Writing

Unlocking Potential: Interview #1

Garth Beyer

I get a lot of people telling me that I inspire them, that they like the way I think and the status-quo-breaking ideas I come up with and test. I admire that. It’s important to note that the motivation I get to inspire other people comes from being inspired myself, from seeing extraordinary potential in people who lose themselves in creativity and from the challenge I give myself to help these artists as much as possible.

With this now in mind, I will be showcasing a small handful of interviews over the next few weeks. These people are artists that I have kept very little touch with, in fact, I may not have talked to them in years until I messaged them recently inquiring if they would participate in an interview. These are noteworthy people, people whom I noticed there to be potential that I would hope to be cracked open all the way. So with that, I am handing you the hammer, the ability to connect, learn from, enjoy, and inspire these people.

Interview: Rose Kendall

The first person who’s interview I will be sharing is Rose Kendall. I met Rose in a Poetry 101 class over two years ago, never really talked in class other than when there were class discussions, and I still remember the passion she poured into her poetry. It’s easy to standout in class by dressing uniquely, being pretty and always participating. It’s not however, easy to standout in poetry. Rose does this and I hope you enjoy the following interview. Feel free to leave a note in the comments section or add Rose on Facebook.

Q: Now, I know your passion is writing. What type of writing do you love most and why?

My favorite type of writing is poetry. I love all types of writing, but poetry speaks the most to me because on one level it is trying to compact so many different emotions and thoughts into one small space, but on another level it can bring so many different ideas and concepts to the table in the subtle meanings of line breaks and punctuation. While I do believe that fiction also has a tendency to be descriptive, poetry is tantalizing because to me personally it propels the imagination like a movie, with the possibility of going in so many different directions.

Q: What gets you through the hard times of writing (depleted inspiration, writers block, time, emotion, etc)?

Listening to good music (I usually pick Sia, Damien Rice, Stateless, Florence + the Machine, and David Gray), closing my eyes, and thinking about what exactly the message is that I want to give off. Then I can usually come up with images that accompany that message. Most times it’s a good start.

Q: If you had to make your own writing prompt, what would it be?

It would be to take a piece of paper, fold it in half, and write on one side a list of nouns that are very common (like clouds, or sun) and on the other side list five adjectives you would never think to use to describe the noun. You will be challenged in so many ways you never thought were possible

Q: What do you want your legacy to be?

I want to be able to share with the world the sadness and anger I feel at the horrifying things that are occurring on a daily basis all over the world. As a society, I feel there are so many topics we are afraid to talk about for various reasons, so we sweep them under the rug (whether conscientiously or not) and choose to avoid them. Yes, they are hard topics, but if we are not made aware of them we will not be able to appropriate the change needed to stop these crimes from happening.

Therefore, I hope to shock my audience enough that they can’t decide if they want to get out of their chair and leave when I’m reading to them, or if they want to stay and consider what is really happening in the world. I would love to be able to travel around the globe and present to large audience my heart and my passion. I also want to continue to become published, and maybe one day be able to publish a whole book of poems.

Q: What determines a successful writing day?

A successful writing day usually is accompanied by a thought or an idea taking form into a poem, but very successful if a whole poem (or more than one) is written.

Q: Take me through a though process of a poem. Do you plan it out? Relate it to your life? Free write?

When I’m writing a poem I generally pick a topic I feel strongly about and concentrate on how I feel as well as why I feel that way. Once I come up with that, generally I will “see” what I want to write in my head. It’s like a movie, and at the risk of sounding like a schizophrenic, I have seen several of my characters chatting with me at the edge of the bed. Maybe less chatting and more just standing there and telepathically telling me their story. Either way once their story is being told it kind of just flows out. Some stories are harder than others, but most times I listen to a lot of calming or inspiring music to try to urge them to tell me. Sometimes when that doesn’t work, lines of poems come to me when I’m trying my hardest to sleep.

Q: What is the most helpful advice you have been given?

Keep a journal of all of the compliments and accomplishments I have made in writing. When I feel like I’m not a good enough writer, or I’m having a dry spell, I read them to remind myself how much I have accomplished. Also, keeping old poetry no matter how bad it is shows to me how far I have come.

Q: What advice would you give to other writers?

Do not worry about what one person thinks about your poetry. There will always be that one person (or a group of people) who are offended by what you write or think it’s no good. Keep working on your goals, and you can accomplish anything. Do not be afraid to have other people give you constructive criticism, it can make you grow in ways you never imagined.

Q: Would you care to share a poem?

After tonight
she’ll never ever again
have to wonder
what it feels like
to try to jump over a barbed wire fence,
catch her foot,
and slam her throat
into the wire
–it’s like climbing to the top
tippy top
of a tree,
* snap *
that first breath
you suck in after collapsing
back first, lungs turning black—
only his weapons are his words
and last night he decided
to see how many it took
before they wrapped around her neck
like his thumbs
squeezing
tightening
thrusting
until she’s one breath away
from dying.

and then he lets go.

She sees herself in the reflection
of the spit he sprays across
her face
the growl that echoes deep in the caves
of his lungs
and she remembers
how beautiful she once was
before the cancer
of the vacuum of his world
started eating away at her face
formed valleys and canyons
that were never there in her youth
even though she’s only 29.

when i first met her
she was perched on
the windowsill of my breaking heart
trying to kick her way
into the bullet-proof glass
surrounding my hope
and complicated things
like how I felt seeing
her teeth sprawled
across the living room floor
after last night’s fight
came too close
to leaving too much proof
so she lies
tells her friends that the dog
pulled her up the stairs and she tripped
(which dog she does not clarify).

but i can feel her,
see her floating nightgown
near the ocean on the edge of my bed
tangerine sunrises
screaming “helpme”
because even though
he’s a vacuum
trying to rid her of herself
of the filth she carries around
in the form of personality
she’s stronger than the marble
statue he wants to turn her into
and her beauty
is a cool breeze in the desert

he does not know how
to appreciate her love.

they always taught him
“be stronger than your fist”
but his fists are like concrete
and his words are like
espestice
eating away
at her lungs
liquid drowning her
under the tide he confuses
with affection.

so i pull her into my bed
twist her hair around my fingers
and show her
what a field of roses
feels like when it’s growing
just beneath your breastbone
and she’s blooming

i know i imagine
what her love would look like
as a photo on my mantle
–my prized wife
because she’s too beautiful
to be a trophy
she deserves to shine
like the sun.

so after tonight
i’m going to take her hand
twist out the fear
gently
and carry her
to the palace
she deserves.

and if he shows up
at my door
looking for her
i’ll blow his fucking head off.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Stay Positive & Poetic In Your Own Way

Garth E. Beyer

The Writer’s Legacy

Garth Beyer

J.K Rowling is legendary. She is legendary  not just for Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, but for six other Harry Potter books and one unrelated new book this Summer. 

If you read the Harry Potter series, you know Voldemort had his soul torn into seven different pieces. Those seven pieces were part of him. Likewise, the seven books are a part of Rowling and in essence, it is those seven pieces that turned Voldemort and Rowling into a legend.

Does Rowling need to write another book? Of course not. She’s set. The fact she is writing another defines what it means to be a writer. Being a writer doesn’t mean you work hard to produce one book and win big on that one book.

Rowling couldn’t have done it with just one Harry Potter book, there’s no legacy in that, no passion. It would just have been a  book that she wrote and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if you have a book inside you anymore. One book doesn’t cut it, one book doesn’t make you an income you can live off of the rest of your life and one book definitely does not create a legacy.

Every legendary writer you can think of has published more than one book, has written more than one essay, has bled more than one poem. Writing a book doesn’t make you a writer, writing a book is average, millions of people do it. Very few write seven like Rowling, 40+ like Stephen King or have more than 1,000 published like L Ron Hubbard.

There is a highlight to reaching this realization. It makes writing that first book easier. See, too many people spend thousands of hours on their first book hoping to make it big. They spend more time editing than they do learning how to write better when learning how to write better is much more important because the more you write, the less you will need to edit. The less you need to edit, the more you can write and the more you can write, the more books you can have written.

Rowling, King, and Hubbard published a lot of work before their novels hit the status of legendary. They wrote endlessly and everything they started making was ugly until they made so much ugliness that it became beautiful and eventually legendary.

Having a book inside you and wanting to be a legendary writer are two different things. Unless of course, every time you vomit that book inside you, another takes its place.

 

Stay Positive & Stick Your Fingers Down Your Throat If You Have To

(just get that first book out and see if another takes its place)

Garth E. Beyer

The Best Time To Post Your Blog Articles

Garth Beyer

Is immediately.

You aren’t the best blogger, neither am I, no one is. Even if you post 5,000 articles in two years, you can still be better, learn more and grow further. You learn by doing, by putting yourself (in this case, your article) out there. Post your blog articles immediately so you are forced to work on more to post and thus can continue growing and learning quicker.

Even more importantly, you need to be producing a lot more articles than you think. There needs to be enough ideas and stories to populate your blog without the need to schedule one a day for the next 2 months.

After all, how could you do that to your readers? How can you deprive them of valuable information, how can you make them wait for something that could change their lives, of something that somebody may need now, not 2 months from now.

The days in which you could become popular with one single post are over. Before, you could follow your audience closely enough to know exactly when to post a particular piece of information. Now, you post as much as you can because there is always someone somewhere looking for the answer you have.

 

Stay Positive & Your Readers Don’t Need To Wait For You, They Will Search For The Answer Somewhere Else. Will You Have Your Article Posted First?

Garth E. Beyer

“And I Thought About You”

Garth Beyer
I like to leave an artistic impression

Lately, if you have noticed, I have been on a long riff about how information is being shared. After months of observance, I had the experience that gave me the ultimate understanding. I owe this post to every single persons experience because you have had it hundreds of times but specifically this post is the story of mine that happened to me a few days ago. I sent a link with the words “and I thought about you”.

A couple of times a week I stop by MentalFloss. I clicked a post about banana art and thought about my brother who refuses to accept he’s an artist because of what he would have to give up (his bad habits) to have his dream. I saw the bananas and had to share it with someone, someone special, someone whom I thought about immediately after seeing the bananas.

That’s the aim of content isn’t it? Or at least, it’s supposed to be the aim. Great content does good to one person but can only change the world if it’s shared with everyone on it. Whether changing the world is done through banana art or any of the billions of artistic niches, it has to be shared. To be shared, you must have the reader or viewer think of those five words.

Those five words are the most powerful words in the world because they employ action. The moment a person thinks about someone else after reading or viewing some form of content, they are held accountable to share it with that person.

Thinking about it again, this happened the other month when I sent a picture of this tiger to my friend whose favorite animal is a Tiger.

Rawr

As a writer and creator of valuable content, the aim of having it shared is not based off the most Tweets, the most “likes” or the most reblogs. While the content can be shared with thousands of people this way, the connection of the shared knowledge is void of character, void of passion, void of care. The aim of providing invaluable content is to fit into someones worldview and you can only do so when you say or type those 5 words.

 

Stay Positive & I Wrote This Because I Thought About You

Garth E. Beyer

The Difference Between Being Smart and Bullshitting A Paper

Garth Beyer

I have written a substantial amount of papers and reports throughout my educational career. The majority of which were written the night before or the day it was due. My reasoning is explained here. Besides implementing the Pareto principle, doing things near the last-minute is one of my talents. I work very well under stress.

As a result for producing A+ papers right before they were due, I was labeled the King of Bullshitting Papers.

The title is far from accurate so it’s time people understand the different types of smart people that school churns out.  I am one of three types of scholars. Can you pick which one you are most like?

1. The Valedictorian: Reads the entire book, takes notes, reviews the book again and then writes the report.

2. The Bullshitter: Reads a review of the book online and adds unrelated information into the report as a filler.

3.The Unnoticed Genius: Scans the entire book and takes the most important parts and writes a report based on the important factors, previously learned content and personal experience.

If you are a Valedictorian, you are the best at following orders, listening to directions, and having zero creativity. The Bullshitter of course, may not even read a review of the book. It’s likely that the bullshitter just reads the back of the book or only the introduction. The last type of smart person is the one most wrongly assumed as being the Bullshitter. The Unnoticed Genius takes the core of both the Valedictorian and the Bullshitter, squishes them together and with a bit of creativity, forms art.

Understand that knowing an idea and elaborating on it quickly, based off of both research and experience, is not bullshitting. Trying to act like you know the idea and pretending you are expert enough to elaborate on it – that is bullshitting.

 

Stay Positive & Remember Who You Mistakenly Call King Of Bullshitting, They’re The Ones Who Are Going Far In Life

Garth E. Beyer

 

Writing Games w/ Life Lessons

Garth Beyer
Guess Who Is In Control: You or The Pencil?

Success is really what you call “Mastered Creativity”. What you will find below are some constructed writing challenges and exercises to push your creativity.  They are formed in a way to apply practice to parts of writing (and thinking) you have rarely practiced before. The goal is to get your creative mind to push limits, stretch its imagination and to give it a game to play.

To have an open and expanded mind that is capable of using objects, sounds, movements, etc., and turn them into something solid and applicable is exactly what the most successful creators do. So why not start with the basics – Creative Writing. You might just realize that there are some life lessons to be learned from the writing exercises.

1. Newspaper Headline: I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading all the negativity in the newspaper. Old Zig Ziglar always said that the reason foreigners can come to America and become millionaires within a year is that they can’t read all the negativity in the newspaper. For this challenge, write your own headline article for the newspaper and share what you think is important enough for all to know. Lesson: Make sure the positive is what remains on the front page. Focus on the good, the happy, the love and remember to share it with everyone. Put all of the negativity in the obituary section.

2. Oddvertisement: You have seen great advertisements that may have even gotten you to buy something, but you have also seen terrible ads that feel like a continuous prod in the ribs. Advertisements are only fun when you see an advertisement for something odd. That’s why I call it an Oddvertisement. Open up your pantry or closet and dig for something in the far back that never gets used. Now it’s time to sell it. Write an oddvertisement that is creative and encouraging enough for someone to consider buying it. Lesson: Anyone can make a sale, but only the creative make a living off of it. There is always a different way to look at things, you just have to have the right mindset.

3. MadLib Promotion: While MadLibs are extremely fun. The joy can be even more fruitful when you are the one who created the MadLib for someone else to complete. Lesson: Challenge others by giving them the authority to choose what word goes in a certain spot.

4. Word Of The Day Stories: Dictionary.com has a Word of The Day every day. For a beginner writer, try freewriting and using the words from the last seven days. For a more expert writer, create a story using all of last months words. To take it a step further, you can even start your story by using the time and setting of  the actual month that you are using the new words from. Lesson: Time really does go by quickly, yet it’s still possible to learn something new everyday and apply it to your life.

5. Improv Writing: Improv, Improv Character Building, Improv-ing Writing Skills  Lesson: People-observation skills and the ability to make a correct judgement can be critical in some situations. In others, it’s necessary to keep an open mind about a person since truly, you don’t know where they come from, what they are thinking or where they want to go in life.

6. Who’s Quote Is It Anyway?: Have a list of famous quotes you absolutely love? Create a story that implements them word by word, as the theme, or by using your own derivative of the meaning. Give the quote an all new definition and background. Who knows, if you switch it up enough, you just might be quoted for it. Lesson: Emulating The Successful Through Quotes.

7. Poetry Walk Or Meditation. While walking and becoming aware of all that is around you, carry a journal and write down notes and ideas to create a poem from. Lesson: Living in the moment and remaining aware.

8.  Connect-The-Sentences: Either pull random sentences from different books or use sentences you have recently heard someone say. Make three columns and in the first and third, write down the sentences that you gathered. The middle column is for you to write your own sentence that can connect the first and third sentences. The more challenging you want it, the more columns you can add, making every other column blank. Lesson: To achieve anything in life from where you are, you have to create a bridge. There is never skipping steps. You can’t just skip the middle column of this writing game or skip the work you need to do to get to where you want to be in life. It’s also great to realize that you can make the bridge as interesting and be as creative as possible.

9. Word Jump. While freewriting, start every sentence with the word that you blindly land your finger on in a book or newspaper. Lesson: You never know what’s going to pop up in your life to knock you off track. Are you creative enough to adapt and overcome?

10. Guest Post: Instead of getting a guest to write a blog post for you, you write it. Open up the post like you normally would on a  subject of your choice (preferably controversial, but it doesn’t need to be). Then introduce your guest that will be writing a post on the subject (Create an alias for yourself). Now begin writing from a different perspective, as the guest blogger. Lesson: Getting different perspectives.

11. Word Play: Write a poem with word play… wait, weight, waste, waist, hole, whole. Lesson: Simply just fun!

12. I Write Dead People: Open up a newspaper to the Obituary section and write a story about how a person died. Lesson: Makes you happy to be alive doesn’t it? Life’s too short to not be creative.

13. Telephone Book Tale: Open to a random page of your yellow book, placing your finger on a part of the page and using what is written in that ad, put it in your story. Did your finger lie on a Muffler shop? Has there been a recent murder there? Was all that was left at the scene a piece of paper and the phone number which has been disconnected? Big yellow phone books don’t do any good unless you can write a story from them. Lesson: Nothing is ever as it seems.

14. Where Do You WANT To See Yourself In 5 Years?: Simple as that. Write every detail, every dream come true, every aspect of the life you want. Get crazy with it! So many people will ask you this throughout your life. Create an answer that will blow them away.

 

Stay Positive & Then Follow Through To Make That 5th Year Come True

Garth E. Beyer

So, You Want To Start Blogging Pt. 2

Garth Beyer
What Are You Waiting For?

The one piece of advice that most people give about starting a blog is to find your niche and then start writing all the content you can about it.

Find Your Niche

Write To Find Your Niche

What remains unseen in some of the most popular blogs that are written on a specific subject is the first or second post that was ever written on that blog. If you go to the back of Shel Israel’s posts you will find that before he began zoning in on his passion (Social Media), he had a blog where he covered everything that entered his mind. He started by writing on every idea that went through his brain and put it on his first blog, RedCouch before he truly discovered his niche and created his current website.

Tim Ferriss had a similar situation. What you see now is his 4 hour work week blog, but if you go to the last page you will find his reminder that you can catch older content on his previous blog Tim Ferriss: The Human Experiment Blog

This is nearly everywhere, you just don’t see it because it is rare that you go to the last page of any blog. Many”famous” bloggers such as Shel or Tim, keep their old blogs because it was their journey to finding their passion. It may be for you too. Then again, other well-known blogs choose to delete their old scribblings because they only want to be known for their niche content and respected for their passion, not the oddball ideas that got them there.

To be more direct, don’t wait to start a blog. Forget the advice to find your niche before you start writing. Just write… write on every idea you sort-of-kinda feel is worthy because that is how you will discover your passion.

You know what happens to people who wait to find their niche before they start writing a blog?

They don’t find it.

 

Stay Positive & Go Write Right Now

Garth E. Beyer

So You Want To Start Blogging Pt.1