This week we welcome our first Guest Artist, Barbara Lyghtel Rohrer. Congratulations to Barbara on the launch of her new web magazine, The Invisible Map, a place to read, feel, wonder and respond with writing of your own. Please visit this beautiful site. Much time and love has gone into its creation.

Consciously or not, we are struck by the self-accusation of slithering through the world as the con artist soon be caught. How dare we value our emotions, our stories, and our voices? Who are we to think good of the gifts we offer the vastness of the world? What hubris to even create in the first place. Who do we think we are?

Like writing, I don’t do this work for only myself. I want those who partake of my efforts to feel nourished. As to be expected, family and friends take places at the table with far more eagerness than they’d respond to being invited to read. That’s okay. Pass the butter. Pass the berries. Pass the syrup. Please.

At our best, our intuitions dance with our differences while harmonizing with our echoes of the whole and the particular. Being is lonely. Art is what we do for one another to ease our loneliness by declaring “I’m lonely, too.” It’s not the language or image or music we crave; it’s the resonance between our souls.

Writing is a transformative experience, an abundance of choice and change. Form doesn’t matter on this point. Be it poetry or memoir or fiction or nonfiction or a hybrid, without a story centered in changing—or not changing—no one has anything of substance to write.

Taking the proofreader as judge and jury is where writers’ pasts in writing for grades emerges with ferocity. Mine did, until I started to understand that the blue was not meant to signal failure, but as a conversation with someone who was asking if I knew why I’d chosen those words in that order. Could I defend my work?

Inevitable, yet always unexpected, Road Closed signs pop-up in life so often that life itself may prove to be one long detour. On occasion, the detour demands that I set aside my writing, usually when the writing is going well, when I have momentum and ideas and the language to render those ideas on the page. I only want to write and physically cannot. Swear word. Swear word. Swear word.

I tell you these details because my back is essentially going through a rigorous revision. It will hurt like hell, like pulling out 250 pages of a 300-page novel when I realize those pages don’t work.

Emotional work in art always comes with the potential risk of aftermath. Learning to recognize and guide myself through those moments, days, weeks of gaining new understandings is as essential as any other writing tool. Admitting to depression isn’t failing. Admitting to it is a different level of self-editing and revision that I can only do once I accept what I’m resisting.

The more vulnerably human we can make all our characters on levels of both sympathy and empathy, the richer the story and the deeper the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Sympathy plus Empathy equals Complicity—the reader’s willingness to follow and feel the events of the story.

The artistry in working with imaginary people comes from understanding these other characters have needs and weaknesses of their own. Their needs and weaknesses collide, clash, confront one another—always in service of the protagonist’s story. They advance the protagonist’s journey—even by throwing in a detour to the resolution of the main character’s wants, needs, and limitations.

Of course, you may plant your vehicle—your writing—in either town and refuse to leave, but getting out on the road helps your vehicle run smoother. And you don’t want to miss the differing Points of View you might notice in your travels. The reasoning of this mind-play is to create a concrete means of seeing that none of us are one or the other. We’re living in a both/and world. We’re all pantsers. We’re all plotters. It all depends on what our stories need.

The truth: Living is so hard that her reasons will forever be a mystery to me. They were probably a mystery to her as well. She swooned so that she could rest the weight of her being on the nearest comfort she could find. All I can offer her now is the mercy not to judge her…

Here’s the big lesson: nobody sits down and writes a novel. Or memoir. Or essay. Creating a work of writing is more akin to making old-school puff pastry croissants or finessing finicky phyllo dough into a spanakopita. Writing demands a patient working with layers, the thinner, the better. I can write only one layer at a time.

Less renown in our set of tools are the can’t-write-without items such as the favorite mug with the chipped handle, the tea or coffee of choice, the motivating music—or not, blank notebooks (even though I have space enough in others), and of course, the correct pens, pencils, keyboards and screens waiting to fill the world with unbridled brilliance.

To prepare your space is to prepare yourself. If you have trouble owning your needs as a writer, you will have the same kind of trouble owning your words, your truth, in your writing. Both are a means of declaring you exist. The true perfect room of your own is located within your commitment to your writing.

Consider this your invitation to watch the marathon chaotic game of a novel coming into being. Join me here for the weekly updates and the low-downs of turning an idea into a book while, simultaneously, trying to find publication for the finished new one. In other words, the story behind the story.

The problem: A resolution’s fine print is located in its meaning. To resolve is to bring a state of tension back to a state of equilibrium. Clench your fist tight and then relax it, that feeling of relief is the resolution. It’s not a task. It’s a release. However for me, a resolution held a vow that I would exert control over myself until I realized my arbitrary goals. Or so I told myself. Mind over matter. Year after year.

The writer may need solitude and silence to create, but to make that creation into a book requires a devoted community. We readily sing the praises of agents and editors and cover artists. This short essay is dedicated to those in the background who’ve more than earned a pedestal all their own: our Beta Readers.

Along the way, your mind might question the value of your wandering. That’s what the mind does—it creates questions. Your heart needs no compass, for the heart has always known where it wants to be. Your heart waits only for a state of recognition to emerge. A state of home.