On Becoming a Writer (Part 2)
[Click here for Part 1]
In addition to my autobiographies, beginning in my mid-thirties and with my first major adventure travel experience (to Russia), I had started an email list entitled “Marc’s life and travels” – an “intimate journal of Marc’s life, travels, adventures, relationships, business activities, philosophies and other narcissistic ramblings.” Over the years since then, anybody I met with whom I felt any affinity I recruited to my mailing list, and eventually I developed quite a following, including people who had forgotten ever meeting me (and vice-versa) but kept track of me through my newsletter.
I got a tremendous amount of pleasure from writing it, and received a great deal of positive feedback and acknowledgement. A few angry unsubscribes as well – if a writer isn’t provocative or challenging in some way he’s not worth reading, to my mind. Eventually I had over 300 people signed-up to “Marc’s life”. I wrote about everything, including fairly intimate details of my sexual adventures, ha. How could I not, really, when my romantic and sexual adventures have been the greatest source of meaning and transformation in my life?
Anyway, “Marc’s life” has been a very profound source of fulfillment and connection to me over the years, so much so that I recommend everybody do it (create a personal newsletter). Of course, if every one I know wrote me a long travelogue of their life every month, it might become a problem (and for this reason I am very grateful to people who take the time to respond to my letters). However, I can think of at least a few dozen people (including everyone in my family, hint-hint) that I would be very happy to receive a regular newsletter from, and pretty well everyone in my life I appreciate getting the occasional “ping” (ie, “I am alive and I am thinking of you”). Writing is, at core, a very efficient means of communication – it only takes a few minutes to read and absorb a communication that might have taken the author an hour to write. It’s not a replacement for in-person meetings or telephone, of course, but it has an important role to play. I know at least one person, for example, who has created a workshop on the writing of love-letters, which he considers one of the most important and underused tools in seduction and romance.
Which brings me to another, very important point. The kind of writing that I do – personal transformational writing – requires an audience to work its magic. An audience of one, perhaps, but an audience nonetheless. It’s not really necessary to get feedback for this kind of writing to work. Feedback of course is nice, but the only thing that is truly necessary for me is to know that there is at least one person out there who has an interest and who has taken the time to read it. All of my autobiographies have gone out to 20-30 people in my life, and if it hadn’t been for that intent, I would never have bothered writing at all. I don’t care much for journal writing – I only do it now when I am bored and I have nothing else to do. There are entire schools dedicated to journal writing (see Ira Progoff “At a journal workshop”). All writing should be for publication, even if it’s only to one’s intimate circle (or perhaps for reading at the writing workshop itself). It has occurred to me to teach a course on writing one’s autobiography – now that would be a trip. They do that in Salt Lake City, I almost signed-up as a teacher when I was there.
One of my favorite sayings is from the Course in Miracles: “No one is healed alone”. Committing to paper my inner journey to share with others heals me. I hope that in some way it feeds you too, dear reader.
