Foundational Lenses for the Journeypen Project
What’s a “foundational lens”? I introduce them here.
If you’re here, I’m assuming that you’re interested in my perspective.
I want to remind you that my perspective is ONE perspective.
My perspective works for me, most of the time. However, since all of us are still building perspectives that works for you, I’ll share the foundational lenses behind my perspective.
I don't expect you to accept my Foundational Lenses so that you can accept them as your own. I share what my Foundational Lenses are so that you can put my perspective in context as you formulate your own.
As a bonus, I think it would be great if you all became more skillful in seeing Foundational Lenses in your own life and creating them in your own fiction, but that’s really up to you.
I built the foundation of my particular views on following understandings:
No one has all the answers, but everyone has a piece of the answer.
I created The Journeypen Project to map out everything that I’ve learned about writing, with tools to guide and orientate you on your own creative path. However, even after two and a half decades of experience, I don’t know everything.
I expect you to be listening to other writers and creators out there, just as I did, and when I mean other writers and creators, I’m including you, sweet one.
You should always be at the top of the list of people you listen to.
Storytelling is one path to growing into a whole, emotionally healthy human.
Actually, it’s my preferred path to emotional health. and after many years of making it a daily practice, all of my writer tools have also become life tools.
Everything I share comes from the perspective that what I use to shape my stories also shapes my life.
I consider myself a toolmaker, making tools you’ll use on your own.
What I share here at the Journeypen Project are tools, which you can use, ignore, or adapt according to your personal needs. The Journeypen Project itself is one large tool; it’s a map of all the places my pen has taken me, which can help to orient you as you learn to navigate your own creative terrain.
Everything I share, including every story I tell, is also a tool. Although I created each hoping that it will help you, how you use each tool is up to you.
If you’re alive today, you’re growing. I include myself in that.
Writers—like all people—never stop learning and shifting. I too am always learning, even after decades of practice, and for years, I think that stopped me from sharing what I knew.—I was always waiting to perfect my knowledge. After all, what I know tomorrow is always going to be more complete than what I know today, and as the world is changing drastically these days, so am I.
So, all I can promise you on this website is that whatever I share here is full of all the knowledge and experience I’d acquired up until the moment I finished writing it. I reserve the right to change my mind if I grow into a better understanding of a topic.
I may even make a practice of revisiting the Journeypen creations and releasing new editions, based on what else I’ve learned. (Walt Whitman did this with Leaves of Grass, and I’ve always liked that about him.)
Writing is my process of sustaining sanctuary for myself. I believe it can be yours too.
We’re clearly living in a messy world, and each of us are swamped with more emotions than we’re used to handling.
Writing—whether fictional and public or personal and private—is one of the ways I metabolize my feelings into meaning. That makes writing my safe place—my writing practice is the method I use to make my mind safe for living in, no matter what the external circumstances are.
As I share the skills I’ve developed, this is the skill that I most want to pass on: process your life through writing, and in doing so, create ways to feel safe and comfortable within it.