Transcript: Episode 16

Hey friends, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

Before I jump into this month’s topic, I have a quick announcement about a new resource I’ve created for the pod community. The Creative Rescue Kit is a set of bite-sized but powerful tools to help anxious writers like myself get out of the drafting doom spiral and back onto the path of actually writing your stories.

The kit includes a quick guided audio practice to bypass anxiety blocks in the moment during a writing session, so you can hit eject on the doom spiral and make the most of your creative time. There’s also some low-pressure but deep-diving journal prompts to help shift your creative anxiety at the source. And to help you reclaim your writing practice for the long term, I’ve also created a streamlined digital writing session tracker to spot patterns in your writing life and discover which practices really increase your creative flow and fulfillment.

If you’re already a member of the newsletter circle, check the monthly resource email for a link to the Creative Rescue Kit. And if you’re not yet subscribed to the newsletter, just scroll down in the show notes to join and get instant access.

I have to say, I’ve been tinkering with this offering for a while and am pretty excited to be finally sharing it with you, so I hope you’ll check it out (and let me know how it fits into your creative practice!).

Okay! On to today’s episode…

Back in episode 14, I talked a lot about the need to introduce some nuance and flexibility into the core advice we align with in our writing practices – particularly the standard ideal of writing every day and finishing every project. I’m a big advocate for allowing ourselves to deviate from that advice, and to do so with compassionate intention and full self-awareness… instead of letting that advice get in our heads in ways that derail our practice without our intention or awareness.

When it comes to the “write every day” bit of the Standard Big Advice, episode 14 got into the difference between having just rigid discipline vs cultivating a more positive and flexible definition of persistence. But so far on the pod I haven’t touched as specifically on the second aspect of the standard advice, the part about finishing everything. So that’s where we’re going today.

How can we know when we need to see a tricky project through (even when we don’t really want to), vs when we need to let that project go (even when we don’t really want to)?

To delve into this, I think we have to start by looking at the motivations at play when we hold onto a project that has become difficult to carry through to the end. In general, I think there are two common reasons we don’t let a story go:

Number 1 - We know that finishing projects is a valuable learning experience, one of the things that sets quote-unquote “real” writers apart.

Number 2 - Our emotional attachment to the idea of finishing this specific story outweighs our emotional attachment to sustaining our creative spirit overall.

I’m going to take these two reasons in that order, because that first motivation can feed into the second one – in part because there is actually a lot of truth in the ideal of finishing projects in order to learn from that experience. I mean, despite the issues I take with the Big Standard Writing Advice, I don’t think it comes out of nowhere – it wasn’t invented by some cabal of successful-yet-cranky authors just to mess with the rest of us.

(Although, I wonder now if there's some sort of successful-yet-cranky author Discord server of some sort. I feel like Discord is where the Cranky Cabal would gather on the internet; either that or they have just a never-ending single Gmail thread dating back to 2005.)

There’s a reason the standard writing advice does work for some people, and that it has such a compelling sway over those of us for whom it demonstrably does not work (or at least not nearly as consistently). The reason it can sometimes be good advice is that it’s pretty much objectively true that finishing stories is an excellent way to get better at finishing stories. This is true on both a practical level and a craft level. Building the ability to exercise persistence when the drafting gets tough is a huge benefit of sticking a draft out to its end.

And in every genre I’ve ever attempted (which is a fair number of them), writing endings is also just a technically difficult aspect of the writing craft. It’s the part when you have to fully weave everything together, whether “everything” is a fictional plot, a series of real-life events, or a sequence of poetic imagery. So working a project through to an ending or to completion is excellent craft practice, even when the result turns out to not measure up to the standards you were aiming for (and here I’m talking about either your own standards, or some external measurement).

This is especially true if you’re the kind of writer who does tend to want to bail on your drafts somewhere between the halfway and three-quarter mark. I’ve personally never written any fiction of any length that I didn’t want to scrap entirely as soon as I got right around the midpoint of the plot. That’s just the point in the process where the reality of the draft begins to feel like an utter irredeemable shit-tangle – and sometimes the thought “well, at least I’ll learn something” seems like the only plausible positive outcome of continuing the work.

And sometimes that has indeed been the main positive outcome, which is a valuable achievement in itself. But sometimes the positive outcome is also that I finished something I ended up feeling good about after all.

However, even with the clear benefits of learning to finish things even when it’s difficult… I don’t think it’s actually always best to push through to the finish. (And I’m still talking about learning the writing craft here; we’re not getting into the emotional or psychological side of this yet.) Sometimes pushing through becomes a reinforcement of unhelpful craft habits, ways of approaching craft that we’re ready to outgrow but don’t know how to yet.

To give a hypothetical example, let’s say you’re a writer who has gotten good at putting together the events of a narrative in a compelling way. But you’ve hit a tangle in your draft that seems clearly connected to character development. The people on the page don’t feel quite real, or maybe you’re realizing that the outward narrative events and the inner lives of these characters aren’t really driving each other – they feel like two stories sort of spread on top of each other and loosely stitched at the edges, rather than being an interwoven and living fabric.

You could push through to the end of the project, working on the assumption that you’ll learn how to fully explore the characters along the way. But when you’ve got a tangle in a draft that’s really challenging to keep pushing through, it’s natural to fall back on your strengths and rely on them to pull you along in the drafting.

So in this hypothetical, there’s a good chance you’d break out all your narrative plotting tricks in order to create the momentum needed to keep writing to the end. But you’d already figured out that there was a fundamental element of character development missing from the story. Something that should have been informing each step of the narrative, but that you really didn’t know how to begin addressing. So all the drafting decisions you made in order to finish that narrative were essentially practicing writing without full character development – practicing the exact thing that you don’t want to be doing anymore.

Lest this sound like some sort of scary warning that you might be screwing yourself up as a writer by finishing your current draft – that’s not what I’m trying to say. It’s always possible to write an early draft that goes in the wrong direction, to learn from that, and then to go back and revise it into something amazing. Writers do this all the time! It’s normal and okay!

What I am saying is that when you know there’s something big you’re ready to learn, but you’re truly stumped on how to attempt it, you may find yourself at a place in your evolution as a writer where you have to be willing to put your current project on an indefinite pause, in order to give yourself the space to take on learning a challenging new piece of your craft. Because learning something difficult requires flexibility and experimentation and play, not a pre-determined goal of finishing a particular project draft.

And once you’ve begun to learn that new and difficult and exciting thing, there’s always a chance that the project you put on hold won’t be a project you want to finish anymore. Basically, to learn the big new thing, the next evolution in your skill as a storyteller, you have to be willing to let go of the storyteller you are right now – and whatever projects you had underway.

I should be clear that I don’t think this is the kind of learning point we’re at all the time. Like I said earlier, there’s truth to the rule that finishing projects is good writing experience, as long as we’re using it as a general rule of thumb and not a hard-and-fast ideal. So how can you tell what kind of point you’re at in your development – how can you tell when it’s time to keep going with a project draft and when it’s time to pause and make that experimental room for some major growth?

I’d suggest that there are three key questions to discerning this: First, have you finished any projects like your current draft before? Second, can you identify the aspect of writing craft that’s holding you back? And if the answer to that question is yes, what’s your reaction to that knowledge?

If you’re working on a book-length memoir and you’ve never finished a full-length memoir before, then sticking with your draft is probably exactly the right call. You’re new to completing this kind of story – it’s natural that doing so will be tricky. And getting through as much of a draft as you possibly can is the best way to start discovering what this kind of story is like when you’re crafting it from the inside.

Essentially, you don’t yet know what you don’t yet know, and finishing your draft is an excellent route to figuring out what those things are, so that you can then go learn them.

(Because remember, it’s absolutely okay if your first draft is a bit of a mess in this kind of scenario. If you’re telling yourself that your very first finished memoir draft needs to be a fully functioning and/or publishable manuscript, then maybe ask yourself if you’d want an architect student who just drew their first set of blueprints to immediately build that house for you. Same goes for your very first novel draft, or poetry collection draft, or whatever.)

But let’s say you have finished at least one project in the same vein as your current one. Moving on to my second suggested question: Can you identify the aspect of craft that’s holding you back? If the answer is no, I think it can be useful to keep plugging away with your draft – while specifically looking out for clues as to what’s missing or not working.

I’m going to go back to my hypothetical scenario of the novel draft that’s lacking in deep character development. Let’s say you’re working on this tricky draft, it’s not your first novel draft ever, but you don’t immediately see that the problem is with the characters. So you keep going, but as you draft, you’re approaching it as a bit of a detective project.

You’re looking for clues: Which parts of this feel right and come together easily and clearly on the page, and which parts feel like a sudden fog of confusion and despair has descended, leaving you wandering the proverbial narrative moors in circles like a tortured and tragic Romantic heroine?

Or which parts of your draft feel like they were drafted by somebody who doesn’t actually like books in the first place and was trying to finish the scene as quickly as possible in order to go do literally anything else?

(That’s what my first drafts tend to look like – there will be some completely passable section that’s like establishing a cool setting and doing character exploration and then I get to a scene that’s more forward action and it’s like “She picked up the cup and looked at it. Then she threw the cup at him and then she walked out of the room or something I guess, whatever, I hate this.” Which is a major clue that I’m not naturally good at plot action.)

In your hypothetical novel draft, maybe you notice that you’ve got a bunch of sections popping up directly telling the reader something that a character is thinking in order to justify an action they just took or are about to take. This can be a sign that your characters aren’t fully developed. The story isn’t being formed organically around any sort of deep psychological core, so you end up having to justify the plot with some surface-level motivations – rather than it feeling like there’s a natural give-and-take and cause-and-effect between the plot and the inner lives of the people in it.

Or to give a different example clue, maybe you get to a fuzzy area in the plot and realize you have zero idea what the characters are going to do, because you don’t actually know them well enough to intuit what their responses would be.

If you’re proceeding with your tricky draft in the spirit of ferreting out the weak points, these kinds of clues can give you a working theory about what the core problem is – which is to say, what the core opportunity is for deeper discovery and growth.

So now you’re at question three for discerning whether to keep writing this draft: What’s your reaction to the thought of working on this aspect of your craft?

If you start having ideas about how to dig deeper into your current project, that’s a great sign to continue. And maybe that will mean moving on ahead in the draft (in terms of adding page count), or maybe it will mean circling back to the beginning to rewrite and picking up and exploring new threads. Either way, huzzah! Proceed!

But maybe you have one of these responses instead: You realize you don’t even know where to begin to make the needed changes to your current draft. Or, you feel some level of dread about having to dig into this particular area of your craft.

Not just the kind of nervous energy or even frustration that can come from thinking about doing something difficult. I mean the kind of creative anxiety that I am often talking about on this pod, the kind of anxiety that makes you feel like you will never be able to figure this draft out and also if you don’t then you have no value as a human and probably nobody you love has ever actually liked you and yes that includes your pets, because animals can especially tell that you are an existential fraud and thus only snuggle with you for show, in exchange for their food and shelter.

So. If you find yourself either completely, deeply stumped about how to change the necessary aspect of your draft, or if you find yourself consistently deep inside the doom spiral… in my opinion, those are both excellent times to let go of your current project. Even if you don’t want to.

Both of these responses are signals that there’s something for you to learn in your craft that is going to require some major experimentation. And it’s incredibly hard to give yourself permission for that kind of experimentation when you’re also attached to the goal of completing a specific project.

This is a time for reading new craft books and doing all the practice exercises in them (yup, even those three really unappealing ones). This is a time for taking a writing class – maybe even in a different genre, one you’ve never tried before. This is a time for watching weird movies and taking notes on what you like or hate about the way the stories are put together.

In a nutshell, this is a time for fundamentally changing things up in your creative practice and then seeing what you learn. And it’s a time for approaching whatever you do in a true spirit of play and discovery.

Maybe you’ll start having ideas about the project you let go of, ideas that open up enough possibility that you realize it’s time to return to it. And maybe you’ll find yourself wanting to bring what you’ve learned into a totally new project. Either outcome is okay. Sometimes, it’s okay to not finish a thing, to change as a storyteller in ways that lead you down a totally new artistic and expressive path.

This brings me to the second reason that we sometimes don’t let go of a project, besides just the ideal of finishing it in order to get better at the craft. Sometimes we don’t let go because our emotional attachment to the idea of finishing this specific story outweighs our emotional attachment to sustaining our creative spirit overall.

In my own experience, this has happened to me when I’ve been telling myself an inner story about what finishing a current project means for me as a writer – an inner story that I was actually more enamored with than I was with the story I was trying to write.

I’ve mentioned in a couple previous episodes that I have a novel project that I’ve been working on, putting down, and coming back to repeatedly over the past ten years or so. This is by no means the only thing I’ve been writing in that time, but it’s always been The Thing, with two capital letters. It’s the dream project. And it’s always been a really tricky and anxiety-inducing draft for me in terms of structure and plot – hence the continual getting stuck and hitting pause and coming back.

But even with all the pauses I’ve taken while working on this story, I had never ever let go of this story. I’d never taken the step of truly setting it aside and giving myself the space and permission to get out of my doom spiral response and find out what I’d learn if I just wasn’t writing this same damn novel.

I’ve finished other novels prior to this one, and have queried projects to agents as well. But the literary stars just weren’t quite aligned for those manuscripts – and I took that mostly in stride. When I started writing the dream project, though, it felt different. I was at a point in my adulthood when I decided that my next project would be the determiner for whether I was actually going to “be a writer” or not.

Here’s where I put in a sidebar to campaign for the forever abolishment of all magazine features celebrating people based on the age they are when they meet a vocational milestone… as catchy as the phrase “30 under 30” is, there’s exactly zero correlation between being under any particular age and excelling at something, unless that something is a physical activity requiring bone density.

Aside from the pressure I was putting on myself because of the grave shortcoming of not being 25 anymore… I just really love this story. But instead of letting that love fuel creative exploration and expression, I funneled it right back into fueling the other story, the one saying that this project would reveal my worth as a storyteller – or my lack thereof. I so deeply wanted this particular idea and setting and group of characters to be the one that was going to prove my writing was worthy of being considered real.

Combine that inner narrative with the one that real writers are writers who finish their projects, and you end up with one deeply miserable me, noodling miserably around with the same unfinished novel for way too many years.

I’m not actually blaming this creative block on “30 writers under 30” articles or on the Big Standard Writing Advice or on any one thing or person or idea. It’s the result of a lot of strands of thought and experience and culture and even brain chemistry all coming together. Which makes it difficult to get out of the tangle – start pulling on one strand and you end up mired in all the other ones that are snarled up with it.

But I think there is one thread that can guide us through the tangle. Instead of following our attachment to any one project, or any one goal, or any one rule or method or idol – we need to follow a foundational attachment to sustaining our creative spirit. And if we don’t really have that kind of attachment to our own creative spirit yet, we need to start by finding it.

Continuously agonizing over whether or not I would ever finish that one specific novel – even when I was supposedly taking a break from that novel – wasn’t sustaining my creative spirit. It wasn’t creating that radically permissive space to play and explore and make discoveries, the kind of space that we all sometimes need in order to deepen our craft. Instead, it was keeping me stuck in the same place, unable to let go of the (blocked, miserable) storyteller I was in order to become something new.

I thought that letting go of that story would mean I was failing to show up for my writing. But really I was failing to show up for my creativity – failing to allow creative expression itself to be more important than any one single goal I was trying to accomplish through creative expression.

A draft is just a draft. It’s good to finish drafts, sure. But if the drafting is empty, if it’s fueled by dread and disappointment, if it’s reinforcing old habits and paths and approaches you’re ready to outgrow – then you’re not really creating something. Or certainly not something with life and spirit.

That’s when it’s time to let the story go. Even if you don’t want to.

I mentioned earlier that when you do let a story go in order to get back to learning and exploring and creating, you have to accept the chance you won’t come back to that story. But here’s the flip side to that reality. When you let a project go, even if you have every intention of really, truly letting it go for good – there’s always a chance you’ll find your way back to each other again. There’s always a chance that letting it go makes space for you to become the writer that story needs.

It would be nice to be able to close this episode by telling you that I did finally let go of my novel, and that now we’ve found our way back to each other. (If you also grew up with the ‘90s cinema masterpiece Homeward Bound, just picture the scene where the lost pets come running home over the hill as wholesome music swells in the background.) The truth is, though, that I’m not really sure if that’s what’s happening with this particular story, because I still have never fully let it go, because I am really not good at taking my own advice.

But when I started this podcast a little over a year ago, the novel did stop being The Thing I was centering my inner creative narrative around. The podcast became my new focus. And I’ve been doing everything I can to keep my focus more playful and curious than strict and controlling, and I’ve been trying to bring that play into other areas of my writing and my creative life. I haven’t done any significant work on the novel in all that time.

Now I think I’m maybe feeling ready to write it again. I really don’t know how that’s going to turn out. Maybe I’ve been able to sort of trick myself into taking the space that I needed.

But I do know that if I find myself once again drafting deep in a tangle, with utterly no idea how to write my way out of it, then it will be time for me to let this story go – to let it go with love instead of self-recrimination, and with hope for whatever I’ll discover next.

If you’re also at a point of considering whether it’s time to let go of a story, remember to hop on the newsletter list to get access to the Creative Rescue Kit. Reclaiming your writing sessions from the doom spiral is an excellent first step to figuring out whether you can see the way forward with a draft, or if it’s time to take space to explore something else. You can get access to the kit by heading to inspiritedword.com/contact – just hit the big peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.” Or, you can scroll down in the show notes to the newsletter link.

Thanks for hanging out with me today, and as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.