Showing posts with label The Artist's Way. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Artist's Way. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2022

On My Mind: Treating the Writer Gently

 Yesterday, Jeffe shared a blog post from the SFWA blog with me.  Treading on Embers talks about the challenges of existing - much less writing and performing as a public-facing author - while managing chronic disability. In this case, it's invisible disability: chronic migraine disorder. It speaks to any chronic pain disability, though, and brings me to What's On My Mind this week.

How do you treat your writer gently?

Most of us in the writing trenches understand that 80 to 90 percent of the time, discipline is the answer to just about all of our writing woes. But there are days or weeks or months or (gods forbid) years where discipline is crumpled up like a used tissue and cast aside by Life Events (TM). It could be chronic illness that a writer has to contend with and which no amount of discipline will overcome. It could be a crushing and terrible diagnosis and subsequent treatment. It could be the deep pain of sitting in the hospital room with your slowly dying child. Or it could be a tornado of activity, instability, uncertainty, and circumstance changes crushing you into burnout.

Of course taking a break and allowing yourself to rest and heal is the first, obvious answer. But that's physical and mental recovery. There's also a subtler recovery required - more than emotional. I'm thinking about creative recovery.

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way lays out a 12 week path to creative recovery. The program is laid out as a 12-step program because it was the way Julia Cameron charted her course for creative recovery after managing alcoholism. It is useful and it can be powerful. The current issue with the program for me is that it demands going out in public once a week. For me, that's a dicey commitment both with a pandemic that hasn't resolved in our favor and a chronic pain issue. It isn't that I don't *want* to go on Artist's Dates - it's that working a day job means there are no spoons left at 5pm to do anything but take a pain pill and collapse. That doesn't negate the rest of the program, granted. 

I'm just interested in how other people recognize their need for creative recovery and then what they do (or don't) in order to treat that writerly part of themselves with compassion and care - tempering discipline with a bit of nurturing. 

If you've considered how to treat your writer gently, what are you favorite ways of doing that? How do you approach creative recovery if it's ever been necessary for you?

Friday, August 21, 2020

Writing Through the Rough Patches

Getting past stuck or numb or despondent or any other major block is as individual as the writer, I suspect. I carry a bag of tools around (virtually, y'know) to help when I sit staring at a blinking cursor for too long. Try a few of them on for fit.

1. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. This is a 25 year old book about breaking through creative
blocks. It's still popular because for a lot of people, it works. I'm working through it myself, right now. If you try this, don't just read it. USE it. Even if it seems hokey.
2. Expeditions. No one creates in a vacuum. And sometimes all that's needed to shake the brain loose is a trip to a museum or art gallery or botanical garden. Maybe a hike in the woods or a trip to the beach. All safely masked and socially distanced, of course.
3. A break. I'm on writing hiatus this week - in part because another class of medication failed to prevent migraines and came with a host of really awful side effects. The weight of not getting the productivity I thought I ought to be achieving each day (while suffering chronic daily migraines) got to be more than sanity could support. Hence a little break. It's all good. I have a new med that seems to be helping and a little lightening of the load for a few days seems to really be shifting things. Don't overlook the power of a break to refresh you and your outlook.
4. Repetitive physical tasks. Bonus if they're outside. Many times, a block is little more than over thinking. Something I would know nothing about. 🙄 So I go out into the garden and pull weeds or plant flowers. Getting into the dirt is mostly a mindless task, but it takes just enough brain power to absorb the critical brain and leaves the subconscious/story brain free to do a little roving.
5. Create something else. Cook. Sew. Draw. Color. Paint. Build models. Whatever. Just make it something you don't make money from. No professional pressure. This is about wasting time on profitless (or so we imagine) play. You recover a little sense of joy in doing the things that aren't quite as fraught as writing.
6. Ask for an immersion weekend. Ask the fam to support and protect your weekend from all interlopers (including them). You need supportive and cooperative family for this one - because someone else has to take ALL responsibility for keeping life and limb together for a weekend while you do nothing but type as fast as you can on a story even if you don't know what happens next. The point here is to have people bring you things - tea, goodies. You're asking to be taken care of for two days while you let slip all responsibility for anything and everything. I won't pretend that guilt doesn't creep in. It does. Then you remind yourself that for two days nothing is your circus and those are not your monkeys. Someone else can handle them. Your circus is the story. Make it ridiculous just to see what happens.

It really helps to have an entire arsenal against stuckness. Not only do different people need different tools, what works for you one time may not the next, so having options tips this whole creating thing in your favor.

Friday, February 9, 2018

Why You're Not Writing

Just a little blue heron for you today.

Full disclosure: This week's question was mine. That's because so many people tell me they want to write a book but they have no idea where to start. Or that they actually started the book and then read one on the same subject that was so good and they could never, ever do that well so they quit and gave up writing. I have an email file full of responses bleed pain all over my Outlook folders from people who knew what they wanted but believed themselves inadequate to the task of going and getting what they wanted.

Most of these people are women. (I did ask guys, too, I swear! But guys mostly denied every wanting to write books. Of the few who responded with wanting to write, every last one had also given up.)

So. Why aren't these people writing that book?

1. Because they're confused about what writing is.
Those of us who DO write have come to figure out that it's a multiphase process that in its first stage requires you to regress to your earliest and lamest excuse for language in order to get the bones of a story on a page. Don't believe me? Someday we'll auction off sneak peeks at a couple of my first drafts. (The price of my humiliation will be high.) They only barely qualify as language. Most of it has no caps and no punctuation. They're heavy on 'I know what I meant, even if no one else does.' That draft gets edited into something more mature. That draft goes to beta and then gets rewritten again . . . So yeah. The people notably NOT writing thought they could sit down and be, if not brilliant, at least understood from the moment their fingers touched a keyboard. They were deeply disappointed in themselves when that didn't happen. I send these people to Julia Cameron The Artist's Way - something that will ease them into viewing writing as a process.

2. They're comparing their raw drafts to someone else's finished product.
Most of us have been there. Let's pretend I was working on an 'an alien comes to earth and gets hooked up with a group of kids' story. And then ET came out. On the big screen. With a John Williams score and cinematography that plucked every emotional string I had and a few I didn't know I had. Where do you suppose that alien story *I* was working on went? Right. Straight under the bed. Get it back out. Write that alien. Write those kids. Ya know. If the plot is too much like ET, change it up. But your telling of the alien stranded on earth is going to be different because of your voice - that's what readers buy. Oh! You thought it was the story? Or your lovely prose? Nope. Not saying those things don't help - but no one cares if there's a typo on page 612. Your readers care whether your story connected with them emotionally. Did it make them feel anything? If yes, you win. If no, well, you won't likely sell many copies. Readers pay you to make them feel something. Lots of writers who write about writing address this. So I hand over my copies of Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

3. They're afraid.
We live in a society that demands there be a right answer and a wrong answer. It is the basis of our educational system. It's etched pretty deeply into our psyches when we're young. Most of us have a dreadful relationship with failure. No matter how many inspirational memes we paste on the mirror telling us that failure means we're learning, we've internalized the message that failure means we're bad human beings. Even how we talk about it brands US as failures rather than our endeavors. (We say "I tried and failed" rather than "I tried and the thing I tried failed.") Writing fiction, by definition has no right and no wrong. There's only a story to be told. That's stepping pretty far outside societal conditioning there, pal, you sure you wanna leave the pavement that way?? So that aspect is scary enough. Then you have to deal with the fear of spending all that time and all that effort only to have everyone hate what you did. Or worse yet, roundly ignore it. Those things are pretty fail-y, aren't they? And that kind of perceived rejection is mighty threatening to a social beast like humans. I honestly don't have resources to offer on that one. Nike ads notwithstanding.

If you have any suggestions for assuaging or coping with that fear, I'd love to hear it. A couple of the women have glorious minds and amazing stories to tell. I'm invested in not letting the stories die with them.