The play knew before I did.

The play opens on the morning of his execution. An older lawyer arrives to offer him a way out of death. If the revolutionary will write a formal statement declaring he was mentally ill when he committed his crimes, he will receive a new trial with a guaranteed stay of execution.

While writing the play, I got to page twenty and the revolutionary asked the lawyer, "Do you think what I did makes me a terrorist?" The lawyer responded, “I think your actions are a national embarrassment...and a hideous mark on our family name.” I didn’t think anything of it. 

Then I read it back to myself: "Family name," I thought.

Then it hit me: "Oh my God, That isn’t his lawyer. That’s his father!

Wait!  That’s MY  father! And the other character is ME!

Good God! I’m writing a play about my relationship with my father!"

The play knew before I did. But once I discovered this, the way  I discovered it, I was never the same writer again. Suddenly, I understood—our creative acts unfold just like dreams. They are encoded reflections of inner lives, just like the symbols in our dreams, and mastery of their purpose, no matter the form, means unmasking all they are trying to convey to us and the world we live in.

Creative work has a way of knowing things before we do.

A story, a song, a painting, a film can contain clues to what we're really trying to say long before we're able to articulate it.

My work with artists begins by paying attention to those clues. Together, we look at the work almost as we might look at a dream—full of personal, mythological, and archetypal puzzle pieces that can reveal not only what the work is trying to become, but what the artist is trying to discover about themselves.

This can open up both the work and the artist in ways that couldn't have been imagined at the moment of inspiration.

And then we get practical.

We use what we've discovered to make the work better, clearer, truer, and more responsible—both to itself and to the world it seeks to serve.