Being Awake
by Mary Carroll Moore, guest blogger

I woke up this morning to a soft, snow-drenched landscape and pink light. Sunrise always feels full of new possibilities, and I’m excited about the gifts and challenges my new day will present. But soon daily work begins: the phone rings, emails arrive with their questions and demands for attention. Pink light fades to rush of traffic, the fast pulse of day.

Staying awake becomes the real work. To be awake throughout the day, inwardly and outwardly, whatever comes.

Writing books is one way I stay awake. It’s my favorite creative expression. Each book I publish gets closer to my heart and my personal truth, a process that occurs for many writers. We’re figuring out who we are, as awake as we can be, as we write. The trick is to stay awake and open to our particular truth as it comes through, to allow it onto the page for others to see.

When my recent novel, Qualities of Light, got published, I began a book tour that took me in front of large and small audiences, friends and family, students from my writing classes and strangers I’d never see again. In a book tour, the author often has the surreal experience of people knowing you better than you know yourself-because they’ve read your book and seen things you revealed. They look for the places in your art that you’re awake, conscious, revealing more hints about how to be a whole person. This comes through your writing, your characters, your story. Readers ask you to be awake so you can help them see their lives in a new way. They tell you how the story you wrote brought them a gift or a challenge. They are often generous in enthusiasm for what you’ve created.

Qualities of Light treats a tender subject to me—one that made me stay awake as I wrote. The story is about family healing after tragedy. My sister passed away suddenly a few years ago and I wanted to explore this in my writing. In my novel, I chose a different scenario: a young boy almost drowns, his older sister is blamed, and the family-all artists-struggle with their twists of perception.

The book is about how people, artists, who are trained to be awake and look deeply into life, become blind to their own feelings. And who wakes them up again.

In Qualities of Light, the “waking up” arrives via the young heroine, Molly. At almost sixteen, she ends up saving her parents as she saves herself.

Today I’m writing, working on the sequel, called Breathing Room. It continues the story five years later. My job today is to stay awake to what this story is about. To stay awake to my life and the particular gifts and challenges it will bring me with its snowy landscape of early January. So many of us want to stay awake. I would ask how willing you are to show up for your life. Living in an awake state, like writing a book, forces us to reveal ourselves to the world.

Mary Carroll Moore teaches creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center near New York City, and The Studios at Key West. Her eleven published books include How to Master Change in Your Life: Sixty-seven Ways to Handle Life’s Toughest Moments (Eckankar Books), Cholesterol Cures (Rodale Press), and the award-winning Healthy Cooking (Ortho Publications). Your Book Starts Here: Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book, based on her How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book ™ writing workshops, will be released in 2010. A former nationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Mary’s essays, short stories, articles, and poetry have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers around the U.S. and have won awards with the McKnight Awards for Creative Prose, Glimmer Train Press, the Loft Mentor Series, and other writing competitions. She lives with her family in Connecticut and New Hampshire and writes a weekly blog for book writers at http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com.