Elizabeth C. Haynes | Elizabeth C. Haynes

Toy Soldiers

by Elizabeth C. Haynes

The world out there is one for toy soldiers,
Lined up in rows, one after the other,
Their camo green bodies of similar size, shape, proportions
All called to conform.

Yet here I sit, a different shape entirely.
Bright colors.
A pacifist no less.
With absolutely nowhere to fall into line.

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My first book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife, was released on August 18, 2020 by Warren Publishing and was re-released on February 16, 2021 by White Ocean Press. To read an excerpt, check out reviews, see the author Q&A, or find links to buy, click the Learn More button.

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

Where Creativity Begins

I’m sitting down at my computer after the longest fallow period of my entire professional life. I haven’t written much of anything since I stopped working on my second book in October of 2020. In that time, I found myself not just completely blank creatively, but with a mind filled with incredibly loud noise. The noise became so intense that, for the first time ever, I was unable to access the source of everything that allows me to write.

I commented on a tweet recently where people were arguing over the merits of “struggle” as a necessary spark for the arising of creativity. I will agree that struggle has informed my writing and has also impacted my ability to think about the world in a multidimensional way. But in my response to that tweet, I argued that struggle more often kills creativity. This is because our minds cannot access creative power when they’re filled with worry, strife, depression, anger, frustration, or fears about basic safety.

Creativity is born from spaciousness.

I admittedly was still a sputtering creative during some of the toughest periods of my life, but I also spent a lot of that time producing underwhelming material or unable to write much at all. I regularly wondered why I could not consistently find any inspiration or flow, or why I had so many fits and starts, or why it took me five tries to finally complete a book that was good enough to have published (and also why it took me five long years to complete that single book). I recognized that my own self-doubt played a huge role in this struggle, but I didn’t really understand the rest of the problem.

As I return to my writing and to other creative means in the second half of my life, I plan to approach my work differently because I feel like I’ve finally found the key to ongoing creativity. It is, as I mentioned, born from spaciousness. That’s it. It’s about decreasing the noise in your head and creating some white space so that you can fully get out of your own way.

I think the act of being creative is not something we do with our minds anyway. Creativity is something that flows through us from another source – when there is enough space available for it to rush in, that is. Then we take it and run with it with the tools available in our minds, and it emerges as artistic expression or a creative solution to a problem or some other tangible output. In other words, our mind simply uses the creative force in the best way it knows how.

So we need to not only keep the space open for creativity to come, but we need to also free the mind to focus on the creative inspiration once it does.

I’ve noticed that when I sit down to write – more specifically, when I am successful at it – my mind quickly switches to an “off” position while I work. It’s a strange occurrence because it seems like you need your mind to do whatever you are doing, but in actuality the mind operates on autopilot for a while. It knows what to do either because you were born with the ability or have taught it those skills over many years, and so it just does it. It uses the creative inspiration it downloads and molds it into something else, all without too much conscious work on your part. This is what so many artists refer to as “flow,” where you lose a sense of time and also of yourself.

I’ve learned to recognize this partnership over the years and have found some important strategies for staying with it. The most crucial one is to work in a place where I won’t be interrupted by anyone or anything, whether it be a person walking in or a ding on my phone or an email notification flying in from the side of my screen. Because the moment my mind switches back to “on” and the noise begins again, the magic is broken. The entire mechanism breaks down and I can no longer find the right words to say.

As far as the daily noise in your head, managing it can take time and determination. All of the following had shut off my creativity completely for almost a year and a half:

Financial stress from unemployment.
Pandemic stress.
Lack of purpose.
Disappointment about certain aspects of my life.
Worries about my health.
Fears about my mobility.
Stress related to where I live.
The war in Ukraine.

All of this noise is still here, but the difference is I’ve been able to soften it by deciding to just accept of all of these things as part of my reality. Sometimes it takes getting to the cusp of mental insanity before you can do this, which is what happened to me. I’d grown so tired of trying to figure out my life (and my living situation and my job situation and everything else), that my brain sort of gave up. It had been turning these things over for months on end and finding no solution, and had finally reached a level of noise that felt like insanity between my ears. So I threw up my hands one day and said, “Enough! I just can’t think about this anymore, and I won’t. It’s making me absolutely crazy.”

The spaciousness crept back in almost immediately, painting a white opaqueness over the incessant black scribbles in my mind. My desire to write and to create resurfaced, and I even went to a craft store to pick up some art supplies. I plan to try painting for the first time since watching Bob Ross on TV in the 80s, and maybe I’ll finally restart work on my next book.

So for anyone striving to be creative and feeling like you can’t find it (or have lost it), I would say to be gentle with yourself and first work on the noise in your head. You may find some creativity arising even if you can just turn the volume down a bit. Then secondly, practice doing your creative work in a space where your mind can focus intently – without interruption – on whatever it is that you’re doing. Your creativity is not gone, nor has it dimmed. It’s just been pushed to the background while it waits for some space to open up.

And remember that self-criticism is mental noise too. It will produce a creative dam that’s worse than any other type, and can be so strong that it blocks your work for a lifetime. So don’t forget to work on that noise as well.

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

What Makes Readers Bored

It’s not easy to write interesting copy, an interesting book, an interesting script, etc. If you don’t connect with your readers properly or give them something to latch on to, you’ll lose them in the first few paragraphs.

My number one tip for not boring your readers is to tell a story. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy story and it doesn’t have to have a plot or dialogue or anything else – it just has to take them from point A to point B, or help them visualize a real-life situation.

Here’s an example of some writing that’s rather boring due to a lack of storytelling:

“AirPods are headphones without wires. They come with a case that has a connector for charging, and they allow you to listen to sounds without having to be right next to the device. They are superior to other types of headphones.”

Okay. So they’re headphones, so they have no wires, so they’re “superior.” And? Snooze.

Let’s tell a story instead:

“AirPods allow you to live life untethered. Even though they’re wireless, these headphones give you the same crisp sound without the worry of untangling knots in the wires, threading wires through your coat in winter, or brushing them out of your face during a jog. You can charge the AirPods easily with the included case, and they’re still small enough to fit in your pocket.”

See the difference?

I told micro-stories, in a sense. I brought the AirPods to life by creating real-world scenarios that the reader could visualize. There is no true beginning or end for the storytelling here, like you’d see in a novel or short story; it’s just me allowing the reader to move quickly through the different experiences one has when using headphones. It makes a static thing more vibrant and interesting.

You can apply this technique to many types of writing. In fact, the original purpose of writing was to record information or to document oral stories. So why not focus on storytelling first?

Will Anyone Like My Book?

As I was going along on my journey toward authorship, a question I often asked myself was, “Is anyone even going to like this?” And then I’d follow it up with, “Am I putting myself out there just to be rejected?”

For people in a rush, I’ll give you a quick answer: YES, someone will like your book. Write it. 🙂

But to break it down a bit, I think the question most people are actually asking is, “Will lots of people like this?” Meaning, numbers that publishers would consider a success and that might create a new career opportunity for an aspiring author.

The answer to that one is: Well… (you probably know what I will say anyway)

It’s a bummer to realize that mainstream success might be tough, especially when your dream is to achieve success in that way. But I think we need to work on how we define “success” when it comes to publishing a book, and also how we define “lots” when it comes to the number of people who find it meaningful.

What I’ve learned is that if you’re driven to write a book, and when it’s from some sort of internal place that has nothing to do with fame and accolades, then there are people out there who will want to read it. One of my teachers used to say (when I was studying to be a yoga teacher) that the students who need you will show up for whatever you, in your uniqueness, have to offer.

So I say to you that the readers who need you will show up for whatever you, in your uniqueness, have to offer. And that YES, someone will like your book. In fact, MANY someones might like your book.

I think the amount of material success a particular book achieves is really out of our hands anyway, and I mean this on a material level but also sort of on an otherworldly level. Materially, some books sell widely because they have powerful publishing houses to create a marketing machine on behalf of the author and his/her work. High dollars translate to high visibility in the marketplace.

But!

My (extremely popular) dentist has a plaque on the wall in one of the patient rooms that says, “Our greatest compliment is your referral.” So don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth to conquer the material part of selling a book that is well-written. It happens ALL the time.

On a more otherworldly level, though, the success of your book may depend on what the planet needs right now. If lots of people need what you have to say, and if it’s your purpose in life to say it broadly with this book (not having a hit now doesn’t mean you won’t have one later), you might have a better shot at mainstream success. But if a smaller part of the world needs what you have to say, it may never make it to mainstream even though the book may be equally as good as another really popular one. This is not a failure.

I think when we ask questions like, “How can I sell a lot of copies” or “How do I make it to the bestseller list,” we are missing the actual point. I suspect bestsellers are the result, mostly, of people not focusing on writing a bestseller – they are focused instead on doing their best work and offering something special to the world. If people like it, great. If people don’t, well, the author likes it and feels satisfied in what they’ve done.

So I challenge you to write regardless of the outcome, and to know that whatever you create is needed – simply because you want to create it. How we define success as a writer, author, artist, musician, or other creative type should be based on intent and quality anyway. Meaning, can we produce something unique that even one or two other people find life-altering or impactful? That’s the goal. That’s success as an author, even if we have to maintain our day jobs to make our bills.

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

Fallow Periods

I don’t think life is meant to be a continuous charging forward—one with no pit stops, no breakdowns, and no change in direction. And yet we act like it is. We act like unless we are walking a certain path, with a certain style, we are failing at life. And then if we have a catastrophe or if we aren’t sure where we are for a little while, we’re doing it all wrong.

But that’s not really how life works.

Like many other humans, I can say that almost nothing has gone according to plan in my own life. I might have a destination in mind and maybe I get there eventually, but the directions often rewrite themselves along the way. Or the road isn’t as smooth as I thought it would be, or it doesn’t wind in the direction I expected. And then sometimes I find myself at a dead end entirely, sitting in a pile of loose dirt that marks a fallow period and therefore breaks up my journey with seeming non-movement.

And that’s what I want to talk about now. Fallow periods. The times when we feel like we’re at a standstill but perhaps really aren’t.

I often think about how fields cannot produce abundance without time for the soil to lay fallow: to replenish its nutrients, to regain its energy, to recover its ability to push out incredible life forms. And so it goes with humans, too. Sometimes we’re simply in a fallow period and, although we don’t see it that way, it’s actually a necessary period we need to pass through in order to recalibrate our journey to whatever comes next.

A fallow period can appear in a lot of ways, I think. It can appear most prominently via unemployment when you’ve literally got nothing to do. All the downtime then forces you to sit in the present moment and to confront your own emotions around what that present moment means. Then maybe you move into thinking about what your past looked like and how your future may look a bit different, and sometimes you even change direction—either by necessity or by force.

It can also appear when someone dies. A death often makes us hit pause on our own lives as we fall into grief. Then we find ourselves in a sort of suspended animation, watching the rest of the world as through a window, with everyone moving along as if nothing has happened. And yet we now have to stop everything before we can start anew, because our life is so different without that person in it.

It can also appear in times like these—pandemic times. Times when we’re forced to be more still, to wait, to suffer, to reevaluate. Times when we’re unsure of when it all will end and what it all means anyway, and times when we’re forced to look at our lives in a fresh way. What’s really important? Who is really important? Am I using my time in the best way I can?

This year, 2020, was a significant fallow period for me—and not just because of the pandemic. And for a while I was really distressed by it. By this pause, as I wrote about in The Big Pause. By this not doing of anything, really. And then I realized what it actually was (a fallow period) and I told myself it was okay. I gave myself permission to have a fallow period and to experience it in whatever way that might be.

If you’re in a fallow period right now, regardless of how that period arrived in your life, could you give yourself permission to just be in it? To experience it fully as a period of preparation rather than as lack of progress? And, yes, to recognize that it’s a period of uncertainty and discomfort, but to also know that it’s a necessary one to propel you on your way?

I started emerging from my fallow period only a few weeks ago, and when I realized the fallow period had ended of its own accord (without much effort by me, to tell the truth), I was glad I’d chosen to sit in it while it was here. To not fight it, but to instead use it as a space to ready myself for whatever came next.

Do not fear the fallow periods. Use them instead for self-discovery, and to tune in to your internal frequencies. And also, try not to stress about them even though they can be very stressful (especially if your unemployment benefits, for example, are about to end like mine were).

Remember that something greater than you could ever imagine is moving the pieces on the game board and closing or opening doors for you. Trust in that presence—whatever you believe it to be—and just sit in the moment that has been given to you. Every moment, including a seemingly inactive one, is always given to you for a reason.

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

Daily Word Counts

Do you give yourself a daily word count to hit? Have you thought about smashing that rule to pieces?

I’ve been writing for two decades so you may be surprised to hear that I’ve never given myself daily word counts. But before I elaborate on why you might want to follow suit, I do think a daily word count works for some people. Reasons:

It forces you to maintain discipline
It helps you meet deadlines (if you have them)
It makes you feel good about your work
It is a tangible measurement of progress

But here’s what I think happens sometimes when you impose inflexible word counts on yourself:

You get stuck/blocked
You write uninspired drafts
You become too frustrated
You sometimes feel like a failure
You write before you’re actually ready to do so

I like that last point the most, because sometimes you’re just not ready to write the thing you want to write—as crappy as that might feel. Sometimes you need to live life, get some experience, and find inspiration. Sometimes faster isn’t actually the goal, and sometimes you’ll finally release a torrent of words after a long drought.

For me, daily word counts force me to write when I don’t want to or when I don’t actually have anything to say. So how do I make progress, you might ask, if I don’t use word counts? Well, I set broad goals for myself instead. Here are some recent examples:

I want to release a book of poems. I’m going to continue writing them as they come, and then when I have enough, I’ll comb through them and see what’s there.
I want to finish a draft of my second book by the end of 2021. I’ll make sure to write a page or two as often as I can, and try to target 5,000 words per month, but if I run out of ideas or am uninspired, I’ll stop until I have more to flesh out. This is okay. I can adjust my date if necessary, because uninspired work is not what I want to produce.
I want to submit some poems to a few literary journals. I’ll do this within the next three months. I’ll find some suitable journals first, and then I’ll identify some pieces to submit.

Sure, this means it sometimes takes me longer to get a project done. But the draft I do write is much stronger than the one I’d write if I forced my brain to string together words it hadn’t quite figured out. It’s also a much less frustrating process.

And I’ll leave this little nugget here too: You do NOT have to write every day to be a “real” writer. I’ve had people tell me I need to write every day. No, I don’t. What I need to do is to write regularly so that I continue to work on my craft, but I don’t need to write every single day – and neither do you.

What do you think? Do you like word counts? Hate them? Have you tried it both ways? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

Tips for Getting Moving

I recently came across a writer who had been sitting on an outline for years. He wanted to lock himself in a cabin to make himself write, but I argued that locking oneself in a cabin will be ineffective if the underlying issue is fear.

Are you afraid to write?

If so, tell yourself the following:

1. I am allowed to write badly. Everybody writes garbage.

2. I can’t edit a blank page. It’s better to have something there.

3. I am going to write without editing. I can do that later.

4. I will refrain from judging anything I write. I can do that later.

5. If I don’t do well enough the first time, I’ll just try again.

6. My desire to write a book comes from something that is greater than my mind. I am going to trust whatever that is to also grant me the ability to do it.

Once you’ve solved this problem, feel free to go lock yourself in a cabin. 🙂

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

The Worm That Changed My Mind

About a month ago, I came across a tomato hornworm on my cherry tomato plant. If you haven’t seen a tomato hornworm (and I don’t intend for this to be a long, boring diatribe about a worm, but you need to read the story to get my point), it’s a really large, green worm that is about as big and thick as my thumb.

As is often the case with Mother Nature, these worms are cleverly made to blend in with their target plants and are therefore extremely hard to spot. For the previous 36 hours, I’d scratched my head and stared at the plant, wondering what could possibly have decimated it so quickly. A third of the leaves were gone, half of the fruit was gone, and the stems were eaten down to nubs. I looked and looked but couldn’t find any anything out of the ordinary.

I’d learned a few months back that sometimes cutting off all the injured or diseased parts was step one to a plant’s healing, much like how we humans start to heal when we treat our underlying disease or remove things that are broken (like my poor gallbladder, may it RIP). And it was when I went around to prune off the jagged stems and half-eaten fruit that I suddenly spotted him gnawing contentedly on one of my green tomatoes.

I dropped my pruner and ran inside the house. Yelling up the stairs to my husband, who was working in his office, I requested that he come down immediately to provide moral support while I attempted to remove a huge worm from my plant. He was unsure of why I needed such support, but as good husbands do, he came outside.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Right there. Look. There.” I pointed.

“Where?”

“Right here, see? He’s on the stem,” still pointing.

“I don’t see it…”

And then, “Ohhhhh. Wow, they sure do blend in.”

As someone who likes to be thoroughly prepared so as to assure my own success, I’d already researched every possible tomato plant (and pest) issue – including the tomato hornworm. And the internets had told me I should remove said worm and throw him into a bucket of soapy water to snuff him out – much like stink bugs and caterpillars and the like.

Okay.

So I went and got a clear plastic cup, added some water and dish soap, put on my glove like a surgeon, and went back outside to attempt to pull him off while proclaiming, “Yuck yuck yuck!” audibly enough for the neighbors to overhear.

Except he wouldn’t come off.

I tried, he clung tight. I tried harder, he didn’t budge. Eventually I realized I wasn’t going to squish him if I gripped and pulled him off like Velcro, so I finally won the battle and quickly heaved him into the cup.

“Phew,” I said to my husband, relief washing over me that I’d done this necessary gardening thing and therefore was probably legit initiated into it now.

But then I looked over and saw this poor worm struggling, drowning, suffocating in a soapy swimming pool with insurmountable walls. And I felt my heart start to crumble.

“Gawd. I just can’t do that to him, Jason,” I said, and quickly dumped him out onto the grass. “It makes me really sad.”

“Yeah,” he said, understanding what I meant.

I thought for a moment about what I ought to do next, with said worm now squiggling around on the grass helplessly near my back gate. So I scooped him up in the empty cup – which had small soap bubbles still clinging to the rim – and then I marched out of my backyard, around my house, and down the street to a little clump of native brush that somehow hadn’t been destroyed by the construction of our neighborhood about 12 years ago (Texas has a nasty habit of bulldozing everything to the ground). I then heaved him into said brush even though I’d come to realize he’d likely die anyway from the soap residue, and I sent a silent well wish and an apology to his little soul.

Maybe my behavior sounds a bit nonsensical because, after all, it’s just a worm. But I tell you this story because the worm changed how I see the life around me. It made me realize that we often fear the things we do not understand – and this fear response is an important behavior for us humans (myself included) to learn to manage properly.

I feared him because he looked different than any bug I’d ever encountered. He was large, he was green, he had a little horn on his back, and there were multiple sets of feet clinging tightly to a branch that was half the diameter of his massive body.

I also feared him because I did not truly see him. What I mean is, I didn’t see him as part of the same life that exists in me, nor did I see him as an important part of the well-oiled mechanics of our planet. He was just hanging around, doing what he’s supposed to do – which is, yes, eat my tomatoes – but I didn’t acknowledge that he has as much right to the plant as I have. We all share this planet and its resources, and I really had enough tomato plants left over that I could have given that one to him and been just fine.

I think we do this fear response thing a lot, fellow humans. I think this is why we have so much prejudice, and intolerance, and lack of understanding, and weird behavior. It’s because we don’t understand the “other” and therefore we are afraid of that thing or person or animal or way of life.

And what do we do when we’re afraid? We self-protect. We mount our defenses. We turn our heads in disgust, we kill, or sometimes we just run away. In other words, we lose ourselves in some weird egoic protective instinct instead of clearing our heads and seeing the world for what it really is: a place where we are all kind of the same.

Back in grade school, I was fascinated to learn that everything is made up of atoms which are then comprised of sub-atomic particles. A recent Google search says the smallest currently known particle is a quark (these are sub-atomic particles that combine to create protons and neutrons), and that we don’t yet have the ability to break these particles down further.

So we are ALL comprised of this stuff at our core – and it’s true as much for you as it is for a rock, a bird, a tree, or a worm.

I feel like once we get in touch with what this really means, we can start to rethink some of our behaviors. This is why I felt sad for hurting the worm and had to abort the mission: killing him was killing a part of myself, a part of my essence, because we are formed from the same stuff. And not everyone is going to be able to follow me when I say that (it’s okay if you don’t). But I try very hard not to kill anything and this little guy was new to my world. So I got afraid and lost my center until I looked, understood what he was, and immediately changed course.

Have you lost your center with people who aren’t like you? Or maybe with that little rat who lives outside your house, doing nothing but trying to live life just like you are, but you simply don’t want to share the space with him because you’re afraid he’ll <fill in the blank>?

What this time in our history has taught me is that so many people live their lives in a fear state. It’s MINE. They’ll TAKE what’s MINE. There’s not ENOUGH to go around. I’ve got to have my SHARE. They’re coming to take my LIFE, my PROPERTY, my LIBERTY.

Me, me, me. But what about others?

What about this planet of ours that is smoldering? What about the humans who are starving? What about the ecosystems that are collapsing?

What about the trees that are eaten by big machines to make way for MORE buildings? And what about the animals that are killed with poison, with shovels, with guns simply because they want to exist just like you do but landed in your space by chance?

It’s not all about us, fellow humans.

So I can tell you exactly how I’ll react the next time I see a tomato hornworm: I’ll look at him with kindness and I’ll tell him hello. And then I’ll tell him I appreciate that he’s visited and has found some food, but that this is my food, and I hope he has had a good helping and can find more food elsewhere.

And then I’ll glove myself again like a surgeon to pry him off the stem, but this time I’ll place him gently into an EMPTY cup. I’ll walk down the street to that patch of brush, drop him there carefully to give him his best shot at survival, and wish him well as he goes on his way.

This is how life should be, guys. This is how we should be to each other – to other people, to animals, to birds, to bugs, to plants, to the planet. Let’s not forget that we all need each other in order to exist. Too many people don’t seem to understand this anymore, and if we don’t get it together…well, I don’t want to think about that. We’re already seeing it on the west coast, and with storms, and with temperatures rising, and with…so many things.

Let’s all just try to do better.

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by Elizabeth C. Haynes

2020

by Elizabeth C. Haynes

The clouds are moving in, over my life.
Rolling dark gray since the pandemic.
With the sick tumbling across the land
Inundating beds, and nurses, and doctors.
But with a populace looking on, utterly unconcerned
Because they’d rather pretend to be free.

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