Why Writing Your Book Will Change You As Much As It Will Change the World

Invite in the fire of purification with Bealtaine, the Celtic festival of fire, so you can summon the persistence to turn your writing into art

It takes the tenacity of spring  and the fire of summer to write a book.

In my work as The Story Catalyst book coach, I often say your book will change you as much as it may change the world. 

I help people move from magical idea to a sturdy living, breathing outline; draft their chapters and craft stellar book proposals that get them book deals. But what I really do is help writers become authors.

During the living and writing of my memoir, Boundless (coming September 2024 from Atmosphere Press), I became an expert on becoming. 

Which is delightful to me now but would have been perplexing to hear then. What I thought I had become an expert on seven years ago was being stuck.

divenire

/di-ve-ni-re/

Italian

To become

Black oak bog at the entrance to the processional in the Bealtaine section of Brigit’s Garden, Co. Galway, Ireland

Bealtaine, the Celtic festival of fire

Are you aching for a transformation? This is the ideal time, because, in the Celtic wheel of the year, we just ushered in Bealtaine, the festival of fire. 

Fire brings us light, the vision so we can see beyond the dark side of the year and turn to the bright side of the year, harnessing the fire of the sun so we can move into the growth and abundance of summer. 

Spring can be a season of anxiety, said Owen O’Suilleabhain, a teacher of Celtic wisdom this week on the Inner Soul Circle gathering for Bealtaine. That’s because what’s bursting into life is also fragile. Just when the shoots come up, the bunnies munch them down. Just when the apple blossoms open, a frost comes. 

Spring requires persistence. It’s a stop-start sort of season. It is a time not to give up. But remember, just because you cannot see it doesn’t mean you stop trying, O’Suilleabhain says. 

Just because your good work to change the world may not be finished in this lifetime, doesn’t mean you stop participating, This is the conversation we have been having this weekend at the School of Earth and Soul retreat with John Philip Newell, author of many Celtic wisdom books, at UCross Ranch in Sheridan, Wyoming. 

The hearth where we met for the Earth and Soul retreat at UCross Ranch in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Because it is Bealtaine, and because this is Wyoming in the spring, we met before a fireplace of rough-hewn stone with a fire crackling behind an iron grate with a moose and an elk. And we talked about how to keep persisting in doing good creative work.

The question to ask yourself, then, is “Do I give up? Or do I fight with a more powerful fire?”

This is the question to invite in when you need to persist in writing a book and the path feels fragile. 

This is the question to welcome when you want to do good in this world and so much seems immovable—let’s say, restoring balance to our burning planet, for one; let’s say, restoring the voice of the divine feminine in a world gone astray because it has suppressed that voice, for another. 

You wonder if you can finish the work. 

She Wrote Here Today: The processional in the Bealtaine garden at Brigit’s Garden, Co. Galway, Ireland.

The fire of purification

Fire not only fights darkness. Fire fights fire.

The more powerful fire has arrived. Bealtaine represents the fire of union, as I saw when I walked through Brigit’s Garden in County Galway, Ireland, last summer, where you are welcomed into a processional between two black bog oaks carved into flames, and you walk past columns of standing stones to a throne that represents the marriage of the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine. 

She Wrote Here Today: The throne in the Bealtaine section of Brigit’s Garden, Co. Galway, Ireland.

Bealtaine brings the fire of purification, like the myth of the phoenix, when the sun is reduced to ashes, every 500 or 600 years, so it can regenerate. The bird with brilliant orange and gold feathers is emblematic of the rebirth of the sun. The Celtic wheel of the year is attuned to this, inscribing the calendar with a story about the sun.

To fight with a more powerful fire, you must let yourself be changed. 

This may be the most challenging part of writing a book. Yes, I grant you that the part about how getting words down on the page is quite a feat. That’s skill. Yes, I grant you that the part about how holding sight of what you’re truly after is a noble quest. That’s the vision. 

But the hardest part is letting your book tell you what it must be. What will it ask of you? The answer is, always: More of you. That’s because, as Donald Barthelme wrote, “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art.”

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,

rather because it wishes to be art.”

Donald Barthelme

When you hit that seemingly immovable part of writing your book, ask if it’s time to fight fire with a more powerful fire. I love the fierceness of that.

Seven years to regeneration, seven years to art

It took me seven years to live Boundless, write Boundless and transform Boundless into art. What I mean by “turning it to art” is that the particulars of my travails speak to something beyond my small life—they speak to the universal. I see them as a window into becoming—a window into how we all become.

Every seven years, we regenerate all new cells in our bodies, or so the popular idea goes. Some parts are faster than others. Every seven days, new eyelashes and a new esophagus. Every few weeks, a new lining to the stomach. Every 10 years, new bones.

Our cellular makeup governs how we think, touch and see. This tells me that our bodies already have a plan to transform how we see the world. Our job as writers, artists and activists is to catch up with that.

I may not have known it when I was living the events of Boundless—that felt like fire. That felt like destruction. That felt like, as William Butler Yeats writes in his quintessential poem, “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” a fire in my head.

I may not have known it when I was writing it—writing it felt like the stop-start of spring. It felt like all I had going for me was the tenacity of laying down words to the page and holding my eyes fast to the glimmer I had that I ought to write it in the first place. 

How I started to know it was a project worth doing: I wrote my way there, what I call Draft to Discover. I’d simply lived into something else, following the fire of purification, letting it light my way. Last year, when I walked between the two black bog oak flames in the Bealtaine garden, I knew I was coming closer.

And that’s what Boundless is about—letting the fire of purification transform you, not so you are restored to the identity you knew, but so that you have become something new.

Boundless is available for pre-order!

My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the mailing list here.

Order it here!

BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque

BARNES & NOBLE

AMAZON

Come on over to carolynflynn.com and sign up for the mailing list to get news about Living Boundlessly, Story Catalyst writing craft classes and Uncommon Hours productivity for creatives. Get a free downloadable book club discussion guide for Boundless at carolynflynn.com.

Tell me more about this Celtic stuff

We have one slot left for the Ireland Writing Retreat on the Ring of Kerry, June 9-13.

Plus, if you are in Ireland or the United Kingdom, you may buy a day pass to hear our special guests, Noirin Ni Riain and Micheal O’Suilleabhain.

Apply by May 12 for the last slot. Or register for the day pass on the retreat web site.

Find out more here: https://www.carolynflynn.com/ireland-2024/

How can you learn to be boundless?

What is your stop-start experience with what you’re creating now? How can you put some fire into it? Let’s expand the conversation. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1AV_Z4yOdLOep5w_0-tUU5x4Nz04-osiRcUiKkG6xajI/edit

Join my pre-order list to be the first to find out when Boundless is available by subscribing to this newsletter or signing up for my mailing list at www.carolynflynn.com.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.