WRITING A BOOK FROM THE DEEPER SELF — A SOULFUL PROCESS

Chaotic times are frequently an intrinsic opening to a new creation of some kind. Yes, chaos is the parent of a more cohesive form, opening a door into something else you may find you want.

When Chaos Contains the Seeds of Creativity

I know you know we are living in chaotic times, and it may well have affected your own life, and/or the lives of people you know and care about. The thing about chaotic times is that you can feel awash in the swirl, or muscle-achey tired from your efforts to hold on tight.

One thing you may not currently realize about chaotic times is that they are intrinsically an opening to a new creation of some kind. Yes, chaos is the parent of a more cohesive form.

Or it can be. One can get mired in the chaos, pulled this way and that, susceptible to its lure of drama, and then lose track of who one is and is becoming. In that kind of case, chaos is just chaos.

But this “parent of form” thing is real. Creative chaos, as I like to think of it, upends your world (or some portion of it) as you knew it, opening a door into something else. The spiritual view, as I perceive it, is that this “something else” can be something wonderful, and bigger than you would have known to ask for — almost as big as your real nature, itself.

I once read a book by a researcher who wanted to understand what was behind the most creative periods in history — the ancient Greek plethora of wisdom figures and their legacies, the artists of the Renaissance, even the early years of our own Internet culture. In his passion to find out, this researcher traveled to Greece to talk with people, to Italy to learn more closely about the era that produced Michelangelo and DaVinci and so many more brilliant artists, and elsewhere as well.

Do you know what he found out?

All these creatively productive eras were not, as one might have thought, smooth-sailing times, where artists and philosophers and inventors and the like had the time and space and material comfort to wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “Gee, what would I like to accomplish today? I know, I’ll do a painting, and then I’ll have breakfast, and then I’ll go for a walk, and then I’ll sit outdoors with a friend in the pastoral loveliness and have a chat.” No, they lived in tumultuous times, as we do. The chaos of their times brought forth, somehow, a tidal wave of creativity that we are still the heirs to.

I’m starting to believe that if we allow our innate creativity to have a place, a voice, in our lives — and perhaps even in our work — this makes use of the element of chaos that begins the formation of life. I’m thinking of the first nine verses of Genesis in the Old Testament (how much more basic can you get than that?), where it says: “In the beginning….”

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

Writing a book may begin in chaos but as the author feels into it, it begins to take form. illustration by naomi rose.

Whatever your religious beliefs, this is a prototype explanation of how chaos becomes distinct as form — as distinct, separated form deriving from One Source. This kind of process takes place, to some extent, every time a human being is inspired to create something. First there is the “Nothing” . . . then something wants to arise out of that. What is it that wants to arise? Often, you don’t initially know. A desire comes that calls attention to itself. It could ask to be this, it could ask to be that.

It’s like this when the desire to write a book inserts itself into a person’s perhaps otherwise humming-along life. Chaos looms. “What would it mean to write a book?” “A book about what?” What if I’m not equipped, aren’t ready, aren’t ‘writerly’ enough to be an ‘author’?” And so on. The creative impulse has for the moment thrown what may have been an ordinary, good-enough life into chaos. Because the seed has been planted. Even if it’s not watered by your love and care and contemplation and action, it’s still in there somewhere.

I find it helpful to distinguish between “chaos” (as in “Why did this ##@!!&!! chaos have to happen??”) and “creative chaos.” It reminds me that there may be a purpose behind what I think of as unanticipated change and loss and uncertainty. And this kind of chaos doesn’t necessarily need to take place on a huge scale. It can be something as ordinary as a shift in the nature of one’s work.

This cycles back to what I said in the beginning about why I’ve been so long in sending out a newsletter. Sometime early last spring, I knew in my heart that I needed to shift my focus in my work to some degree. I felt the call to downscale my tried-and-true, decades-long work as an editor, and upscale my focus on the creative process (the Book Development consultations, as well as coming up with products supporting the creative process). I had been an editor for over 40 years, and it was time to wind it down. I had imagined this would be a simple thing — just do more of the work I love, the Book Development & Creative Midwifery, where I get to sit with people directly and help them birth the books of their heart. But it was far from simple.

In addition to finishing up projects that lasted far longer than expected (I didn’t want to leave any editing clients in the lurch), the space that opened up which previously had been filled by editing projects was not, immediately, a new stage festooned with banners and balloons. It was swirly, unclear — chaos!

It can be like that. You say “No” to what no longer fits, and the specifics of the “Yes” can take time to reveal themselves. Then the self-doubts have room to surface: “What were you thinking?” “You already had something good going — what are you planning to do now? Exactly what are your plans? Are you sure you haven’t just gone and made a big mistake? And at your age, too!”

This chaotic phase felt like it lasted quite a while, (though in linear time, it was actually kind of brief). But it’s in that phase — the “not that, but then what?” phase of transition, of not yet knowing, of unmistakable discomfort and uncertainty — that the formless begins to gradually take form. Gradually, the light is separated from the darkness, and what is here to be known can be seen. It takes faith, and persistence, and I suppose (at least in my case) the ability to witness the negativity of the inner critic as it jumps in to “protect” you and not fall under its familiar spell, and to trust that something in you is being born out of the chaos. Something that will show itself to you enough to recognize as a new creation asking you to be its parent, its instrument, its voice.

Once this is recognized, things begin to change. There is still work to do, bringing this what-wants-to-be-known into a form that’s consonant with who you are and what you value and are capable of. But the swirly uncertainty of the chaos begins to resolve into something you love, something that does get you out of bed in the morning to bring it into form in a way that only you can.

All this that I’ve said here is from my own experience and observation — of myself, and also of my clients, the trajectory of creation they travel when they say “Yes” to birthing the book inside them.

But it’s also the intrinsic trajectory of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — where the impulse to create something (a book, a situation, a relationship, a healing, whatever) starts from above, from the formless Source, and makes its way down the “tree” (the spheres of manifestation, or sephirot) until the idea, the desire, the wish has been materialized. What I mean is, I may have discovered some of this on my own, but I didn’t make it up. It exists as the ground of the way the Universe works. And we are its heirs and its instruments.

So to sum up what the recent chaos has brought me to:

Remodeling the House

I was watching a webinar on workbooks (“Churn it out in a week! Make big bucks!” the presenter promised), and I thought, “I could do that!” After all, I needed a focus to replace editing, my fallen-away sure thing. And I was already in the process of writing a book about writing a book (yes, another one in my “Creative Process” series), called Growing Your Book by Listening to What’s Inside You: A Writing from the Deeper Self Approach. It was still in progress when the webinar promised me quick, remunerative rewards, but I thought perhaps I might take a single chapter from this book and turn it into a workbook.

The chapter that attracted my notice was a brief one I had written on how you can write a book without making an outline. I wrote it after observing how I actually had gone about writing that very book — by paying attention to what gave itself to me, and inserting a more logical development afterwards. “It should be simple to expand it and turn it into a workbook,” I thought.

But what was intended to be a brief workbook grew into an actual full book, of which the workbook was simply a part. I hadn’t planned to make this a book, but as I wrote, it seemed to address an obvious need. There was context to provide, and examples to give, and even visual illustrations to include (pairing words with images feels so much more complete, to me), before the workbook really made sense and supplied encouraging, creative support to its readers.

As for the “churn it out in a week” part, well, much as I would have wished it, that didn’t seem to match my nature. I needed to go deeper to mine the truly inspirational gifts; I needed to give myself the time to create a work that felt resonant and whole, distilled into a fragrance, with nothing essential left out. It took me about two months of full-on dedication to put this simple book together. Then it took more time for the manuscript to be typeset and set up for print and ebook formats, and so on.

But the book that came out of this felt worth it to me. An Organic Approach to Structuring Your Book: A Right-Brained Alternative to Outlines (Workbook Included) is everything I wish I’d had back in college and graduate school and during parts of my career when I was forcing myself to write outlines because “that’s what you have to do to write a work, right?”

Perhaps naively, I had thought getting An Organic Approach into print and ebook would be the end-point. But chaos still shadowed cloudily in the foreground. I hadn’t fully realized all the background things that would need to be generated or revamped in order to get the word out about this book properly.

Creating a landing page for the book.
Revising my Writing from the Deeper Self website to reflect what my work looks like and what I do, for whom, now.
Setting up an ecommerce store on my Rose Press website.
Setting up an account here on Substack (which I heard such great things about), where my newsletters will now be featured.
Hiring out those portions of what needed doing that I could never do in a thousand years (e.g., coding), or that even a die-hard DIY like me had to admit someone else could do quicker and better. Figuring out what was needed, and who could do make things work, and finding these people.

Chaos, once again. Seemingly.

But maybe not only that.

At some point, I began to think of my in-process situation as a house I was remodeling — changing the floor plan in some ways, adding on extensions, re-roofing, new windows, solar panels, etc. I spent time grumping inside about all those moving parts (the websites, the landing page, the newsletter venue setup, the umpteen thousand picky details), wishing I could just let people know about my books and my work with clients without having to do so much preparation to come out with it. Until all these moving parts began to resolve in my mind into a “house” I was remodeling that would be sustaining and welcoming for me and my visitors.

writing a book can be a lot like remodeling a house. you’re in the midst of all the messiness, and wonder if it will ever be inhabitable. but if you stay the course, it will.

This helpful metaphor calmed my frayed nerves, and I began to trust that the house of my work would somehow, sometime come together. When I found myself griping about the need to find a (metaphorical) spot to sit and eat a (metaphorical) sandwich in the middle of the racket of the new walls going up, I would try to remember the purpose of the remodeling, and how wonderful it would be to reside in the more spacious, beautiful, welcoming new place. And to welcome people in! People I already knew, and also people I didn’t yet know but would. There would be a beautiful door (I trusted), with faceted clear glass that refracted the light. I would open this door to welcome visitors into my remodeled house of work, where they would feel comfortable and I would feel at-home enough to easily midwife their creative chaos into a beautiful, meaningful form.

Your Creation(s)

So. Maybe this will speak to you in some way. Maybe starting to see the chaos in your life (if such there may be) as an invitation to create form from the chaos will shift your perspective, and your willingness to find and shape what wants to be known that can be created through you alone.

woman writing radiantly. Illustration by naomi rose.

This creation can take nearly infinite forms. It could be a relationship. It could be a new way of working. It could be writing a book. If writing a book is the case for you (whether it’s currently an intention or simply a wish), I’d love to be of service. You can amble through my website, www.naomirose.net, and see if what’s there speaks to your need and desire in encouraging ways.

Another simple, low-cost way to step into this desire is to work with the book I mentioned, An Organic Approach to Structuring Your Book: A Right-Brained Alternative to Outlines (Workbook Included). It’s truly helpful to know that you don’t have to come up with a traditional outline in order to flesh out a book that both comes from you and speaks to you. This alternative works with your own creative process. You can find out more about it here.

May you hold chaos as a potential precursor of creation, and may you create in trust and joy,

INSPIRED TO WRITE YOUR BOOK?
BUT DON’T WANT TO DO IT ALL ALONE?

NAOMI ROSE, BOOK COACH / BOOK DEVELOPER & CREATIVE MIDWIFE, WELCOMES YOUR INQUIRIES AND OFFERS A GIFT SESSION

I help people who value the inner life write the book of their heart.

Together, we listen out what's there wanting to be written. And we discover your natural ways of creating, so you can be even more of yourself) in the process.

Because you are essential to the writing of your book.

And only you can do it.

As the creator of the "Writing from the Deeper Self" process, with over 30 years in the publications field, I have worked with many wonderful authors (often, first-time authors) whose books are now in print. I also provide help with self-publishing.