Transcript: Episode 1

Hello, and thanks for being here with me for the inaugural episode of the Inspirited Word. Just in case you listen to a lot of podcasts and completely tuned out the words in the intro you just heard—no shame, my friend. I’m Mary, and I’m a writer, professional book editor, and the host of this show.

I want to start by extending an especially warm welcome to all disenchanted writers listening today. By “disenchanted,” I don’t just mean writers who are having a tough time with a draft and are starting to fantasize about hosting a backyard bonfire with a suspicious amount of fire starter. (Although frustrated creatives with a flair for the dramatic are certainly welcome here.)

But to be disenchanted goes deeper than just being frustrated or stuck.

To be disenchanted is to be seeking for something powerful that has been lost, even if you’re not quite sure exactly what that something is. To be disenchanted, one must first believe deeply in the potential to transform the ordinary into the mythical, the potential to create tangible change in the world through the subtle but seismic powers of the imagination.

If you’re a disenchanted writer, you’re not actually a failure or a fatalist. You are, at heart, a visionary. You believe that stories are inherently powerful and that storytelling can change the world, literally—but the day-to-day reality of your writing practice has become anything but powerful. You might, just for example, spend most of your time playing word Tetris with the same five pages of your draft and ducking away to the kitchen to make another absolutely vital cup of tea, desperately hoping you’ll stop feeling so stuck. (Or at least, that’s what being a disenchanted writer usually looks like for me.)

To put it succinctly: disenchanted writers still have the vision, but we’ve lost the magic.

If you’re a writer with a creative process that is serving you well and with a heart full of hope for your work, then I am unironically and genuinely happy for you. Run with that state of creative affairs as long as you’ve got it, and may you have it forever. But this probably isn’t the podcast for you.

What is this podcast, then? It’s not a how-to series on the mechanics of storytelling. Don’t get me wrong—writing mechanics will come up, and those craft skills have immense value. But I’m not going to be teaching them here directly. In fact, I’m not going to be teaching you anything here directly. This podcast will not be giving straightforward, simple answers on how to be a better, deeper, more enlivened and inspirited storyteller. But this podcast will be asking questions. It will be an exploration. It will be a way into thinking differently about the mechanics and machinery of our imaginations. It will be a journey to uncover new ways of writing, creating, and telling our most powerful, most transformative, most necessary stories.

Before I go more into who I am, why I’m here, and frankly why you should trust me to go on this journey with you, I’m going to ask you to join me in a mental exercise that will help illustrate what I’m getting at when I talk about deep, transformative stories. If you’re listening to this pod while you’re doing something else, that’s fine—I’m often doing dishes and cleaning my kitchen when I listen to podcasts myself. But I’m just going to ask you to let your attention slip a bit into a more contemplative place. So, if you’re doing something like driving right now, feel free to keep listening, but maybe plan to come back to this again in a moment when you don’t need to focus your attention on not running into things with large machinery.

(This of course is the prime rule of working with any kind of machinery, including words: don’t run over things—or at least, not without meaning to.)

I want you to call to mind a written story that has had a deep, personal impact on your life. Ideally one of the first stories that had this kind of effect on you. If you were a big reader as a child, this will likely be a book or story you read in childhood—but if you came to love reading later in life, maybe this is a story you encountered in early adulthood. Either way, go with the first story that emerges now as you’re listening. Don’t overthink too much.

Got your story?

Now I’m going to ask you not just to call this story to mind in the sense of remembering the title and the basic gist of the plot. Really call it into your mind, the way you’d invite a loved one to step into your living room or to join you at a table or to sit by your hearth fire. Call that story forward and let it take a personal, relatable shape in your mind. Maybe it looks like an especially beloved character. Maybe it’s a color or a shape. Maybe it’s just a felt sense of being in the world of the story, like the experience of a certain smell or quality of air.

However this story is appearing to you right now, take a moment to feel that presence in your body, again the way you might internally feel the presence and nearness of a beloved friend while you’re speaking to them. Share space and breath with this story presence. Know that this story presence is always with you—that’s why it’s the story that floated to the surface when you heard this prompt. This story presence is a being who has cultivated a key part of your imagination and your lived experience.

Take a moment here to enjoy the presence of this story being.

Now I invite you to directly address this being and to thank it for whatever amazing gifts it gave you, exactly when you needed them. Thank this story for the possibilities it revealed, or the companionship it offered, or for helping you grow up when you desperately wanted a steady presence to take care of the abandoned or lost parts of you.

Once you’ve thanked this story being, take this encounter with them one step further. Allow them to respond to you. Ask them a question and see what they say. Or if this is an especially cuddly story being from your childhood, give them a giant imaginary hug and let them hug you back.

Yes, friend, I am asking you to hug a story. You may be totally into this idea, or it may seem utterly bonkers. But you probably wouldn’t have gotten this far into this episode if you weren’t, in some small amount, a bonkers sort of human. At any rate, give it a shot. Interact with this story the way you would interact with a being who can independently respond to what you do, say, and feel. See what it says to you. See what it does.

If you want to take a few minutes here to hang out with this story, hit pause and do that. I’ll wait.

 

Okay. If you got really deep into this story encounter, go ahead and shift back into a more neutral brain space. Tell your story being that you’ll interact with them again later if you want, but say goodbye to them for now and bring your attention back from that space the way you would after a meditation session or a deep daydream. Move around, take a drink of water, whatever you need to do.

You might have found it a bit weird to think of a story this way, to attempt to interact with it as a being rather than an abstract series of ideas and images. Even when we love a story, even when we find it to be beautiful or engrossing or deeply hilarious, we don’t usually conceive of stories as beings we are interacting with. And of course, in a literal sense—or more accurately, a materialist sense—they aren’t. In that sense, written stories are just marks on a page or screen that signify words.

But of course, if that’s the way you interacted with stories, you wouldn’t love stories. You wouldn’t be an avid reader. You wouldn’t be a writer. You wouldn’t have been able to interact with a story the way you just interacted with the story presence you encountered in your mind. Maybe that story just said something to you it had never said before, or maybe it appeared in a form that surprised you, even though you’ve read it a dozen times.

So I have a question for you, and for myself as well: If we can interact with stories and encounter them in ways that are surprising, personal, and ever-evolving, ways that exert tangible change and transformation—can’t stories be described as alive?

I know this is a bit of an odd proposition, which is why I suggested calling to mind one of the earliest books that really changed your life. Stories we encountered in childhood are often easier to imagine this way, because our concept of the story was shaped by a part of us that still more easily believed in different types of reality, in ways of existing and being alive beyond the material.

Here’s the next question: When was the last time you encountered one of your own stories this way as you were writing it? Have you ever approached your own writing this way, not as if it were a series of plot issues to resolve or mechanics to perfect, but as if it were a presence you were in relationship with? As if it were a beloved? As if the words that make up your work are inspirited and alive rather than mechanical and dead?

As our first step together on the journey of this podcast, the journey toward the inspirited word, I’m asking you to explore this core concept with me—what happens when we write in relationship with our stories, when we encounter stories as if our entire creative process is inspirited and alive?

If this sounds promising, then I’m so glad our virtual paths have crossed today. But those of you who don’t know me yet may be wondering: who am I, and why keep listening to me, personally, talk about this stuff?

First off, the official bio. In terms of my cultural identities: I’m a queer human, a descendent of settlers, and a recovering Catholic, all of which shape my relationship with creativity and stories. As an editor, I work with authors, publishers, and with game designers, with a focus on speculative fiction and spiritual nonfiction (say that five times fast). In terms of my professional credentials, I’ve trained with several professional associations for editors. And I’ve studied writing in the academic world, so I’ve clocked quite a few hours in fiction workshops (for better or for worse).

So having said all that, it might seem a little weird for me to share what I’m about to share: I’m a really bad writer.

Okay, let me qualify that a little—I am actually pretty good with words. All editors are in some way or another, even if they don’t consider themselves to be writers with a capital “W.” But I am truly, deeply bad at the actual activity of creative writing. I have been for years, to the extent that I go through periods of barely working on projects of my own.

Let me pause here to promise that this pod is not turning into a sob story about my writing neuroses, which I know would not be particularly interesting or useful to anyone (probably including myself). I’m talking about this to illustrate a wider point, one that I think is a common thread of trouble for many writers who want to tell deep, powerful, dare we say transformative stories.

So bear with me as I describe the core of my own trouble when I try to write. Whenever I resolve to get back to my personal projects, to put in the necessary and nearly always unglamorous time and consistency to actually Write a Thing, I end up in the same place. It starts out pretty promising: the time is indeed unglamorous, but sometimes it’s fun. And even when it’s not, I’m glad to have done the work.

Then I reach the Panic Zone.

(Just as a heads up, there’s some brief talk about mental health ahead.)

The Panic Zone usually happens about two weeks into a period of writing work, regardless of what the project is or where I am in the draft. I’m not talking panic here in the sense of a manic drive to spill increasingly shitty words on the page, or even just being worried about finishing the draft. I’m talking about the bone deep kind of panic familiar to anyone with an anxiety disorder, something akin to storytelling derealization. The same pages that were flawed but promising last week now feel not just “bad,” but utterly devoid of any internal meaning or substance. Sort of like when you say an awkward word a bunch of times in a row and your brain stops believing it’s language—but multiplied by every single word you’ve ever written in the past or will write in the future.

(This sentence is a debacle. This chapter is a debacle. My entire existence is a debacle. Who am I and what the hell is a debacle??)

This derealization panic is not something I’ve ever felt in my role as an editor. Which is lucky for everybody involved, because the trick to being a good editor is not to get waylaid by the current draft. It’s the editor’s job to see the writer’s deeper vision and meaning underneath the actual words that are currently on the page—and then to help the writer remember it and make it real.

So here’s the part where my personal experience starts to intersect with the theme or mission of this podcast.

I realized recently that part of the reason I’m so much more comfortable in that editorial role is that when I’m working with another writer on their project, I’m automatically approaching that work through the lens of relationship. I’m working with another creative. I’m working with their story, a story that has form and potential and life outside of my personal goals and apprehensions. Any good editor is working within a container of living, creative relationship, (even if they might not use that admittedly woo-woo phrase for it).

But when it came to my own writing, that relational container was missing. There was no relationship—or at least, not an acknowledged one.

I wasn’t writing from a place of enlivened, collaborative, generative possibility. I was writing from a place of estrangement, evaluation, and punishing expectation—as if the story were a problem to solve, and my value as a human depended on solving it. Instead of discovering a living story, I was tinkering with a dead wind-up machine: plot threads bolted to character arcs powered by themes.

Again, my point with this podcast is not to dismiss writing mechanics as a useful concept. I mean, it’s literally my job to help people with writing mechanics.

But the more I reflect on my lifelong relationship with writing, the more I see how it’s been stripped of any sort of ghost inside the machine. And I think this is true for so many of us. We’ve been taught to relate to our creativity and to our stories through the lens of rules, productivity, and high-pressure objectives.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Whenever I first feel a story emerging in my awareness, before I’ve put any words onto the page, it’s always alive. You can take that figuratively or literally, but I honestly don’t know how else to describe it. That initial scrap of setting or line of dialogue or striking gesture is a glimpse of something larger, deeper, and full of its own awareness and agency. I am aware of it and it is aware of me. If the language I’m using here for this experience sounds spiritual or quote-unquote “supernatural,” that’s because it is—it’s like realizing you’re not alone in a room. It’s an encounter.

But almost as soon as I start writing and translating that encounter with the technical tools of our craft (plot threads, character arcs, themes), the story becomes dead. That’s the source of the growing dread I’d feel getting larger each day as I came to the blank page or the blinking cursor—the more I worked, the more clear it was that the living essence of that story had left the room. And I didn’t know how to get it back.

This podcast is about how to get it back.

I’ve just described my own experience of this “dead story” phenomenon, of how my writing process is somehow fundamentally disconnected from the relational encounter that births my desire to write in the first place. But I know I’m not alone in this experience of disenchantment—which means if you’ve struggled with a similar flavor of creative crisis, you’re not alone with it either.

In future episodes we’ll explore how we might uncover ways to re-enchant our writing, and ways to unlearn the mental frameworks that have alienated us from our creative wellsprings.

I’m mentioning “unlearning” as a goal here because creative alienation doesn’t come out of nowhere, or out of some flaw inside you. It’s a natural side effect of trying to live a creative life in a late-stage-capitalist world where everything is framed as a quantifiable commodity—including your imagination.

But other ways of creating and being are possible. What that looks like when it comes to writing and storytelling is up to us—to those of us writers who want something deeper for ourselves, our work, and the world. Who are happy to learn about practical craft skills like pacing and structure and dialogue mechanics, but who are also open to the powerful idea of embracing stories as living, inspirited companions, co-creators, and teachers.

In the next episode, we’ll be thinking about the concept of right relationship and how it can revitalize the writing process. If you’re up for the ride, I’m excited to have you with me.

Speaking of the ride, this podcast is going to be a bit more than just a podcast. Starting with episode two, each installment of the Inspirited Word will include follow-up practices, to help you actually apply the concepts explored in the pod. You know, instead of just thinking “whoa, that could be cool!” and then getting distracted by the cat or a Zoom call or just life, and never taking any sort of actual new action. So, if you’re dreaming of an actual writing practice filled with more life, spirit, and deep magic, hit the link in the show notes to join the newsletter and get monthly inspiration and supportive practices delivered right to your inbox.

And in the meantime, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode!