Am I a channel for my lead characters?
I was asked this question often when I described how I wrote Let's Go Home: Finding There While Staying Here, and now as I launch Beneath The Veil, I am again being asked similar questions.
"This doesn’t feel like a made-up story, so do you believe in the possibility of channelling a story? Because when I read your book, I feel like I am reading someone speaking their truth through you, that you have written the words they’ve spoken to you."
I admit I have a unique connection to my protagonists, Halia (Let's Go Home), Clara and Maeve (Beneath The Veil) but I am reluctant to use the term channel to describe my writing. A channel, in this context, describes the act or practice of serving as a medium through which a spirit guide purportedly communicates with living persons. There are connotation attached to this that I don’t feel accurately reflect the way that I write.
Many artists, whether it is as a writer, painter, sculptor, musician, singer or actor will talk about the feeling of being taken into another space or realm when they go into ‘the zone’, and experience a sense of something outside of them working through them.
This is exactly what I feel, it is not that an entity of some sort takes over my body and I become the character, speaking for them. In contrast, it is the feeling of myself opening to a higher energy and my being acts as an open vessel to transmute the vibration of the higher energy. For musicians this comes through in their music, for artists in their painting, for actors in their performance. For me, it comes through in the words I write. The words I am gifted to write.
Some artists call the higher energy their muse, I refer to them and see them as the character of the story they are sharing with me.
For someone who was once highly intellectual and left-brain dominant, it has been challenging for me to describe my experience of writing in this way, because I know that many left-brain dominant people won’t understand it and it will sound quite ‘woo-woo’.
Yet this is who I am and this is how I write. I know it is a gift and as long as I remain open to, and embrace working in this way, I will be gifted with many more stories to share with the world.
I believe in the power of story as a creator of change and I am honoured to be a vehicle for this change.
Click on the link below to download Chapter 1 of Beneath The Veil.
