davidjrogersftw

December 13, 2023 · 1:48 pm

Why Are So Many Talented Writers Unsuccessful?

I’m assuming that you have a writing talent, and that you may even have been the most talented in your class, in your school, and now are the most talented in your writers’ group, most talented in your home town. That’s something to be proud of. But talent alone isn’t enough to make you a highly successful writer in the competitive field of creative writing in which almost everyone is talented, everyone gifted, and everyone exceptional.

But there are qualities other than talent that will determine how successful, fulfilling, and happy your writing career will be in that competitive world of very talented people. That hard-to-define stuff called talent is just one of the many requirements of the writer who excels. If you are relying solely on the talent you were born with to bring you writing success and happiness you are making a mistake.

Poet John Berryman thought that talent was no more than 20% of a successful poet’s personality, and why shouldn’t the same may be true of novelists, dramatists, screen writers, and essayists? What I’m asking is, “What comprises the eighty percent of a writer’s personality that blended with natural talent brings about success?”

To that question there are innumerable possible answers. According to writers, teachers, critics, and researchers other factors that are important are:

Endurance/ Persistence

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut said that talent was extremely common, but what is rare is endurance, the willingness to endure the sometimes difficult and trying life of the writer. Many writers have come to the conclusion that sheer old-fashioned day-by-day doggedness is the key to writers’ success. In the book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes says, “Success as a writer is within the grasp of whoever can tell a story on paper that people want to hear and is willing to persevere, to put up with boredom, frustration, and anxiety. Determined writers will find ways to get published regardless of whether they are brilliant or have a degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.”

Whenever people say to me “I hate writing” I am shocked. Teachers tell me that most people hate writing. It is only a person who has a continuous intense interest in writing and in mastering the skills of writing who will persist in developing their abilities over a long period of time. Non-writers cannot be motivated or even forced to work at a writing task to the extent that a person with an intense interest does willingly. Writers—creative people generally—are often such astoundingly motivated people that less creative people have difficulty comprehending their zeal, their stamina, their capacity for sustained effort. Few people who ever lived–whatever their art, whatever their field–were as motivated as Shakespeare, Dickens, or Faulkner.

Passion, Intensity, Obsessiveness, Willpower, and Patience

Among the personal qualities that cause motivation strong enough to sustain a writer through the inevitable trials, disappointments, setbacks, and self-doubts are those that are not luxuries but necessities for any writer who is in any way serious about writing: passion, intensity, obsessiveness, willpower, and patience. Gertrude Stein said that all of a writer’s work comes out of a passion as a powerful force, and added that if you really have that passion you aren’t able to recognize it because you don’t know what it is to feel any differently. Many people with obsessive compulsiveness–including writers I’ve known–are especially productive not despite that affliction but because of it.

Hard Work, Commitment, and the Hunger for Success

Writing teachers are generally in agreement that it’s not the best, most talented students whose names they see in print in later years, but the hardest workers and the hungriest for success. The students with the most talent but the weakest work ethic who dazzled the class disappear into oblivion, while the hard workers often go on to great achievements. Many prodigiously gifted but poorly motivated people do not end up where gifted people belong: in the upper echelons of their field. Without pursuing all your goals with clear-mindedness, confidence, and commitment over years, you’ll probably quit after repeated failure.

Every writer, as every artist and every actor, who experiences minimal success eventually asks “Should I quit?” or lowers their ambitions. Writers who have achieved a high level of excellence and success are not satisfied to reach merely an acceptable level of performance, but are motivated to pursue increasingly higher goals.

Example of Pursing Increasingly Higher Creative Goals: Frank Loesser

In the field of music Frank Loesser began by being contracted to write individual songs for movies. To hear what they sounded like he made up makeshift lyrics. His wife told him that his makeshift words were better than the lyrics of the lyricists he turned his music over to, so he then started writing words as well as the music. Then he became more ambitious and turned to writing all the music in movies and then, more ambitious still, turned to writing the stories and the librettos (the words and music) in plays like Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Similarly, novels are often written by men and women who started their careers as short story writers where they learned the fundamentals of their craft.

Self-Confidence and The Need to do Your Best

Those who are sure of themselves intensify their efforts when they don’t reach their goal. Studies of high-performers in all the arts show that they are all universally alike: over and over again they are people who believe in trying to excel, in doing one’s best, in working very hard and spending time constructively. They are intensely attracted to their field from their first exposure to it and all through their efforts to develop their skills and their “reach.” In fact, if you have an intense interest in a creative field, that in itself is almost always a sign that you have a natural talent in it.

The Effect of Passing Comments

Talent can be ignited at any time. The cause of motivation to write a 300 page book or continue on the writer’s life path may be nothing more than a passing comment. Simply being told by someone else or telling yourself that you can achieve much more through trying harder will get most people to try harder. Just being told that they are talented is often enough to start people off to develop that talent.

An Analogy

Talent in writing will not bring success unless it is supplemented by other human qualities. Without endurance, determination, intensity, passion for writing, obsessiveness, will power, hard work, commitment, hunger for success, and self-confidence a writer would be analogous to an automobile–beautiful, streamlined, expertly designed–but lacking an engine.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Waging Business Warfare812sCY9edLL._SL1500_

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

7 Comments

Filed under Confidence, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, High Achievement, Intensity, Persistence, Success, Willpower, Writers, Writers' Characteristics

Tagged as Frank Loesser, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut, passing comments, Ralph Keyes

November 9, 2023 · 1:07 pm

Why Your Life as a Writer Creates Conflicts

Writing is a time-consuming process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-expression that may satisfy a writer’s deepest needs. Some writers find that nothing can compete with, nothing can replace, the writer’s joy of creating. Many writers so saturate themselves with their work that it becomes a need as strong as sleep, sometimes stronger. Many writers think, “This writing that I am doing is essential to my fulfillment and well-being. At times I may be so involved I will forget to eat. I will forget to make love. I will block out distractions. I will arrange a life-style and personal habits and routines to accommodate my writing.”

But writers have other roles too. And this fact creates conflicts. Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung thought that the artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts because two forces are at war in them—on the one hand the normal human longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security, and on the other hand “a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire.” That passion for creation absorbs almost all the artist’s energy: “A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction with a consequent drain from some other side of life.” The artist’s work “means more to him than his personal fate, whether he is aware of it or not. Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it.” (Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychology and Literature’ in Brewster Ghiselin, ed. The Creative Process).

In Silences, Tillie Olsen points out that delaying a focus on writing for a long time during a period in your life may become a habit: “The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility of daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you” (Tillie Olsen, Silences, p. 38). If you desire to be a serious writer, these habits of letting other things come first create conflicts.

Some writers do consider writing the most important role in their life and give other roles short shrift. Many writers would agree with Katherine Anne Porter who said that the “thing” between her and writing was the strongest bond she had ever had—stronger than any bond she had ever had with any person or activity. A survey showed that writers and poets are considered highly desirable occupations for a mate. But many are so consumed by writing, and work such long hours in such solitude, that they may make poor spouses. Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow—married five times–said, “I have always put the requirements of what I was writing first—before jobs, before children, before any material or practical interest, and if I discover that anything interferes with what I’m doing, I chuck it. Perhaps this is foolish, but it has been the case with me.” (Saul Bellow in Conversations with Saul Bellow, p. 20)

Others consider writing enjoyable, but not nearly their most important role. Being an actively involved parent–a time-consuming function–can take precedence. Some writers think during the day about when they’ll have all the time to write whenever they want, but because they have other roles to fulfill, they consider themselves lucky if they can write at all. Married women writers especially testify to the difficulty of finding the time and support needed to have a successful writing career while also possibly holding another job and managing a family.

Here it seems appropriate to talk about my Law of Give Up to Get. The Law of Give Up to Get means simply that to get something important in life, you must give up something else. Gripe all you want, rail at the gods, and wish it weren’t so, but you have no choice. In the long run, perhaps you can have everything you desire. But at any one time, to get A you’ll have to give up B. To get X you must give up Y, and maybe you might have to give up Z too. To write, you have no choice but to give up something else—maybe more than one thing. That’s a law, the way life works: to achieve this, you’ll have to give up that—time, energy and other resources spent doing other things, attaining other satisfactions.

Your Roles in Addition to Writing

Now I want you to identify four other roles you have in addition to your role as a writer. Also think about how important each role is to you and your major responsibilities in that role. Rank them in a hierarchy from the most important to the least important. (Include the role of a writer which may be number 1, number 5, or somewhere in between).

Where does your writing role fit on your hierarchy?

Now, answer the question: “What will I do to fulfill my role as a writer to the degree I want while also fulfilling the demands of other roles that I value highly?”

Are there any roles in your life that can be supported with a smaller investment of time, energy, and other resources so that you can devote more time to writing? Are there any roles currently in your life you might dispense with?

You may have found that the life of a serious, hard-working writer is a difficult life. Yet in the midst of difficulties, writers from the Greeks and Romans to the present would agree with Henry Miller that writing is worth pursuing because, despite difficulties and disappointments, setbacks and trials, and the competition among your roles, writing is “a delectable thing.”

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

7 Comments

Filed under Advice, Creativity Self-Improvement, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, Goals and Purposes, Habits, Law of Give Up to Get, Writers, Writers' Life

Tagged as Carl Gustav Jung, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, Saul Bellow, Tillie Olsen, Writing

September 27, 2023 · 3:06 pm

Bring Your Memoir to Life: The Writer’s Skill of Evoking People and Places from the Past

A Talent That Is Remarkable

Exceptional writers have exceptional memories. Their talent to evoke in exact detail written images of the places, people, and events they recall is remarkable. Their writing is vivid and immensely readable. It conveys the sense of ”What I am telling you really happened” that you and all other memoirists would like their work to convey.

Most good writers find their richest material in their past. Writer after writer reports that. I believe it was John Updike who said he had all the material he would ever need by the age of twelve. No one knows why there is such a strong connection between breadth, depth, and accuracy of memory and writing skill.

Every memoirist, (as well as every writer of fiction and personal essays and every poet and playwright) should strive to make that attainable talent to evoke the past a part of their repertoire of skills. They can then call on that talent every day as they compose, and it will bring their writing vividly to life.

Exemplar: Aunt Sarah’s Living Room in 1948 as I Remember It

Aunt Sarah’s 1948 living room was wonderfully cluttered. On a gorgeous filigreed silver tray– catching your eye first–was a herd of delicate colored glass figurines of unicorns, deer, bears, tigers and leopards–red, pink, orange, green, and blue that stood in mute silence on glass shelves in a five-foot tall unbalanced glass case that rattled when anyone came too close–and a collection of miniature porcelain tea cups and saucers that seemed so delicate that a careless breath would dislodge them and send them crashing to smithereens at your feet. There were thick beige and red throw-pillows soft as balls of cotton scattered on the enormous plush sofa and on the neighboring recliner that through years of use had acquired the shape of Aunt Sarah’s body, and two large upholstered straight-back chairs. The faint path visible in the carpet leading in from the front hall was beginning to wear more noticeably this year.

There was a paisley ottoman and a footrest that you could trip over if you weren’t careful–or even if you were–and a glass coffee table that it was advisable to guard your shins from. In a corner lived a noisy parakeet that spent its every waking hour pecking at the door of its cage–to no avail.

There were not enough living room chairs to go around when the full family came over, but there were the dining room chairs to carry in and also for an overflow crowd there were gray metal fold-up chairs stenciled on the back in white “Property of Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Aunt Sarah stored them in the hall closet hidden behind her prized full-length fur coat, and was embarrassed for strangers to see them, for fear they believe the impossible, but conceivable–that she had pilfered the chairs from that house of God.

Lamps were everywhere. Aunt Sarah was a believer in bright lighting because in her words, “You have only one pair of eyes and they must be preserved.” There were gold floor lamps with shades still in their clear plastic wrappings, large, heavy, orange table lamps, and a miniature blue and white Little Bo Peep lamp on a tiny wooden platform that gathered dust on the wall over the upright piano, a piano around which a family sings together being a virtual necessity in a Welsh home.

A plastic fern decorated, as well as it could, the mahogany credenza next to the long, low radiator that from morning to night during the brutal Midwest winters and on chilly spring nights clanged, clanged again, and sputtered steam. The walls were papered in a design of vivid red and alluring pink roses with curved green stems.

On a kitchen wall, above the old serviceable stove, was fastened an Elgin clock that ran fast, forcing everyone to subtract twenty-two minutes a day if they wished for some reason to be accurate, and in the corner of the living room, close to the large drafty window fronting Austin Avenue, was an impressive century- old grandfather clock whose big bronze pendulum, to the entire family’s collective memory, had never moved.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

The Poetry of Riding Freight Trains Across America by David J. Rogers

Anyone who knew what we were planning said, “You’re crazy.” They said, “You’ll come face to face with evil in the form of men whose death would improve the world, men out there who are too evil to live in society. They live by rules you have no knowledge of. They will slit your throats for your shoes.”

After we graduated from high school my good friend Nick and I–age seventeen–decided to do something we had never done before nor had known anyone who had. We would ride freight trains across America for half a year before we started college. People told us that we shouldn’t. We were just boys.

We spent six months hitchhiking and “ridin the rails,” a life that is alien to the more secure lives of stock brokers, school teachers, social workers, demographers, meteorologists, and the like that I thought was worth writing about so there would be a record of that unique way of life.

Running Along the Tracks

How free I feel though far from my home
Along railroad tracks on a hot June day
With a knapsack bouncing on my back,
The chink, chink, chink, chink
Of crushed stones and coal cinders
Under the soles of my scuffed boots as I sprint,
Laughing with my buddy.

Setting Out

Nothing in this world will burden me.
Fields of crops out to the horizon.
Breathing in winds that rejuvenate like milk.
Waving to hikers come out from the city. We aim
To jump off this train a thousand miles away.

A Savory Dinner

Sitting cross-legged, face to face like diplomats or friends,
Backpacks for tables, water from canteens,
We dine on ham on bread with caraway seeds.

Full Throttle

We were really moving now, the hot wind raging in through the two open doors, but outside the box car not a leaf was moving. Birds sailed this way and that in the gossamer sky, grasshoppers chirped and leaped along the tracks, and butterflies, their wings outspread and fluttering, darted among the bushes. One of the butterflies flew into the car, explored a bit, found that our company wasn’t to its liking, then flew back out while in the background a scarecrow was out in a field together with a cluster of flitting blue jays and surrounded by mist. Then the ground rose to overlook a meadow resplendent with white wild flowers.

Hobos in a Clearing

We reach the crest of a hill at dusk.
Below us, like the camps of infantry,
Burn the scattered fires of forgotten men,
Each a separate picture.
They live in the open or in
The opulence of tarpaper lean-tos against a tree,
And migrate as punctually as geese.
They wear black–perhaps it is the soot of freight trains–
And squat on their haunches like crickets
Beside the snapping flames.
Streams of smoke trail off high into the trees
And embers flicker and fade, flicker and fade
In the harsh bite and sparkle of the wind,
And glow bronze on the men’s untroubled faces
Late into the night.

Knife Fight

Overcast this morning.
When we were looking for a box car to board
We saw dead beetles floating on a puddle.
And then we saw three men lying against a log.

When we were close to the men the big one
On the right asked if we had any money.
I said no. He asked if I was sure and I said I was.
I saw that the one in the middle had a newspaper

Wrapped around his arm.
The newspaper was drenched with blood.
The man’s skin was gray, his limp eyes were
Sunken into his head, and he looked weak.

The man on the left said,
Do you want to see something?’”
And reached over and took off the newspaper.
The man’s bloody arm had a deep, three-inch wide

Gash from the crook of his arm down to his wrist.
I went closer and could see the inside of his
Arm very clearly–red, blue, purple, gristly, and white.
His eyes were dull and without luster.

Blood trickled out of his wound and dripped in the dirt.
The man on the right said,
“He was in a knife fight and the guy cut him up.
It’s pretty bad, huh?”

“It’s very bad,” I said. “You have to get him to a doctor.”
“Think so?” the man on the left said.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” the man on the right said.
On either side of the track were a fresh-smelling

Forest of oaks and pines and a broad stream
Running through it. We hadn’t seen buildings
For two hours on the train and there was nothing there.
“Go up front and tell the engineer that

You’ve got a dying man here and you’ve got
To get him to a doctor right away.” I said.
The dying man said, “Don’t bother,”
And closed his eyes.

Later, on the train Nick said,
“I guess he’s going to die.”
“Yes, he’ll die all right,” I said.
“He’ll bleed to death right there.”

His eyes would blur over with death
And his breath seep out,
And his associates would gaze on
With wonder as strange as dreams.

Girl for Sale

In a train yard one morning
A man approached with a girl
My younger sister’s age
Wearing a yellow sun dress,
Frail, her limbs just bones.
“You can have her for twenty dollars.”
“What?”
“You can buy this girl for twenty dollars.”
No sale, he continued down the track,
The shy girl following dutifully.

Milk

The train hadn’t stopped
For a long time, and our canteens
Were empty.
We’d never been as thirsty.

I fell asleep in the heat and dreamed
That I opened the refrigerator
At home and saw every shelf loaded
With bottles of milk.

Then in a second dream
I saw waterfalls of milk spraying
And roaring down like Victoria Falls–
Streams of milk, rivers of milk–

An ocean of cold milk. Nick asked if I was
Awake and I said I was.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Milk.”

“Milk?”
“Milk.”

Ice Cold Nights in Box Cars

On cold nights we paced back and forth,
From end to end, side to side,
Stamped our feet, pressed ourselves against the walls,
Rubbed the circulation into our hands, and
Flapped our arms against our bodies for warmth.

In the Company of the Most Beautiful Girl

We stopped for coffee one night in a little café up in North Platte, Nebraska. Outside it was cold and gray. We went inside, out of the rain, and sat at the counter and waited. In a few minutes we saw the kitchen door swing open and a waitress about our age came out. She poured our coffee carefully, biting her lower lip, her finger on the top of the pot, not looking at us, and our eyes large, we watched her closely. She had long, lovely-shaded hair that flowed like oil and tossed from side to side. She smiled so gently, so exquisitely, that I was numb. It was my opinion that she was the most beautiful girl we would ever see in our lives and Nick agreed. We stayed as long as we could just to look at her and be around her. When we paid up and left at closing time we said goodbye to her, regretting we would never see her again, and she blushed and smiled at us in a friendly way, her eyes very bright. We were warmed by the sincerity with which she said, “Good luck, boys.” The thought of her made us happy for a long time.

What You See and Hear Along a Siding On a Rainy Night

In the distant moon’s quiet light
Shadows of elegant birches
Are silk patches lying lightly
On the surface of puddles.
The chatter of fidgety locusts in the grass
Is gossip of talkative neighbors.

Arrayed along this siding are cars stenciled
Santa Fe, Illinois Central, Southern Pacific,
Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Central Pacific,
The Soo Line, and B&O.

In a warm and refreshing wind
Whispering up from the south
You can hear
The booming midnight clash of freight cars coupling and uncoupling,
The heavy huff of released steam from brakes,
The languid breathing of engines cooling
As though they are falling asleep,
The muted voices of gaunt men stepping out of darkness,
Carrying oil cans with long necks, and swinging
With ease and grace, yellow-glowing lanterns,
Setting signals, and calling to each other in a garbled language
That we have no hope of understanding.
I may be wrong, but I think this is Montana.

Shot at, Chased By Dogs

When our freight train reached Kelso-Longview
The railroad police were waiting,
Holding the leash of a German shepherd
In one hand, waving a gun in the other.
Shouting and running, we youngest, running fastest,
Hobos leaped or fell from the cars and dashed
In every direction, chased by the cops.
As Nick and I ran we laughed at how out
Of our element we were and how ludicrous
The whole scene must appear–a hundred
Running hobos and bulls, men firing revolvers,
Other men praying not to be shot,
Ferocious dogs snapping at our heels.

Cherry Pickers

Cold, we stand at a curb in darkness at four in the morning
With a group of half-drunk, miserably poor, but good-hearted
Homeless men–day laborers–the Yakima sun too fierce
To work past noon. The boss hits Nick and me on the shoulder
With a rolled magazine. We look strong. We will work today, and
Everyone who works will be paid twenty-five cents a pail.

We are hauled out to the orchards under a tarp in a truck
Past rows of ramshackle abandoned houses with no
Windows and open front doors hanging from their hinges.
Everyone is in a good mood. Comrades now, we joke that the
Driver doesn’t know where the hell he’s going:
“Hey, he’s taking us to Walla-Walla.”
(A chorus of laughter shakes the truck.)

Working in a thick silence as though mute,
Clans of indefatigable
Migrant workers from Texas–
Old men, old women, young men, young
Women, children sweep the orchards clean
Like locusts with nimble fingers.

Love in a Parking Lot

Old cars with dented fenders and gaudy garters dangling on their rear-view mirrors, and pick-up trucks with rifle racks cradling shotguns and carbines were parked four deep in the lot. When the door of the Inn swung open, muscle-bound men, their shirt sleeves rolled up above the bicep, sauntered out, their arms tight around the waists of conspicuously made-up women, their heads thrown back in exaltation and abandon, and the chime of laughter spilled into the night like flowing wine.

On a Flat Car of a Freight Train Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert Late at Night

Cold settles savagely on the
Great Salt Lake desert late at night.
When we reached it after a long, lazy day,
The massive red sun pulsating in the sky
Like a throbbing heart,
The temperature fell precipitously.
There would be a frost.
Then in the great, black,
Brooding mass of night,
The wind of the fast-moving train
Became a wall of icy air coming straight at us,
Death seeking to lay hold of us,
The frost to murder us, growing colder.
Colder, we in shirt sleeves.

You wanted to scream; you wanted
Someone to end this pain, to come
To your aid, to save you, to be merciful.
You prayed the train would fly off the
Track so it would have to stop
The merciless cold wind.
You wished to beg some power to
Lift you off this little island of misery
Where you knew without doubt you
Might die before the sun rose.

I had it in my mind that were
We to sleep we would never
Wake again, like mountain climbers
Dying on glaciers, so I shouted-
-La, la, la, tra-la, la, la–that
I thought would keep us awake.

I thought: “If I am about to die,
If am about to die,
If I am about to die
Why must it be as my life is beginning?
Why couldn’t death wait twenty
Or thirty years? What’s the hurry?
What is to be gained by killing a boy?”

Craning my neck I looked up
And saw the high twinkling stars.
I thought then that as long as I lived
I would never forget how beautiful they had been.

My thoughts flew like sparrows,
Repeating, “Tomorrow will be better,
Tomorrow will be warm, tomorrow
I will be out of it, and I will never have to
Come back to this place again.” And all the while
The sky was sublime: the orange glow of sunset,
The blue glow of evening; the white glow of the moon.

Eight Stalking Wolves

I point my finger and call to my friend:
“There, there up on the slope above us,
There, to the left, in those trees.”
Eight stalking wolves coming down
The mountain slowly, like liquid
Through a drizzle of large, wet snowflakes
In single file. A fawn has strayed from the herd.

.As the herd moves en masse, the wolves
Streak to the fawn through evergreens
And blue spruces, the wind blowing their tails,
Circling, wheeling, teasing, and tormenting the fawn,
Burrowing their snouts playfully in the snow.
Barks and cries echo through the canyons.
We shout and wildly wave our arms.

They stop. Every sound, every muscle,
Every movement ceases, their ears perk.
But they know that we are not hunters.
They have no fear of us. Their yellow eyes glisten.
As we leave the mountain the contours and the dim colors
Of the slopes, the sky, and the trees become beautiful.
So placid, so sublime, the radiance of the moon.

The Flanks of Tall Mountains

The flanks of tall mountains are abundant with gray shale
Slipping from higher elevations and lying like the rubble
Of fallen pillars of ancient kingdoms and battlefield dead.
On windy days and nights the air hisses in lofty evergreens
Slanting off mountains, furtive sounds everywhere.
Always vast distances lie wherever we look.
The lumpy hills of Sun Valley, with red-brown and
Black shadows spread like blankets, rise and gently dip.

Occasionally in the pall of night, here and there,
As though to frighten us, appears an unexplained light
Through the darkness, mysterious and indifferent.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

14 Comments

Filed under Poetry, Travel

Tagged as freight trains, Hitchhiking, Hobos, stories from youth

July 6, 2023 · 1:59 pm

Good Writers Who Were Discovered by Agents and Publishers

Writers, are you having trouble getting published? I sympathize. Yet, be ready! In a month, week, or day or a few hours, or minutes, you may come in contact with that one editor, one agent you must have confidence exists here, there, somewhere, who will discover you, recognizing your potential, your craft, your genius the way young Faber & Faber editor Charles Monteith recognized novelist William Golding’s immense promise when no one else in the world did.

William Golding

Monteith was charming, witty, and sophisticated, qualities Golding did not possess. Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was Monteith’s first editorial project; his first taste of an editor’s role. Some editors–very capable in other areas–are surprisingly poor at judging the work of beginning writers, but that was not the case with Monteith.

The manuscript Golding submitted was worn, torn, and stained when Monteith first saw it. It had obviously been rejected by other publishers. Even Monteith agreed that this work of a public school teacher was over-written, disorganized, repetitive–a mess–and seemed never to get started. After many rejections Golding was losing hope of having the book published, of ever being published.

But Monteith saw “something” in the book, and in Golding –the work of a unique talent–and fought for it at editorial conferences, almost coming to blows with a senior editor who was known to have impeccable taste in picking properties that would succeed. Monteith prevailed, staking his young reputation on the book. Lord of the Flies was published, caught on, and was published in many languages. Many Golding/Monteith novels followed. Monteith and Golding were editor and author friends the rest of their lives. William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983.

What might have happened had Golding’s beaten-up manuscript not caught the eye of the best possible editor for him? One day you may be fortunate: a Monteith may be excited by your work and discover you.

The Need to Be Discovered

The logical conclusion of the process of serious writing is to see the work published. Before writers get published they have to be discovered, to be recognized as a person with a talent that can generate revenue. When a writer is discovered by an agent or publisher, their life changes for the better. This post is about writers who were discovered, then published, and found success–perhaps more success than they expected. There are so many writers with all the talent in the world who are trying very hard to be discovered by an agent or publisher who is trying as hard to discover them. There is a good chance that many writers we read would never have been published had they not been discovered by the right agent and a right publisher.

Harold Kushner

A friend of mine was the late Rabbi Harold Kushner. He too was discovered by an editor with insight and moxie. Harold personally hand-carried his manuscript to publisher after publisher in New York and Boston. Every publisher rejected When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Editors said the book couldn’t possibly succeed. For one thing it was “too Jewish.”

Finally a small publisher picked it up. However, this editor who discovered the book, was different. He was enthusiastic and said to Harold, “Your book is going to be a best seller.” Finally what Harold had been hoping for: someone had faith in the book and its spiritual message. It became a phenomenal best -seller, the most popular book in the world, selling twenty -five million copies.

Thomas Wolfe

Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins discovered biographical novelist Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe was the most talented writer of his generation. His monumental goal was to convey in his writing every experience he had ever had. His vocabulary and expressiveness with language was so stunningly extraordinary that it didn’t take a genius to recognize that Wolfe was one. Wolfe wasted ten years trying to be a playwright until his married lover, patron, and muse Aline Bernstein told him, “You were not meant to be a dramatist. You should be writing novels.” The popularity of his first novel Look Homeward Angel marked him as a major talent, so much so that when fellow American Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in November, 1930 Lewis praised Wolfe as the writer to be reckoned with in the future.

Maxwell Perkins was the greatest American editor. Editor of giants Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway at the same time, he tutored and guided Wolfe who never had a concept of “a publishable book.” Thousands of hand-written words poured out of high-energy Wolfe in a frenzy all night long. In the morning a woman picked the pages off the floor of his New York apartment, where Wolfe had thrown them, and typed them up. Perkins taught and tutored Wolfe literally daily. Each man considered their meeting and their relationship the most important event in their lives. Perkins gave Wolfe assignments such as “You have to cut this episode by six thousand words,” and “Cut the book by 200, 000 words. I’ll help you.”

Jack London

Persistent and confident in spite of failures, Jack London submitted his manuscripts hundreds of times to publishers that rejected the work before an editor discovered him. But after that, within a single year London, a self-educated writer, took the literary world by storm and was the most popular, most critically and financially successful novelist/short story writer in the world.

Talented People Looking For a Break

I traveled extensively in North America and Europe during my career as author/public speaker and often after a work day and dinner would have a drink in the hotel lounge and enjoy the entertainment. Invariably I would think, “All these incredibly talented performers I see–artists who are looking for a big break and are dying to be discovered.” Much like them, so many writers with so much talent also are trying very hard to be discovered. Without the people who discovered William Golding, Thomas Wolfe, Harold Kushner, or Jack London, would we have ever heard of those famous authors?

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

13 Comments

Filed under Adversity, Charles Monteith, Confidence, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, Editor, Goals and Purposes, Harold Kushner, Jack London, Maxwell Perkins, Publishing, Thomas Wolfe, William Golding, Writers

Tagged as artists and writers, goals, talent

May 10, 2023 · 2:22 pm

Why Writers and Artists Are So Intense

I wanted to know why artists and writers are so self-absorbed.

Then I wanted to know why writers, painters, and other artists bloom late.

In popular posts I addressed those questions. Now I want to know why so many writers and artists are intense and have intense personalities.

Waking, Wanting To Get Going

I was excited waking up at 3:00 A.M. yesterday, and I was not thinking of going back to sleep. I wanted to finish some poems where I had left off the night before. I thought, “Let my wife–a calmer, less excitable person–sleep; I love to work and I have work to do.”

Then I started thinking that it was likely that other creative people I know–good friends in the arts–at that very moment also were waking early and were anxious to get to work on their project, that we are similar–we resemble each other in regard to the emotions we bring to bear as we live and work–that we are all creative and we are all intense and excitable. Certain qualities endear creative people to me. One is their intensity.

It seemed to me then that intensity and excitability were a pattern, a hard and fast characteristic of myself and my artful friends, and come to think of it, of many of the famous writers and artists and other creative people I have been reading about, studying, admiring, and writing about all my life. Their intensity made them different.

The Feeling of Intensity

What does intensity feel like?

Intense writers and artists do everything intensely–experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining. They are significantly different human beings from other writers and artists (and agents and family members and co-workers) who are not intense. They feel their emotions strongly. They soar high with elevated emotions, and they plunge into dark moods, at times their moods changing so fast as to be bewildering. In contrast, people who are not intense the way so many writers and artists are feel their emotions more mildly and without such major fluctuations between the high moods and the low moods. Differences in intensity between people who work closely together or live together may cause conflicts.

Some writers and artists feel that they are being flooded by waves of joy, that their every cell is being excited. Some writers and artists–perhaps you, certainly I–revise their work tirelessly, at times almost maniacally, ten times, twenty times, thirty times, until they are satisfied the work is the best they can do. Only then can they stop themselves.

The intensity of writers’ and artists’ personality is a powerful element of their creativity. The wonderful poet John Keats thought that intensity–not intelligence or any other quality — in and of itself is the most powerful creative element of all.

Intensity and the Arts

Intensity is a quality found in many creative people that facilitates artistic pursuits. Abbe Dimnet said that the creator’s intensity will be reflected in the quality of the work: “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” Henry James wrote: “It is art that makes life, makes intensity, makes importance.” Horace said, “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” It is their intensity that gives them strength. Keats said, “The excellency of every art is its intensity “ A problem every writer and artist faces is maintaining in every phase of their story or painting the intensity that keeps it going and energizes the creator’s every gesture and the work’s every detail. They must be able to generate and sustain intensity as they work.

Emotional Intensity and Over-Excitability of Many People in the Arts

“Emotional intensity” of the kind I am describing is a quality that Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, physician, and poet Kazimierz Dabrowski found when he studied intellectually or artistically gifted people. The degree of a person’s emotional intensity is a stable characteristic. Some people are intense; some are not. Just as self-absorbed artists and writers can’t help being self-absorbed any more than they can help having the color eyes they do, intense artists and writers can’t help being intense.

Dabrowski recognized that, as I thought, creative people experience an intensification of experience much beyond what other people experience. Dabrowski considered the intensity of their emotions, their sensitivity and emotional extremes–their “over-excitabilities”–to be part and parcel of their makeup. Every aspect of their personality is intense.

They are “spirited,” and are also more sensitive, perceptive, energetic, and persistent than other people. They possess what I have called “inner” skills such as persistence, confidence, and courage that not everyone has but that lead directly to success in the arts. Dabrowski identified five “overexcitabilites” exhibited by more people in the artistically gifted population than in the general population.

The Five Dimensions of Intense Writers’ and Artists’ Lives

Sensual

Sensualists, intense writers and artists seek an enhanced sensory and aesthetic pleasure in seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and sex. They delight in beautiful objects and in sounds of words, and in form, color, and balance. Negatively, they may overeat and be sexually over-indulgent.

Psychomotor

Intense people have a surplus of energy, are competitive, enjoy intense physical activity such as fast games and sports, often are compulsive talkers–they may jabber–and act impulsively. They may have nervous habits. They may bite their nails or have nervous twitches.

Intellectual

They enjoy intensified activity of their mind in their curiosity, concentration, and in their capacity for sustained intellectual effort, avid reading, asking probing questions, and making keen observations. They can vividly recall what they see with their eyes (that fundamental necessity for writers and artists) and may be detailed planners. They are tenacious problem-solvers. They search for truth and understanding. They think about thinking and love theory and analysis. They are logical and independent thinkers.

Imaginational

In speaking and writing, intense writers and artists often use images and metaphors, are given to poetic and dramatic perceptions, and are skilled at inventing. Some can make up fantasy worlds of their own and imaginary companions and are attracted to magic and fairy tales. Under emotional tension their imagery can mix truth and fiction. They may have elaborate dreams and illusions. They cannot tolerate boredom. They may lack self-judgment and be overly-critical.

Emotional

The feelings and emotions of over-excitable writers and artists are intensified. They are given to extremes of emotions, complex feelings and a large range of emotions and have an awareness of the feelings of others. They have heights and depths of emotions that others lack. At times their mood soars. And it also may plunge. Their moods change quickly.

They may have strong physical expressions of over-excitability such as tense stomach, sinking heart, pounding heart, sweaty palms. Intense writers and artists experience euphoria, enthusiasm, and ecstasy, but also shyness, timidity, and obsessiveness.

But Dabrowski found that inner forces were at work in them also, forces that generated overstimulation, conflicts, and pain, and often set them out in a search for a way out. One way out may lead to inner growth and transformation, another may lead to results such as addiction.

Examples of Famous Intense Writers and Artists

Who could be more intense than poet Walt Whitman who expressed a wish to have “one hour of madness and joy,” “to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom,” “To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.” Who more intense than novelists Charles Dickens with his phenomenal storehouse of drive that enabled him to work on a multiplicity of books, speeches, plays, travels, and social projects at the same time without ever tiring?

Or Thomas Wolfe whose monumental goal was nothing less than to describe in the millions of published words that poured out of him uncontrollably, as from a spigot, every experience he had ever had? And Gustave Flaubert, a pioneer of a modern writing style, who agonized rewriting his novels and stories to perfection? Or intense painter Vincent van Gogh who produced a masterpiece a day, or Claude Monet, who for his artistic experiments could paint thirty or forty canvasses of exactly the same scene.

There are drawbacks to a writer or artist being over-excitable and intense. But the advantages of being a writer or artist who is intense and has the powerful energies, the drive, and many other qualities that facilitate success in the arts far outweigh the negatives. The creative’s intensity is reflected in the quality of the work they produce–more intensity, better quality work.

If writers and artists are asked to identify the important characteristics they would l really like to have that would positively affect their career, they will be wise to identify intensity.

An intense writer or artist trying to create a vision they perhaps alone perceive is fortunate.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

8 Comments

Filed under Artists, Charles Dickens, Claude Monet, concentration, Dabrowski, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, energy, Excellence in the Arts, Imagery in the Arts, Inner Skills, Intensity, Moods, Over-Excitabilities, talent, Walt Whitman, Writers, Writers' Characteristics

Tagged as Creativity, over-excitability

March 29, 2023 · 2:54 pm

Embrace Your Destiny as a Writer

If you are to be a writer who will be recognized, you must have faith that you have been created to be a writer, that writing is a destiny toward which your life has been aimed. Virginia Wolf and Toni Morison felt that way, and James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Ernest Hemingway. Many writers we haven’t heard of yet, but will, also feel that way. The faith that you are fated to be a writer is a writer’s first requirement. You must believe that it is when you are writing that you’re doing what you were brought into the world to do.

That sense of being fated stirs writers to action: now they must go out to embrace with their whole being their writer’s destiny, to accept it, to resolve to be it, to realize their writer’s vocation, and not flee from it the way many people flee from the heights they could have reached.

As a gift to you–a person with a literary talent–nature has singled you out. You have been specially endowed with not only “creative stuff” that is the source of achievement in all the arts and is possessed by only a minority of people, but with personal qualities that equip you specifically to fulfill the writer’s demanding role–energy, high intelligence, curiosity, a love of your language, a dictionary in your head of favorite words, the playfulness of a child, doggedness, discipline, daring, intuition, intensity, deep emotions, imagination, self-assurance, a warrior’s courage, the stamina of athletes, maturity, refined taste and wise judgment.

History shows that writers who will amount to anything also all have an attitude of “seriousness” about their work and their lives: “This is my only life; I am not playing games. I try to write every day. I strive to get better and better still and will do that all my life.”

It is the identity of a writer that gives you the confidence that you are a person with a definite life task—to write, to spend your life writing, to create poems, stories, novels, dramas, screen plays, essays–whatever form of literature you desire that comes out of you assembled in your own words, fashioned from the disappointments and glories of your own life, different as your life and your writing are from the life and writing of all other writers who are alive now or have ever lived.

Writing–the physical acts of writing, the movement of your muscles to write, your eyes to focus, the shifting of your weight in the chair–is so essential to writers that if they are prevented from writing for any reason, they will be tense and conflicted until circumstances change and once again they are able to write freely, confidently, and without holding back. And then, as though touched by a healer with extraordinary powers, they will be well again.

As a writer you must be true to your awesome potential–must be in fact what you are potentially. If you are not doing enough with your gifts, your conscience lets you know. The conscience of a writer asks, “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Have I become what I should have become? If I have not become what I should have become, what will I do now?” Your writer’s conscience is the voice that calls you to be the person you are fully prepared to be, the uniquely talented writer you have been created to be.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

5 Comments

Filed under Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, High Achievement, Success, talent, The Writer's Path, Writer's Destiny, Writers' Characteristics, Writers' Life

Tagged as destiny, fate, Writing

March 10, 2023 · 11:44 am

Poems Mainly About People by David J. Rogers

Cool Wind

And I thought how lovely
It was to feel
Through an open window
A cool wind on a hot night
Such as this
And to see let in
Between the window shade
And the window sill
Leaves’ shadows dancing on
A midnight floor.

The Silence That Settles So Softly

Silence has settled as softly
As pollen on her hospital room
As visitors take their magazines
And as quietly as moths
Go out the door, leaving
Us to face this night alone.

“How fast life goes, Dave,” she says.
“It’s no longer than a mosquito’s life.
Why does it go so fast?”
A little room, a bed,
A pair of eyes; someone watching,
A young woman very ill.
Night has come, the day is gone.
Over the city shines a blue light.
Chrysanthemums stand in a vase.

She asks, “How do you explain life?
What does a person live for?”
It is probably happiness.
Yes, that was it all the time,
The happiness one feels. No one
Could say she hadn’t known exquisite happiness.

I feel such love toward her that could I,
I would die for her
And am so regretful that I cannot suffer
Her pain for her, and am powerless to help her,
And that she soon will be gone entirely from my life
And from this world.

But now, dear sister,
Close your brown eyes.

Phoebe Leads Quite a Life

My friend Phoebe the writer leads quite a life.
She tried to explain why in affairs she chooses men that are out of character.
She said: “I read in George Eliot’s biography a perfect description
Of myself not as I seem, or would want to be, but as I really am:”
She quoted Eliot:
A retiring woman of gentle disposition and orderly habits.
A very cautious woman who chooses courses of action she cannot rationally defend.’

Sounds Beyond Number

I’ve run down the front stairs and
Out into the neighborhood
On my seventh birthday.
No adults who love me restrain me.
I am as free as the wind.
About me: the air and sunlight; the clouds,
The church tower, Lake Michigan, the cityscape
That good fortune has allocated for my pleasure
During these years of my happy youth.
These languorous streets of mine,
Mapped indelibly in my mind, are shaded by
Cool poplars, sycamores, and elms this sunny October day.

Familiar cars pass, and in the hedges
Crickets whose voices I recall are out in noisy numbers.
Bob the panhandler is dozing in his favorite doorway.
His mouth is closed but his lips flutter.
Machinists, teachers, clerks, and mechanics
On their way to somewhere else pass me by without a word.

Odors of bubbling tar are in the street where men
Soaked wet with sweat and without shirts
Work diligently in the torrid noon sun.
The silver-painted wagon I am pulling rattles
Among other street sounds beyond my counting.
They ring in my receptive ears
Like the jingle- jangle of festive bells.

Mister Koehler

When I was a boy in Chicago
Every Sunday the tallest man in the world
Sat in the seat next to mine in church–8’2”
The disparity in our height was
An object of humor, but not to me.

He had difficulty walking because he was so tall
And his spine was weak.
He shuffled between two wood canes,
Bent over, frail, his arms quivering, his eyes cast down
So that he would not fall.

He drove a car. He was a salesman.
His car had no front seat,
Only a back seat where he sat,
His long arms reaching the steering wheel,
His long legs the pedals.

There is a replica of him
In a wax Museum in London.
He is cited in
The Guinness Book of World Records
As earth’s tallest person.

He was too tall to have a long life.

Woman Sitting at a Table
In a Restaurant on Broadway
In New York City

I saw you
Looking at me
Knowing I had
Looked at you,
No chance ever
To see you again
Or you to
Look at me again
With your mystic eyes.
You who had I
Known long ago
I would have run
My finger over
So carefully
And cupped
In my hand
Like an orchid.

Young Woman in the Pontchartrain
Hotel, Detroit, Michigan

If I tell you that in the elevator
At three a.m. she stopped me and said,
“I’ve been looking for you all night”
You would have an idea of her lonely
Profession, but no idea what kind of
Woman she was, nor how pretty.

In the summer before the often cruel cold Chicago winter each year of my childhood there came in a truck the coal-shoveler who would appear in the alley to do his job. On the way to school I would walk past him carrying my books and would look at his tall pile of coal and wonder “How in the world will one man be able to shovel all that coal?” When I returned home the coal would be gone and the coal- shoveler–his work done– would be sleeping, waiting to be picked up, or he would be gone until reappearing when I would be a year older.

The Silent Coal -Shoveler

Behind the apartment building
Where I lived with my family and
Beside a mountain of coal
Toiled the always silent, always alone,
Never-speaking, never-grunting,
Never- complaining
Muscular black coal-shoveler.
From chilly dawn
To the end of afternoon
While I was at school
Or at the playground
From the alley
Behind my gate
Across from the church,
That cadenced scrape
Of his shovel
Between coal and pavement
Could be heard, and chunks of coal
Thumping, tumbling noisily
Like pieces of thunder
Down the wooden chute
Into the dark cellar.

Encounters in the Natural World

When I was a boy my father, brother, and I would leave the city and hike in the forests north of Chicago, where now, in a thriving suburb, I live with my wife. I remember our last hike:

In the underbrush along the path we followed were morning glories, wild flowers, lilies of the valley, azaleas, and asters. In the trees squirrels preened on their hind legs, then leaped from branch to branch. A chipmunk made its departure into the lush chipmunk world.

A small female white-tail deer waited for us to pass, a puzzled expression in her bulging eyes, and then bounded across the path. We were so close we could have touched. Then a full-grown, majestic male with more serious eyes appeared as though it had come up from the ground.

Grasshoppers still damp with morning dew dried themselves in the sunlight, and we took care to step around them. A yellow finch, its head bobbing, whistled sweetly, and insects squabbled in the air. The fragrance of warm, sweet clover was everywhere.

A wind rippled across the river in front of us and the gold leaves on the trees along its banks rattled. The sun bright, the trees cast long, thin shadows that in the wind swayed on the water like a company of dancers.

Jim, Jim, I’ve Remembered You Often

Jim, Jim, I’ve remembered you often,
My roommate in college, a tortured
Red-headed business major so caught
In the grip of a terrible addiction to
Alcohol that, when desperate, he
Drank anything, including:
Lighter fluid
Hair tonic
Motor oil and lubricants
Gasoline

I had been studying all night when I heard Jim
Staggering up the stairs after a night ending at dawn at County Line, the dump
Where he often wound up after hours. There nothing was prohibited.

He was trying so hard to appear sober crossing the bedroom floor,
But his hands were shaking. His legs were as stiff as brooms.
I watched him compassionately without speaking a word

As I would watch an injured cat or dog, hoping that he would
Be able to do what I could see he had in mind to impress me with–
Hoping that he would be able to hang neatly on a hanger

Without any help the blue jacket he was holding in his right hand.
But the hanger slipped tragically from his grip and
Clattered on the wooden floor.

Then I saw what I cannot erase
From memories of my college years or of Jim:
The expression on his face of shame.

A False Assumption

Some people fall into a trap. They assume
That because the woman or man they desire is beautiful
And seems to be their ideal that they also possess fine qualities
Such as intelligence, kindness, and decency,
But often soon find them lacking virtues without a trace.

The Death of Judy Wazorick

I remember Judy Wazorick fondly.
We were in grammar school together.
She had a blue eye and a brown eye,
And sat in the last seat of the last row.
She was shy, but when I looked at her
She always smiled at me.
Now I see she won’t be at the reunion,
And I am so sad because Judy Wazorick
Has passed away.

Wings

Two seasons each year–spring and fall–
Flocks of familiar geese flutter down
From the sky to dine on the grassy field outside my home,
Waddling, pecking, bickering like
Children or thieves–then a truce–
Only a misunderstanding:
All is forgiven, friend. Departing
They assemble for the flight
In perfect order, poised, silent; air quivering.
Then torrents of ascending wings–wings.

There Were

There were pleasant, guileless women I liked on sight,
And women with the look of dreamers that I knew were
Full of dangers, but couldn’t resist and didn’t try very hard to.

There were women with long, raven-black hair that flowed like oil,
And plain, sincere, friendly women, and women who smiled
So gently, so exquisitely, that I was numb.

There were women who acted as if they were personal friends of God,
And light-hearted women, and women whose mood never changed,
And women with deep voices and treacherous eyes.

There were young, ugly-duckling women who were just about to be beautiful,
And attached women who enjoyed being fallen women, as well as a
Playful, petite woman full of horse-sense and laughter.

They and others brightened my life and are a pleasure to remember.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

18 Comments

Filed under Personal Stories, Poetry

Tagged as lyric poetry, poetic images

February 22, 2023 · 2:27 pm

Claude Monet’s Experiments That Transformed Art

When a new and different style in the arts first appears, it is not welcomed. Innovation clashes with the artists, critics, teachers, and the public whose tastes currently dominate the art and is greeted with ridicule and contempt. Such was the case with painting’s Impressionism. It was distained, laughed at, and belittled by the establishment.

Monet painting of two wome in white dresses in a garden with a background of trees

Monet: The Garden

The central members of the group of artists we call Impressionists met each other in cafes, studios, and galleries in the early and middle 1860s, and by the end of that decade had worked together long enough to identify themselves as a group. Among them were Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro (the oldest and most steadfast of them), Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley (the least well known), Mary Cassatt (an American), Berthe Morisot( the most misunderstood) and Gustave Caillebotte. The paintings they created are arguably the most beautiful and accessible in the history of art.

In time, Impressionism established itself as a major force, then became the most popular style of panting in the West. Its appeal passed on quickly to painters in other countries and to all other arts, including the music of Frenchman Claude Debussy whose Impressionist compositions such as Prelude a L’après-midi d’un faune changed forever the very sound of music, and the Impressionistic literature of popular American writer Stephen Crane.

Just as no two Impressionists were exactly alike–Degas the son of a wealthy Parisian banker, Renoir the son of an impoverished tailor, Cassatt a Philadelphia socialite, Pissarro a Danish citizen educated in Central America–so no two Impressionists were trying to accomplish exactly the same thingsin their art.

One of the most flexible aspects of the Impressionist movement was its refusal to be highly defined. There was no doctrine of Impressionism and there were never rules. There were no clear standards on which to judge a work. The early Impressionists painters shared with the novelists, playwrights, and composers of their generation a fascination with “the here and now,” the wish to represent their own time. Impressionist paintings, prints, and drawings of the streets and locations in Paris and its surroundings reflect their world so accurately that they can be dated.

As a school of painting, Impressionism culminated the art of the nineteenth century. It fused together the contributions of conflicting schools in a way that led painting to the art of the twentieth century, partially as a continuation of Impressionism and partially as a reaction against it.

However different their concerns, all Impressionists shared an interest in the effects of light on objects, none of them more than Claude Monet (1840-1926), to whom light became a long obsession.

An Impressionist wants to reproduce the effects of light rather than the form of the object that is reflected in the light–a painting of a yellow flower only as the impression of light made on the artist.

Claude Monet

Monet was the most renowned and most influential pioneer of Impressionism–the giant of Impressionism. Painting out of doors, Monet devoted his life to creating new ways of capturing light’s changeable qualities on canvas. A 12:00 p.m. sunlight is not the same as a 4:00 p.m. sunlight, or even a 12:05 sunlight or 12:10 sunlight. Early evening sunlight is similar to but, different from morning sunlight. The suns of one month are different from the suns of every other month. Such facts filled Monet’s thoughts.

Monet was only twenty-seven when he painted The Beach of Sainte-Adresse, and shortly after painted On the Seine at Bannecourt, which though painted in brilliant hues, lacked a clear subject or a focus on any part of the landscape. These were thoroughly unconventional landscapes that were in every respect ahead of their time.

The lack of a central focus made On the Seine at Bennecourt more appealing. Monet realized that The Beach of Sainte-Adresse was so unusual, and in a way shocking, that he didn’t publically display it for ten years, until the public was more ready to “understand” it. The Seine at Bannecourt has been called the first truly Impressionist landscape.

Monet was a high-energy, insatiable worker. He strove continually to develop and refine his own art, and through his art, advanced the development of the art of Western painting. Many years passed before the full scope of his talents were recognized. Yet, working alone without a powerful patron, the importance of his vision of art was recognized during his lifetime. Unlike many pioneers who pass away uncelebrated and in poverty, Monet would end his life prosperous and acclaimed.

The Mind of a Scientist

The scientific method involving theories, observations, and experiments appealed to Monet. He had a scientist’s mind, testing his theories and carefully recording the effects of his experiments that focused on sunlight. The emphasis on the subject at “a particular moment of time” that he sought to capture in his paintings–which he termed “instantaneity”– is akin to what the French call un coup d’oeil. It means “something perceived in the blink of an eye.”

Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge with purples

Monet: Waterloo Bridge in sunlight

“The quality of instant vision, the subject revealed in a momentary aspect, takes on more importance in Impressionism than it ever had before…The pure Impressionists will paint as if they had caught the subject unaware in a chance gesture, “(John Canaday.) In painting colored light Impressionists break the surface of the canvas into thousands of fragmented tints.

Monet became so focused on light–to reducing all visual experiences to pure light–that when his young wife died, he was horrified to find himself analyzing the nacreous tints of her skin in the early light.

Monet painting of Waterloo bridge in fog

Monet: Waterloo Bridge in Fog

As his fascination with light grew, he expressed the wish that he had been born blind in order to paint objects without knowing what they were. He began more and more to develop the ability to look at a scene or an object and see light and nothing but light.

His Aims Change

His aims in his art changed as he more and more deeply immersed himself in theoretical thinking about his art. In his early painting, like any artist he is absorbed in the pleasure of the subject–what is being shown in the painting. Apparent too is his joy in the act of painting, of the inventiveness and energy involved in the painter’s craft and a participation in a real-life world of sunlight, air, and flowers.

He then experienced the change from being a painter whose role was to respond to nature into a painter who became fascinated and preoccupied by an abstract problem.

Saint-Lazare Train Station and the Field of Poppies

The 1877 Impressionist exhibition included in one room seven paintings of the surviving twelve painted by Monet of the Parisian depot Saint-

Monet painting of Saint Lazare Train Station

Monet: Saint Lazare Train Station

Lazare. They were the first series of Monet’s long career to explore a single subject at different times and under different conditions of light and dark.

It has been said that Monet convinced the station master that he was a famous artist in order to persuade him to run the engines while the trains stood still so they would make billowing clouds of steam. It was from the Saint-Lazare station that artists took trains to virtually all the landscape sites that the Impressionists preferred.

Monet painting of red poppies on green hill with cloudy sky and three figures in foreground

Monet: Field of poppies

Thirteen and fourteen years later Monet chose to paint in three paintings the difficult subject of poppy fields. They were challenging because the intense greens, reds, and oranges of the fields were affected very little by atmospheric conditions. To compensate he looked tor variety in the skies and the shadows in the trees. The poppy group was followed by another series of five paintings of ripening wheat, and that series was followed by The Haystacks.

The Haystacks Paintings, the Rouen Cathedral, the Pool at Giverny

In his later paintings Monet’s fascination with the scene became a devotion to the technical process of painting works that illustrate a style he was seeking to create. Monet was analyzing the relationship between color and sunlight in a variety of stages between early morning light, the bright light of midday and evening half-light exhibited a series of fifteen paintings of haystacks he painted in 1891 in different lights at different times of day.

Monet became obsessed with the sculptured shape of haystacks and with the dramatic contrasts of light and shade inherent in their form. The haystack paintings were a great success and led Monet to a more elaborate analysis of the effects of light on objects.

Monet painted forty pictures of Rouen Cathedral on gray days, bright days, in early light, late light, full light, and light at different seasons of the year. The Rouen pictures were followed by another series of a perfect subject.

For the subject that would absorb him most Monet need go no further than his garden. He preferred to reside with his family in spacious suburban houses with elaborate flower gardens and immense day-lit studios. In the garden of his house in Giverny was a pool of water lilies that took his attention in the 1890’s. He discovered in the pool and its surfaces, leaves, and blossoms that floated on it his subject for the rest of his life–the translucent petals of the blossoms, the leaves half-submerged in the water the same color with light glancing off surfaces, the whites and rainbow tints.

From the Effects of Light to an Art of Abstract Surfaces: The Water Lilies Period

Monet gradually transformed his art from painting spontaneous approximations of the effects of light and atmosphere to an art of abstract surfaces existing for themselves. The focus of his art became the surface of pools and areas where the balance of water, light, air and the delicate substance of blossoms co-mingled, echoed each other, crossed on another’s boundaries, and blended together so that there was no difference between them. His last works were a series of large decorative panels in which the forms of nature are difficult to distinguish.

If the water lilies are thought of as real-life water lilies they become a great disorderly mass of arbitrary color. But if the water lilies are considered abstract arrangements of color applied in careful strokes they coalesce meaningfully.

Through his obsession with light, his energy, work ethic, scientist’s mind, craft, and controlled experiments, Claude Monet took Impressionism to its limits–and beyond.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

6 Comments

Filed under Artists, Claude Monet, Impressionism, Innovation, Style, The Nature of Artists

Tagged as artistic style, painters

January 4, 2023 · 2:32 pm

A Book of Spiritual Wisdom To Help Discouraged People

Think of the last time you were discouraged. You were knocked off balance and became weakened and vulnerable. Possibly something you longed to happen did not happen, or something you dreaded happening did happen. Then you were discouraged. Courage is a thing of the heart. The word “courage” derives from couer,” the French for heart. To be “dis” couraged is to lose heart. You were never too young and will never be too old be to be discouraged. You don’t outgrow discouragement.

Action is the most effective antidote to discouragement To rid yourself of being discouraged strive to be a person of action. The happiest and most courageous people in the world have a preference for action. Rarely are they discouraged. They are too busy to be. In high spirits they persist through difficulties, overcoming setbacks, resisting gloomy moods, never losing hope. That is why they are so happy. The samurai of ancient Japan were the most action-obsessed men and women who ever lived.

An Example of What Happens When You Are Discouraged

Good things can come out of bad things. So life taught me.

When you are cheated out of money, it is usually because you were too trusting, and I was to the tune of a sixty thousand dollar loss at a time when sixty thousand dollars might just as we’ll have been six million. I had a wife and four children and I was not rich. I had performed work in good faith, and then did not get paid. My spirit was taken out of me, my once firm faith in peoples’ decency was now shaken, and I couldn’t find peace. So I began to search for solace and wisdom.

I had to think. I had to decide what to do now. I was so miserable and angry that I decided, being a writer, to put together a research-based book that would help me recover and would also appeal to other people who were battling the pains of discouragement.

The product of what I thought would be a one year creative venture was to be a book about which people would say, “It saved me from despair. It gave me hope. Once I was discouraged, but now I’m not.” In the book there would be no anger, bitterness, or vengefulness toward anyone, even the two evil men who had taken food out of my children’s mouths. Just good sense, good feelings, and good writing.

I chose as the basis of the book the spiritual insights of samurai warriors of ancient Japan. It may seem that the psychology of people like that who lived four centuries ago in a foreign country would have little to say to you, yet if you are interested in ways to strengthen yourself spiritually, that is the place and era to look for information. Samurai had introduced the teachings of Zen into the Japanese culture. Zen was “the religion of the samurai.” Many samurai were poets.

Were you to acquire the skills of the samurai that the book I wrote is concerned with, the following benefits–the changes in their lives readers told me about–would occur:

Your resilience in recovering from discouragement and other setbacks would be remarkable

Your commitment to your major life’s purposes would be miraculous

Your powers of concentration would be exceptional

You would be afraid less often; old fears would disappear

Committing Yourself to Action

Samurai were models of action-oriented people. The essential feature of the samurai “Way” (way of life) is action. (That a discipline is a Way is indicated by the suffix “do.” The samurai Way is “bushido). All samurai spiritual insights and training were designed for one reason: to equip the person (a samurai or you) to make up their mind quickly and firmly and to go into action confidently.

Samurai were consumed by making a decision and taking steps to achieve their goals, and doing so with little time between the urge to action and the action itself, just as the flame appears immediately when you strike a match. A text that guided samurai says, “The Way of the samurai is immediacy. It is doing things NOW.” Another says, “When things are done slowly seven of ten turn out poorly.”

You will have ideal results if like a samurai you commit your entire being when you take action, putting all of your physical, spiritual, and psychological strength into the acts your life requires you to perform– an author writing a book, a sales person making a pitch, a public speaker addressing an audience, a parent listening to a little child as she speaks to you, etc.

Hold nothing back in reserve. Clear your mind of all distractions. Forget everything else. Forget yourself. Forget the impression you are making. Forget winning or losing. Forget fame and wealth. Forget setbacks. Concentrate solely on performing the action beautifully. Behave as though your every act is the last of your life. Behave as though this is what you will be remembered for.

Are you a person of action or are you waiting for someone to save you?

Writing a Successful Book

I was fortunate to find a good agent who had faith in the project and in me, and we proposed the book to a publisher who accepted it. There would be an advance in two payments. That was good; I needed the money. I laid everything else aside, not having time to waste, and was excited by the process I loved–studying, reading, writing, revising, using my brain, having insights, then “aha” revelations. I found that the sections that gave me the most trouble and took the most time invariably proved to be the most popular when the book was published. That was a profound learning, I worked twelve to fifteen hours a day for two years to finish Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life.

Fighting to Win’s popularity began slowly. There was a minimum of initial publicity. But then the book found its market–men and women looking for strength, a new beginning, and an escape from discouragement. It caught fire in one city after another, racking up sales in the United States, Japan, and Europe. When my article “Fighting to Win” appeared in Success Magazine it was the most read feature Success ever published.

Being Discouraged Is Contrary to Good Mental Health

Every day’s goal of healthy people is to be happy, to love and be loved, and not to be discouraged. But there are many impediments–opponents. In the arts among artists and writers I know so well, and in everyday work and personal life, like a samurai in battle, everyone encounters those opponents. Some are outer opponents–an outrageous person who’s hard to get along with (a harsh critic of your writing or painting, for example if you are in the arts), personal crises, setbacks, failures, Etc. People who steal from you.

But most opponents are inner psychological “dragons” in the samurai vocabulary, powerful opponents such as obsessions, anxieties, fears, and worries. Usually the inner spiritual opponents are the most dreadful. Every person has talents. If you surrender to dragons it makes full realization of those talents impossible. You won’t become the person you had the potential to be.

All samurai training was designed to overcome those dragons so that in your everyday life you will progress smoothly from experience to experience, challenge to challenge, achievement to achievement, happiness to happiness.

Be Ready for These Five Dragons

Samurai were trained to overcome five universal spiritual blocks to action, and developed many methods for doing so, as Fighting to Win prescribes. If left alone without dealing with them, these blocks will fester and lead some people to discouragement. Those main inner opponent dragons are described in Chapter Two of Fighting to Win. They are:

Fear–of any kind (Everyone is afraid of at least one thing every day)
Being afraid to take risks. (That fear makes people timid and cowardly)
Thinking too much and not acting at all, or not quickly enough
Doubting yourself (the main dragon of many people, particularly people in the arts.)
Hesitating

Acquiring wisdom from the samurai Way suits people who wish to overcome discouragement and are able to make use of insights and techniques from any era or culture that will help them. What strikes me is the ease with which readers of the book adapt those insights from centuries ago to their current everyday living.

Writing is said to be therapeutic, and that was certainly true of my experience writing Fighting to Win. I overcame my deep discouragement and was happy to find that the book helped many people overcome theirs.

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

Click on book image to order from Amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

22 Comments

Filed under Blocks to Action, Conquering Blocks, Eastern Philosophy, Encouragement, Fighting to Win, Overcoming Misfortune, Personal Stories, Samurai Techniques

Tagged as action, better life, blocks, Eastern philosophy, inner opponents, personal stories, spiritual wisdom, success

	davidjrogersftw on When Writers’ and Artists’ Liv…
	kkessler833 on When Writers’ and Artists’ Liv…
	Andrew McDowell on When Writers’ and Artists’ Liv…
	davidjrogersftw on When Writers’ and Artists’ Liv…
	davidjrogersftw on When Writers’ and Artists’ Liv…

davidjrogersftw

Why Are So Many Talented Writers Unsuccessful?

Why Your Life as a Writer Creates Conflicts

Bring Your Memoir to Life: The Writer’s Skill of Evoking People and Places from the Past

The Poetry of Riding Freight Trains Across America by David J. Rogers

Good Writers Who Were Discovered by Agents and Publishers

Why Writers and Artists Are So Intense

Embrace Your Destiny as a Writer

Poems Mainly About People by David J. Rogers

Claude Monet’s Experiments That Transformed Art

A Book of Spiritual Wisdom To Help Discouraged People

Archives

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Blog via Email

David J. Rogers

Recent Comments

Topics

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Archives

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Recent Comments

Topics