Book Excerpt: Total Writing: A Transdisciplinary Method for Creative Writing With Soul, Purpose and Pleasure

May 4, 2026 | Book Excerpts - Nonfiction, Publishing Industry - Write, Publish, Promote

Book Title: 

Total Writing: A Transdisciplinary Method for Creative Writing With Soul, Purpose and Pleasure

Author: 

Edvaldo Pereira Lima

Publishing Information: 

epl, 2026

Link to Buy Book:

Amazon

Synopsis:

Total Writing is the innovative method — grounded on a transdisciplinary approach that includes top research on creativity — that awakens the natural potential living within all of us, offering an accessible path for beginners and experienced writers alike to develop memoirs, biographies, essays, chronicles, profiles, academic and corporate texts, poetry, fiction, and more. Created by Edvaldo Pereira Lima, the method draws from the international tradition of Literary Journalism, weaving in the wisdom of masters such as Pablo Neruda, García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Borges, Eliane Brum, Alma Guillermoprieto, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and George Orwell. Writing can flow with the spontaneity of a river, and Total Writing clears the path to your inner wellspring of lived experiences, memories, perceptions, and imagination, releasing the creative currents that a misguided approach to learning may have dammed up — guiding you to connect with your authentic voice, break through creative blocks, structure compelling narratives, and forge deep bonds with your readers. Aligned with emerging conceptual frameworks that are driving a global transformation, the book moves beyond the false divides between reason and emotion, science and spirituality, offering an integrative approach where different ways of knowing converge, and recognizing that creative writing plays an essential role in the evolution of human consciousness — encompassing therapeutic applications, the recovery of ancestral wisdom, academic research, and effective corporate communication. 

Author Bio: 

Edvaldo Pereira Lima is an international storytelling writer, coach, journalist, and scholar, and the creator of the Total Writing® method, dedicated to a singular mission: crafting compelling nonfiction that illuminates the human journey of consciousness evolution. With thirty published books — and counting — spanning academic works, journalistic reportage, biographies, and travel narratives, he holds a Doctorate in Communication Sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP), where he served as professor until retirement, and completed postdoctoral studies in Education at the University of Toronto. A trilingual writer fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, English, and Spanish, he combines decades of academic rigor with a transformative coaching practice, guiding authors from a transdisciplinary, systemic, and holistic perspective rooted in Literary Journalism. His recent work reflects his integrated activities in nonfiction: co-authoring Journey to the Heart of Pain with Francisco Kaiut (U.S., 2025), mentoring Maryline Anna Roux for her memoir Shadows of The Ivory (U.S., 2025), and writing the biography Edison Tamascia — A Transformative Saga of Prosperity and People (Brazil, 2024). A São Paulo resident who defines himself as a citizen of the world, having lived in eight countries across four continents, Pereira Lima writes and teaches from a transcultural perspective in which the evolution of consciousness is the universal thread running through everything he creates.

Book Excerpt: 

Total Writing and the (New) Keys of Perception

Writing better, more creatively, is a pleasant process that opens a wide avenue of access to yourself and to the world. It expands your ability to communicate and amplifies your self-knowledge.

To achieve these objectives, the first thing that the Total Writing (TW) method asks is that you set aside excessive seriousness. Excessive seriousness means, here, too much attachment to rules and norms. It means wanting to create everything in your head before putting ideas on paper. But then, when you go to put everything on paper, this excessive rationality kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.

For a long time, there was great confusion in the teaching of writing in schools. In Brazil, and probably in many other countries. In fact, unfortunately, this still occurs today. The traditional way of teaching writing imposes many grammatical rules on students’ heads, wanting them to obey orthographic norms excessively, even before they release their ideas and delight themselves with the enchantment of creating new things through their own texts. With this, the school contributes to eliminating the creative potential of many people.

The confusion, which is because of a mistaken premise regarding the nature of the human creative act, mixes two distinct stages of the act of writing into one thing. In fact, writing is a creative act that comprises two integrated sequential parts:

WRITING itself, which is letting your emotions, impressions, sensations, and information pour onto paper — or onto the computer — like waterfall water plunging from above.

EDITING, which is fixing your text, checking grammatical agreement, spelling correctness, verifying the coherence, consistency, and structure of the message you have organized.

Writing is a free stage, in which your creativity should flow openly. Writing is not an exclusive act of the rational mind. You also write with the heart, with the body. It requires a spontaneous, loose, emotional, creative attitude. You should be as free as possible to let what is in your soul leak out, without fear, without censorship, without being tied to any kind of limiting rule. It is the primary and essential stage of alchemy, transforming ideas and feelings into written text.

Editing is a later stage, important but accessory. It is more a task of logical reason than of emotion, but it should not interfere to the point of disrupting the emotional essence of what you produced with all the sensitivity and intensity in the first moment. Between the first stage and the second, an interval of time should be given — hours, a day, even more if possible — so that the author can shift from the intuitive mental state to the analytical mental state. Then, you can only smooth the edges of the text, without harming its strength.

Thus, what schools do most of the time is forcefully impose the act of editing onto the act of writing, mixing messages that should circulate in different channels. With this, what they achieve is to create a fruit salad that destroys the student’s creative desire, reducing it to a mere bureaucratic tool. It’s no use putting the cart before the horse, because it will be a federal mess, right?

Let’s forget this mistaken procedure. Better yet, let’s retire it completely. Agreed?

Let’s consider that the act of editing — respecting grammatical rules, correcting spelling, etc. — is already emphasized enough by schools.

It is a part that comes after the writing process. I don’t need to comment much on this at the moment, because the educational system takes care of this, I think. Or it should, at least. We will leave this for another section of this book.

Let’s go to the resources of TW. If you are a teacher, you can use them later with your students, if applicable. Pay attention, throughout the book, to the Teachers’ Wing sections.

The invitation is for you to enter the warm-up exercise, first memorizing the instructions, or recording them orally and then listening to them when doing it:

1. Get sheets of unlined paper (letter-size bond paper, for example), as many as you want.
2. Also get pens and pencils. Colored pens of different colors, or those with two or more color options.
3. Feel yourself comfortable, sit down to write. No crossed legs! Plant both feet on the floor.
4. Let your mind be free.
5. Set five minutes on the clock. During this time, just write on the first sheet, as quickly as possible, any word that comes to your mind. Avoid worrying about writing correctly. Throw onto the paper, SUPER-QUICKLY, everything you want, no matter how banal or crazy it seems. Don’t think! Just write.

Once this phase is finished, set 10 minutes on the clock and practice the quick writing technique (my term, similar to what is called “freewriting” in America):

1. Get another sheet of paper, leave about three or four lines blank at the top of the page.
2. Start writing a text, SUPER-QUICKLY. Don’t think! Just write. With no concern for grammar, spelling, coherence of ideas, nothing. Put speed in your hand.

DON’T THINK! WRITE! 

This is all you have to do.

3. Write what?

Anything and everything that comes to your mind. If you don’t have any idea what to write, simply start like this, for example:

My head is empty. I don’t have any idea in my head. I don’t know what to write. Geez, what a boring guy! Am I now obligated to invent what to write? Well, I guess that’s the way and so I go forward… blah… blah…

4. WRITE! Keep going. Don’t give up. Don’t pay attention to tiredness. Put speed in that wrist.
5. Done! When time is up, go back to the top of the page, take a quick look at your text, with no critical sense. Enjoy it. Add the title, in large letters, at the top of the sheet, in the lines you had left blank at the beginning. Don’t think too much. Accept the inspiration from your intuition. Give it the title. Record the date in a corner of the first sheet. Keep the text, to track your progress with the method.

From now on, it’s convenient for you to gather these sheets into a set, like those office file folders. If you prefer, also do this on the computer. I suggest you open a folder with the name TW. And inside it, open a subfolder with the name I will indicate below. Or if you’re only doing this by hand, give your folder a name:

Progress Notebook

6. Now, if you wish, give the text to someone to read, with no critical eye.
7. Ask the person just to enjoy the text with you. Delight in it together.

OK?

Very well.

The quick writing technique is fundamental in TW. It is a basic component of many other techniques. Practice it playfully once a day for three consecutive days, to start. Respect the time: don’t stop before 10 minutes and, if you wish, you can extend it a little longer.

Teachers’ Wing

You can apply the same sequence with your students, integrating them as a group. Explain that no one should worry about the quality of the text. What matters, simply, is to write. No one should listen to someone’s text in order to analyze it, or interpret a colleague’s text. Set that aside.

Students can do the warm-up exercise together and quickly, one at a time, offering a word that should be added to each person’s sheet. Accept any word, no matter how outlandish or out of context it may seem. Got it?

With your students, give them time to enjoy writing with no other commitment. Don’t force them to read the texts to the class, but encourage them. And when the first volunteer agrees to read, guide the class not to criticize their classmate. Each one should just feel the text, observe what sensations or feelings it provokes.

“Teacher, I thought the composition was cool.”

“Gee, teacher, that composition left me kind of down.”

“It’s awesome!”

Comments like these are great. Be satisfied with them; don’t fall into the temptation of analyzing or interpreting the text for the class, nor asking students to do so. Ignore grammatical or spelling errors. Say that part will be corrected later.

***

After about three consecutive days practicing the warm-up and quick writing, prepare for the language rhythm technique:

1. Start paying more attention to music. Listen more than usual to the music you like. Enjoy it a lot. Dance along with the music, if you feel like it.
2. Also pay attention to song lyrics. Brazilian Popular Music is extremely rich in this aspect — we have fabulous composers: Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Lenine, Adriana Calcanhoto. In the English-speaking world, look to lyricists like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Hozier, Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers, Nick Cave, and SZA. Embrace what you like, whether it’s opera, country music, rock, or whatever.
3. Also choose a book of poetry. If you’ve never read one, do it this time. If you have read one and really like a certain poet, no problem repeating the reading. Only now, choose one or more poems from the book. Read them aloud to yourself, twice a day, for three consecutive days. In front of the mirror, for example. Preferably, upon waking and before going to sleep.

Don’t worry about “analyzing” or “understanding” the poetry. Poetry is not made to be logically understood. It is made for us to enjoy. Enjoy the sound of the words, the rhymes, the evocations of feelings and images. If you don’t like poetry, read it anyway, just this once in your life. Experiment. It doesn’t hurt and won’t break anything.

4. Personally, I like Pablo Neruda and his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (“and miles to go before I sleep”), and works by Gabriela Mistral, Fernando Pessoa, and Walt Whitman. And you? Choose your poet.
5. After three more consecutive days listening to lots of music, dancing, and reading poetry aloud, do a warm-up. After that, place at the top of a blank sheet the first word you feel like writing and make a text in quick writing, using whatever comes to your mind after the word. It acts as a catalyst and trigger for your creative process. Let’s call it a trigger word.
6. Repeat the entire process for three more consecutive days.

What you get with this technique is the recognition that written language also has rhythm. There is music embedded in a written text.

Music is perhaps the most universal language of existence. Everything has vibration, frequency, rhythm. If you pay attention, you perceive music within you. Have you ever heard the internal sound of your body when you close your eyes while covering your ears with your hands simultaneously? Try it. And have you watched the cinema classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Do you remember what language the protagonist — played by actor Richard Dreyfuss — discovered would be the only one that would allow communication with extraterrestrials, since it is universal? Well, there you go.

For text to have life, it needs rhythm. But rhythm doesn’t arise through imposing norms and rules. Rhythm is something spontaneous, within us. If we just let it happen, it appears, translating naturally into written text. Because we are much more creative than we imagine. We stimulate rhythm in our texts by motivating ourselves to listen to music and poetry, to listen to the world. Then just let it happen.