Transcript: Episode 7

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

Today on the pod, I’m going to be talking about the difference between our creative goals and our creative values, and the setbacks that can arise when we lose sight of that difference. And I’m also going to explore why the ideal of “creativity” may not exactly be the positive, affirming value we usually think it is.

(Danger music plays! No, just kidding – I promise this is ultimately an affirming topic, and I am not in the business of squelching creativity, so please stick with me.)

I want to jump into this topic by talking about a common frustration that I’ve experienced and that I’ve seen other writers experience as well: those times when you struggle and push through to meet a writing goal, only to feel let down once you actually reach it. Or worse, only to find that the story you wrote wasn’t at all what you wanted to create, and you have no idea how that happened.

To some extent, feeling a bit let down by the reality of a goal you’ve been striving toward is a frustrating but natural part of figuring out what type of storyteller you want to be. And sometimes a creative project evolves in ways that are unexpected but ultimately illuminating and generative.

But if you’re finding that you’re consistently unsatisfied with the end results of your writing process, there’s likely something deeper at work. Here’s what I think is really going on when we have this kind of deep experience of letdown in our writing journeys: We’ve substituted a creative goal for a creative vision.

This might sound sort of simplistic or obvious when it’s stated directly, and with the benefit of hindsight on your unsatisfying project. But in the moment – or rather in the long and winding sequence of moments that happened along the way – that substitution of goal for vision wasn’t obvious. That’s exactly why you did it. The substitution happened in such a subtle way that you probably can’t even pinpoint when you started veering off course.

When our goals diverge from our vision in this way, it’s not a conscious decision at all, which is why it’s so surprising and disappointing when the goal isn’t fulfilling.

I’m going to propose a possible solution in this episode, and it requires a framework shift that again sounds really simple. But this framework can actually get very juicy and transformative the deeper you go into it.

If you’re looking for more satisfaction and growth and even success in your writing life, write toward your values, not your goals.

To fully explore what I’m getting at here, I’m going to first make my case for why I think this can be such a good practical shift to make, in terms of writing sustainably and writing well. Then I’m going to get into how to actually make this shift, and what sort of discoveries it might open up.

So, to begin with the practical stuff: Writing toward values instead of goals can really help create a sustainable practice that’s supportive of you as a human, and not just driven by “pushing through” or “doing the work.” But defining your writing values isn’t just going to be good for your wellbeing as a writer. It can also make you a better writer.

There are two main reasons I think defining and prioritizing your writing values is so key:

1. You can’t control what happens to your story once it’s out in the world.
2. Goals narrow creative possibility.

This first point applies to anybody who shares stories with readers, whether that’s through pursuing publishing or joining a writers group.

If one of your goals is to get a publishing deal, there’s only so much you can control when it comes to making that happen. Put another way: Publication is never guaranteed for any story. (And if anybody in the industry promises you will get a book deal if you work with them, that flag is so red it’s scarlet. No agent or editor can guarantee or even clearly predict that – including me!)

If your goal is self-publishing, there’s only so much you can do to ensure your books will find the audience you’re hoping for. You can invest time or money (or both) in promoting your work, but there’s always still an element of luck and serendipity in reaching people with any creative project.

And however your story gets in front of readers (and whether your audience is the faceless public or a five-person writing group), you still can’t control how your readers receive or interpret your story. This is one of the toughest things about writing—although that uncontrolled, collaborative experience through the written word is also rewarding and beautiful.

This is where your creative values become so important. If you create your work from an inner compass of defined values, rather than only chasing an external goal, you’ll have a deeper connection and relationship and satisfaction with your stories (no matter how the external things shake out).

Instead of relying on the goal and the result to tell you the value of your work, you’ll already know you’ve met the creative values that matter to you most. When your stories grow out of that deeper, defined vision, you can weather the uncontrolled and the unpredictable with more grace, fulfillment, and confidence.

But like I said earlier, defined creative values aren’t just good for your writing mindset. I think they also make for better storytelling.

By definition, setting a goal limits your possibilities. It funnels you into making choices that serve that specific goal, that meet the artistic and logistical parameters for reaching it. This isn’t always a bad thing by any means. Limits give us manageable actions to take and help us make what we imagine concrete.

So I’m not here to completely dump manure on your goal parade – sometimes you have to set a specific endgame you’re aiming for, so you can determine the steps most likely to get you there. That’s especially true if you’re melding creative expression with a monetized industry like book publishing.

But the more specific and external your goals, the more they place limits around what kind of story you can write.

If you want to get picked up by a certain publisher, you probably need to agree to their suggestions for your final revision. If you want to reach a certain niche of readers, you need to write a story that’s marketable in that current niche, something those readers will want to grab off the shelf (physically or virtually).

I should clarify that this doesn’t mean you have to chase trends. If you’re a listener of this podcast, I sort of doubt that you’re a trend-chasing storyteller – but even if you might be inclined to do that in the name of finding readers, it’s actually not a great strategy. Unless you’re self-publishing and putting out your books on a really quick schedule, you’re likely to end up a step behind the trend – which is going to be counterproductive for building an audience of fans.

But no matter what kind of writer you are, and no matter how you want to publish, you do have to consider the expectations readers have for your niche. Most genres have certain fundamental parameters readers are looking for (and yes, this includes literary genres). The classic example of this is that if you’re writing for romance readers, you have to end with the main characters getting together – if you break that rule, you haven’t written a romance, even if your story includes a romance plotline.

Or, for a slightly less obvious example: If you write a book about a murder with an ambiguous ending to the mystery plot, you haven’t actually written a murder mystery. You’ve probably written a psychological thriller. But if you thought you were writing a standard mystery, the story probably isn’t the best thriller it could be.

To bring this around to the deeper topic of goals and limits: Sometimes these kinds of creative limits and compromises are productive. They can help you make decisions and, for lack of a better phrase, get shit done. But sometimes external limits take you further away from creating the type of story you really want to write – even if those limits seem roughly aligned with your work.

I’m going to use the romance hypothetical again here, just because it’s such a clear example. Maybe you enjoy writing about romantic relationships, so you’ve decided that your goal is to break into the romance niche. On the surface, that seems reasonable and smart, since romance is a popular genre.

But if what you really enjoy as a storyteller is exploring relationships that don’t necessarily end happily, then writing within the limits of the romance genre is going to restrict you from going there. By meeting the seemingly strategic goal of breaking into that niche, you’ll be building a writing practice or career that doesn’t actually support you in discovering your deepest work.

The best way to tell whether a limit is a useful guidepost or a deal-breaker is to check it against your writing values. Does this direction open up possibilities that truly align with your creative values? Or does it simply take you closer to ticking off the box on a goal? Following possibilities that align with your values will lead you to more vibrant and meaningful storytelling – even if you have to give up a goal along the way.

So when it comes to making decisions about what to pursue in your writing, here’s the general approach I’m arguing for: Define your writing values first, and sacrifice them last.

On a practical level, this means taking the time to make a literal list of key creative values before you set any major new writing goals. (Or, if you have some old goals you’re not sure are still a good fit, making a values list can help you reassess.)

When making this kind of values list, I think it’s helpful to consider both the types of stories you love most and what you want your writing practice to look like. And for that second consideration, be wary of backsliding into listing goals. We’re so trained to approach our practices this way that it’s surprisingly easy to do.

A creative value isn’t a number of words you want to write, or even a certain habit you want to build. It’s how you want the experience of writing those words to feel. When it comes to writing for the long-haul and giving yourself space to really explore and grow and be present with your stories – the experience of your practice is just as important as any final outcome or daily routine.

A writing value can be expressed as poetically or as simply as you like, but I find that it’s helpful to make them somewhat specific. This will help you do those gut checks when it’s time to assess a goal or a decision.

Here’s what I mean: A creative value of “love” certainly sounds nice, and it would be an excellent value in some other contexts. But it’s too broad to be useful when making choices about a particular writing project.

Here’s an example of a more specific writing value: “I write stories that help readers imagine new ways of finding and nurturing family.”

That’s still fairly abstract, but it’s much less broad than “love.” It’s specific enough to form a solid point on a compass of writing values. Let’s say this is on your values list, and a critique partner has suggested you add a love triangle to your novel to make the character arcs more dynamic. Let’s also say you’re writing queer science fiction.

You know that having a romance subplot could very well make the book more marketable to your target readers. And maybe one of your goals for this book is to reach a larger audience. But you really hadn’t pictured this story with a love triangle.

So, instead of prioritizing the goal of reaching that larger audience, you prioritize your values list first. Does the potential love triangle help you explore how your characters find and nurture a strong chosen family?

If it does, you can be confident this suggestion will create a story aligned with your deeper storytelling vision. But if it doesn’t – congrats, you’ve just avoided chasing a goal at the expense of writing something you really love.

By defining what you value – and by prioritizing that inner creative compass above all else – you can create a writing life that’s filled with more meaning and with fewer unexpected creative disappointments. And that’s a goal worth pursuing (insert corny joke rimshot here). (I guess I could actually put in a rimshot sound effect through the power of audio editing… but that might make the corny joke even cornier??)

Despite the dad joke, at this point I have hopefully won you over to the idea of defining your creative values, and to prioritizing them over your goals. So now I want to explore what it might look like to do that, and just how deep and powerful that shift could be.

Last week, I listened to an episode of the Throughline podcast, which fellow NPR nerds will likely be familiar with. The episode is called “No Bad Ideas,” and the topic is the history of creativity as a concept in American culture – how and why it evolved, and how it functions in the present day. The episode is based around the book The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin. It’s a new release so I haven’t read it yet, but the Throughline episode is really interesting if you need another pod to hit play on after this one.

Without summarizing the whole thing, here’s the gist of it: As the title of Franklin’s book suggests, “creativity” as a widely acknowledged American cultural value didn’t really emerge until pretty recently. It was popularized during the Cold War, essentially as an individualist contrast to the collective ideal of Soviet communism. And because the Cold War was the backdrop for the rise of “creativity” as a cultural value – creativity was also inherently tied to capitalism and to economic productivity, right from the beginning.

We tend to see creativity as a universal, ancestral, or even spiritual concept that’s been coopted by capitalism and by productivity or hustle culture. But Franklin argues that there never was any pure concept of “creativity” that wasn’t being used to sort of churn out good, productive, individual-yet-ultimately-exploitable capitalist workers.

Of course, humans have always made and invented stuff and come up with ideas and solutions and created art – but before the 1950s, there wasn’t really any discourse about “creativity” (or how to access or harness it) in the ubiquitous way we talk about it now.

I admit that this struck me as being almost impossible at first. But then I realized that it actually lines up with what I’ve read about the history of creative writing as an academic discipline in America. The development of the first MFA program began a bit before the Cold War, but that process of institutionalizing writing craft really gained steam and became solidified during the Cold War era.

Many of our supposedly natural or universal ideas about writing as a craft and a practice actually come out of a consciously engineered cultural movement. And the goal of that movement was to promote a type of writing (and a type of writer) that would shore up not just democratic ideals, but capitalist ones.

I’m not going to jump fully down that rabbit hole in this episode – both in the interest of time, and because I’m still reading some sources on this and will probably devote a whole episode to it in the future. But, if you want receipts on this history and its effects, check out the work of Eric Bennet, Matthew Salesses, and Felicia Rose Chavez (all linked in the show notes).

What I want to pluck out of this history for us to think about today is a specific question from the Throughline podcast. Toward the end of the episode, one of the hosts, Ramtin Arablouei, gives a bit of pushback against sort of throwing out creativity as a value (even if its history isn’t what we might like it to be). He says, quote, “there’s something that is very intrinsic and natural in all of us in our ability to respond to our surroundings or our circumstances in a what we call creative way. I do think that there has to be something that’s fundamental there.”

And in response to this, Franklin says, quote, “I think there are other values that we could try to extricate from it. … If we can disentangle some of the things that creativity tangles together in our mind, we might feel something freeing in that. One of the things that creativity does is it makes every new thing into an equivalent product of creativity, and that has the effect of taking away our ability to ask ourselves what should be created and what should not be created.” (End quote.)

I was really struck by this exchange because I think it encapsulates so much of what tends to plague us psychologically as writers – we’re constantly chasing both purity and productivity, because both of these concepts are tangled together in the value of creativity.

Despite its decidedly un-pure (or at least un-organic) origins, we now conceive of creativity as being a pure, natural ideal that we’re striving to live up to and derive meaning from. But at the same time, creativity’s historical origins have always intrinsically tied it to economic productivity, and all the alienation that can entail. And that conceptual, psychological link persists – even when we’re just trying to make art for ourselves.

To put this in terms from last month’s episode on creative dogma: Creativity as an ideal carries a little virus of dogma inside it, dogma that gets reinforced by countless collective and individual authorities. And that dogma tells us that the value of our craft is measured in output – in creative product. Or in other words, in meeting goals.

In this framework, having a goal is synonymous with having a vision. That’s why it’s so easy to swap our goals in for our vision. That’s why we lose track of our deepest storytelling in the push to produce an output.

So when it comes to defining and prioritizing our writing values, as I argued in the first half of this episode, I think extricating our values from the tangled ideal of “creativity” could be a really powerful place to start. Especially when we’re trying to identify how we really want our creative practices to feel.

I admit that I’m definitely having trouble wrapping my brain around this. Productive creativity has become so foundational to the way we think about making stories that it’s difficult to even find language that doesn’t just circle back to that assumed baseline ideal of creativity as output. And like I mentioned earlier, goals can be a useful part of your writing life, as long as they’re not running the show. This is especially true if you’re telling stories within the publishing industry. We have to balance writing as a vocation with writing as a profession.

But that’s what makes this dismantling or unpacking of creativity culture feel like such a potentially generative way of thinking. What might happen if we threw “creativity” into the compost heap and broke it down into something richer and wilder and more luxuriant? What new foundational guidance would those values give us? And what would grow out of that kind of lush soil? Maybe it would be something that has more in common with an evolving, living narrative ecosystem, and less in common with forced, unsatisfying, or inert outputs.

A common theme I’ve come back to a lot on this podcast so far is the concept of storytelling as a relationship. One of the ways that storytelling can be a relationship is that a powerful can require you to become a certain type of storyteller. It can require you to evolve and change and meet it on common ground (even if only for a little while).

In this sense, your storytelling is a method or tool or portal for aligning your values and beliefs with the way you live and create. The real core of your creativity – for lack of a better word – isn’t a product you finish or a goal you meet. It’s a process and relationship that shapes what’s possible, both for you and for everyone else who encounters your stories.

And if that’s the case, then I think we have to ask ourselves: What values do I want to embody through the way I tell stories? What do those values look, feel, and sound like? What kinds of stories do I want to be in relationship with, and how can I invite them to show up and do their work on me and through me?

This month in the newsletter, I’m sharing some expanded prompts to help you uncover and articulate your own storytelling values (beyond productive creativity). So if you haven’t yet joined the newsletter circle, you can do that right now by scrolling down to the link in the show notes on your phone, or on the episode web page if you’re listening on the website.

As a final signoff today, I want to close on a bit more of a personal note. I was just talking about how a creative project can require us to evolve and change in order to meet it on common ground – in order to be the storyteller that the story needs. Over the past few months, this podcast has been that type of project for me. It’s required me to learn to use my voice in new ways, in the obvious literal sense and in the also sort of obvious figurative sense as well. And I’ve loved starting to build this relationship with the podcast and with its listeners.

But as much as I enjoy crafting these episodes, I think the pod has the potential to become more – some kind of more tangible community of storytellers, a bigger web of relationships and support and exploration. And that’s a pretty exciting idea. But to be completely real and honest with you: Before I can start digging into that possibility and what it might look like, this pod needs to reach more listeners first. Whatever direction things grow in, I want it to serve the real needs of real writers. So I’m building toward a certain threshold of listeners and newsletter subscribers to help shape the future of this project.

Direct word of mouth is by far the best way for podcasts to reach new folks. So if you have anyone in your life who you think might enjoy the Inspirited Word, please take a few minutes to share it with them. Text them the link to your favorite episode – there’s usually some kind of share button on the show notes screen in your podcast app that will generate that link for you, easy-peasy.

And if nobody to share with directly is springing to your mind right now, don’t worry – you can help by leaving a positive review in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

(And at the risk of sounding a little pedantic: reviews with less than five stars tend to hurt rather than help, no matter what the review actually says. So if you’re the kind of discerning human who leaves a glowing written review and then pops three stars on it for mysterious and esoteric reasons you choose to keep to yourself – I respect your rigorous aesthetic standards, friend. But I would really appreciate if you left a dorkily enthusiastic five stars this time.)

Seriously, though: Your support really does help, and I am so genuinely grateful to everyone who’s spent time so far listening to me tell stories about storytelling on this pod. And as always: Keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.