When asked to write about who she might be without this creation story, as an ordinary little girl born into a grief-stricken family, she ran into a wall of fear. Finally, Toni was able to hypothetically describe this girl-self: “She’d be sad, I suppose. Probably confused. Scared that her mother might disappear, too. She might feel guilty that she

When you engage the Witness while writing, it helps quiet the brilliant, inventive left hemisphere of the brain. The discursive mind settles, and your intuition and emotional intelligence can emerge.

prose. The strengths you need are courage, transparency, commitment to the truth, and a sincere desire to transcend your story.

Enjoy your solitude. As writers, we must learn to enjoy our own company. We must enjoy visiting our own minds, hearing what we have to say, and remembering that we are okay on our own. We can step away from the crowd and neither panic nor lose a sense of who we are. Practice enjoying the unfilled space and hearing the sounds within the silence.

Emotional groundwork is laid by the time we are seven months old, so long before you began to speak, an encyclopedia of preverbal information was transmitted to your baby brain.

I imagined that when I entered my mother’s body, she had already drifted someplace else.

Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is rich, inspiring, and restful; replete with space and possibility.

It’s a case of the “the devil you know”—I know what it’s like to be strangled; I don’t know what it’s like to be free.

Our blood is rich with information. Our bodies hold secrets, clues, and stories accessible through intuition and by reaching imaginatively into the past. Writing is an act of the imagination. This is important to understand because when we dream back in time to describe things that happened long ago, imagination enables us to recreate from memory.