by Lauren Sapala
For the longest time I had major problems doing revisions on my writing. It seemed so easy for everyone else. Why was it so hard for me? Of course, I also had trouble writing. I hardly ever experienced that state of “effortless flow” everyone talked about, in which the words just magically spewed out of me down onto the page. For years—a lot of years—I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt like I was a failure as a writer.
Then, I discovered something.
It wasn’t that there was something wrong with me, it was that the way I approached my writing was all wrong. Traditional writing wisdom set out a bunch of rules that didn’t help me, that I knew. But what I didn’t realize was that traditional writing wisdom had also implanted a mindset within me that was completely distorted, a skewed perspective that didn’t fit at all into my personal growth as an artist.
You see, for years and years, traditional writing wisdom had told me that I was in charge of the manuscript. That I was in control of everything. That the characters in my story were people I had made up, and now I was responsible for “making them” do this thing or that thing that had to be specifically engineered to move the story along. Traditional writing wisdom told me that good protagonists had certain qualities and good antagonists had others, that characters should be consistent and not contradict themselves. That a story had to follow a story arc or no one would get it.
Of course, it wasn’t all the fault of traditional writing wisdom. I was the one who chose to believe it.
But all along I questioned this information, if only in the back of my own mind. I have always read a huge amount of books, and I’ve always read widely. So, there were a few things I didn’t understand. If a story always had to follow a story arc so people could understand it, then how come Samuel Beckett won a Nobel Prize in Literature? And if protagonists and antagonists had to have certain qualities, then how did Dostoevsky’s Underground Man fit into that picture?
And how was it that everyone said you should follow all of these rules when you were an aspiring writer, but once someone’s work was conventionally accepted as a masterpiece written by a “genius” they didn’t have to follow the rules anymore? Would I have to wait to be recognized as a genius before I could stop following all these silly rules? Would that be the point when I could just write like I wanted to and not worry about what other people thought?
I had a lot of questions, and no answers.
These questions nagged at me so much, and I got so discouraged trying to “do it the right way” that I finally gave up on all of it and started writing only for myself. I decided that no one would see my manuscripts so it wouldn’t matter how I wrote anyway.
And that’s when I set myself free.
As I wrote only for myself I discovered the magic in my work. I let my intuition blossom and followed it wherever it led me. I started relying on my own gut instinct, my own emotions, and the feelings in my own body to tell me the next thing to write and how it fit into the big vision for my work.
I started to work in response to the writing. I stopped trying to force it to be what I thought it should be.
This is the method that finally broke open the floodgates for me. Working in response to the story cracked open every previous belief I held about what a story is or how it’s supposed to go. It reconnected me to my heart center and showed me how to direct my creative energy through my intuitive soul, instead of my rational intellect, and out onto the page in the gushing, spewing fountains of words I had always dreamed of seeing. Yes, it was messy, and yes, I was filled with doubt every step of the way. But something about this new method of working in response to the creative force within me felt right like nothing ever had before.
The secret to learning how to work in response to the writing is to shift your belief systems so that you can embrace these simple truths:
Your characters are real people. Seriously. They are not made up pretend people that came out of your head. They are real people with real souls, and they are counting on you to honor and respect their individual worth and agendas.
Your story is a living, breathing being. It grows organically, like a plant. It already carries the seeds of DNA that will dictate what it is to become inside of it. You are not the one in charge. You are the gardener blessed with plants that might potentially grow if you take care of them.
You cannot force yourself to work harder or “sit your butt in the chair” and get it done on some sort of timetable that you get to enforce and whip yourself over if you fail to reach goals. Well, you probably can, but you’re never going to get the results you truly want. You’ll end up forcing the characters or the story to go in an unnatural direction due to your own impatience and the story will slowly fizzle and die, or you’ll complete it but it will feel flat.
And the truest true kernel of truth in all of these truth statements above is this one thing: It’s not about you. It’s about the story you were given to tell. The Universe gave it specifically to you because you are the only one with the tools to tell that specific story. So it’s time to drop all the other baggage.
Instead of forcing, the writer working in response lets go. Instead of pushing, the writer working in response waits and listens. Instead of conquering, the writer working in response submits to the story in order to receive it.
For those of you who are very attached to being in control, feeling certain about what lies ahead, and who need security before you can take the next step, working in response is going to feel different and uncomfortable, and possibly scary. It will ask for every bit of trust you can manage. It will also get better the more you work with it.
So put down the word count goals, the outlines, and all the hundreds of writing rules you’ve collected. Let yourself sit and daydream. Take a long walk with no end destination in mind and talk to your characters like the real people they are. Ask them directly what they do next or how you should write their stories, and determine to honor their wishes.
Open, submit, and receive. You will be astounded by the creative magic that comes through you.
Guest post contributed by Lauren Sapala. Lauren is a writing coach who specializes in personal growth and artistic development for introverted intuitive writers. She is the author of The INFJ Writer and currently blogs on writing, creativity and personality theory at www.laurensapala.com. She lives in San Francisco.
Whew! That’s a doozy! This post hits me in the gut, in that long stretch of intestines that balls up when I face the blank page, or worse yet, when i contemplate page two.
Thanks! I see the door opening a crack!
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Reblogged this on Author S. L. Danielson and commented:
I honestly can write only when inspired, even to edit! That’s when it works best, not at some pre-determined time.
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Reblogged this on Kim's Musings.
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Wow. Love this! Thank you!
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That’s the most encouraging bit of writing advice I’ve read… ever! Thank you! I must stop feeling guilty if I don’t write every day. I must stop feeling guilty if I miss the mark on word count goals. Etc. Thank you!
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Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this post from A Writer’s Path blog with the topic: Stuck with your story? Why you keep hitting walls and dead ends in your writing
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Agree completely! I wrote three novels and then started to feel like I was doing things wrong. I always just followed my characters and wrote down what they said and did. Then I felt like I needed to plot because that’s what other writers did and I thought I was doing it wrong or in my stories would be lacking. When I tried to plot, I never finished a thing. (I think I pissed my characters off and they stopped talking to me) I went back to doing things my way and haven’t had trouble finishing.
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This is the best advice, ever! If you are a writer, you have to write, it is a need to tell your story about your friends (characters), and to tell it from your soul and your mind. I love my characters, good, bad and sometimes ugly, I laugh with them, and cry with them. If they aren’t real enough to you to cry when they are hurt or worse when they have to die, you aren’t writing for yourself.
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Interesting post, thank you. Intuition and listening to your characters plays a pivotal role in both the drafting and revision process for me. I think it can be combined with the more traditional outlining and plotting–it doesn’t have to be either or–but when stuck it’s best to listen.
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Reblogged this on BJ Sikes, author and commented:
Sometimes rules stifle our creativity. I find them useful but sometimes, you just have to trust your intuition about characters or your story. No, I’m not switching from being a hard-core plotter but I value writing what feels right.
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Hey. I found when I wrote my first
novel that I basically made it up as I went along, stopping at points when I had to puzzle out how to proceed. With my second (not quite ready for release), I thought I’d try planning out the tale more so I had structure around the process but I hated doing it like that (and so ditched it) because the creativity seemed to vanish from it quite a bit. There are pros and cons to either approach I think but I much prefer the former. 🙂
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Lauren, I must be more like you than I realize or want to accept. Probably being old enough to be your mother, I wouldn’t have thought I should change to way I approach my writing. I don’t actually think of my characters as ‘real’ people. Instead, I think of them as conglomerates of ‘real’ people. Even so, reading your post here at Writing Path, I must admit I’m probably holding onto the reins too tight, not letting the story and characters pull me along.
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