Lighting the Lamp

As writers, we have more experience in pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps than most professions. We work alone, paid very little (or nothing), trying to stamp our impression of the world around us into the fabric of that world.

Often there's no one around to field ideas. There may be community, but it's usually after the fact. You may take your laptop and meet a friend at the diner for a writing session, but when the waitress brings your coffee and the computers are warmed up, it's just you and the page.

It wouldn't matter if there were fifteen people sitting across from you. When you write, you write alone.

All that solitude sometimes causes your good writing energy to spiral down into a very dark place. Depression. Isolation. Fear. Doubt. Things that eat away at good energy, your good health, confidence, well-being.

When that happens, you can cope with it by writing it out of your way with an exercise I call Lighting the Lamp. The term comes from a Hindu prayer, which translated means “I salute the One who is the lamplight, that brings auspiciousness, prosperity, good health, abundance of wealth, and the destruction of the intellect's enemy.”

Kind of a mouthful, isn't it? Which is why I call it Lighting the Lamp. It's a great example of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

If you're in need of this exercise, it's probably because you're not writing well today (or not writing at all). If you are in mid-page, put aside the day's writing work and take out a fresh sheet of paper. At the top of it, write the following:

I am a great writer. Through my words I share my wisdom.

You may feel dumb writing it. Embarrassed. Right now you don't feel like a great anything – certainly not a great writer. Go ahead and write it down. What have you got to lose? Nobody's going to see it but you.

Next, write Now, in this moment, I am grateful for ____ .

Write down five things you're glad you have. It doesn't matter what they are. Your health. Your kids. Your cat. A chocolate fudge brownie with whipped cream on top. A freshly sharpened #2 pencil. Whatever.

No matter how glum and hopeless you feel, you will think of five things. If you don't, email me. I'll help you think of five things.

Feeling dumb now? Thinking to yourself, “you've got to be kidding me – I thought you were a writing mentor, not some half-baked new age clown.”

Writing is living. Write it down. No one will see it but you.

It may be more readily apparent to fiction writers, but I'm willing to bet a lot of full-time, eight-hour-a-day worldbuilders haven't thought of it. Writers develop an odd tunnel-vision when it comes to the act of writing, its potential in their lives, and its uses outside of storytelling.

Simply put: Writing it makes it real.

Surprised? We do it all the time. It's our stock and trade. We turn the blank page into a spacecraft filled with exotic aliens, a stagecoach hurtling along a prairie track, a surreptitious meeting between our heroine and her doomed lover.

We create the scene of a murder and turn our reader into a detective, sweeping the crime scene for clues. We unleash a monster who exists in only two dimensions, and our dismayed, very three-dimensional reader sleeps with the lights on, half-convinced the monster will escape the page and stalk him in reality.

Your imagination has power. Writing transfers this power into reality. Try the exercise. If you're having a bad week, do it every morning for the next week. Takes five minutes.

I am a great writer. Through my words I share my wisdom. It doesn't matter if you don't believe it at first. Written down, it becomes an affirmation – something that holds more truth the more you repeat it. If it doesn't work the first day, do it again the second day. And again the third day.

The second part of the exercise is about perspective, and a reminder that if you look at a glass of water, you decide if the glass is half-empty or half-full. If you have five things to be grateful for, today isn't as bad as it seems.

There will be some writers out there who think this sounds like a bunch of silly, mystical, power-crystal-clutching hooey. Until very recently, I would have been in that group myself. Yet some of the world's most respected philosophers have embraced it. Rene Descartes argued that nothing exists outside of your own experience, a rather more extreme version of imagining becoming real. As a philosophy student, I certainly thought that idea was ridiculous – even as I was proving its validity in my daily writing.

It came down to this: I had a bad week and I tried it. Two days later I felt better and got back to work. That's the best recommendation I can give: I tried it, and it worked for me.

If it doesn't work for you, nothing's lost for the attempt. And I'm willing to bet it will work. It has worked for a lot of respected, highly creative people, including Jack Canfield, the guy behind the insanely popular Chicken Soup books.

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