A few months ago I sold a painting - hang out the flags! - and treated myself to six life-coaching sessions. I’ve never had life-coaching before, but my creative life had hit such a state of blockage and despair that I knew I Had To Do Something.
Life coaching, I’ve discovered, is different from therapy. It’s very much based in the here-and-now, and around the belief that the client has the answers in herself. The coach asks questions, makes suggestions and encourages the client to take specific steps forward.
So I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned so far, in case it helps anyone else’s writer’s block.
1. Support is Essential
We all need support. Just knowing that there’s somebody there who supports and encourages your creativity is a massive gift. Who are the supporters and warmers of your creativity and who are those who freeze or discourage it? Which parts of yourself are supportive to your creative self, and which parts are destructive to it? How can you best support yourself – and enlist support - to write regularly and wholeheartedly?
2. Baby Steps
Think too big at the beginning and you will get overwhelmed. Break up your writing journey into small, manageable steps, and, if it’s helpful, find a way of marking each forward step. A writing friend made a schedule of the editing she needed to do, chapter by chapter, stuck it on the wall and ticked each off as she completed it. She’s now finished the novel. David Whyte (author of Crossing The Unknown Sea) decided to take one small action a day towards his ambition of becoming a full-time poet. Within three months he was standing in front of an audience, an event brought about by one of his actions.
3. Be Specific
Forget what may or may not happen at the end of the process of writing your novel. Forget the state of publishing, the statistics of the slushpile. Forget too – at least for the moment – the vision of winning the Booker. It’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the big unknowns, in life and in art. Fear thrives in the intangible, the virtual and the grandiose. Creativity thrives in the specific and the physical: in the action of sitting down to write those 500 words, or printing out your manuscript to send to one agent. What’s the next, small, specific task you can do right now? Each specific achievement embeds the concept of ‘can’ into your soul.
4. Be joyful
Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget joy. We get so wrapped up in the competition, the ambition, the achievement, that we lose sight of the sheer pleasure of being a wordsmith, of tinkering about with ideas, of playing. If you can discover what, in your life, brings you joy and simply do more of that thing, you are on the path towards fulfilment. If I keep noticing where the vitality in my life is and fish from that pool, joy follows. Joy’s a subjective business. Honour yours.
5. It’s Only Marketing
When my life coach said this, I was taken aback. Suddenly, everything fell into place. As writers, our business is to write. Everything else is marketing. Marketing includes anything that connects you and your work with the outside world, whether it’s blogging, researching agents, entering competitions, submitting to agents or publishers, or self-publishing. Necessary work, but just marketing. Nothing personal about it.
6. Two Steps Forward…
…and at least one step back. That’s the process.
As an experiment, how about choosing one of these to focus on for a week and noticing how it affects your attitude to your writing?
7 comments:
Your number 4, Joy, is my favourite. I love writing and sometimes get too bogged down with your number 3. Thanks for sharing the session.
Although I've never been to a life coach, I think I nstinctively opperate in the way they advocate.
i'm a firm believer in making lists, not just of what I need to do, but also what I want.
Only once you've boiled tht down can to you take the steps to get it.
HB x
Wow, that's really great advice. I think "support" and "baby steps" are key.
Agree with all of this. I especially like:
Fear thrives in the intangible, the virtual and the grandiose. Creativity thrives in the specific and the physical
Re 5 - do you mean that rejection doesn't mean you're a crap writer necessarily - only that a particular person doesn't want that particluar ms at that time bla bla??
px
Thanks for this post. Really excellent, accessible suggestions. It's very hard to find one's creative space when the "business" of what we do, surrounds us each step of the way. Clearing a pathway through it to reach the writing itself is made much easier by your points.
Thanks, all, for your comments. :)
Poppy, I think I was just saying in 5. that everything we do beyond writing can be seen as marketing. We get it out there and that's all we can do. The only place we have real power to change is in the writing itself. So I can work to be a better writer, but I can't do anything about people's response to my writing which is governed by trillions of different preferences and circumstances. All I can do is send it out there. If it clicks, it clicks. If it doesn't, then I keep working to make it better and keep sending it out.
Susiex
Joy is such an overlooked aspect of creativity. Yes, we create because we're driven to do so, but also there is an element of joy and completion. Lose that and we lose a vital part of ourselves. Thanks for the insights Susie.
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