Foreword
The Creative Compass
The book before you, written by Dan Millman and his daughter Sierra Prasada, a published author in her own right, shows how to develop and refine the way you think about and approach your writing, and outlines how to accomplish the goals you have set for yourself. Through a series of questions posed and well-developed answers provided, father and daughter look separately and together at what they have discovered about their own writing and the writings of others.
Much of what they suggest about how to become a better writer centers on determined, committed, and organized effort. They remind us that the quality of our daily life and action is reflected in the writing we produce.
In The Creative Compass, Dan and Sierra offer advice on all aspects of the writing life. From the first glimmerings of an idea to the completion of a polished piece; from dreams of seeing your work in print to the reality of being published; from feeling lost to finding a way — it’s all here.
Thoughtful, thorough, and practical in its application, this is an important work on the creative process, and on the craft, business, and magic of writing.
Read it through. Decide for yourself. You won’t regret it.
— Terry Brooks
Prologue
Your Story, Our Story
The only end of writing is to enable the reader
better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
– Samuel Johnson
You may not have realized it yet, but you’re a storyteller. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, whether you make films, speak to large crowds, care for children, or work at an office — every day, you swap stories with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers. Few of us would ever think to call ourselves storytellers. Yet we all take a sweet, deep pleasure in telling good stories, some of them true. Like this one:
Not so very long ago, a young girl showed her father something she’d written, a part of herself, upon which he lavished the same attention that he gave to his own published work. Even as she herself began to publish in newspapers, magazines, and books, she continued to show her writing to him. Soon she began to critique his work in turn, and mentorship evolved into a collaboration that balanced his experience and perspective with her energy and ingenuity. That collaboration led to spirited conversation about what it means to make one’s own way as a storyteller and writer, and to a partnership, as father and daughter became coauthors. In this book we share with you an adaptable approach to any creative project, grounded in a cycle of five universal stages:
Dream, Draft, Develop, Refine, and Share.
At the Dream stage, a sticky idea calls you on a quest, and you set out to slay your own creative dragons.
At the Draft stage, you produce those early layers of writing that form your first draft.
At the Develop stage, a demanding middle act, you shape, cut, and rewrite draft after draft until your sentences and paragraphs anchor a coherent series of resonant ideas.
At the Refine stage, you seek comments from readers and editors as you distill your text down to an essence in which every word counts.
At the Share stage, you choose the most appropriate mode of publication, depending on your aims and the readiness of your manuscript.
No matter your level of experience, you’ll find something about this cycle’s basic structure familiar. We’re all intuitively aware that works of invention begin with an idea and emerge from ritual and labor. Yet it remains mysterious how a finished book, for instance, could have started as a draft, or a full-length symphony from a simple melodic phrase. As members of an audience, we usually reach for words like talented, genius, or brilliant, even miraculous, to describe transformations that we can’t witness and don’t understand. But the key to such transformation lies in a dynamic attitude toward dreaming, a layered approach to drafting, and, most of all, in distinguishing the fourth stage, Refine, from the third, which revolves around what we call development.
The Develop stage is the middle act in a cycle that repeats with each project and that you may return to more than once before you complete each project, like a wheel within a wheel. Development is where the magic happens and, because we’re not magicians, we have no qualms about sharing the secrets of our trade with you. It’s your trade as well, after all.
As you read on, you’ll learn how to conceive, begin, and stick with exciting new projects. You’ll find your way in conversation with yourself, fellow writers, early readers, characters, and the world at large. It won’t be one so-called best way, and most likely not the way you first seized upon, but rather the way that you determine, over time and trial, best serves you and your creative work.
As you read on, you’ll dream up new ways to develop both your work and yourself. You’ll learn how to surmount obstacles, on and off the page, by drawing upon what we call Master Metaphors, experiences that can make you believe in your own untapped potential.
Woodrow Wilson once said, “I use not only all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” After his example, we supplement our own experience with sage advice from Chinua Achebe, Isaac Asimov, Terry Brooks, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Albert Einstein, EM. Forster, Marilyn French, Gabriel García Márquez, Elizabeth Gilbert, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Carl Jung, Mary Karr, Rudyard Kipling, Madeleine L’Engle, Laila Lalami, John le Carré, Spike Lee, David Morrell, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Constantin Stanislavski, John Steinbeck, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Heaton Vorse, and many more.
It’s no accident that the experiences of so many writers and thinkers resonate with the model presented here — we’ve identified and described the five stages rather than invented them. These stages also captured our own process in writing this book, even if it’s a guide to story and only partly a story itself. When it comes to process, the five stages apply equally to narrative and expository writing. In writing about story craft, we articulate and explore a set of foundational values with wide relevance, including purpose, clarity, coherence, brevity, accuracy, sensitivity, and ethics.
Whatever wisdom we ourselves have to share comes directly from what Socrates might have called the “examined life” — in select chapters, we include personal stories and anecdotes, showing how our approaches have evolved and continue to do so. Over the years, we’ve written novels, nonfiction books, works of memoir, and articles for print and the web. We’ve edited manuscripts in many genres and taught writing seminars and memoir classes. And we’ve also achieved mastery in seemingly unrelated fields — one of us is a former world champion gymnast, and the other is fluent in Arabic — which provides us each with our own Master Metaphor, as well as insights into the power of process, the value of effort over time, and the essential interconnectedness of creative disciplines.
We draw upon our own experience to offer practical, concrete advice on writing, editing, and twenty-first-century publishing. You can benefit from this counsel regardless of whether you approach our shared practice as a beloved pastime or seek a fulfilling career.
In working together on this book, we honored the part of writing that is inherently collaborative. We drafted chapters individually. Then we edited each other’s work to create a single voice, one that invokes that internal voice we’ve come to value whenever we seek guidance or encouragement. In the pages of this book, you’ll hear that voice calling to you to write your own way from inspiration to publication. We wish you good journeys.
Writing Your Way – from Inspiration to Publication
This book, written by father-daughter co-authors, reveals the five universal stages to creative mastery to guide you on the writer’s path. For writers, storytellers and other innovators, this book answers nearly any question you may have about the process. It will help you to: pursue ideas with which you strongly connect; learn what works best for you; overcome obstacles including doubt and anxiety; appreciate drafts as layers leading to quality craft; and find, in your practice, a metaphor that will enrich your life.
Chapters include: The Cycles and Layers of Learning; Sweat Trumps Talent; Never Surrender; The Master Metaphor; When the World Becomes Your Teacher, and much more.
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About Sierra Prasada
The Creative Compass: An Introduction:
Interview with the co-authors: