I recently attended a memoir writing retreat at La Finca in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where eleven of us gathered in the Caribbean breeze each morning to discuss work submitted by two separate participants. But before we plunged into the nitty-gritty of structure, voice, character development, and so on, we warmed up our brains each morning by spending fifteen minutes responding to a writing prompt provided by Elizabeth Cohen, award winning writer, poet, memoirist, journalist, steadfast writing mentor, and Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh.

I like writing prompts, timed prompts; they drive me to write fast, to keep the pen moving, to not fret over whatever it is I’m writing about. Prompts force me to let it all out, to express what I otherwise would second-guess expressing. One of my favorite prompts Elizabeth offered us came from a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day.” In the poem she says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” The prompt: “What is a prayer?”

Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what Elizabeth asked us to respond to, because I heard her say this: “What does it mean to pray.” But, hey, that’s the beauty of prompts; they leave room for choice. So here’s what I wrote:

To be still and quiet is to pray. To walk barefoot in the grass, and feel each blade between the toes. To close your eyes against the day’s glare and turn inside yourself and breath out any knots and tangles. To breath in the memory of being carefree, of doing water angels and skipping stones on a midnight lake. To pray is to sing, to write, to call forward that which makes you still, still enough to listen to the sounds you cannot hear. It’s to hold close to you the heartbeat of what matters most to you. To pray is to remember that you are not alone, and that candy breezes have the capacity to carry you closer and closer toward the inside of you, deep into the uterine center of you. To pray is to imagine, to feel, to hold a butterfly in the palm of our hand.

I’d love to hear from others what it means to you to pray. (or if you’re good at paying attention, “What is a prayer?”) What other mind-limbering prompts do you have to share?

Remember that punched-in-the-gut feeling when the one guy (or girl) you had a crush on in high school went to the prom with your best friend instead of you? Or how about the first time you tried out for the soccer team and you didn’t make the cut? Rejection doesn’t feel very good. You might as well be a deflated balloon. That’s what it felt like for me when a literary journal recently rejected an essay of mine. I’ve received lots of rejections from journals, but this one, for no reason I can explain, hurt like a motherfucker. Because I’m generally a curious person, I can’t help but wonder why rejection causes humans so much emotional pain.

By nature, humans are social beings. Just as we need food and water to survive, we depend on others to feel a sense of belonging. To be rejected is like suffering from hunger and thirst. Because we have access to technology and other modern conveniences, we could manage to lead a solitary existence, though it would likely be a depressing one. To say “I’m in a lot of pain” after receiving a rejection letter from your top choice college, or after failing to land your dream job is not merely a figure of speech. It’s as real as physical pain. Through MRI studies, researchers have found that rejection stimulates many of the same areas of the brain involved with physical pain. As researcher Naomi Eisenberger describes, “As far as your brain is concerned, a broken heart is not so different from a broken arm.”

So, if we feel just as lousy when rejected as we do when experiencing physical pain, maybe the two cold be treated in the same way. That’s what researchers thought, and had a group of volunteer subjects take Tylenol for three weeks, while a second group of subjects were given a placebo. At the end of the study period, those who were given the Tylenol reported fewer episodes of hurt feelings. To confirm those reports, MRIs were taken of the Tylenol group, and showed less activity in the pain regions of the brain. Similar results have been found in real-life:  The same researchers conducted MRIs of individuals whose partners had recently ended their relationships, and when they were shown pictures of their ex-partners, the pain regions of the brain lit up.

Of course, while some individuals experience very few rejections over time (personally, I don’t know any of those people), others experience one rejection after another. And how each of us copes with rejection differs. Some are better at picking up and moving on; others crawl back into bed and bury themselves in the dark. (I’ll admit it: sometimes that’s where I end up, back in bed.) But, even though studies have proven that Tylenol can heal hurt feelings, pain serves us well. Since it’s an evolutionary advantage that we maintain social connections, though it means risking rejection, if we isolate ourselves, we’ll ultimately perish. So, the next time you receive a rejection of any kind, remember this: pain means you’re not as alone as you might think you are.

Do you fret over writing dialogue? Do you use dialogue as a filler because you’re not sure where to go next on the page? Well, I’m here to offer some suggestions, that is, on behalf of Rita Zoe Chin, the author of Let the Tornado Come, a brilliantly rendered memoir about her adult onset panic disorder and how she galloped through the storm with unwavering resilience. I met Rita during her writing craft session, “Essentials of Dialogue,” at this year’s Muse and Marketplace in Boston. Since most of us shiver when we hear “rules,” I’m here to assure you that her guidelines are just that, guidelines, though worthy ones I vote for keeping close by on your writing desk.

First and foremost, think of dialogue as having a purpose. Does it advance the narrative, develop the characters, highlight a relationship? When writing the earlier drafts of my memoir, I used to believe I had to get it exact: every word my mother or sister or brother said twelve years earlier. Well, we all know that memories are slippery at best, and what we remember from a dozen years ago may as well be categorized as fiction. When talking about memoir, the best we can do is get it as close to the truth as possible. That said, you don’t need to include every “um,” “uh,” and “oh” on the page. If anything, they’re distracting to readers. Imagine reading this: “Um, I don’t know. Oh, I see. Uh, let me think about that. And, um, I have a story to tell you, um, do you want to hear it?” No. Similarly, salutations like “Hello” and “Goodbye” are not needed. The same goes for nonessential pieces of information like what a character ate for lunch (I suppose if what the character ate moves the story forward in some way then it would be essential). As for accents, this is a tough one. They too can be distracting. And, believe it or not, adverbs do not make for good dialogue. Take a look at this example Rita shared: “She ripped off the wrapping paper and opened the box before he finished reading the gift tag on his. “I love it,” she said, happily.” It’s clear she is happy without having to say so, right? Then there are dialogue tags: I said, he said, she said. Our initial instinct may be to liven up these tags with more active verbs like “I uttered” or “He bellowed.” But, as Rita noted, “let the dialogue do the work.” In other words, get rid of the voice of the narrator. Look at it in the way Rita suggested: “Dialogue tags are there simply to guide us.”

There’s more, but for now, I’ll leave you with a savory tip from Rita: Listen closely to conversations among others: expression, tone, word choice, etc. Pay attention to dialogue when reading, when watching a movie or a play. Read your own dialogue out loud, marking words you stumble over. Maybe there are words unintentionally repeated. And remember: sometimes silence on the page says much more than dialogue.

Hope this helps!

Are you resilient? Do you sink or swim when faced with obstacles or stressful events? Say you grew up poor, I mean really poor, and all you had to eat for lunch each day at school were saltine cracker and butter sandwiches. Because you didn’t want your more well to do schoolmates to feel sorry for you, each time you crunched down on your cracker sandwich and licked the butter from the salted edges, you smiled. Despite your chronic adverse circumstances – low socioeconomic status – you worked hard in school. In fact you excelled, and you continue to do so: maybe at work or as a parent, or both. That’s resilience.

If you’ve never experienced a life challenge (unless you have lived in bubble wrap for all of your existence, I find this nearly impossible), you’ll never know whether or not you’re resilient. Adverse events can be chronic, as in the scenario I depicted above, or acute, as in witnessing a trauma or being a victim of an accident.

To better understand what makes us resilient, one researcher has looked at what are called “protective factors,” the particulars of individuals’ backgrounds, including personality, that play a role in their success, regardless of challenges. In follow-up to his research, his students identified factors that fell into two different groups: psychological makeup, disposition, or environmental influences in one group, and pure chance in the other. Another, larger study attempted to decipher the factors contributing to resiliency. Though, similar to the former study, luck played a role in some cases, psychological constitution was instrumental in the majority of situations. They might not have been geniuses, but the more resilient children possessed a healthy sense of self. They were willing to seek out new experiences, take chances, utilize the skills they had to be successful. One researcher describes these children as having an “internal locus of control,” meaning that they believed they, rather than outside circumstances, had control over their outcomes. They believed they were the authors of their life scripts.

As with most things though, resilience fluctuates. We’re human after all: if we’re burdened with one stressor after another – divorce, death, a job loss, injury – we tire and lose resilience (think of an overstretched rubber band). But the good news is: we just might be able to learn how to be resilient. Another researcher has discovered that individuals who did not bounce back so easily as children were able to develop resilient skills later in life, enabling them to prosper.

If we have the capacity to create our outcomes, then why not say resilience is an offshoot of perception, another human element within our control. As a clinical psychologist at Columbia University says, “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.” Because we’re the ones who label the event as traumatic, we also have the capacity to re-label it as something else – simply as an experience, for instance. In this way we become more resilient. Of course, it’s not always that easy. Because we’re human, we agonize over this and that, lose sleep over this and that. It takes re-training the brain, taming our unwieldy thought patterns, tying our worries and fears into a constrictor knot. Though this hackneyed phrase may cause you to roll your eyes (Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this, how many times now?), I’m going to share it with you anyway: If we expect something to become true, it will become true. If we focus on an adverse event as potentially harmful, we sink. If we focus on that same event as a challenge, we swim – and win.

What is it like to live with a traumatic brain injury (TBI)? Maybe you feel as if you know longer know who you are. You might say that your identity has been “stripped” away, that your independence has been ripped from you. You feel utterly lost. In an interview with marketing consultant Angela Treat Lyon on Daring Dreamers Radio, this is exactly how Nathalie Kelly, a TBI survivor, describes how she felt in the days, months, and years after her sailboat toppled over during a storm on Lake Champlain in Vermont and smacked her in the head, leaving her bobbing in the cold water for forty minutes, until the coast guard arrived.

A brain injury advocate, writer, inspirational speaker, and board certified hypnotherapist, Nathalie speaks with eloquence and candor about her post-TBI road-blocks, set-backs, growth-spurts, and more. The motto of Daring Dreamers Radio is “to dare you to live free, inspired, and in constant delight.” And that is precisely what Nathalie does in the interview: She has come to understand that living with a TBI means learning to accept that you are “perfectly imperfect,” and, though our culture frowns upon anything less than perfection, she “dares” us to embrace it, to “embrace vulnerability,” to let yourself be the person you are now, to shed all expectations of others. “That’s living an authentic life,” Nathalie says.

To be inspired and awakened and free, I dare you to listen to Nathalie’s interview at Daring Dreamers Radio.