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Adult ADHD ADD Tips and Support
Adult ADHD ADD Tips – Author Warren Goldie: The Long Game of a Creative Professional
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Adult ADHD ADD Tips and Support Podcast - A Podcast for Neurodivergent Creatives. Interview with Author, Warren Goldie. The Long Game of a Creative Professional. This podcast is an audio companion to the book "The Drummer and the Great Mountain - A Gui...
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- [00:16]
A
Welcome to the Drummer and the Great Mountain, a podcast where we share effective tips and practices for working with adults. Add ADHD in a natural, effective way without the use of medications each episode Join me your host Batman Saram, along with the author of the Drummer and the Great Mountain, Michael Joseph Ferguson. Join Michael and myself in an interactive discussion of sharing our stories as we journey together in transforming what can be the gift of being what we call hunter types. This podcast is intended to be your audio companion to the book written by Michael, who joins me each episode where we both will strive to foster dialogue, give you our personal insights and and share both of our experiences on this similar path that we are all on. Our intention and hope is that along with the book, this podcast gives you an additional perspective as you listen to us, delve deeper into each chapter of the book to give you even more tools to go along with what it is that you are reading. Visit us at Drummer and the great mountain.com to purchase the book and look for more tools, tips and updates as well as giving us feedback on this podcast. Join our growing global community of creative types, entrepreneurs and out of the box thinkers on our shared journey. Welcome to the Drummer and the Great Mountain podcast.
- [01:53]
B
Welcome everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host Michael Joseph Ferguson. How are you all doing? We have a very special episode today. We have with us writer, novelist and author of the book Waking Warren Goldie. We'll be discussing his journey as a neurodivergent creative professional. From his work in Hollywood, including his time working on Steven Spielberg's Showa project, to his journey bringing his own creative projects to fruition. We'll be covering both the struggles and gifts of making a living with your creativity and he'll provide some really useful tips in working with the creative process from inception to completion. Warren is just a treasure trove of wisdom in his unique approach to creative writing that can be applied to just about any creative endeavor. This is such a rich conversation, I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. Okay, so just one quick announcement. We'll be starting a live online six week support group starting on June 25th. These will be live two hour sessions and as typical for our offerings, you'll be joined by fellow neurodivergent hunter types from around the world and we'll be working with the same process I use in my one on one life coaching sessions. So we're just bringing that into the group format and if you're wanting support in integrating the topics we discuss on this podcast or you've joined us in previous workshops, but you need a little extra support of the weekly support group. This is the group for you, from developing your goals to putting them into action. This group is about having a supportive anchor in your week. So whether it's your health and wellness plan going into the summer and just getting that anchored or anchoring a creative or business project you've been putting off, this is what we'll be covering so this group can assist you in getting the support and tools you need to make those things happen. This group will be limited to 24 people, so it may fill up quick. And some of you have asked about splitting up payments for workshops so you don't have to pay it all at once. We've added that function now, so when you go to checkout under PayPal, there'll be an option that says pay later and you'll have the option to split up your payments if that helps you. So I hope you can join us. If you're interested, go to drummerinthegreatmountain.com group or check the link in the podcast Description Warren Goldie has been a professional writer for over 30 years. He is most known as author of the book Waking Maya. A novelist produced playwright, writer of short fiction, poetry and essays, Warren has had a long career in both entertainment and high tech. His articles and stories have been published on topics ranging from speculative fiction to first person essays to explorations of states of consciousness. As a playwright, he has been featured in festivals throughout the United States. Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a Holocaust survivor, Warren has also worked with Steven Spielberg at the Shoah Foundation. A self described highly sensitive person, his work often explores the topics of mental health, philosophy, and spirituality. I'm pleased to have with us Warren Goldie. So we met in Hollywood in the mid-1990s. I remember 1995. It was winter of 1995. You were living near Runyon Canyon, which is a fairly famous location in the entertainment industry where people have lived. I've heard lots of podcasts of people talking about that area and where they lived, especially coming up in the industry. Down the street from Rock and Roll Ralph's, you were working on Steven Spielberg's Showa Project.
- [05:41]
C
Yes, yes, I remember it well. And meeting you was just great. Cause I thought we were on a very similar wavelength as far as creativity goes. And I remember hearing your music and you talking about your own creative projects and then we actually worked on a few things together and I thought we were always aligned, which is, you know, sort of stayed that way throughout all.
- [06:04]
B
The years, I became a big fan of your writing when we first you share with me some of your short stories, and it was like, wow, imaginative. Your writing was really clean, like Vonnegut. It had that kind of really crisp. It was like, deceptively easy to read. And I always know from writing that that takes a long time to get there. It's not an easy process. The tendency is to overwrite. And so when I read your work, I went, oh, yeah, like polished, really inspiring, very imaginative, but easy to read, easy to drop. Right. And then, like you said, we then end up working on TI tomorrow. We will touch on that briefly. We even brought you over to Kauai. We worked on a project there that was late 90s. So I want to get a little bit of a backstory, though. I want to hear a little bit about where you grew up and what first inspired you to start writing.
- [07:03]
C
Okay. Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. My family lived there until I was seven. My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was Romanian, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz with her family. Many of her family perished. She came over to Cuba and then to the US Met my dad in Brooklyn. He was an orphan. And so I spent the first seven years of my life in Brooklyn, which back, you know, in those days, it was nothing like the way it is now. You know, it was lots of immigrants, simple, warm 41st street is where I grew up. And then dad moved us to a suburb of Baltimore when I was seven. And that's where I was until I graduated college. Now, you know, growing up, you know, one of the ways that I tie into your work is I was hypersensitive child, you know, what I guess they call a highly sensitive person. I was aware of everything, easily distractible, easily bored. I could perceive things at a deep level. I felt like I could really understand people's emotions. And a lot of the things I was, you know, whether it was art or music or food or philosophy, whatever it was, I felt like I was grokking it at a deep level. And, you know, I think I didn't get a lot of support for that from my family. They just didn't understand, you know, they were operating on a more gross level. They were great people. But I did feel alone and isolated growing up the way that I was. And so. So it was difficult. You know, I had plenty of depression, anxiety issues through my teen years. But as far as the answer to your question about the writing, it's been two tracks for me. It's been a creative writing career. And it's been a business writing career.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And one of the projects that you and I did that you forgot to mention was the. The kiosks at the seafaring museum.
- [09:04]
B
I completely forgot about that. Y. Yeah. And that was actually one of the. One of our. We've actually spent the most time together working on that.
- [09:11]
C
Yeah.
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B
Just, for some reason, just completely blocked that out. Yes.
- [09:14]
C
Yep. Yeah. Because that was. That was filmmaking. You were making these little documentaries. I was looking at captain's logs from this museum down in Southern California, and that was really fun. But my point is, there's been two tracks, and I've, you know, used my energy in both tracks.
- [09:32]
B
Yes. And I want to go back to the backstory a little bit, too, because there's a lot of pieces there that I think are important to explore, which is that growing up hypersensitive, very imaginative, it sounds like you were probably in your own world a bit, because the people around you didn't really connect with you. And I'm wondering if that energy went into reading and exploring. Who were you reading at that time, growing up that. That compelled you or connected to you or give you. Gave you a sense of, like, oh, I'm. I'm part of this world. This world feels more real than maybe the people around you.
- [10:12]
C
Well, that's a. That's a really good point, because I did read a lot of. Mostly novels. I was spiritually curious as well, so I read a lot about Eastern religions. I remember coming across a book about the Tao Te Ching and some Taoist kind of literature that. I mean, I was, like, maybe 12 or 13 years old, and I was looking at this stuff saying, wow, that kind of describes my experience a little bit, some of these wisdom writings. But as you say, Vonnegut was one of the formative authors for me, but I remember just disappearing into novels to escape my pain, that I was feeling the pain of loneliness and isolation and anxiety. But at the same time, I was an athlete, which was really helpful because, you know, I played basketball and tennis and I was competitive, and that put me out into the public sphere in a confident way. But, yeah, quite often I would be reading and watching TV and watching movies. You know, in retrospect, I'm not sure how, you know, healthy that was, you know, like, kind of disappeared into it.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But on the other hand, you know, I read a lot of fiction writers, and, you know, I incorporated, you know, sort of their methods and techniques and so on.
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B
Yeah. And so did. How. When did the. What was the point where you Went from just taking it in and digesting it to analyzing it and going, oh, I see what this person's doing. Like, I can see, like the craft underneath it. When did that happen?
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C
Well, kind of late, actually. It wasn't until I was 31, and then I started experimenting with creative writing. Up until then, believe it or not, my undergraduate degree was in biology, and I took some software developing development courses in my last year, and I went into software development for a few years and I was really ill suited for all this stuff, but, you know, I somehow managed to do okay. So it took me, you know, I kind of worked for the. For the. For the company, you know, whatever corporation it was through my 20s. And then at 31, I don't know, I just felt this overriding drive to start creating. And I had read so many books by then, and I took a class at a college outside of Baltimore and I wrote some essays. And my teacher encouraged me to submit one to the Baltimore sun, which is the major newspaper in Baltimore. And they accepted it and they printed this essay. And then I kind of kept tinkering around and writing and submitting, and that's kind of how I got started with creative writing.
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B
And what brought you to the West.
- [12:57]
C
Coast, I think that was around the early 90s. I had a friend in LA and I just decided to come out and check it out, and that's what I did. I've got some stories, but it would probably take too long. But I did find myself working for a couple of Hollywood production companies. And I was handed scripts to read and analyze. And this is a job that exists in Hollywood, was pretty instructional to read scripts, some of which weren't written that well. And, you know, because everything we read is published is so well written, but to sort of see the seams that show in the. In the work that's not so. So well developed. And I learned. I learned a lot about story structure. I would say story structure is one of my greatest interests. You know, developing characters that are interesting, having them do things that are interesting. You know, always keeping an eye out on the reader or the viewer to make sure that not only am I being true to the story and the characters, but that it appeals to whoever's watching a reading.
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B
I want to dig into that just a little bit deeper because that job I'm familiar with, it is people are basically sending tons of scripts to a production house saying, make this, make this, make this. And the producers are like, here, read this. Pick out the best ones. Let us know which ones are worthwhile and which ones we send a rejection letter to. Was that the job?
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C
Yes. Yes. I was working for a production company, and they had stacks of these scripts. And every time a writer or an agent came in the development department, who is the department that basically goes through those, would always tell the writer they were great then. And then they would. They would. They had a bunch of readers, you know, freelancers mostly. I was in. I worked for the company.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And we would read them and write a short report, you know, recommending whether it was good enough to pursue and. And then it was up to the director of the development department to do that. But the vast majority of them weren't quite good enough. Every once in a while, I'm not even sure I ever found one that I could say at the bottom of your report, you would say pass or consider. And I'm pretty sure that virtually everything I read, if not all of them, weren't quite good enough.
- [15:21]
B
Yeah. What were you looking for?
- [15:24]
C
You know, a really compelling story, you know, being glued to it, wanting to know what was happening next, interesting characters, and then importantly, you know, a great climax and resolution, but mostly just to be interested. Start to finish and originality, you know something. It was hard to come up. A lot of things were cliched. So you knew there were lots that were good, but maybe not good enough, but you kind of knew if you had read a bunch of these things.
- [15:52]
B
And I'm guessing that honed your craft even more. Right. As you moved into doing your own creative process, you were like, oh, okay. You must have been storing that information somewhere.
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C
Yeah. Somewhere around the time I was doing this, I started writing my novel, which I know that you know about, called Waking Maya and. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, there was a novel that came out in the 90s called the Celestine Prophecy that was kind of popular. It had mixed reviews from people, but it was a spiritually oriented adventure story. And when I read that, I thought, I think I would like to try writing something like this. So that's how my novel got started.
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B
I want to get into that because it's definitely. Huge fan of it, as many people are. I want to go into the show, a project real quick, though. I want to talk about that because that not only did that. That hit home for you because you had a connection with it. Sadly, I don't think people know much about it even now because it's still in existence. That material is probably still available somewhere, right?
- [16:58]
C
Absolutely. Well, one of the production companies I was working for as employee. As an employee was called Bedford Falls Company. And this was a big time and still is. It's Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick who were the guys who did Glory and Shakespeare in Love, the Last Samurai, the 30 something. There was the whole Blood diamond, quite a lot of popular movies. And I was in that company. I was reading the scripts. And long story short, one of the employees in that company went over to the Steven Spielberg project, the Showa Project, which was a nonprofit, and it was based at Universal Studios on the back lot. And this friend of mine, you know, suggested me to come and do, you know, help with the pr, literature and writing and such. And I was tired. And, you know, as I say, the job was right at Universal Studios on the back lot. This was when it was Amblin, when Spielberg's company was called Amblin, before DreamWorks. In fact, DreamWorks was just sort of coming. They were figuring it out as I was there. It was a nonprofit and basically mostly volunteers around the world were going around. Videographers and interviewers were interviewing Holocaust survivors, as many as they could, because these people were aging. And so I was at the headquarters for this, and we were right next door to Amblin. And Steven Spielberg would often come through. He would bring people, like famous people through. You'd be sitting there working, and there was Steven Spielberg with Hands Zimmer or Kirk Douglas or once Barbara Walters. And he sat right outside my office. I did an interview for a news show. So that was a really exciting project. Then ultimately, I think they got around 50,000 hours of holocaust survivor testimonies. And I believe they're at usc, accessible to people who are historians and such.
- [19:00]
B
Fascinating. And when you were working on that project, what do you think? What did you glean from that project? Because I knew later, and hopefully we can talk about a little bit some of the things that you've been working on recently, connecting back to your roots and your family's roots at the time. What, what did you get? What did you feel like you got from that project towards your own writing?
- [19:22]
C
Yeah, well, my mother, as I said, it's a Holocaust survivor. So she was interviewed on the project, as was my aunt, and I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, I have the, you know, I've got those interviews. They're precious. They were two hour interviews and all these interviews were structured the same way. They'd be 20 minutes learning about people's lives wherever they lived in Europe before the Holocaust. And then the middle half of the interview of the two hours was, you know, what happened to them in the Holocaust. And then the last quarter was what happened afterwards, you know, and they'd show photographs, you know, the apartments where they moved to in America or wherever they went. So my mother was interviewed for that and my aunt. And there was so much great information on these interviews for me. I mean, I watched them, I wrote articles about them. And then just recently, some of my cousins were asking me whether I would consider writing something dramatic, actually a novel featuring my own family experiences. So I started on this last summer. My grandfather, who owned a factory in northern Romania, was a very interesting guy who I'd learned a lot about from my aunt and my mother. And so I just imagined him as best I could on one of his business trips through Europe. And I started writing the beginning of this novel, and it really flowed. And it's something that's in process now, but I'm hoping to be able to share quite a lot of authentic family details. But I'm also, you know, creating a fictional plot as well, you know, to make it have a little bit more dramatic forward movement, like many things based on reality. There'll be a lot of reality in it and a few things that maybe, you know, are for plot.
- [21:13]
B
I'm excited because I've read snippets. I think you've sent me over a couple, and I was just like, wow, let's segue a little bit into Waking Maya, because this was one of your great works so far. I want to hear a little bit about it. Why don't you share a little bit about Waking Maya? Talk a little bit about the plot, talk a little bit about your process in writing it. I'd love to hear from, like, inception to what you've learned as you've been, as you've worked on that project.
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C
Well, first, thank you for the compliments on the writing. I think what I really try to. Everybody's different in how they express themselves creatively. I try to just let the story and the characters lead. I try to minimize my ego involvement. And so I'm looking for the story and the characters in as true a way as I can, and, you know, trying to find them. Waking Maya started with a very morbid thought I had once before my daughter was born. What if I got a mortal illness and I passed away before she got to know me? And I thought maybe I would just write a book to her, you know, a true thing from my heart and that. I thought about that idea. So Waking Maya, it starts out with a young woman who's living in suburbia and Feeling kind of bored and disillusioned and not interested in what her options are. And she finds a journal from her father, who she has never met, who mysteriously disappeared when she was a child. And some of this is written to her, but some of it is our mystical teachings. And there's a few things in there that she decides to pursue. She decides to go off and see if she could find out what happened to him. And it starts her on an adventure. And the adventure is about her learning about her own family, her history, her own psychology, the culture in general. But it's also an adventure that explores metaphysical concepts, things that have been out in the public sphere for some time. For example, collective consciousness. You know, Carl Jung's theory that on a very deep level our psyches are connected up and that cultural movements and evolution of the species and cultural movements, democracy, the different periods that have occurred through history are ways of the race trying to experience something new and thus know itself better. Like, these are theories, okay? And I think they're interesting, and who knows, maybe they're true. So her journey leads her into this world, is basically what goes on in the book. So I worked on it to weave some of the metaphysical sort of elements of it into her adventure. And then ultimately, I think it was finished, and I thought the job was done. Okay. And there's a readership for it.
- [24:17]
B
It's a brilliant book. And remember feeling the energy around it when we first met, because you were pondering it. You have a very unique perspective on creativity that I share. It kind of connects to how we're wired in our audience. I think it's this intuitive quality that tends to come with the wiring, is kind of tapping into these creative realms and pulling things back and putting them into some kind of form, whether it's music, whether it's writing, whether it's filmmaking.
- [24:51]
C
Yeah. I think it might go with this highly sensitive Persona and the hunter type in that you're perceiving things kind of deeply. So, as you said, and we've discussed this before, I think the ideas exist in some form. I think I'm finding them and I'm accessing them, and I'm trying to, through the writing, kind of crystallize them. So putting aside the novel, which, you know, that's a marathon to go, you know, go through that many pages. But in writing poetry, short stories, essays or plays, you know, one gets an idea, and the ideas, you know, come at odd times. You know, I meditate every day, and quite often in the meditation, something pops in. But. But once I start working on it. There's that well known analogy of the sculptor creating a marble sculpture out of a block. And he chips, chips, chips until the form shows itself. And then basically more chip, chip, chipping. And then eventually there's this perfect marble form that was always in there. And all that you did was you remove the pieces that didn't align with the correctness of it. So.
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B
And that would be the editing process. Like, so what I'm hearing is there's these. There's the initial impetus. You're kind of getting it down in its rough form. And for you, it sounds like then it's coming back and then removing everything that isn't. That doesn't reflect what came through or what, what you're. What you're feeling from whatever the thing you're creating is.
- [26:30]
C
Right. It is the two different complete processes, which I think it's been talked and written about a lot. And maybe different parts of the brain are associated with each. But the first is the creation. And I try to do what I had picked up from others. You just don't interfere with the creation process. So if you're writing a short story, you just write it and you don't edit. You're basically looking for the energy. You can feel it as you're going. If you feel a little excitement, a little energy, you keep going in that direction. And you don't ask yourself whether it's right or wrong, because that's sort of the end of it.
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B
If you ask, that kills it. Yeah.
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C
So you keep going and you get to the end. And you know, if you didn't sleep well, you don't feel that well. You don't do that process. You wait until you're feeling well to give it a shot. And then, you know, you look at it. And if you're a writer trying to write a story, you see whether there's a story there, a story that has, you know, that feels like it's got a beginning, middle and end, and characters that work, et cetera. And if it doesn't, then I probably would abandon something at that point. And then the editing process is completely different. You go through it. And I happen to probably love editing as much as anybody. I don't know why, but I go through it and I listen, I try to feel what's, you know, what I've written. And I hone it in the same way the marble sculptor does it. And this, you know, this can take some time.
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B
Yeah. Okay, so let's break this down. So the creative sitting down and Doing a creative session. The idea comes, you've got it, Maybe you've. It came to you in meditation, came to you in the shower, came to you while you're doing something else. And you're like, okay, I'm going to sit down and explore this. So it's an exploration. How long is that session? How long do you allow yourself to just flow with that? Like what's, what is on average? What, what does a session look like on the creative end of it?
- [28:35]
C
It depends because I mean, I'm writing these days. Okay, it could be a short story, it could be a business article, it could be a poem. It could be working on that novel I was talking about. It could be an analysis of someone's novel. You know, it really varies. You know, it could be an hour or two of work at a time. I'm not sure I to go longer than two hours or, you know, or so. But it really depends. And at times that creation process can be uncomfortable because there's so much uncertainty, you know, and there's a part of you that's, that is trying to judge what you're doing, you know, and you have to just forge on.
- [29:16]
B
Yeah, that's good. And I want to highlight because just work with a lot of creative professionals, there's often a self judgment of like, oh, I should have worked like eight hours on this. And I'm like, no one does more than like three hours at a time. It's almost unheard of. Unless it's like you're really on fire and you're just going straight through. But in terms of like editing or actually doing the grunt work, it's really difficult to do. It's so mentally taxing and emotionally taxing, especially that it's hard to go longer than those, you know, two or three hour chunks. Would you agree with that?
- [29:49]
C
It is for me, but I don't know how it is for other people because some people, I don't know, like Stephen King and people like that, I think could just sit there and type for hours.
- [29:56]
B
He was, he was juiced up for the early part of his career. I think we, we've learned that. So how do you deal with. So let's split these two up. So the, in the creative session, how do you deal with your inner critic, your physical body feeling uncomfortable? Like, how do you, how do you work with that as you're going through the creative end of it?
- [30:22]
C
You just do the best you can, you know, those things are going to arise and you just do the best you can, you know, to go. To go through it. But, you know, you try not to pick up your phone or anything like that.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Like, one thing I've got all these little rituals and techniques I use, and one of them is when I go, this isn't something I always do, but I sometimes do it because I'm working on the same computer for the business stuff and the creative stuff. And when I do the creative stuff, a lot of times I'll clear my desk of all papers and I might light a candle, you know, I might put a little bit of music on or do a few minutes of silence just to show the demarcation, the change into this other realm, you know, because in the creative writing, I'm trying to find things that are, I think, ethereal a little bit, you know.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah.
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C
But no, I think it's a battle to, you know, interruptions and your own discomfort and your. The constant desire to eat something or go out for a breath of air. I mean, you can always do that and come back.
- [31:30]
B
Sure, sure. And that there. Is that. Is that. Is there the sense that, okay, I'm in kind of an energy field of some kind? When you're doing that work and you're trying to preserve that energy as you're. You're doing that, the creative side of it is that.
- [31:47]
C
I think so, yes. I really think about energy a lot because I feel like I perceive it. But for example, last summer when I was doing a lot of work on that novel about my family and my grandfather, I said to myself, okay, just imagine your grandfather. You're in his head. You already know a lot about him, and he's on a business trip in Czechoslovakia, and you kind of know what his attitude is. So I started writing it and it flowed. And I was like, wow, this is great. I really do feel like I filmed. So I just kept going. I just kept going and going and going. And I did feel those little urges to get up or do whatever, but I felt like I hit a vein, you know, or. And. And I was. After all these years, you know, if you hit something like that, you better stick with it. Right.
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B
You know how.
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C
Pressure. You can always go get a dessert or something sometime later.
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B
Yeah. This is the other side of hyperfocus is that you're plugged into a certain brain state and you're getting something useful from it.
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C
It.
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B
And so you want to preserve that as much as possible, especially when, you know it's. Especially if you've been creative for a long time, you realize, oh, it's fleeting. They don't always show up like this. You can conjure it, but it's not always available in that particular. With that force of energy that sounds like that you had in that experience.
- [33:04]
C
Yeah, that's right.
- [33:05]
B
Let's talk about the other side of it. Let's talk about the, the, the other brain because these are two different, different I think measurable brain states. Beta, which is more which you would need for editing and just kind of consolidation and more theta just sort of the, the dreamy brain states that really support creativity. So when you're editing, what does that session look like? How long does it last? How do you approach it?
- [33:34]
C
Well, as I said, I love the editing part. I don't know why, but again, it depends what kind of project we're talking about. One thing that's very important and it's very hard to do is to read your draft as though you're a first time reader. As though you're not the person who created it and has a stake in it. And one of the worst things is to fall in love with your writing because what happens then is you don't see it clearly and you have no idea how it's going to feel to somebody else. So the ideal thing is if you can somehow forget you're the author and that you wrote this and even for forget the material and read it as though you're reading it for the first time. And so over the years I've come up with different ways to try to do this. I'm looking at it and I'm like, one of the things that I can do because I guess of my abilities and imagination is put myself in other shoes. This might go with other hypersensitive type people, but I can imagine I'm somebody else and see things through their eyes. So what I do is I read it and I blank myself out and I read the sentence. I look at that first sentence and I like flip a switch and I try to feel the sentence in a way that a first time reader would feel it. And I think one of the ways I was able to do that or that I'm able to do this is I've eliminated the ego part, the falling in love with my writing. In fact, some drafts I will read as though I hate them. Okay? I will put myself into a position that really hates this author and doesn't have any time. And the author is some friend of his who's asked him to read this. And I've promised to read it and look at it that way. And then, boy, if anything's off about it, you sure see it. Wow.
- [35:23]
B
Wow.
- [35:23]
C
But little tricks like that. And another one that I do, this is very helpful, is I will cut and paste the text and I'll put it on my phone, and I'll sit the phone beside the computer and I'll scroll with my finger on it and I'll put it in different fonts. I'm doing anything to make it look and feel different from what I had put down. And I don't know how this works, but it does work. In fact, everything I do, I put it on my phone and I scroll it by the side of the screen while I'm editing the document on the screen. One other thing I do while I'm throwing these things out is I have it read aloud. So whether it's your phone or your computer, there's ways you can push a button, have the computer speakers read it aloud. So I do that with every single thing. And not only do you feel it with that, but any typos or grammatical problems or anything like that pop right out. So my conclusion here, just great.
- [36:25]
B
Those are excellent.
- [36:26]
C
Except I'm looking at any different way I can to perceive the writing differently. And. And I guess somehow with the reading aloud and the phone thing, it works and the reading it very critically, you know. And the other thing is I'm like. Like I'm trying to feel it, you know, I'm trying to feel it and so I read it. And I imagine I'm a person who really needs this. I really need to enjoy this thing really bad. And I sure hope it works, but if it doesn't, I'm not going to keep reading. And then, oh, line three is a little flat. I can see there's a little something I can do there to make it work better. And I put it in and then I do all that and then I go away. And you gotta let it sit for a little while. I'll come back at some later time. It could be like a lot of times I work in the morning, afternoon, and evening separated by several hours. Look at it the next morning. Don't be shocked when it looks different than what you thought. Just roll with it.
- [37:33]
B
That's a really good point. I think there's a. Let's highlight that for a second. Because when you're creating something, sometimes you're just like, this is the best thing I've ever created. Then you come back the next day and you go, this is the absolute worst. I never do this ever again. And if you're not used to that, Emotionally, it. I think when you. When you're professional and you've done it for a long time, you know, that's part of the. The process. How do you talk yourself through that, rereading it and going, oh, I thought. What I thought was really good now I think is awful.
- [38:07]
C
Well, what I shoot for is not, this is the best thing, but this is pretty good. If I get a. This is pretty good, I'm fine with that. Like I said, you. You keep working. If you look at it the next day and it doesn't work for you, then you. You keep trying to find it. You know, like, I think you and I had discussed the idea of Platonic ideals, you know, these. These metaphysical realities that. That are there, that are the perfect version of things that exist in the physical realm of Earth.
- [38:39]
B
Yeah.
- [38:39]
C
And so I think whether it's a story, I just wrote a story about, it's about all the organisms that live in the human body and that we are essentially a planet to all the different organisms, bacteria and such, that live on us. And think of it that way. Why not just to shift your reality up a little bit? So I'd written this priest, and the idea was to get someone to experience that perspective, to shift them. And so I read it the next day, and there were some things that needed to be adjusted, but all the time I knew that it was there. As long as it's the juice, the energy and the story is in there, I don't have any problem being patient to get it right. And sometimes I've got one short thing I've been working on for years that's just like one page.
- [39:38]
B
So this is a good. I think this is a key piece here. So how do. So. And I want to go back to the hunter type tendencies a little bit too. So as you're working on a project, follow through is one of the big things that many of us struggle with. So I'm already hearing there's like a deep love for writing that you've preserved, which is. That in itself is amazing, given technology and all the things that can distract us, that you're still really engaged in this pro. This very primitive form of creation. Right. It goes. It goes back a long time. It's. That can. I mean, storytelling is ancient, ancient, ancient. And then taking those stories and then putting them into written language is. Was the next step. But storytelling is the kernel of it. How do you keep going? What is your process of fault? What keeps you going to complete a project, whether it's a creative project, whether it's a work project or you're working for someone else and you're working on that project. How do you work with focus? How do you work with the emotional challenges to carry you through to complete a project?
- [40:47]
C
It's always to realize the vision. Okay? There's a vision that somehow I see it up ahead and I don't always see it clearly. And when I get there, though, I usually know it or approximately get there, get there close enough. So whether it's a client job, like if I have to write a corporate script or a blog article about some business subject, there's, you know, I know what the deliverable is. You know, I know what the goal is to get the reader to understand a certain thing or want a certain thing or feel a certain thing. And you know, generally know when I get there, if it's the creative non business kind of thing, it is the vision. I guess I have the vision for each thing at the beginning. So there's like a guiding North Star up ahead that I'm going toward. So for example, in Waking Maya, I kind of. It was an adventure of this young woman. And I sort of had an idea of that climax, like what she was going to be doing at this climax that was up ahead. And that was really helpful because I knew where I was going, but I didn't know what was going to happen. And I kind of knew vaguely the situation. The second answer, the larger answer to your question is my mission as a creative writer. I guess I haven't given this a lot of thought. I just kind of do things that feel right. But I think my mission is to expand people's consciousness, to give them, whether it's a story about all the microorganisms in your body, to shift someone's perspective of out of the ordinary, but be true and honest, you know, and hopefully result in changing them in some small way. So I'm pretty sure that, you know, when you were talking about the stuff I'd written early on, you know, it all was, you know, all of my stuff is about seeking for knowledge, seeking for experience. I'm not really making a commentary on human society or the way it is. It's about deepening someone's experience or consciousness in some way. So whenever I write something that's always in the back of my mind. That and the vision of where I want it to go. I don't know if that answers your question.
- [43:11]
B
It does.
- [43:12]
C
That's what came to me.
- [43:13]
B
That's great. And I was just flashing on, I think one of the first Stories you had given me to read of yours. It was a short story and I don't remember the name of it. It was. It was just a little snippet in someone's life. It was like a two day snippet. And at the end they go outside and the rain kind of wakes them up.
- [43:32]
C
Oh yeah.
- [43:33]
B
What was the name of that story?
- [43:37]
C
I think it was.
- [43:37]
B
You've written so much at this point.
- [43:39]
C
A rainy Day called Rainy Day is D A Z E. That's it. Perhaps that's right.
- [43:44]
B
Because the kernel of who you are, I think is carried through your writing all the way through, through from what I've seen. Which means that you found that thing early and that's a gift because.
- [43:57]
C
Yeah, maybe what we're trying to do or what I'm trying to do is take this thing that's in me and share it, you know, and maybe that goes back to some of the highly sensitive hunter type stuff too of feeling different and wanting to share. Okay, you, you, the world. You say I'm different because I have a different neurological sensitivity and such. And here I'm going to trick you by taking the really cool parts of that and share it here in artistic form and you get an experience of it and there, you know, you've accepted me perhaps, or you understand where I'm coming from a little better.
- [44:34]
B
Yeah, and I'm valid.
- [44:35]
C
Just guessing.
- [44:36]
B
I'm valid. I'm a valid human being and contributing to the collective even though I feel completely foreign to the people around me. Is that part of it?
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, I think society doesn't accept these, you know, the highly sensitive type very much because it just doesn't. And yeah, I know I've always felt like an outsider, not accepted. So that's probably a motivation for some of what I do, I'm sure.
- [45:04]
B
Let's talk a little bit about the challenges. I want to hear a little bit about how technology has affected you because I know it's affected me. I'm still my attention span, even though I really work on it. Just phones and YouTube and all the distractions, especially sitting down and reading a book, become very challenge. It's more challenging for me now. What I find when I give myself like, okay, I'm going to do a 24 hour, no screen time, I almost instantly go to reading a book. I will sit and just go through and voraciously read a book. But I don't do that normally. So for you, what's on your list of things that are the most challenging for you?
- [45:52]
C
Well, let me Just commend you on being able to read a book. Okay, that's really, really good. I've got several around here. Every night I get in bed and I've got the iPad on one side and a book on the other side. And I always say to myself, you're going to read the book. And it just does not happen. So I have a really hard time with the phone, with the distraction of all the different apps. You know, like you, I come out of a technology world. And even though, like you, I'm a creative, you know, I'm pretty good with the technology. So it's a. It's a horrible distraction and, you know, it's a continual fight. And your idea to turn all the stuff off is fantastic. I keep telling myself, just put the stuff in the car at the end of the night, put the phone and the iPad in the car and read. So I guess to answer your question, when I work, usually I work in the mornings and often in the evenings. And I do have some distractions, the phone or whatever, but if I'm writing, I plow on. So I just pushed through it. But technology, on the good side, I can get my stories read aloud through the computer and hear them like I was just talking about. And also what you said a moment ago about having a schedule and following your health guidelines, you know, we haven't gotten into that, but that's really. As a highly distractible person, I do have, you know, every single day I exercise aerobically or I play sports, watch the diet, do the best I can with sleep. And meditation has been really, really big for me. Many times I get ideas when I'm on the rewrite. The subconscious is at work on it and it wants to present the answers. If you're too lost in your head, you don't hear them. But in meditation, there's many different kinds, but the idea is simply to detach from the chitter, chatter thought stream for a little while. And I find after, I don't know, decades of doing it, I can detach from it and then these solutions pop in, you know, which is very interesting. But just the, you know, as far as just detaching for health reasons as well, not just for creative reasons. I don't meditate for creative reasons. It just happens by itself. Meditation, exercise, diet, sleep. You know, you talk about all these things in your book and your podcasts limit technology. You know, I do. People say not to look at it before bed, but I do find I fall right asleep anyway, even though I'm looking at Some baseball on my iPad or reading the news. It's very challenging, no question about it.
- [48:44]
B
Talk a little bit about your spiritual practice and just the like, where. What does it look like now and where did it come from? It's interesting that you came to a lot of this. This prior to, you know, the modern tech. I mean, we had TVs, but both of us were able to develop some spiritual practices prior to smartphones and things like that. And I think it was a gift because I think it's a lot harder for the next generations coming through because they're just bombarded with it from birth. So talk a little bit about your spiritual practice, where your meditation practice. What does it look like for you now, and where did that come from?
- [49:26]
C
Okay, well, I think most children of Holocaust survivors are a fairly tortured lot because our parents, you know, have gone through hell and, you know, and there's no way for a child to not sort of take that in. And I think that creates a. Two things can happen at that time. I mean, it creates a need to try to lessen your emotional pain. Pain. To find some way to lessen your pain. Now, some people go to drugs, and I did do some of that back in high school, and some people go into avoidance. And the spiritual journey happens to be another route you can take to try to lessen your pain. Maybe that's not the purest motivation, but it's, you know, it's a motivation.
- [50:10]
B
It's motivated millions of people in the past. You do what you got to do.
- [50:16]
C
Yeah, so. So I started when I was, I don't know, 10 or 11 or 12, started reading some of these books on Taoism and Buddhism and such, and I found my way to meditation at some point. And I'd say over the years I was in therapy and such, and I was always trying to find. Get closer to the real me rather than this kind of construct I created to fit it in because of being rejected in some ways by my family and others and such. But I found some teachers, like Eckhart Tolle has always been a big one for me. And meditating with Transcendental Meditation is what I practice. And I guess the core of the spiritual side that has worked for me is acceptance and surrender. So to not try to fight what you're going through, you know, like, even if it's horrible, and to kind of just stick with yourself, go through it, surrender to what's happening. If you can do something about a situation, do it. But if you can't, you can't. And you Know, keep up all of your healthy habits. I guess over the years, I've mellowed out quite a bit. I was fairly tortured earlier in life. I've always had a feeling that, you know, on a deep level, I'm okay, you know, as a. Whatever the deepest part of me is, beyond all of my conditioning and life experience and mistakes and difficulties, that there's a kind of a pure essence there. Yeah, and, you know, a little bit of everything, I guess, with the spirituality. But definitely I, I. Every single day I put some effort into that.
- [52:12]
B
And with your meditation practice, what does it look like when you sit down to meditate? What drops you into it?
- [52:21]
C
Well, I do. I learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, but I do a slightly different variance. So what I do is I start out with some mindfulness. I close my eyes and I just tune into my body and I try to feel, you know, just. I try to feel what's going on in my body. There might be some tightness in my chest or my knee might hurt or, I don't know, there should be some kind of sensation or pain. Doesn't really matter. It's just that I've taken my attention into the body somehow that I think that might be called mindfulness somehow that eases my, you know, the worrying thoughts are not controlling me at that point. And believe me, the mind is trying to pull me out of that. So I kind of forced myself to focus on the body. I come out, come out, go back in. I only do that for a couple of minutes. It kind of roots me. And then I go into a mantra meditation, which is just a simple sound that you say internally in your mind. And the universal mantra is om. Om. Something like that. Transcendental meditation has their own teaching for it. And as I practice that, fairly soon my thoughts, I start detaching from the whirring thoughts. I start feeling calmer and calmer, and sometimes I will drop off. I don't even know if it's sleep, because a lot of times it only lasts a few moments. And when I come out of it, I feel really quite good. But either way, I spend about 20 minutes doing the meditation. And, you know, you never know what's going to happen. If there's a lot of strife in my life or something, it might be hard to hit a calm state, but quite often I hit this state which feels very calm and quiet. And then when I come out of it, I kind of feel that going into the activity, whatever I do. So. And I do, I do this morning and evening Both. So that's. That's how my meditation works.
- [54:27]
B
That's fantastic. Yeah, I appreciate the specificity because as you were talking, I'm like, yeah, there's. There's so many threads there about pain. Brought you there to a degree. Right. It's. There's a survival instinct that. That I'm sure as just knowing you, I think it probably fed your meditation practice. Right. Because you. It was necessity. You were like, okay, this thing helps, and therefore it becomes a priority in your life. Would that be accurate?
- [54:57]
C
The desire not to be in pain is a strong motivator. Yes, that's right.
- [55:05]
B
And again, I'm just thinking about people listening, that there's also. I think we can feel very tortured being wired this way. There's that, for me, anxiety, like rumination of something I said that I should have not said that something that other people would never even think about. They just. Something would have happened. They wouldn't have. But the subtle social cues and social anxiety, those are the things that I struggle with. But underneath that is this deeper place. And so what I'm hearing from you is meditation connects you back into that. That source where you're. That place where you're not, not the ego. This sort of top level. It's kind of like the top of the ocean that's very rough and tumultuous, but then you drop down a couple fathoms and then it's quiet. And I'm hearing that's what you're searching for. And then the result of it sounds like is that you feel refreshed, you can go about your day, and it's. It's supporting you in ways that maybe you don't even know yourself. How it helps throughout the day. Would that be accurate?
- [56:13]
C
Yes, I kind of think of it. There's chattering mind and then there's free of chattering mind. You know, Eckhart Tolle had this great statement. Oh, he just talked about you're not your mind. So I think most people. I think if you've been in this place where you're like, normally in your thoughts and everything, but you've also been in this quiet place that feels like you're not really listening to all those chattering thoughts, then. Then you kind of change at that point, and you realize that there's a whole different, better, quieter way to experience things. And I think most people who have not experienced that won't know what you're talking about because they haven't experienced it yet. And it's kind of an awakening experience to have that happen. And who knows how it happens. I meditated earlier in my life. I never felt, I think, think I don't think I felt it the way I do in recent years. And I know people who've meditated and they hit it right away. Yeah, you can still fall into your patterns pretty easily out in the world, behaving and reacting and such. But, you know, I find that the twice a day meditation coming back to that, you know, can take me out of whatever whirlwind I'm in.
- [57:24]
B
I'm thrilled that we were able to have this conversation because, yeah, you've got, you got the juice. There's just people in my life that, that I keep coming back to, like, wow, like you. You've had, and you've had it since I've known you, and that's almost 30 years. So it's just, it's an honor to connect with you and, and to hear your wisdom from that. What you've gleaned from just the countless, countless hours of sitting down and writing. And you put that time and energy into your craft and you've created works that outlive you, and it's fantastic. We had mentioned offering a suggested creative writing assignment to our audience, and I would wonder if you'd share that. I like giving people something to come out of. Not just to have an informative interview, but maybe something that they can do for themselves. Especially if you're not a writer. Especially if you don't feel like you are a writer. Maybe this can be helpful to you as a creative exercise to show you what you're capable of and just to experience the innate joy of writing as one of the creative expressions. So you want to share the idea you came up with.
- [58:33]
C
Okay, so this is just something that occurred to me that might be an interesting suggestion for people to experiment with. It's to write a short story about some event that occurred in your life with family or friends involved and so forth, but write it from the point of view of one of the other people. Okay. Not from your point of view. So that will, you know, in doing that, you'll have to imagine how they interpreted the event. If it was your spouse or your sibling, you had a conversation, had an argument, or you went to a roller coaster and went on the roller coaster and then talked about it afterwards. Any sort of story that you recall that has a little bit of resonance. And write what happened in a little story, but do it from the other person's point of view as if they are writing it. Not. You get you to imagine how they would interpret events. You know, that'll take you out of your own head and put you in someone else's shoes.
- [59:35]
B
And also just to our specific audience, this is therapeutic because often we can be so in our heads that we don't see the impact we have on other people, both positive and negative. And to be able to write from that point of view, I think could be a rich assignment. So Warren, tell people about where they can find your work.
- [59:54]
C
So to check out Waking Maya that's available on Amazon, it's W A K I N G second word M A Y a and you can google me to find my work online. Warren Goldie My website is mostly at this time geared for business stuff, so I'm not sure you'll find that terribly interesting. But you can find my articles, essays and such around the Internet.
- [60:20]
B
Okay, so I hope you enjoyed that interview with Warren Goldie. Again, if you're interested in joining us in our upcoming weekly support group starting on June 25th, you can go to drummerinthegreatmountain.com group and I will leave a link in the description. And until next time, be well.
- [60:42]
D
Thanks for joining us. If you'd like to learn more about the book the Drummer and the Great Mountain, visit Drummer and the Great Mountain.com to join us on social media, click the links at the top of the homepage. Help us spread the word. We're a small press and reviews really help. If you've been enjoying the podcast or the book, consider writing a review on itunes, Amazon, Goodreads, or your podcast app.
- [61:09]
C
App.
- [61:10]
D
If you're new to the podcast and want to quickly get up to speed on the concepts we discuss, check out our free 5 day mini course. Visit drummerandthegreatmountain.com Minicourse if there's a topic you'd like us to cover on future episodes, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email@inforummarandthegreatmountain.com Sam.
- [62:01]
C
Sa Sam.