inner world, while the outer world filled my heart with beauty.

On the second day in this foreign country, a man approached me. ‘Boungiorno,’ I said hesitantly. He looked familiar to me, a visceral memory from a dream a few nights earlier.

‘Piccola mia,’ he replied and suddenly my broken heart was mended and ready for new adventures.

For the next three months, I was shown la bella vita by Andrea. Quiet tucked away dinners on the foreshore of Lago di Bracciano, motorbike trips through the cobbled laneways of Rome. Secret trips to the top of the cupola at St Peters, snow covered getaways in Umbria. He cooked spaghetti and laughed at the small portions I ate as he urged me to manga. He greeted me in the morning with cornetti and baci chocolates, and covered me in kisses at the traffic lights. I studied Italian in Florence and promised myself I would never speak a word of English again. I was in love, and Italy returned my affection. At the age of 29, I was home.

When I was alone I had my notebook, and I wrote of the way Italy was showing me how to live. Every day, I recorded the tiny moments. I came to know Italy and I came to know myself, each word a tiny postcard of the soul. Andrea was a thread that bound the experience to my heart, a man who showed me deep inside the Romani way, to places the tourists don’t see. And I am grateful.

And then it was time for the story to end.

I sobbed my goodbyes on that train journey from Stazione Termini to Fiumicino airport. A kindly nonno passed me some fazzoletti and carmello (tissues and a lolly). I sobbed when I landed back in Melbourne. My Italian sojourn, the love and the lovers, a brief interlude in a life that was forever changed by Italy and her grace. I will return this year. I have been homesick for twenty years. Like Romulus and Remus, Rome is my mother. I have adopted her, and she has cradled me in memories.

I returned with three filled journals in my suitcase. My writings still await my shaping – a twenty-year love story that has no ending, and is always beginning.

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When a writer finds their voice

One of the greatest compliments I have ever received as a writer was also one of the greatest revelations.

‘I was sitting in a café, and I picked up a magazine and started reading a story about a tea sommelier, and I got about half way through and thought to myself ‘Lindy wrote this’,” said a friend to me recently.

I was unprepared for the wave of emotion that rippled through me at being seen and known that intimately. Writing is such a public display of an inner reality and when I self-critique I am quick to chastise myself for being too pedestrian.

Yet here was someone who saw into and through the words and saw the part of me, that authentic writer, that had left a trace of herself despite her own recriminations. I had written something that had written me.

It was a beautiful feeling, full of relief, and surrender.

Last year I mentored a young man through a writing project he did for his year 12 assessments. When it came to giving a presentation reflecting on his process, I found myself offering the group – quite unpreparedly – an insight into the real achievement this young man’s year had held – he had found his unique voice. I knew he was the author of his stories without needing to read a byline. He was so young, so tentative, so in need of an editor – but he had voice.

This truth is voice is not easy to master. Too often we attempt to mimic others – a bestselling author, someone we admire, someone who does not know us nor do we know them. Too often we lack confidence in our own ‘way to be with the words’ and fall into the safety net of sameness presented in writing courses and how to books. It can take years to find our writing voices, but I also think it can be a simple moment where we absolutely fall into ourselves and let our writerly way roam free in authenticity, courage and respect.

Write one million words and always sound like somebody else (often nameless) or write one word and be real. Really.

Voice is a relationship between words and rhythm and intention and energy and knowing and vocabulary and spirit and grammar and cadence and tone and presence.

Voice cannot be imitated or forced. I’m not sure we can even truly name our voice, but we can know it and allow it to live its own life through our writing – a kind of muse that brings juice to the page.

If I think about the article I wrote that was apparently so recognisable as ‘my voice’ I am immediately transported back to how I wrote that piece. I was passionately engaged in the topic, I was still humming with the delightful time I’d had interviewing the subject, and I was totally overwhelmed and in that headspace that so often starts my process that screams at me ‘you can’t do this justice’.

Voice then is my Joan of Arc, that force that rescues me and brings an aliveness to my words. I write ‘in the shape’ of this force and the words that follow are distilled from a deeper place in me than ‘thinking’ can form.

I am a voice that is the sum of my lifetime, of that which I have found precious, of words that hold meaning and music that runs underneath the madness that keeps this crazy song going. Voice is what I leave on the page, more than words – although the words I choose are most certainly essential elements in voice.

When I write in my unique voice, there seems to always be someone who is touched, someone who sees me, someone who finds their own meaning within mine. And that is the reward of writing, and why if you just do one thing to ‘be a writer’ it’s the most delicious, heart pumping, act of fortitude to simply write your voice.

 

The magazine article is ‘The True nature of Tea’ available to read in my portfolio.

©Lindy Schneider www.lindyschneider.com.au

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Eight reasons why you haven’t hired a professional writer yet (and why excuses are BS!)

You’re worried what they will think of your writing
A Professional Writer will never judge you for your writing skills, or any attempt you’ve made to get your thoughts down on paper. We applaud you. We know it’s hard. And guess what – we are inspired by the challenge your writing presents us.

You’re not sure if you need a professional? (Aunty Mavis has always been a ‘bit good’ at English)
Would you cut your own hair? Install your own power points? Fix your own brakes? Probably not. Professional skills matter, let the experts do what they do best.

You don’t know how to put in words what you want to say
Thats exactly the right reason to hire a writer. We will help you work through your random ideas and craft it into copy that sings. That’s what we do best. We help you through the confusing bit and put words to your ideas. It will be exactly what you meant to say – promise.

You think you could or should be able to do it all
Outsourcing is where it’s at. Seems like the pressure today is to be a jack of everything. Not only do you have to run your business, make your products and more, you also have to be a social media expert, a writing maven and an SEO and website tech head. It’s exhausting and you can’t possibly do everything well. So outsource your writing tasks and focus on what you do best (and enjoy most).
Busy people need support.
You can’t be all things.
You can’t.

You still think you can write it yourself
You learn to write in primary school so you should be good at writing, right? Kind of. You’re probably better than you think you are, but even so, a Professional Writer has spent extra years in education and honing their craft in addition to primary school or high school English. It’s a special range of skills and knowledge you can’t possibly be expected to know.
And how long have you been meaning to write that piece or freshen up your website? Months? I thought so.

You’re not sure if its too expensive for you
A Professional Writer will always work with you on a brief, a quote and a budget. They are the three things you need to ask for, and in doing so you’ll have control. And consider the costs of not having professional words to back you up. People leave websites just because they’ve seen a typo. People can’t get you and what you’re offering if they don’t read a clear message. It’s a distracting world out there and a Professional Writer will bring clarity, direction and focus to your words and business.

You don’t want to look silly, unprepared, and a million other ways we tell ourselves we’re not ok
We get this. It’s almost everyone’s bag. No judgement. We’re all equals.

You’ve just never done it before so you don’t know what to expect or how it rolls
The first step is a baby one – make the call or enquiry. We will figure it out. We’ll take care of you. Every writing job is different and we’ll guide you step by step.

And yes, you can get out of it. And yes you get final say on what is written.

And it will be fun!

(C)Lindy Schneider

Contact - basic

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