The Only Thing That Matters

I sent off another story yesterday. Now I’m wondering if I sent it to the right place. It’s how the self-doubt starts.

In a few weeks, if I don’t receive a response, the question will shift in a subtle way. It will become something very different. It will turn into “Was it ready to send out?" And then “Did I need to do more work on it?”

And all of a sudden, like a trap door dropping beneath my feet when I least expect it, the question will become: “Was it good enough?” Meaning, of course: “Am I good enough?”

Maybe each of us asks this question, or maybe it’s only me questioning my own worth as a writer.

Even after years of writing, I notice, I find myself still seeking reassurance from an external source that what I do is valid, that the words that I put down on the page are legitimate. It’s as if I need to hear a voice say, “Yes, the words are fine. You are good enough.”

In the end, though, writing isn’t a question of whether anybody else thinks we’re good enough or that our words are fine. Rather, it’s about determining just how much writing means to us, regardless of how others might view our work.

If your writing doesn’t thrill you or make you happy or move you, well, you don’t need to ask anyone. You know. And then it's a question of why it's not pleasing you... or what you can do to make it more thrilling, more moving. 

Sure, sometimes you may make a mistake. You may think your story is ready to share before it’s actually ready to go out into the world. That’s okay. We all make that mistake.

Does your story still pull you into it?

If the answer is yes! then keep working on it. Send it out again.

But if it has lost its pull, put it aside. Work on something else. Let the story simmer on a back burner. Wait for it to cook a little more. See how it develops.

You have to trust your opinion, not someone else’s, to decide when your work is ready to send out. It’s your choice. The fate of your work rests in your hands.

Try to remember this: silence—even rejection—is not always about you or your work.

Ask yourself how you can sustain your work in the face of silence and rejection. How can you keep writing?

Sometimes it’s just learning to ignore the silence and critical voices.

Sometimes it's just this: keep your hand moving across the page.

In the end, with or without recognition, with or without readers, you’ll write because of one reason: your need to write.

That’s the only thing that matters, really, and the only reason to keep writing.

Each Story Begins With a Choice

Every time we sit down to write, we must make a choice.

Do we play it safe or do we take a risk?

Do we create a story that lets us feel safe and grounded, a story that removes danger (and threats of danger) from our world?

Or do we create a story that forces us to climb a high wire and take risks, to reach into the dark box of our hidden (and not-so-hidden) fears and confront them?

For most of us, it’s not a choice that we’re aware of as we begin to move our pens across the page.

In that moment of beginning, we write what we need to write, exploring our imaginations, memories, and experiences in ways that we hope will help us understand who we are and how we came to be who we are.

But by its very nature, the act of writing involves taking risks. 

So, when we set out to describe the world--either the physical one that we inhabit or the one that we see in our imagination--that simple act of description can feel like a risk, an act of defiance.

Perhaps that's because in describing the world in which we live, we are trying to share what someone told us never to share or because we’re revealing stories that we thought always had to be hidden.

  

When we write, we take the risk of showing our true self and letting others hear our voice, our thoughts, our opinions.

When we write--whether we’re writing a novel, short story, memoir, essay, or poem--we end up testing ourselves against the expectations and standards of our field, and risk criticism, negative comments, and displeased readers. 

When we write, we take the scariest risk of all, which involves stepping across a line that has been declared off limits.

We don’t always know why it’s forbidden to cross the line.

And we don’t always know who forbade us to cross it.

We only know that we need to cross that line in order to open the box of secrets inside ourselves and find the hidden stories that are waiting for us to write.

It's only when we take these kinds of risks in our writing and cross these invisible boundary lines that our stories come to life with energy bubbling beneath the surface.

Taking risks is what helps us create and foster curiosity in our readers about how we will deal (successfully or unsuccessfully) with the emotional and psychological fallout of taking such risks.

So, remember: each time you write, you must make a choice.

You can choose to stay safely on the ground.

Or you can choose to climb up to the high wire and make your way across it.

Sometimes, as you write, you might not see the high wire. You may not even see that you have a choice to climb it. But the wire--and the choice--is there each time you sit down to write.

Do you choose to take the risk and suffer the pain and embarrassment of falling from the high wire if you miss a step?

If you’ve spent enough years writing, you know that falling isn’t the end of the story.

It’s only the beginning.

Trust or Bust

In "Trust or Bust," a chapter in Danny Gregory's The Creative License, he discusses Keith Jarrett and his 1975 album, The Koln Concerts, an album that Gregory calls the "best-selling solo piano album ever."

"What's extraordinary," writes Gegory, "was that the music on the album is purely improvised."

If you want to learn to improvise, to reach that place where you are totally immersed in the present moment, Gregory suggests you have to learn how to "quiet down, clear the crap, and trust."

"When Jarrett improvises" writes Gregory, "he allows the performance to be a distillation of who he is and what he knows. He says you have to assume that what you are doing is meaningless, to be willing to toss it away. You can't think that what you are making will be recorded, sold, reviewed, even listened to. Just do it and see what happens."

But sometimes we're afraid of just letting go and seeing what happens.

And that's often because we're afraid of making mistakes.

But, as Gregory asks in an earlier chapter ("Celebrate Your Mistakes"), "what is 'a mistake' really?"

Isn't it just an outcome you hadn't anticipated? A variation from your expectation? And what made you right before (when you set up your expectations) but not during (when you drew your lines)?

So the real questions are:

What goes into your expectations? What's wrong with an unexpected outcome? What if you had tried to achieve it in the first place? What if you actually set out to draw whatever lopsided mess you are chastising yourself for? Could you have? Could you have purposefully created this mistake?

And beyond: Have you been able to survive the most horrendous mistakes of your past? Should a mistake or fear of a mistake prevent you from reaching your goal? Can you expand your mind to deal with the unexpected? What would life be like without mistakes? Without gravity? Without evolution?

Not only does Gregory offer advice on how to deal with your inner critic, he offers questions that can help you gain perspective on your work and the risks such work requires.

Although The Creative License is designed for artists, many writers can benefit from Gregory's wisdom on creativity and his insights into how to sustain one's creative vision over the course of a life-time.

Here's what the Table of Contents offers:

1. Drawing: Kick-starting your creativity and learning to see
2 Journaling: Making creativity into a habit
3. Shock: Blasting your butt out of a rut
4. Sensitization: Re-connecting with reality
5. Resistance: Winning the fight to go on
6. Judgment: From enemy to ally
7. Identity: Who you are and why that's fine
8. Expanding: Broadening your creativity
9. Next: Creativity in the real world

Anyway, you don't have to want to draw to find worthwhile advice in this book. You just have to want to create, and Gregory will help you open your eyes to the creative sparks that dwell within you.

For more information on Gregory and his work, visit his website: http://www.dannygregory.com/

For an interview with Gregory, visit:
http://litpark.com/2006/10/25/danny-gregory/

Swimming Off Course

Mistake - (n) a fault in understanding, perception, interpretation, etc; blunder; error, misunderstanding. (Webster's New World Dictionary, college edition)

Unless you swim in a pool with thick, black lines painted clearly on the bottom, or which has strings of egg-shaped floats separating the pool into lanes, you can easily swim off course.

It's even easier to swim off course in a lake or in the ocean, where you have to gauge your direction based on your relationship to the shore, or with regard to a distant landmark such as a stand of palm trees or pines, or, perhaps, a dock or tower in the distance.

But even with clearly drawn lines on the bottom of a pool or well-defined landmarks on shore, you still can misjudge the currents or blunder into the next lane, discovering your mistake only when you crash into the swimmer coming towards you... or after you miss him by inches.

Perhaps you were swimming with your eyes closed, or you were pulling too hard with your left arm, or your goggles fogged up, or you let your thoughts drift... and, as your mind wandered, so did your strokes... until you discovered that you'd ended up in a place that you hadn't intended to be.

This is a rather small embarrassment to suffer (although the headache from a collision isn't always so small). Yet it's an example of the kind of mistake that we try to avoid in swimming... and in writing.

Usually, we strive to stay on course, to figure out a path (a plot) and hold to it, for fear of losing our way.

But why are we so afraid of swimming off course and losing our way?

What difference does it make, really, if it takes us five minutes--or five years--to find our way in our story?

Is the time spent learning what we need to learn a mistake? Are the years wasted, the effort itself worthless, simply because the results don't turn out the way we anticipate?

Each stroke that you take as you swim through your story--whether you stay in your lane or not--is teaching you something about yourself and your story that you never knew before taking that stroke.

You may even find, in fact, that making such "mistakes" is an essential part of the writing process, and that these "errors" or "blunders" reveal your story in new ways that were impossible to see before you swam outside your lane or off the course that you set for yourself.

We're trained from early in our writing careers--indeed, from early in our lives--to avoid making mistakes at all costs and to view mistakes in a negative light.

But what if... rather than fearing mistakes... we embrace them? What if we learn to see blunders as opportunities that allow us to go even deeper into our stories?

From such "mis-perceptions," we might begin to understand our stories in new ways, to perceive our characters and their struggles from a different angle, another view.

If we can change the way we think about mistakes, perhaps we can learn to see writing as a process of discovery rather than as a process of aiming for (and falling short of) perfection.

Shifting our view of mistakes in this way can help transform our revision process--whether it involves one draft or thirty--into a celebratory passage from understanding a story in one way to understanding it in a new way... and not merely as a chance to "fix" mistakes.

Sometimes swimming off course is the best way to find unexpected treasures. New insights and pathways, hidden from one angle, can suddenly appear illuminated from a different perspective.

Each time you worry about making a mistake, ask yourself why you're so afraid.

Is it fear of looking foolish, feeling ignorant, sounding dumb?

Are you more worried about what others think than about what you think?

Are you focusing too much on the end-product instead of on the process?

The key to writing, especially in the early stages of a work-in-progress, is to open yourself to whatever comes... to explore the world of your imagination without fear, without judgment... and to accept whatever is there... whatever you see... and get it down on paper.

That's what is so amazing about swimming off course.

Sometimes making a mistake is exactly what will help you find your way into your story.

Wordswimmer exercise:

Has making a "mistake" ever led you to a new discovery about your story?

Take a few minutes to reflect on your experience so you can see more clearly how making the mistake liberated you from an old viewpoint, a stale perspective.

If you'd like to share your discovery with other Wordswimmers, we'd welcome the chance to learn from your "mistake."

For more thoughts on learning from mistakes, visit:
http://www.quotelady.com/subjects/mistakes.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/business/24shortcuts.html?ref=yourmoney&pagewanted=print
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html