Transcript: Episode 24

Hey friend, 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.

I also hope that if you’re living in a part of the world that’s entering the sort of dreary phase of winter that you’re getting light when and where you can, both literally and figuratively… I think a big reason for all the cultural energy around the concept of the New Year is that we kind of need something to pull us through the weeks when winter feels the least magical and the most interminable.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not the biggest New Year person in terms of my own practices around goal-setting and just taking stock and evaluating what I want in life. But this month I am actually going to be talking about the New Year, so if you’re still riding that energetic train (or if you’re jumping on it late), this is definitely for you. But it’s also for you if you have no interest in that train whatsoever – just ignore the New Year-specific angle and take this as some general thoughts on goal-setting in creative practice.

Regardless of how you feel about the whole “new year, new you” vibe, January is sort of the ultimate case study in how people are approaching goal-setting in the wider cultural zeitgeist. I’ve personally been seeing a big shift in recent years toward more flexible concepts of what it means to set and implement and reach a goal, at least in the kinds of content I’m usually taking in.

Most often, I’m seeing new year goals approached from a perspective of choosing desired ways to feel and act along the path toward a goal, rather than setting hyper-specific benchmarks for what counts as achieving that goal. (The most stereotyped example of this might be to create health goals around daily or weekly movement rather than an old-school goal to hit a certain number on the scale.) There’s also the approach of choosing a word for the year that encapsulates a desired way of feeling or behaving across multiple areas of your life – a word that serves as a kind of mantra or touchstone to guide you toward your overarching ideals.

Last January, I used that “word of the year” approach as a thematic excuse to make a couple episodes digging into two key words I use to describe this podcast: “visionary,” and “praxis.” But I’m bringing up the word of the year thing again this month to segue into a different alternate take on new year goalsetting: the idea of choosing a question for the year, rather than a word.

This take isn’t nearly as ubiquitous, but I’m also not going to pretend I made it up all by myself. It’s a concept that I’ve heard in several different contexts over the past few weeks – not so much as an overt suggestion for how to start off the year, but more as a sort of implied approach of practicing a kind of focused curiosity in the new year, rather than focusing on a particular goal-based narrative of expansion or change or even acquisition.

There are a few content creators I follow who have talked about this general ethos, and I’m going to borrow the words of one of them here, poet and YouTuber Hannah Louise Poston. She described this mindset as “going deeper into the life you already have.” And I think questions are more fundamentally suited to an ethos of going deeper and being curious, as compared to choosing a word.

Choosing a yearly word can definitely have value and utility – but I think it’s a practice you have to be a little careful with if you want to avoid choosing your word based on a sort of constricting, aspirational assumption about how your goals and ideals are going to actually play out in your life.

I took a cruise through some lists of suggested words for the year, and some of the tricksier ones that jumped out at me were things like “progress,” “achieve,” “completion.” Depending on the context and thought process for choosing these words, they might be a great supportive tool. But I can also really easily see these kinds of words getting chosen with a very specific aspiration in mind, something either conscious or unconscious that shuts down the deeper potential guidance of the word:

“This year, I will make progress toward publication, by which I mean I will get this specific piece published in a magazine, or I will get an agent based on this specific query.”

Or maybe “I’ll know I’ve reached completion with my goals when an outside source validates it for me.”

The word “achieve” is maybe the most sticky one I saw, because it’s really hard to choose the word “achieve” without first picking some specific thing you hope to achieve – and what does achievement look like if the year goes sideways? How do you stay positively curious about not achieving that thing, instead of just feeling like a failure? (I mean, it’s possible, if you’re an emotional intelligence superhero, but like, why make life this hard for yourself?)

All this is to say that guiding questions are just by nature more flexible, more open-ended and nuanced (or at least, a good juicy question is). A question is a reminder to explore how your ideals are emerging and evolving in the moment, not a reminder of a predetermined idea of what path you’re on. That makes a guiding question both more generative and more forgiving of reality.

And being guided by a nuanced, open-ended question doesn’t have to conflict with also having concrete goals. But I think it fundamentally changes how you go about pursuing those goals. So, to give an example of questions you might choose if you have concrete goals for publication: Maybe you’d ask, “What opportunities do I have to share my work with others, and why is this important to me?”

You might still go into the year with a specific list of achievements you want to go after – magazines to submit to, agents to query, grants to apply for. But by choosing to ultimately be guided by that core question about why and how to share your work, you’re setting yourself to weather any disappointments with more grace and flexibility. And maybe even more importantly, you’re also setting yourself up to discover entirely new avenues and possibilities and motivations that you’re not currently aware of or focused on – but that still align with your ideals for your life.

Another place that I was recently reminded of this concept of working with a guiding question is in an old episode of the podcast On Being. Back in 2022, Krista Tippett made a series of four short episodes called “Foundations for Being Alive Now,” and that series came across my internet radar again this month. I’ve linked the full series in the show notes, but there’s one specific episode on what Tippett calls “living the questions.” She makes a brief but compelling case for the power of examining and formulating the big questions that are emerging within your life and within the greater collective – and then actively choosing a question to tap into daily for a certain amount of time, as a contemplative practice.

Just for the sake of clarity, in that episode, Tippett takes the phrase “living the questions” from a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke [rye-ner maria rill-kuh], from the classic Letters to a Young Poet – it’s not a reference to the progressive Christian book and curriculum series. I don’t know much about that “living the questions” beyond the fact that it exists and is also the first thing that comes up when you google the phrase “living the questions” (hence why I’m making this clarification).

Anyway, here’s the Rilke quote that Krista Tippett draws from in that podcast episode:

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

(end quote)

Full confession: I haven’t read much Rilke, in part because whenever I try to read poetry in translation I get so hung up on trying to figure out the best translation that I usually get overwhelmed and bookmark a bunch of contradictory webpages in chrome and then just pick something else to read instead. So, if you happen to be a hardcore Rilke fan and want to just tell me which is the most-true-to-the-actual-German-but-not-stilted-and-awful translation – send me a message, because you may be my only hope for actually reading Rilke.

(Seriously, you can send me an email about poetry translations or anything else by going to the contact page at inspiritedword.com.)

But taking this idea of living the questions out of the context of both Rilke and Krista Tippett – I think a conscious practice of working with a guiding question is a particularly compelling idea for writers, whether it’s January or any other time. Storytelling is deeply entwined with the practice of asking questions. Stories are often described as being a cultural way of providing answers and sharing truths – but the best stories are usually more concerned with the asking and not the telling (at least in my opinion).

This may sound pretty self-evident in the abstract – of course stories are about asking the big questions and exploring what comes our imaginations come up with, hurray stories! But the actual process of writing – and especially writing something you’re hoping to share with an audience – it tends to get a bit taken over by the goal of the finished piece, a concrete goal that stops feeling like a question and becomes more and more like an answer you’re writing toward. And I think a big part of how I feel about my writing as a practice has to do with whether or not I’m staying in close touch with writing as the art of asking good questions, not the art of having the best-worded answer.

I mean, ultimately the wording does matter, or this wouldn’t be an art form, but you get what I’m saying here. At least for me, it’s a lot easier to maintain a regular practice when I’m approaching the writing as an emerging exploration – it helps me keep a forgiving attitude about the actual language that first comes out as I’m drafting (i.e., not the best-worded).

But there’s another layer to the concept of writing as asking questions. The kinds of questions you ask play a key role in the kind of story you end up with, in terms of structure and craft and the actual finished thing on the page. I did a full episode on this angle back in 2023, so if you haven’t taken a listen to that, it’s episode 10, and I’ve linked it in the show notes.

To give a really quick overview of my thoughts on questions and story structure: I find that different structures and craft techniques are essentially asking different kinds of questions. So if you’re writing without a sense of what kind of core questions you’re exploring, it becomes even harder to find the right form and structure for the story you’re telling. And on the flip side, choosing your guiding questions can help you find a concrete form that might otherwise be eluding you – a form you maybe couldn’t have come up with if you tried to jump straight to the answer, to your preconceived idea of what a correct finished version of this story should be.

So, going back to the topic of today’s episode, I’m talking about two different but highly interconnected kinds of guiding questions here: questions that guide your writing life, and questions that guide specific stories or projects. And I think that for most writers, taking a more conscious approach to formulating both of these types of questions could help us to write things we feel good about, and also to feel more good while we’re doing it.

(“Feel more good” in the sense of just having a better time and also in the sense of feeling less stress or guilt or shame about ourselves as writers and therefore as people. It’s okay! You are more good!)

I think you can come at the task of consciously formulating your guiding questions from either side – you could start with formulating the questions that guide your practice, and then use that as a lens onto the questions guiding a specific story. Or you could take the other route, and look at the questions you’re asking in a project and then use that to uncover what questions are currently shaping your practice (or what questions you’d like to be shaping your practice). And no matter which direction you explore from, maybe you find that right now the guiding questions are the same, both for your work and the way you do that work.

As an example, here’s one question that guides both a particular project of mine and the way I try to engage with creative practice in general: Where is the sacred located, and how do we honor it?

I don’t think all guiding questions need to be quite that numinous (or that woo-woo, to use a less flattering description). That same project of mine is also asking how/if we can build a functioning community with people we wouldn’t have chosen to co-exist with on a daily basis. But I wouldn’t really consider that to be a current guiding question for my personal creative practice.

It’s a question that I believe will help me stay curious about what emerges between the characters in the story as I write it, and I hope it will also help me find a fitting form for the story as well. But it’s not the question that keeps me coming to the page on the level of my deep, personal creative drive – which is the ultimate goal of choosing guiding questions for your practice.

That goal of returning to the page again and again leads me into the second part of this episode – but before I make that segue, I want to remind newsletter subscribers to check their inboxes for the monthly writing praxis tip. This month I’ve shared some prompts to help you formulate some guiding questions of your own, both for your practice and for individual projects. And if you’re not yet a subscriber and you’d like access to those prompts, just scroll down in the show notes and look for the link to join the newsletter circle.

One of the core tropes of the “new year, new you” take on goal-setting is that reaching your goals usually involves committing to some new, optimized version of showing up to “do the work.” The standard new year narrative is one particular face of the productivity and self-improvement narrative, that story that we prove our worth through work: maybe by literally working more or harder, or metaphorically by working on ourselves, working on our relationships, working on our mindset.

And as much as I critique the productivity narrative on this podcast, there’s still something to be said for the idea of committing to actually and tangibly showing up for your goals and ideals within your daily life. After all, that’s what I’m saying when I talk about showing up to the page again and again to write or create (not necessarily on a daily basis, unless you want to, but on whatever basis allows you to maintain a living and meaningful creative practice).

So the second piece I want to examine or dialogue with today is this: How can you make a real, vigorous commit to your practices without that commitment devolving into a fixation on whether you’re working vigorously enough? Because that fixation isn’t ever particularly great for creative expression, for going deeper into the life we already have. It has a lot more in common with striving toward a distant, predetermined answer than it does with asking questions, with exploring what’s emerging right here in your immanent, immensely creative present reality.

I’ve been thinking about a shift in wording that might be a way to combat my own ingrained tendency to backslide into a productivity narrative when it comes to my writing. Every time I catch myself asking if I’m “doing the work,” I’m trying to shift that phrase and ask, “Am I performing a working?”

I’m aware that this phrase sounds a little grammatically bonkers, so let me explain what it means.

When “working” becomes a noun instead of a verb, there’s one common way I see it used and then a second, way more niche one – both of which play into why I like making this mental shift in wording. People often use the phrase “inner workings” to talk about the way something is functioning, including the natural world and even our own brains: “the inner workings of the mind,” “the workings of nature.”

And in the super-niche-but-genuinely-fascinating area of occult history, a “working” is a ritual or practice, as in the phrase “performing a magical working.” This use of the word dates back to the Renaissance and the early modern period, when some Europeans with too much time on their hands started doing fun things like dressing up in fancy robes to test out spells from ancient Greek papyri and trying to summon and bind demons from the Bible.

None of which is the type of working I’m suggesting for you today. (I mean, go for it, if you’re a ceremonial magician as well as a writer, but I myself am not, so I’ve got no advice for you on the correct binding circle for Astaroth.) But, I am suggesting the general concept of “performing a creative working” – as in, practicing the ritual of spending time in conversation with your imagination and seeing what happens.

When I sidestep the idea of “doing the work” and instead “perform a working,” I’m more easily able to avoid falling into patterns of “working on myself,” in the sense of trying to batter myself into a different shape based primarily on the belief that I’m broken. By “performing a working,” I can remind myself that creativity is an act long before it’s an artifact. It’s a process that’s part of the inner workings of myself, and that process is itself something kind of magical, regardless of the tangible outcomes.

Maybe this phrase really doesn’t work for you the way it does for me, for any number of reasonable reasons. If it does, great, please steal it – but I’m sharing this bit of mental word play as an example and not a directive. I came up with it because the phrase “doing the work” has gotten fundamentally linked in my brain with some bad life experiences around shame and judgment and worthiness. So I ~performed a little working~ to break its power. (Okay, I’m done now.)

“Doing the work” may not be a problem concept for you; maybe it’s even really helpful for you. But I bet if you’re still listening to this episode, there’s some other dictatorial phrase that’s whispering its disapproving spell in your ear, that keeps you feeling like your ideals are forever just out of reach. Whatever that phrase is, see if you can break it somehow. See if you can gum it up in some clever way that sticks just as easily in your brain, that lets you move away from its clutches and reorient to your guiding questions – those foundational questions that can take you deeper and deeper into the life you already have, and into all the creative potential of that life.

 

If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the pod, then thanks for sharing space with me today here at the beginning of a new year. And if you’re able to take a few minutes right now to support the show and help is grow in 2025, here’s how you can do that. Take a look at whatever pod app you’re currently listening in and give the pod a rating and a review. For metaphorical bonus points, if you know a friend who might also enjoy this episode, share it with them and ask them what they think about it!

If you take either or both of these actions and are not yet subscribed to the pod newsletter, please do hit the link in the show notes to join, so that I can send you some special resources as a thank you for supporting the pod. You’ll get instant access to the Creative Rescue Kit, which is a set of three easy-to-implement tools that I made just for this pod community, to help you re-engage with your writing life in a supportive and sustainable way.

If you’re already a member of the newsletter circle, check your inbox for the prompts that go along with this month’s episode, to help you brainstorm your own guiding questions for your practice and for your current works in progress.

That’s it from me today – whether you’re hearing this in January 2025 or some other time altogether, I am wishing you a renewed sense of depth and curiosity in your creative life (and just in your life, overall, as it exists right now). And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.