Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many mansions. If not, I would have told you: because I go to prepare a place for you. And if I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to myself...  - John 14:1-3 (DR)

About Interior Castle

I have read widely enough to know when I'm over my head with a book and I know that I'm over my head with this one.

Or maybe it's more accurate to say that what pertains to me personally is mostly in the beginning. So that's what I'm going to write about here.

About St. Teresa of Avila

St. Teresa of Avila was a leader and reformer of the Carmelite Orders of both women and men and the first female Doctor of the Catholic Church. She was courageous. She was articulate. And she was devoted to God.

St. Teresa was born in Ávila, Spain in 1515. She was a noblewoman whose paternal grandfather was a marrano (or forced Jewish convert to Christianity). At age 20, she entered the Carmelite Order. She read widely throughout her life. Her writing include an autobiography (The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus), The Way of Perfection and Interior Castle.

When St. Teresa began Interior Castle on Trinity Sunday, June 2nd, 1577, she was already on the radar of the Inquisitors. That may be why she is self-effacing, in the writing that follows, calling herself foolhardy or wretched, a mere woman writing for her fellow sisters only because women understand other women best.

Or that may be how she actually thought of herself. She was humble, after all. A saint.

And a mystic.

There is a lot about mysticism I don't understand but there are couple of things that I notice in St. Teresa's writing. My first observation is that legitimate mystical experience requires an unusually high degree of personal sanctity. The second is that mysticism calls for an intense and unwavering desire to get as close to God as is humanly possible.

That St. Teresa had such a desire from a young age, is obvious. We can see it in the story of how she set out for land of the Moors, as a child of seven, in order to be martyred and then see heaven. And we can see that same dedication shining through the words that she wrote.

The Interior Castle Framework

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many Mansions. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

While St. Teresa often speaks of multiple castles or mansions the model she uses is one of rooms or levels in a greater castle which is ruled by God. The rooms are numbered one through seven, but are at the same time innumerable.

St. Teresa is clear in saying that the castle itself is something which we should not expect to ever understand fully.

...there is no point in our fatiguing ourselves by attempting to comprehend the beauty of this castle...the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul's great dignity and beauty. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

We also are shown that we should not think of the various floors or chambers in a strictly linear way.

Let us now imagine that this castle, as I have said, contains many mansions, some above, others below, others at each side; and in the center and midst of them all is the chiefest mansion where the most secret things pass between God and the soul.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Entering into the Castle

The chambers that St. Teresa describes are beautifully and progressively filled with light but they are not, even on the lowest level, accessible to everyone.

...there are souls so infirm and so accustomed to busying themselves with outside affairs that nothing can be done for them, and it seems as thought they are incapable of entering with themselves at all. So accustomed have they grown to living all the time with the reptiles and other creature to be found in the outer court of the castle that they have almost become like them; and although by nature they are so richly endowed as to have the power of holding converse with none other than God Himself, there is nothing that can be done for them.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

While not everyone can enter the castle, those who do will come through the doorway of prayer.

As far as I can understand, the door of entry into this castle is prayer and meditation: I do not say mental prayer rather than vocal for, if it is prayer at all, it must be accompanied by meditation. If a person does not think Whom he is addressing ...I do not consider that he is praying at all even though he be constantly moving his lips.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Leaving behind the poor "paralyzed souls" who are unable to gain entry, St. Teresa moves on to talk about those in a second group who may (or may not) enter in. St. Theresa describes them as people who...

...are very much absorbed in worldly affairs; but their desires are good; sometimes, though infrequently they commend themselves to Our Lord and they think about the state of their souls, though not very carefully. Full of a thousand preoccupations as they are, they pray on a few times a month and as a rule they are thinking all the time of their preoccupations, for the are very much attached to them, and, where their treasure is there is their heart.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

To my mind, this describes most of us. But I found that encouraging because it also holds out the hope that those who develop a true awareness of their worldly state may achieve ground level access.

The First Castle

From time to time, however they shake their mind free of them [meaning their worldly concerns] and it is a great thing that they should know themselves well enough to realize that they are not going the right way to reach the castle door. Eventually they enter the first rooms on the lowest floor, but so many reptiles get in with them they are unable to appreciate the beautify of the castle or to find any peace within it. Still they have done a good deal by entering at all. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

The idea that we can be within the castle but still caught up in worldly desires highlights the fact that entry is only a beginning.

You must note that the light which comes from the palace occupied by the King hardly reaches these first Mansions at all; for, although they are not dark and black, as...the soul...in a state of sin, they are to some extent darkened ... because ... snakes and vipers and poisonous creatures .... have come in with the soul .... [and] prevent it from seeing the light. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

My Reaction

Remember that in few of the mansions of this castle are we free from struggles with devils ... it is most important that we should not cease to be watchful against the devil's wiles, lest he deceive in the guise of an angel of light. For there are a multitude of ways in which he can deceive us, and gradually make his way into the castle, and until he is actually there we do not realize it.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Full of a thousand preoccupations as they are, they pray only a few times a month and as a rule they are thinking all the time of their preoccupations, for the are very much attached to them, and, where their treasure is there is their heart.

I think about my own attachments and feel quite sure that I am part of the ground level group St. Teresa describes above.

I remember how spiritually advanced I imagined myself to be when I was involved in the new age and the occult. I find it interesting that now, having returned to the Church, I'm struck by how spiritually remedial I actually am.

My Application

I set aside Interior Castle and take a short personal inventory. I come up with seven behaviors that I would like to change. And I know that I'm right to want to change them. These are things that stand between me and God or at the very least show that I don't really trust him.

This is how I know that I am over my head with Interior Castle. While I know that I will read the rest of it anyway, I also know that it's the first chapter I need to focus on. I remember that St. Teresa said we enter the castle through the doorway of prayer so I know that prayer is the key. 

I order a book that Fr. Chad Ripperger recommends called The Ways of Mental Prayer. It promises an explanation of contemplative prayer that is based on of the work of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales and others.

I think about the Interior Castle a lot over the next couple of days. I know it's not especially impressive to find myself stuck in the entryway to St. Teresa's beautiful palace. But to me it feels like a discovery.
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There are several versions of Interior Castle available.  The one I've linked in this post is the Dover Thrift Edition ($4.99).  Interior Castle is also available for $0.74 on kindle and on audible for $10.95.

The Problem with Plotting 

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. - Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

I've written a lot of fiction over the years. Innumerable false starts. Five complete manuscripts. One submission.  Half a million words. Or more.

I tried to tell myself I was learning through doing but I was mostly making the same mistakes over and over again, painting myself into the same plot corners, going off onto the same tangents, losing sight of my theme, seeing my characters devolve until they were so far gone there was no way to put them right.

These are the perils of writing hot.

But whenever I outlined I felt like I was telling two stories.  The one I believed in, and the one I did not.  Sometimes these stories supported each other but more often they were like two parallel lines that could circle the earth forever and not intersect.  These were the manuscripts I didn't complete.

The ones I finished ran hot for 80,000 words and ended by dumping my characters into a place that didn't finish the story I'd set out to write.

The Wisdom of Bradbury

You, the prism, measure the light of the world; it burns through your mind to throw a different spectroscopic reading onto white paper than anyone else anywhere can throw. Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.  - Ray Bradbury Zen in the Art of Writing

Then I read a book by Ray Bradbury called Zen in the Art of Writing.  For the first time I realized that it was possible to approach the craft in a way that seemed craftless but wasn't.

That only problem was that I didn't understand how Ray Bradury did it.  I didn't understand how Bradbury's 1000 words a day could bring his characters to the a place that meant something.  I didn't understand how by bringing them there, he brought me along too.

I know that there are probably a lot people who don't cry buckets at the end of  Fahrenheit 451 but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of writers who have been inspired Zen in the Art of Writing.  They're the writers who sit down at the keyboard every morning with a sense of expectation.  The writers who see what they do as an adventure.  The ones who let their characters lead.

Zen and the Art Writing spoke to me.  I identified with the way Bradbury wrote.  I loved that we had the same  birthday.  I was thrilled when I learned that we shared the same (very large) family tree.

But my novels still didn't end up in the right place, the way his did.  And I somehow missed what he said about rewrites.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too? - Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

I got discouraged.  For a time, I stepped away from fiction.  I wrote 100s of nonfiction articles and struggled to the halfway point of more than one nonfiction manuscripts before I gave up.  And then I came back to fiction and found a new story that would not let me go.

It was about second chances.  Starting over.  Coming home.

It spoke to me because there are things we can do in novels that we can't do in life.  Things we can create that have no true counterpart in the world as we know it.

The Midpoint Moment

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer! -  Ray Bradbury

I was in love with my characters. I had found a story I wanted to write.  But by the time I was a few chapters in, I was in trouble.

That was when I picked up a James Scott Bell book on writing.  There was no 'this is me' moment.  I knew Bell didn't chase after his characters like I did.  But for me that was a good things.  Because Bell was able to teach me things I didn't already know.

I read that first book and then I read another and then I got Bell's audio course.  All of these resources helped but when I read Write Your Novel From The Middle things finally clicked.

It was one of the few (or maybe even the only) writing books I had read that really was for everyone.  And I found something in it, I had not found in other books.  Something that changed the way I thought about my writing.

I found it, as I think Bell might appreciate, in the middle of the book in the section dedicated to those of us who write hot.

Go ahead and start writing.  Play. Get to know your characters.  Put them into scenes and see what happens.  Write up to 10,000 words or so.  Now stop and ask yourself...

I was just a little more than 10,000 words into my manuscript.  It was already going wrong and I knew it.  So I began to answer Bell's questions.  And as I did started to make sense of the book I was trying to birth.

My Take Away

I had been praying for clarity and now I was beginning to get it.

As I kept writing I started to see that my plot wasn't an exterior construct.  Instead, for me, it came from the story itself.  But I saw that I had a role to play too.  I saw that needed to develop the plot as I went along.  I needed to question it.  I needed to shepherd it.  I needed a vision of my story that would keep it on track.

I learned that, in my writing, the story must inform the plot without ever taking full control of it.

I will probably never construct the kind of subtle yet intricate plot can't be fully appreciated until the story is finished and taken apart and reverse engineered.  But I do think that I'm finally writing a book that will make sense.  With luck it will take those probable few who read it to a place worth visiting.

But I have heard farmers tell about their very first wheat crop on their first farm after moving from another state, and if it wasn't Robert Frost talking, it was his cousin, five times removed. I have heard locomotive engineers talk about America in the tones of Thomas Wolfe... I have heard mothers tell of the long night with their firstborn when they were afraid that they and the baby might die. And I have heard my grandmother speak of her first ball when she was seventeen. And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.  - Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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For more on James Scott Bell's writing books and courses please see my blog post, Novel Writing with James Scott Bell

I have been blogging for ten years now. Sometimes successfully. Sometimes not.

In this article I'm going to share what I've learned about blog building (i.e. getting people to read your blog) across five different blogs.

I started my first blog The Mystic Review in August of 2010. For the first year I had an audience of one (thank you Tara) but over the next couple of years the blog's popularity grew. By 2017 it was getting thousands of views a day.

That was when I stepped away from the occult and shut down the blog I had worked so hard to build.

I started a new Christian blog I called Today's Christian Life almost immediately. That blog did not do well. So I started a third and a fourth blog. Blog number three was called New Age To Christian. Blog number four was bible blog, called Scripture Sunday. Despite the cute names, neither caught on.

Then, in late 2019 I started blog number five (the one you're reading now) at BarbaraGraver.com and I'm happy to say that people are reading this one. And that it's nice to be read.

Since things are going well with the blog, I decided to write a post about what I've learned about blog building over the last ten years.  I'm going to share what what I did right and what I did wrong in the list that follows.

Do's and Don't's:

1. Don't get too hung up on a name.  A domain name (preferably a dotcom) is important but it is NOT the end all of blogging.  In blogs 2 through 4 used domain names that included popular keywords (Christian, scripture, new age, etc.) because I thought doing that would make it easier to find my blogs. But there were a couple of problems with this. The first was that these key words were so popular that a zillion websites came up whenever they were entered. The second was that Google doesn't rank websites the way it did in 2010 when I started my first blog.  According to some, Google now ranks spammy, keyword rich domain names lower than unique non keyword specific names.  This may or may not be true but what is true is that using keywords in a blog name probably isn't worth the effort.  My advice? Use your own name (or your pen name) for your blog.
2. Don't go too wide.  My blog number 2 blog concept (Christian Living) was too broad.  Writing for a broad audience (all Christians) wasn't effective.  Potential readers didn't identify with my concept. They didn't feel my blog was "perfect for them." They also didn't know what to expect from my blog. 
3. Don't go too narrow. Scripture Sunday and New Age To Christian were great names. And I liked writing about the bible and leaving the new age - but I wanted to blog about other things too. Yes, the conventional wisdom is that blogs should aim for a very narrow niche but you don't want to be too focused because, eventually, you will rebel.
4. Don't let anyone tell you you have to use WordPress. I know that everybody loves WordPress but it just didn't work for me. I didn't really like the interface and I was never able to establish a readership. When I came back to blogger I started getting read almost immediately.  There were a couple of different reasons why that happened but one, in my opinion, is that Google takes care of their own - usually. A bonus for me is that you can set up a custom domain on blogger for free. If you want to do that on WordPress you have to pay for hosting. 
5. Do blog every week.  Actually, in my first blog I blogged twice a week. Week in. Week out. For seven years. Now because I'm doing other (fiction) writing I usually do one post a week. But I do one post every week. If you only do one thing from this entire article - do this! Blogging regularly doesn't guarantee success and it will get discouraging when your posts aren't getting a lot of attention - but if you don't do it, nothing else you do to promote your blog will have an effect.
6. Do blog on things you want to learn about (or learn more about). This is the only thing - and I mean only - that keeps me going when people aren't reading my posts. This is why this blog focuses on writing, book reviews and the Catholic faith. I am a fiction writer and I am always learning more about my craft. Two important ways of doing that are reading other people's books (which I love to do anyway) and by reading books about writing. I am also deeply committed to learning more about my faith so I write on that too. A caveat - try to pick the two or three things that are most important to you.  If you add in more you won't be able to define your audience as follows.
7. Define your audience.  My first blog was (at the time I started it) relatively niche.  Blogs 2 (Christians) and 3 (people who read the bible) were not. (Blog 4 was niche but unsustainable in terms of writing).  My current blog is a good fit for Catholics who write and / or read Catholic or Catholic friendly articles and ebooks.  It isn't especially narrow but it is perfect for me as a blogger.  It gives me space AND focus which is exactly what I need.
8. Do promote your posts. When I write a new blog post I always take a few minutes to post it to Twitter and Facebook. I also use Hootesuite to schedule the same post to pop up again a couple of weeks or months later on Twitter. And sometimes I do the same thing on Facebook via the Facebook fan page scheduler. I always include an interesting image. I did not do this consistently with blogs 2-4 because my platform at that time wasn't interested in Christian only or Bible only posts. Caution: do not overdo this or people will get annoyed.
9. Do review things. Reviews are useful because they give people an idea of what they can expect from a given activity, whether that activity is reading a book or taking a trip or anything in between. My personal approach to reviews is to talk about how the thing I'm reviewing impacted me on a person level whenever possible. This can be done with fiction as well as nonfiction.  See my review of Colleen Coble's book Inn at Ocean's Edge for an example.
10. Do take a multimedia approach. Educators have long known that people have different ways of learning. Now, thanks to technology people can chose media that fits their learning styles. So it's important to remember that text is only one way to acquire information. While blogging is usually text based it doesn't have to be and - even when it is mostly text - it's a good idea to include some audio or video too. I plan on adding more video to this blog by making and posting more YouTube videos. For more on this, see my post on Joanne Penn's Audio for Authors. Nice images are helpful as well.
11. Do share your own work via feature articles. Reviewing other people's stuff is great but remember to make room for your own work too! For me that's writing.  For you it might be a recipe or a photograph of your most jewelry creation. My most successful posts across every blog I've ever written have been feature articles. My features are creative nonfiction pieces that are often quite personal.  (See A Butterfly In Flight or A Gift From My Grandmother.)
12. Do make it look good.  Actually I did this in blogs 2 and 3 too but I am especially happy with what I've done with this one. It's based on an inexpensive blogger template I bought from an etsy-based web designer. My $10 purchase included free installation and great customer support - which means that you don't have to personally know anything about webdesign to have a pretty and professional blog. The designer I used (and could not recommend more highly) is Eve from Fearne Creative Designs. You can check out her beautiful templates at etsy.com/shop/FearneCreativeDesign.
13. Don't spend a lot of money. The old adage, you can't buy success is absolutely true of blogging.  The blog you are reading is a do-it-yourself free blogger blog with a $10 template.  Images are mostly freebies from pixabay. Video is embedded from my non-premium YouTube channel. But the blog is getting read. As of these writing it has 569,170 page views.  And counting.

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Check back for a post on blog post writing do's and don't's

We need no wings to go in search of Him, but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us.  - St. Teresa of Avila

Over the last few weeks I found myself working on my new inspirational romance almost everyday.  I was happy with my progress.  And then I hit a snag.

Looking back I'm not sure quite how it happened.  All I know is that I started to think about some of my old unpublished manuscripts and then I began to wonder if I might be able to use some of that work in whole or in part.

I am a big fan of Joanna Penn.  I love her books on writing and staying healthy while writing and writing as a business and actually everything she does. 

"White Rose" by Gustave Doré

I have been working with a couple different novel writing books by James Scott Bell.  Though that wasn't my intent originally.

I began with Bell's audio course, How to Write Best Selling Fiction. Then because I loved Bell's approach and the LOCK (lead, objective, conflict and knock-out) system employed in the course I decided to read one of his books , as I worked through the course. I chose Plot & Structure (which is as of this writing only $2.99 on Kindle) because, for me, structure is always an issue.

Then part way through the Plot & Structure exercises I realized I needed more help with conflict and suspense, so I started referencing parts of another one of Bell's books, Conflict & Suspense.  I was learning a lot from that book.  But I was still struggling with the psychology of my lead.  So I picked up Write Your Novel From the Middle, to see if it might help me out.

At this point, I wasn't really sure which book I wanted to review.  I liked them all.  There was some overlap but for each to work as a standalone volume I think there has to be.  Each of the books was insightful and Bell was good at breaking his ideas down and making them understandable.  Nothing he suggested was academic or unclear.  Everything was applicable to specific writing problems.  Many of which I have.

There were no long novel quotes either.  Instead there were specific examples illustrating the points Bell was trying to make, including a fair amount of movie illustrations.  One Amazon reviewer said that she wished Bell would stick to books, as opposed to films for his examples, but for me the movie examples worked.

One of the reasons I liked the mix of novel and film examples is because it's easy to spot the various elements of story in a movie. The other was that most of the movies were ones just about everybody has seen.  Almost all were from various genre specific books that had been made into films.

Some of the books, like Rebecca and Gone With the Wind, I'd read.  Others (like The Firm) I had not.  But I had seen the movie.  For readers (and writers) of legal thrillers the reverse would probably be true.  That's why I thought the film examples made sense.  No matter what genre you read (and probably write in) most of the stories Bell references will be ones you know.

While I found the LOCK system useful, I especially liked the writing from the middle approach.  At first I wasn't sure if Bell was right in saying that there is a single 'mirror moment' dead center in every (well-written) book.  But he gave a lot of examples.  And when I tested it myself - by opening up the book I had just finished (Gone Girl) to the middle - I found the passage where Nick (finally) decides he is going to fight for his freedom.  A significant internal turning point.

Because all of Bell's books are helping me, I decided to do this kind of composite review and then share how I'm applying what I've learned to my own novel in future posts. I'm hoping that sharing what does and doesn't work for me will be helpful to others and for myself!