Experiences With the Energy Body, a short video

Bill Johnson speaks about his experiences of exploring his energy body in this video posted on YouTube. A free journal about Bill's experiences can be found at https://draft2digital.com/book/1291157

Playwright Kwik Jones on Writing, Staging, and Getting Plays Produced

Playwright Kwik Jones will speak to the Portland Chapter of Willamette Writers about his process of writing, staging, and getting his work performed and produced. The meeting is Tuesday, June 7th, at 7-8:30 pm via Zoom.

Kwik has been writing, directing, and producing plays for twenty-eight years. Developing plays such as: A Strange Seed, Forgotten Soul, Voices, Black Like me, Jupiter is Stormy, Spotlight, The Code, Puzzle Dream, Conversations, Organ, L.U.S.T, Both Sides of the Fence, Sweet Mother Jones, Memphis Bound, Water Boyz and many more.

Awards and honors are such: The Portland Civic Theater Guilds New Play Award, for his play Cat Napper. A finalist for the Downtown Urban Arts Festival in New York City for his plays Memphis Bound and Water Boyz which was also selected as a finalist for the PNMC New Play Readers Series Festival. He was named a semifinalist for the Lanford Wilson Festival for the play The Closet Pigeon. Recently his play A Strange Seed was chosen as one of the six finalists in The Portland Civic Theater Guilds New Play Award and just recently became a semifinalist at the 2022 National Playwrighting Conference.

Currently he is working on a new play, We Act, which he has been commissioned to write for the upcoming book (ed. Jose Casas and Tiffany Trent) Every Great Dream: Visioning African American Theater for Young Audiences, which will be published by Dramatic Publishing. Also currently commissioned by The Robey Theater in Los Angeles, California for another new work Man’s Favor Devil’s Plan. Along with being 1 out of 16 playwrights commission to write a BIPOC Superhero plays that will be published on Dramatic Publishing.

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0odeGupjMjG9117CttZFpQwsJ4vw-KuA2o

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Understanding the Symbolic Halo in Paintings and How It Relates to Creativity

I'd mentioned a band of energy around my skull and a friend asked for a fuller explanation. This explanation comes from my years of experiencing my energy body and what I did to effect changes to it. I was born with this awareness. I didn't know until my early twenties that others didn't share this experience.

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When you see Christian paintings with halos, the halos are symbolic of a band of energy that goes around the crown of the skull.

Think of the spine as a 220 volt current, and the body 110. In the arms and legs you have a strong lines of current. Same for chest and back.

The restrictions in the flow of energy in the body are a reflection of and embodiments of the patterns of thought on the mental landscape.

The muscles tend to hold those restrictions, so when I did the bellows breathing, the muscles in my arm would spasm as that restricted flow opened up.

Took a year of doing bellows breath 3 to 4 hours a day to open the various restrictions in energy flow around my body.

Depression is restrictions in the energy flow in the body that don't manifest as pain. When you are sick with the flu and have aches and pains, those are restrictions in the energy flow, but the restriction that cause depression don't manifest as physical pain.

When you had that experience of muscles of your back in spasms (when I touched your back to transfer energy), that extra current released some restriction and tension in those muscles. Now when you get to the head, there is a really tight band of energy that runs around the skull. It's supper strong, super intense, and very difficult to change the flow. When I did bellows breathing and managed to open that band slightly, the released force would throw me out a bed into a wall.

When I experience that flow now, it feels like a tight, metallic band.

Many years ago while in therapy I was doing five 12 step groups a week. Since there was a lot of quiet time, I would visualize a current of energy going from my spiritual eye back to the medulla and then back to the spiritual eye.

I basically did this for an hour a night, for six months. As time when on, I could feel the flow of energy.

Then one of those bands rolled on one side of my head. That's when I started to go into high moods of creativity, connecting to info in the universe, not in my mind.

11 weeks later the other side rolled, and my states of intense creativity and connection to a deeper understanding coming in from outside my mind continued.

11 weeks later, the tight bands of energy around my face opened up.

This was all accompanied by my getting my brain re circuited, a very odd and strange process. Think skull being drilled and ants walking on skull. But when those new circuits opened, I could stay in a high mood as I taught.

The work I'm doing now is to again open that band around my crown.

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My friend asked me about how this relates to her experience of Satori, an expansion of consciousness and feeling connected to the wider universe.

Yes you can experience Satori, and hold on to the experience, and experience it again, but at some point you return to the mind, the energy body that is an expression of the mind, and the body. And if the energy flow is restricted, that's what you return to.

When I was young, I thought deep meditation would make me great at relationships, but I was terrible. I was raised in a dysfunction environment and that was the mind and body I returned to when I wasn't meditating. The lessons I learned growing up where embedded in my mind. I needed therapy to start unlearning those lessons.

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Bill Johnson is the author of a writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon and Smashwords. The ideas in the book came from his spiritual experiences.

The Outsider As Character Type - Review of The Outsiders

The outsider is an enduring character type in fiction, TV series, and movies.

There are many reasons for this.

When an outsider arrives in a new environment, he or she upsets the current status quo. This naturally generates dramatic questions. What will be the outcome of this upset? Will the outsider replace a current leader? Change the direction of a group?

Another form of this character type is someone within a group who changes.

An example of this is S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders.

The POV character is Ponyboy. He's a Greaser. Wears his hair long, carries a switch blade, and fights in rumbles with his gang against others, mainly SOCs, pronounced SOSHes.

He's also a high school freshman who gets straight As.

His family is a brother named Soda who has already dropped out of high school, and an older brother, Darry, who at 20 works two jobs to support his brothers after the death of their parents. Darry also yells at Ponyboy a great deal out of concern that his conformity to being a Greaser might lead him to become a hoodlum. Dally, a wild man and member of the gang, has crossed that line, robbing gas stations and committing other crimes.

Johnny is another young member of the gang and his actions drive the story. Before the story begins, Johnny had been stomped by a group of Socs, well-off kids who drive fancy cars and appear to want for nothing.

The Socs and Greasers are tribal enemies who fight whenever their paths cross.

Johnny enjoys sunsets. He's a sensitive soul but has been born into this Greaser tribe.

At a fair, Johnny and Ponyboy end up spending some time with Cherry, a cheerleader, and another Soc girl, because their dates came to the fair drunk. The girls are impressed by Johnny's love of sunsets, and Cherry has a way of making Ponyboy understand that she has a depth of understanding about life he'd never suspected. She also conveys that just being a Soc does not guarantee an easy life, which is a revelation to Ponyboy.

When a fight with Darry sends Ponyboy out of the house, he and Johnny are cornered by Cherry's angry boyfriend and a few others near a fountain. One of the Socs says he's going to kill Ponyboy by holding his head under water. Johnny stabs and kills the Soc and he and Ponyboy are now on the lam with the aid of Dally.

They have to cut their long Greaser hair to hide out in an abandoned church in a nearby small town.

A fire erupts in the abandoned church. Ponyboy and Johnny rush into the burning building to rescue some trapped young boys.

Ponyboy rescues several boys and gets out, but Johnny is seriously wounded. Pony and Johnny are now celebrated as heroes.

It comes out that Cherry and another Soc are willing to testify that Johnny was just protecting Ponyboy. They are going against their tribe. Pony again must confront the idea that all Socs have an ideal life with no concerns.

The novel ends with Pony reunited with his brothers, but with a deepened understanding of life. He now appears ready to want the better life that Darry wants for him.

The Outsiders provides a wonderful example of the drama that can be created by a built in conflict between tribes and the conflict when a tribal member challenges the status quo.

Changes in the status quo of a family, clan, or tribe fuels many novels. It embeds conflict into the fabric of a story's world.

Hinton's The Outsiders is a novel that has spoken to different generations of young people trying to find their place in the world.

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For more essays about the craft of writing, visit my website at http://www.storyispromise.com

To find A Story is a Promise on Amazon, use this link, https://www.amazon.com/Story-Promise-Spirit-Storytelling-ebook/dp/B004V020N0/?geniuslink=true

Concrete Plot, Subtle Story Notes on The Queen's Gambit

 a review by Bill Johnson

A cornerstone of the a story is a promise concept is that a story creates movement and the movement transports an audience. Simply put, if a story isn't going somewhere from its opening lines, it fails to create the effect of a story.

Plot often operates to set a story into motion around a central question and sub questions. Each chapter in a novel can be a clearly defined step along a plot line. It's a concrete way of understanding the ground a story is covering.

A beginning of a novel also needs to set a story in motion. This can be subtle or obvious, but it needs to be done to convey meaning to the action. You resolve a plot, you fulfill a story's promise.

In The Queen's Gambit, eight year old Beth's parents die in a car accident and she ends up in an orphanage. To keep the children docile, they are given tranquilizers. Beth is afraid and alone. She hides one tranquilizer a day to help her sleep at night. Noises at night were setting her mind racing.

Then she realizes an old black janitor (this is Kentucky) in the basement is not playing checkers but a different game. He rebuffs her request to teach Beth chess but finally relents. In a short time, she is consistently beating him.

An older girl, Jolene, (twelve) tries to introduce Beth to sex play, but Beth now lives in her head, playing chess.

When the orphanage is ordered to stop giving the children tranquilizers, a desperate Beth tries to break in to a locked station to get more. Caught, she is not allowed to visit the basement for a year. No chess.

Since the author has made it clear that Beth is utterly driven to play chess, the question becomes what will happen next? To find out, readers must continue. Again, the plot creates concrete problems to be overcome.

When Beth is adopted by a woman with a husband who seems to be permanently traveling on business, Beth can now play chess and read magazines about the game. Since her adopted mother uses tranquilizers and alcohol to get through her days, Beth can sneak a supply of tranquilizers to help her sleep at night.

When the absent husband makes it official he's not coming back, Beth's adopted mother is now short on money ... until Beth wins a chess tournament and a cash prize.

As Beth plays and wins in bigger and bigger tournaments, Beth's mother introduces Beth to alcohol. The two become more like housemates than mother and adopted daughter. And Beth now has two drugs that help her sleep at night.

When Beth's adopted mother dies, Beth has to work her way through a period of heaving drinking, a plot complication that threatens her ability to play chess on a high level.

As Beth wins bigger and more prestigious competitions, she now accepts some help learning the fine points of chess from more advanced players.

Beth becomes the American chess champion, but this sets up the ultimate goal/plot destination for Beth, can she beat a Russian grand master and become a world champion?

Each section of the plot has clearly defined goals and questions.

To win against the Russians, Beth accepts the help of the best American chess players, but she quickly learns what they can teach her before she moves on. Beth is also introduced to sex, but sex to Beth is about as interesting as having tea and toast for breakfast. It barely registers in her life. It's not chess.

Beth finally meets the Russian world chess champion in competition and loses that match, her first major set back.

Beth realizes she has to give up drinking if she wants to beat that Russian. Jolene, who had graduated from the orphanage, helps Beth learn to exercise to keep her body fit so she can better focus.

Beth also comes to realize she wasn't just playing the world champion; she was up against all the former Russian world chess champions who helped him win matches by studying moves of opponents.

Beth can have a chess second funded by a religious group, but Beth refuses to issue a statement in support of Christianity. She's now going to Russia with a non-chess playing assistant supplied by the U.S. government.

Arriving in Russia, Beth begins beating the lesser players, but she also goes for a walk and discovers a park where old men play chess.

In a climactic battle, Beth fears that she can't win if she's alone playing the Russian and his helpers. At that point she gets a call from a former teacher, and he along with others help Beth plot her next moves.

This is a subtle story point, but Beth is no longer playing alone in her head. She's part of a larger community now, a first for her.

With the help of others steadying her mind, Beth beats the Russian and becomes world champion.

At the end of the novel, she returns to the Moscow park and the old men playing chess. They gather around her, showering her with love and affection.

That lonely, frightened child now feels she is part of and loved by a larger community.

Compared to the plot, this is subtle, but it is the thread that weaves the plot together and gives it a deeper meaning. Beth goes from being alone to part of a larger community.

That offers fulfillment to the story.

I recently read a science fiction novel by someone who had read Promise. Her novel had a concrete plot, with escalating complications, but I had to read to the end of the novel to find out what the story was about.

Until that final chapter, I didn't have a clue.

It's possibly the writer didn't know until she wrote that final chapter. If that was the case, it meant she needed to use that understanding to convey a story from the first page of the novel.

I've read many novels by unpublished authors that withheld what a story was about to create a big reveal. Unfortunately, it was hard to care.

Walter Tevis begins The Queen's Gambit with a frightened, lonely orphan because the fulfillment of the story is that she ultimately finds a new family.

One reason I use a breakdown of a Hollywood movie to teach story mechanics is the failure to generate a story that works with a concrete plot is often deadly. No reason to care about what happens to the main character.

In Promise, one technique I suggest is the 0-5-10 technique. Zero is obscure, five is obvious, ten is suggestive.

Struggling writers write toward zero, being obscure about what a main character seeks to fulfill.

Asking someone to be obvious about what a story is about is a path to understanding how to set in motion a powerful story.

In the latest edition of Promise, I explore how great writers create at ten on that scale.

For too many writers, that concrete wall of plot creates an illusion of storytelling in the same way movies used to use fake storefronts to suggest a town.

Walter Tevis understood the difference between story and plot.

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The Queen's Gambit also airs on Netflix as a mini-series. 

Heavenly Birth Insurance (Show)

Bill Johnson's play Heavenly Birth Insurance was produced as part of the Short+Sweet Theater Festival in Dubai. The play was directed by Nikhil Mittal and produced by Emotive Productions.

Quora Answers About POV in Movies & Other Writing and Movie Questions

Below are answers to writing questions posted on Quora. Quora allows members to ask question around a variety of topic. What I'm posting here is the question and my answer.

Why does “The Affair” have two perspectives of the same story, and which one to believe? 

Bill Johnson

The question reminds me more of the movie The End of the Affair. The movie starts with a husband confiding to a friend that he thinks his wife is having an affair. The friend offers to hire a private detective to find out. This only convinces the husband that his friend had an affair with his wife in the past.

The movie goes back into the past and shows the affair from the friend’s point of view. And it shows the affair ending, from his point of view.

Then the movie shifts and shows the affair ending from the wife’s point of view, which creates an entirely different understanding of why the affair ended.

The movie Hilary and Jackie explores what can be done with switches in a point of view in a more profound way, Hilary and Jackie (1998) - IMDb

Again the shift of point of view completely changes an understanding of what happens in the film. The film even ends with an omniscient pov, where a sister as an adult sees her younger self and sister playing at a beach.

Beautiful film.

There was a TV show called Boomtown. The basic set up was to show a crime/event, then shift the POV to give a different understanding of events.


Question, 'What is the redemption in the movie, "The Shawshank Redemption"?'
 
Tim Robbins goes from being emotionally numb to an ability to feel. There’s a shot early in the movie when he goes to prison showing the width of the walls. That is symbolic of the internal walls that block Tim’s internal life.

Morgan Freeman’s character gains an understanding of how he ended up in prison.

Two men who appear beyond redemption are redeemed.

Originally Answered: 'How many points of view (POVs) are too many in a novel?'
 
The problem with a question like this (or doing a prologue) is that someone skilled at storytelling can accomplish many difficult tasks, including telling a story with multiple points of view.

Someone who lacks skills in understanding POV will screw it up.

Years ago I read a manuscript for an author with a background as a TV producer. She didn’t understand POV. She would shift POV if someone mentioned an article of clothing and she’d go off into a POV shift about what someone thought about it.

No point to the shift, served no purpose, just wrong.

I told her how to fix it. She said she did. She got an agent to read her novel, which was rejected by the agent’s reader because of POV problems. The agent’s reader refused to review the novel.

So the author asked for my help. I again explained how to fix the POV problems and she asked me to ask the agent to again look at the revised novel. The agent’s reader came upon the same POV mess and refused to read the novel.

Suggestions that inexperienced writers avoid POV shifts are for the same reason people are told to avoid doing a prologue and children are advised not to play with gasoline and matches.

More than ONE point of view shift is too many if someone doesn’t understand POV and how to use it.

Question, 'In novels, do you believe that theme is always more important than plot?'

This needs to be broken down.

To say a story has a theme is a way of saying it has a point.

A novel that doesn't have a point risks appearing to be pointless.

When I would be asked to critique pointless novels that eventually had a character dealing with redemption, the author would put the word redemption in the 2nd paragraph of the 2nd page and say, 'See, I have a theme. Everything should be okay now."

Not really. Consider Harry Potter, which is storytelling/plot 101 in terms of mechanics.

Harry wants to fit in. He's the symbol of a war about pure versus mixed blood (about allowing more people to fit in versus a smaller group of pure blood).

That issue connects every character in the novels.

Each novel is a step in Harry's journey toward fitting in.

Each chapter in a Harry Potter novel is a clearly defined step along a plot line, that large step that will resolve the issue of fitting in for Harry in that novel.

Rowling uses a process I call question, answer, question. Each short chapter starts with a question. The answer to the question at the end of the chapter raises a new plot question to resolve that gives meaning to the next chapter.

Returning to the issue of fitting in, even the Dursley's want to fit in by appearing normal. Harry Potter by his existence is a mortal threat to that desire.

See the conflict this creates? It creates what I call narrative tension, the tension an audience feels about whether Harry will be expelled from Hogwarts back to the Dursley's.

As the plot of a Harry Potter novel increases the obstacles Harry must overcome, the narrative tension increases, making each novel compelling (to its audience).

Now, compare that to a novel that appears to be pointless.

The reader has to memorize details until they have a context. By the time you get to the third character who acts to no apparent purpose, getting through that is like getting through a swamp.
Using another example from a popular novel, The Hunt for Red October. Ramius wants to be free of oppression. That's what the story is about, it's theme, if you will. Each step Ramius takes to gain his freedom increases the obstacles he must get through. Once a reader is hooked on the question of whether Ramius can gain his freedom, they have to finish the novel.

Note that any character in the novel, a Soviet pilot for example, can be in the novel for two paragraphs, but his actions clearly have a purpose within the scope of the story, trying to stop or aid Ramius in his quest.

Like in Harry Potter, every character in Hunt is on a side and their actions have meaning that advance the plot.

But these mechanics of storytelling also apply to literary fiction.

In Joyce's short story The Dead, an intellectual doctor in Ireland takes his wife to a salon, where other intellectuals debate the issues of the time. After the salon, riding home in an open sleigh in the snow, the doctor images his wife is waiting for him to explain the intellectual arguments of the evening she didn't understand and that will be a prelude to intimacy.

Instead his wife is thinking of a time when she was a young girl and a suitor came to see her in the snow just before he passed from consumption (tuberculosis).

The intellectual doctor realizes that with all his vaunted intellect, he could not recognize the mood of his wife. That all the intellectual arguments of the night are like the snow covering the earth, some frozen water vapor covering the deeper reality of the earth.

The plot and characters of The Dead revolve around ideas.

The Dead as a story is an inch wide and a mile deep.

The Hunt for Red October is a mile wide and an inch deep.

But both operate to a dramatic purpose and both have a plot.

I recently read All the Light We Cannot See, which is a novel about how war impacts ordinary people. The plot is about which of two main characters will survive a city being bombed, and then who will survive the war.

Simple story, complex plot.

Returning to the issue of theme, in general I avoid using the word and just come to an understanding of what a story is about. Typically for an unpublished novel that starts out pointlessly, that revelation can come deep in a novel.

Another way to consider this is to think of a story in terms of music. Lets say Harry Potter is told in the key of C. That means there are particular notes that work and have an effect in that key, and notes that are discordant. Struggling writers are hitting notes/words in the wrong key.

The audience can hear the difference. Coming up with different verbs for how something crosses a room - siddles, glides, dances, strides - doesn’t change anything if those words are in the wrong key.

Fixing an unpublished (or self published) novel written by someone who doesn't understand what key/theme they are playing in can mean conveying an understanding of storytelling and not thinking changes in grammar or proofreading or changing the order of opening chapters will fix the overriding problem.

Also, someone who doesn't understand what a story is about generally doesn't understand how to create a strong plot.

Bill Johnson, A Story is a Promise