Latest / The Daily Writer / Cross the Streams | DWC Member Spotlight: Lori Melton

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Cross the Streams | DWC Member Spotlight: Lori Melton · The Daily Writer

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast, where we bring you tips and inspiration each day to help you build habits for riding success.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: For more resources, including your free Daily Rider starter kit, visit DailyRiderLife.com.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: In a scene from the 1984 Ghostbusters movie, the three Ghostbusters are trying to capture a ghost that's flying around a hotel ballroom, and their proton packs emit powerful energy streams that can catch the ghost and pull it down to a small box where it'll stay trapped.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: However, Egon Spindler, played by the great Harold Ramus, warns them not to cross the streams or it'll have dire consequences.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, ironically, crossing these streams of energy is the very thing that lets them defeat the villains Gozer and the stay-puffed marshmallow man later in the movie.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the interesting thing about how this applies to us as writers.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of us avoid crossing the streams of our curiosity.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: We keep our reservoirs of knowledge separate from one another.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: History, religion, arts, psychology, politics, technology.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: We keep them all in our nice little boxes.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the best creative thinking comes from the cross-pollination of interesting ideas.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the only way to create new ideas is to cross your streams of knowledge and experience.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why you've got to read in different genres and categories.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: You must talk to people who are different than you.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you must take ideas from one realm of knowledge and blend those with ideas from other realms.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park and a lot of other famous novels, said this.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you are a writer, the assimilation of important experiences almost obliges you to write about them.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Writing is how you make the experience your own, how you explore what it means to you, how you come to possess it, and ultimately release it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is that you can't produce new ideas from the same base of knowledge and experience that's given you your current ideas.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So don't be afraid to cross the streams if you want to reach higher levels of creativity.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's challenge.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: What are two areas of knowledge you can cross-pollinate in your writing today?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you've probably heard me talk about the Daily Writer Club many times here on the show.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of my very favorite things in the world.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so privileged to lead this group of amazing and gifted writers every week.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And here on the podcast, I am periodically featuring members of the club in many interviews.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And today I'm excited to introduce to you my friend Lori Melton.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: She's a spiritual director and retreat leader with a lifelong passion for walking with God and fostering opportunities for others to grow in their relationship with him.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: She and her husband Brian are the founders and directors of the Sanctuary at Bear Creek Retreat Center in Allegan, Michigan, the proud parents of five sons and one daughter, and Nana and Papa to two adorable grandkids.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: She's also the author of the forthcoming book, Journey with a Giant, Find Your Guide, Fulfill Your Purpose, a One Year Adventure.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can connect with Lori and find out more about the Sanctuary at thesanctuary at BearCreek.com.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here's my conversation with Lori.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lori, welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited to feature you as one of our Daily Rider Club members who's doing some really cool stuff.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start here.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us a bit about yourself and your writing and what kind of and how really how you got into this to begin with.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I um started writing in during the pandemic and uh one of those things where we are all stuck at home and um making our list of what we could spend our time on now that we had so much of it.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I wrote down all these things that I might want to do to learn, you know, to utilize this time amazingly well.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And at the bottom of the list was an oh yeah, Lord, if you can do something with this desire I've had to write for the last 25 years, please do it.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I really I had been praying that so long.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like he's probably sick of hearing it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sick of hearing it, my family's sick of hearing it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in the meantime, the next day I got in the mail um a writer's group's free promotion for five days of their teachings.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh wow, okay.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I jumped into that and had the time to start writing and um just started slow.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, my husband and I own um a reach, a small retreat center in Michigan, and I'd been going for my spiritual direction training.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a lot of things I wanted to write about and different people that were coming to our retreat center and on retreats with us that started to create a group that I could write for.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I just started taking those baby steps, and um then in 2020, that it would have been the next year.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: I had been wondering write longer format um work on, and I hadn't thought of anything.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then going into 2021, um felt like I wanted to write about a practice that I had learned during my training that people had started asking me about, and that um led into the journey with a giant work, where I wrote for a year about walking with a spiritual giant, um, and thought, okay, I'll just journal this and then uh the next year I'll have a book.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that was so 2021, I wrote it.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Last year I was shaping it.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still shaping it this year, but um, yeah, there's just so much to learn and writing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: What do you feel like the biggest challenges are right now in in culture or society?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: What are the biggest challenges in trying to practice better spirituality or faith in our lives?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh too many options.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, too many, we're we're never still.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're well, not that we're never still.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's hard to be still.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many things pulling at us.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's hard to just keep your life simple.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I teach on keeping my life still, and I'm probably one of the worst people doing it, you know, like it's it's a really hard thing to do to just keep your life small enough to care about the things God cares about, have time for you know, getting to know him, you know, time for church, even um just all the practices that help us stay close and walk with him for a lifetime.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then you and then you add in all the things that can trip us up on top of that, and yeah, um, and then all the questions because now we know so much about the world, you know, when you think about all the world's problems and you try to figure that out, like we we know too much.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like when generations ago, when you were stuck in your little pod, you knew about your community, but you didn't know about the people groups on the other side of the world that were facing a famine, and and all of a sudden our mind tries to understand all that, and we can't, we can't understand it, and it can trip us up.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we just got to keep things more simple.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: We we will never figure that out.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Just you know, learn how to walk with God where you are, you know.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a really good insight, and I I hadn't actually really thought about that, but yeah, we have so much exposure to constant news.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, literally, we get it on our phones, which there's but there's been constant news for a long time, you know.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even 100 years ago, people could read in the newspaper or 200 years ago what was happening in the world, but now it seems like it's just there all the time, and it's really hard to relax because the world's always in crisis, but it's always been in crisis, it's not like it's any different now than it used to be.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're just more aware of it, I guess.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and we feel like we need to do something about it everywhere, yeah.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not that we shouldn't care, and I'm glad we can, but oh my goodness, that is a lot to carry.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then we start feeling like we're supposed to carry it and forget that God's carrying it.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, you know, there's all those all those pieces.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is interesting, like when you look at the news, it it is so easy to get anxious about things that are happening.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, obviously we're kind of in the beginning stages of a presidential election cycle in the US, and there's always lots of hype and anxiety, and people get very stressed about all that stuff.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: But then when you kind of go, okay, like do I have any control over this the outcome of this as a voter?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe like a tiny, tiny sliver, it's very, very small.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so functionally, not really, but it's it's so hard to let go of those things and just relax and just be.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I that's why I think the work that you're doing, Lori, is really, really important.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a struggle that I have, just this being still and really focusing in and getting distractions out of our lives.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people wrestle with that too.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what you're doing is really, really important work.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just people.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So at our little retreat center, we've got a prayer cabin here.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And just for people to come away from all of the chaos, all of the movement in their own life and in the world, when you come away, things get back in perspective.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: God lifts the fear off and reminds you of just your relationship with him, your life individually, and not all that.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you can go away just like re-centered, re-um, just founded again, rooted again.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that the fear can lift, and you go, you know, our hope has always just been in the Lord.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: We all know our hope is not in that, no matter which way it goes.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Lori, so you've been involved in this writing world a long time, and I know you're working on your book that's going to be coming out in the not too distant future.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: What advice would you give people who want to dip their toe into the world of writing, or maybe they're thinking about their first book?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think what my right now with my first book, I took it on as a mammoth project.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and right now I wish I would have learned um your practice that, you know, the workshop that you did, where write smaller books quicker to get started.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like get one book under your belt, a really small, really doable one.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: When I jumped in, I have a writing mentor.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when I I was writing these little articles and um weekly, and then all of a sudden I get this big idea.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna write a book.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I told her, and she she kind of stepped back almost like a parent before you're gonna have your first child and said, Are you sure you want to do that?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Can you why not just write some magazine articles for a while?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're like, thanks for the confidence boost.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, of course, like a child when their parent is trying to tell them, hey, hey, hey, wait before you jump into all those kids you want to have.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was like, no, it's gonna be great.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: No problem.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I wish I would have started simpler.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And right now, um, if I could reshape my book to a simpler format, I would do it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and then you could, you know, the whole idea of don't take it too seriously.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna do good work, just just show up, put the time in, um, and it'll come and just have fun with it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because I, you know, it the thing about it is that if you have a desire to write and a passion to write, it means so much to you that that puts extra pressure and can crush the gift that you're trying to bring.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like I have a friend who wrote an article for our newsletter, and um, she's really she her top passion is not writing.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's she just can write, but she's really an artist.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's what she loves more.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I asked her to write an article.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: She writes it, sends it over from our conversation.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: What she originally was gonna say, she there was some points that I was like, oh, bring out this other thing.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was so great.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I sent it back to her to ask for edits to edit it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was back to me within half an hour to an hour.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And if that was me, it would have taken me like a day, two days, because I cared too much, you know, and for us just to be more um relaxed and and not have our heart and soul hanging, feel like it's hanging out there, but just to be able to take it easier and be wonderful.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, so I don't I don't know how to do do that when you love it so much, but I don't know either.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I have the exact same struggle.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I I sometimes just care about it too much.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know how not to care.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't even know if I would want to not care.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just to be able to flee for free flow write um would be probably better too, like the prompt idea, like at least once a week.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing um official writing, at least once a week, just do a mindless prompt and let yourself just play with it and remember, like, oh yeah, uh, it doesn't have all have to be serious, you know, or for a purpose.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And just see the good things come out and then go back and read some of your old posts because it's like a haircut that you had.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you when you have that haircut, you think, Oh my gosh, my hair doesn't you maybe you don't relate to this cat because you're not a girl, but when you have that haircut, you're thinking, Oh, my hair, it doesn't look that good.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Look back at it in 10 years and you'll and you'll think, Oh my gosh, I love that haircut, you know.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I feel it's definitely like like that with our writing.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, go back to your blog posts that you thought were like, uh, it's not really that great.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And now I look back at it and go like, oh, that was good.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: So perspective and I don't know, life is hard, you know.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that is really, really good.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been thinking a lot lately about what is what is greatness as a writer?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: What does that really mean?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think increasingly, I think we don't get to decide what what things we produce are considered great, because really that's more determined by other people.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a variety of things that determine that.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if you look, for example, at the movie The Godfather, one of the greatest movies of all time, that people love it, they adore it.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of my favorite movies.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it's funny, like if you objectively look at that movie from the perspective of editing and other things, like there are parts like there's one fight scene in the middle of the movie where the way that they shot it, you can tell like when they're doing the punches, the guys are like way apart from each other.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a this radically obvious mistake, but nobody cares.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of tend to think, okay, we put stuff out there and maybe there's mistakes in it, maybe it's not perfect.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't really get to determine which of our things other people consider great or timeless, you know.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And even if we have one thing in our lives that's considered like a timeless thing, you know, sometimes we make fun of the one-hit wonders in the world of music, but man, even having one major hit, that's a cool blessing.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Most people don't have any hits.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yep, yep.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: I know my my biggest post, you know, I write about spiritual formation.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So hearts stuff.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the biggest responded post that I ever did was my seven-day tea time tea time challenge after Queen Elizabeth died.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: People wanted to jump in and do seven days of pausing once a day to drink tea.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, That's cool.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but it was super fun.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: It created a great community feel, and um, so yeah, you just can't tell.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the things too that was huge was just being willing to put up an article out there was terrifying because I was like, oh my gosh, what if people don't like it?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I heard nothing, the first time I did it, my my email list had been like just sitting with not regular activity for years.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: We just put stuff out and we had hold would hold retreats or something like that, real sporadically.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: So when I started um posting articles every week, sending them out, I had a person or two drop off my email list.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden I thought, I'm I'm not a good writer.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a good writer.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that wasn't, it was just the dead leaves kind of shaking.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: We all deal with it, yeah.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: But just to be like, I I I'm committed, I'm gonna write an article every week, and some day, some weeks you're gonna hear back, some weeks you're not.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: But just and then you'll you'll I would see people out and about and they'd say, Oh my gosh, I loved your article.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I had no idea, you know, just so just the courage to be like, put your words out there, know that the wrong the people that it's not right for will drop off, the other people will find you slowly.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lauren, thanks so much for taking time to um spend a few minutes with us and share your heart for writing and the cool things you're doing.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm super excited about the book you have coming out.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: I know you've been working on it for a while and you're gonna be really glad when it's out.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: How can readers learn more about you and also the cool work you're doing with the sanctuary?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um awesome.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: We are we have a website, thesanctuary at bearcreek.com.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you can jump over there, you sign up for our email, or my blog list is there that I'm super excited about for the last eight months that we've been that I've been blogging weekly.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that'll give you a good feeling about what we do and the events we have in the prayer cabin and all that kind of thing.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks so much.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a blast.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks, Kent.