Guest blogger Anne Underhill

My guest today is Anne Underhill. Anne loves to write, sing, and act. She is currently unpublished, but working on a book while concurrently writing poetry. She loves reading, and enjoys reading indie authors and exploring the world of indie publishing.

Find her on Twitter: @1I7M7IV6

Writing With Passion

Aristotle said the law must be free from passion. And its important the law is free from passion. Passion is powerful, and the emotions it unleashes can cloud judgement, create bias, and blind people from the truth. Which is really why all lawyers should be robots. But I digress. Nothing in this world is ever completely free from passion. It is in how and when it is unleashed, by which it carves its design.

Passion must be writing's most intimate bedfellow.  They must know one another and move together as if they were one body. If not, the unfolding chapters will not be pleasant ones. To begin, you need to believe what you're writing has a legitimate place in this world. If you don't, no one else will. In a world built on a system of rejection, its essential your belief is stout. There is no way to avoid rejection of some kind, so you need to find a way to conquer it. To be frank, rejection isn't really the problem here at all, rejection happens to all of us many times in our lives. It's the fear or rejection, and really, fear itself, that is the enemy. Fear is consuming, crippling, disabling, and can crush our spirits. Fear will swallow passion alive. Defeating fear takes a passion rooted within the soul.  You need to write about something that infuriates you, brings you to ecstatic joy, numb sorrow, or something that might nearly drive you mad. The topic isn't important, what's important is how pissed off, excited, sad or insane you become while you're writing about it. The key is having the passion be so alive that writing becomes like breathing. The words cascade like water off of Niagra. To write, is to be. 

"Writers block" is another way of saying "I have no passion right now."  If writers block begins to become a regular occurrence, its important to ask the question "is it the topic that's passionless or is it me?" Maybe that's harsh. Well, the world is harsh. Its also beautiful. You need to seek out what inspires you. Maybe turn on the news and watch five minutes. Odds are there will be something on to piss you the hell off. Good. Write. Get frustrated, angry, happy, sad, anything. What's important is finding something that burns a passion within you so bright the darkest night cannot douse the light. 

Enjoy some of Anne's poetry...

The temples we build for our cars

Living museums,

Bathed in moments of joy, anger, love and rage...

Seething with a twisted underbelly of oil, gas and combustion

Sometimes stealing moments forever...

Bright, shiny, new and perfect,

Until used,

Soiled with the grime of thousands before...

Clean again, the scars remain

What's inside?

Trash, filth, the black stamp of footprints

Engrained for life

Scrubbed a thousand times

The stench remains

Devalued, hackled and bought

At what price?

Worth, value, purpose.

None remains

Torn apart, sold, discarded

The temples we build for our cars.