In Defense of Reverence

“For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world. It’s what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read is Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson. It's a story about sisters, about unfairness and jealousy and feeling restless and hurting and growing. It's a story about home and found family and departures and arrivals.

It's a rare gem: writing that resonates, like a good cello. Writing that isn't flashy, a story that doesn't overstay its welcome, yet lingers in your heart forever.

In 2014, at the tail end of my debut year, I had the good fortune to have lunch with Katherine Paterson herself - just the two of us and my dear friend, the author Lisa Papademetriou. We'd both put up cash for a fundraising auction when we were getting our MFAs at Vermont College of Fine Arts - lunch or dinner with two of the college's former faculty. So after lunch with Katherine, we had dinner with M.T. Anderson that night. It was an extraordinary day in which I got to experience a true sense of lineage, and my place in a long line of storytellers.

I'd brought my childhood copy of Jacob Have I Loved to lunch. I really don't care about signed copies, but this was different. This was my adult author hands holding one of my favorite books, one I had read over and over as a little girl, then a young woman, a book that was a mirror. It said: It's okay you feel so weird and don't fit in. It's okay to walk away from people who don't love you well.

There are two things I'll never forget from that lunch:

One was that Katherine - the author of Bridge to Terebithia, for god's sake! - had said that every time she sits down to write she feels like a complete beginner.

When someone tells me that it a) comforts me a great deal and b) tells me they are working from beginner's mind. If you're scared, it means you're not playing it safe. It means you're showing up for a great work to come through you.

The second thing is that she signed my book:

For Heather, Thank you for loving Jacob

I about died. To think she was thanking me! Of course, I went home and my dog promptly decided it was a toy to be chomped on (impermanence!), but I taped it up and he managed to miss the signed page, bless him.

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This month the word I've chosen is REVERENCE. When I began thinking about this post, the last page of Jacob Have I Loved came to mind.

There is a beautiful moment at the end where Louise, the protagonist, has finally come into her own. She's found her place in the world, her people, her vocation. The last sentences are hard-earned and come just after Louise has righted a wrong that had been to her, protected a child from being unseen, the Esau to a Jacob. They are:

Hours later, walking home, my boots crunching on the snow, I bent my head backward to drink in the crystal stars. And clearly, as though the voice came from just behind me, I heard a melody so sweet and pure that I had to hold myself to keep from shattering:

I wonder as I wander out under the sky...


These are the first words to a haunting Christmas song, one we can almost imagine Louise's self-absorbed twin sister, the thorn in Louise's side, singing. But for once, that beautiful voice doesn't hurt.

I like this version, if you'd like to sit with it for a moment.

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The Reverent Writer

Close your eyes and say the word out loud: "Reverence."

I love the natural hush of that first R, the alto reverberation as it slides into the luscious V and then ends on that slight hiss of the CE, like the sound a pebble beach makes when the tide pulls back to the sea.

It's been a year, hasn't it? I feel we're due some reverence, and I think our writing souls need it now more than ever. The crass commercialism, the twitter wars, the thinly veiled egoism of Instagram (I'm off it now - more on that in another newsletter), the nightmare of COVID, the attention economy, and geopolitical everything. Another school shooting, women's rights on the line - I could go on, but I won't because

we
need
some
REVERENCE.

Our writing, our stories, and all the life we are called to breathe onto the page are born of the wondering as you wander out under the sky.

This humble wondering can lead to reverence for this life, this planet, this present moment - a moment we desperately want to meet with our words. This is but one way to explore mindfulness for writers.

But how do we tap into reverence in 2021? Our bandwidths are fried by our inboxes and phones and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the modern world. The demands on our time and attention are greater than ever before, and the world is just plain terrifying.

I think what we need is what author, scientist, and indigenous activist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls "everyday acts of practical reverence."

I have a writing practice that can support you as you make space in your life for these every acts and cultivate the ability to experience reverence daily, both on and off the page.

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“Haiku is a refuge when the world seems chaotic, when you are lost, frightened, tangled, and nothing is clear.”

— Natalie Goldberg

The Way of Haiku

In next week's Well Gathering, we'll be diving into a practice that has allowed me to find some real reverence in my everyday life - a practice that has taken my writing to a new level because it trains me to pay attention, to wonder as I wander: the Way of Haiku.

The two books above are great primers in this practice.

When I first introduced this spiritual practice to the writers who were on retreat with me last month, most of them balked. We're not poets, they said.

They were mollified when I talked about haiku as a way to wake up, to find liberation through words, to practice mindfulness with intention while at the same time honing their writing skills. It's also great fun. My inner critic is never around when I practice haiku.

The writers who were most skeptical were the ones who sent me emails filled with haikus about all sorts of things - the structure, it seemed, was liberating, and they were seeing the world with new eyes.

There's always time enough to write three lines.

It's playful and there's a wonderful sense of having finished something when that third line is through. In the busy holiday season, it might be just the thing to inject a few words and a bit of mindfulness in your day.

So this is what I do in the morning, or when I have a chance some time during the day:

• I sit down and I pay attention to what's happening around me. There is a notebook and pen in hand.

• A line comes to me and I count the syllables: five.

• Another line: seven.

• A third line: five.

I make sure to add a kigo - a word or image that grounds us in the season, a key component of haiku. I remind myself that haiku is less about you and more about a moment of wakefulness, one that you articulate as both a gift to yourself and the reader.

Of haiku, Allen Ginsburg said: “The only real measure of a haiku is upon hearing one, your mind experiences a small sensation of space – which is nothing less than God.”

Good enough for me.

I hope you'll join us next Wednesday to explore this practice.

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If you're tired of making promises to yourself that you don't keep...

If you just don't know how to get your bum in the writer's seat...

If you know you're holding yourself back, but you don't know how to flap those wings and fly...

If you're fed up taking a course here or there and not improving...

If something in you wants so badly to get out and you know you can't do it alone...

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In my next newsletter I'm going to be sending you a special PDF to spend some time exploring 2021 and looking ahead to 2022.

We'll be digging into discerning what word might guide the new year, writing in response to powerful quotes, jotting down notes about each monthly word we've worked with in this space in 2021, and more. It's going to be special and lovely and my holiday gift to all of your dear hearts.

And now, a haiku I wrote to express the end of a year and hope for the creativity and work that will come out of it for the one to come.

.
.
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The last leaf, falling
A hard worker gets some rest
The year is compost

The Resting Season

“Practice comes from our body - we receive it.”

— Natalie Goldberg

And...it's snowing in Minnesota! The Buddha is holding it down in our backyard (captured by Zach) and I'm happily inside as much as possible, basking in cozy mornings with Circe, good books, and hot beverages. #queenofthenorth

Receiving Rest

This month's guiding word for me and my community of writers is RECEIVE. I have been working on receiving this season, finding beauty in the icicles outside my window, the flurries that whip around the yard, the luscious quiet of nighttime snowfall. In short: receiving rest. Receiving what is being offered - ease - instead of demanding a book to show for all my time inside.

I want to talk about what it means to receive rest, and to receive a place, a moment, a season of your life. As Natalie Goldberg says above, "Practice comes from our body - we receive it."

What does it mean to receive our writing practice in our bodies?

Sometimes it takes a long time for the seeds of a story to bloom. Sometimes, it just needs good ground to burrow in, and trust from the earth of your body that, when the time is right, the words will flower onto the page.

Trusting that the words will come is hard. Preparing the way is even harder. What does it look like to be actively fallow? To celebrate seasons of rest, periods of preparation?

For this month, I've created an audio gift for you that is a combo meditation / writing exercise on resting places so that you can explore these questions on your own, and find rest wherever you are.

*** There's also a yummy writing / meditation practice in this month's Well lecture notes. Click below to access all of this on the Perks Portal. ***

What are your resting places?

This work with resting places was something we did during the mindfulness for writers retreat that I led earlier this month and I really loved it.

Here are just a few of my resting places over the years:

• the moon

• windchimes on my back and front porches

• lighthouses

• my husband's eyes

• my morning cup of coffee

• the Sahara desert

• my grandmother's lap

• Minnesota

• Bowie’s Starman

• my childhood bunk bed

• The Boston Public Library

• the lake by my old place in North Carolina

• Little Women

• Anne of Green Gables

• my best friend's smile

• my sister's laugh

• my kitty's soft body

• a dark theater just before the curtain rises

• a blank piece of paper

• Mary Oliver

• Sunsets

• Sunrises

• My breath

I've been thinking a lot these days about how my writing can become more of a resting place for me. It's so often fraught - for all of us - with the weight of expectation, the inner critic, always feeling like we've fallen short, or behind.

We crave and grasp and want, so very badly, to flow, to write the book, to finish the book, to get the deal. But after that mountain? More mountains. How do we rest during the climb, on the summit, on the way down, and in the valleys between?

Next month, I'll be sharing some of the haiku we dove into in this month's ALCHEMY mindfulness retreat - it was such a joy to spend all day sitting and breathing and writing with our wonderful group of sisters and to share our pieces of writing that sprung from paying attention in the present moment.

Haiku has given me a gateway into my writing being totally fused with my meditation practice. It doesn't ask more of me than my presence. I get to write with true curiosity and a deep satisfaction I haven't found in a long time in such a short amount of words. I can't wait to share more with you next month.

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Women Writers & The Challenges of Rest

In last week's Well Gathering, we talked about what would it look like to receive rest, to give ourselves permission to reject the pressures of the attention economy: to set the phone down, to not do it all, to take good care of our bones.

Here we have this season whose potential for wonder is stripped away by packed to-do lists and family pain and financial worries and illness - all in the name of "the holidays."

And who in our society carries most of that burden: the cooking and shopping and hand-wringing and organizing and kid wrangling and the no-time-for-writing? By and large: women. You. Me.

So how do we, as people with wonderfully gifted imaginations, imagine our way into some rest this holiday season? Some delight? Some time to jot down a few words?

One way is to see your words in the context of a gift economy, as a gift that is being offered you, and an opportunity for you to pay that gift forward. To see yourself and your words as an essential part of a larger ecological system that needs you to keep telling stories and writing poems and journal entries - not just to-do lists. A gift that you don't have to stand in line for, wrap, mail, or cross off a list.

This gift is already inside you, waiting patiently under the tree of your heart, wrapped and ready to be opened.

A piece of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass sums up the questions we were asking in the Well surrounding giving and receiving rest to ourselves, including the gift of our words and our words as resting places:

“A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward, you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears.
Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

A small writing exercise:

I suggested we all write three ways that we can start, right now, being open-eyed and present. Go ahead, take a pause and do that too.

You Don’t Have To Be A Lone Wolf

In 2022 I'm going to be resting more, and writing more, and giving more time to study. I will still be working one-on-one with writers, but space will be limited, so if you think you'd like to work together, click above and have a look at what I'm available to give in the coming months. Please don't hesitate to email me with any questions.

If you feel a tug, a whispered inner yes, then sit with that. Listen to it. See if it means we need to work together or if it means something else.

What would it look like to build the writing life you long for in the coming year? (Hint, hint: a good journal prompt, methinks).

If one-on-one work is not available to you right now, don't forget all my free resources. There's much to support you, and I'll be here in your inbox too.

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I know the holiday season is painful for many of us: loss, estrangement, distance, SAD, and any number of things. I hope that wherever this holiday season find you, you'll discover a few resting places along the way.

With American Thanksgiving coming up next week, I'll take this opportunity to let you all know how thankful I am to be able to share my words with you.

Knowing you are on the other end of my newsletters and blogs and books has gotten me through a lot and I am more thankful than I can say to have you be a part of my life in this special way. I don't take being the recipient of your attention lightly. That you for the gift of your presence, and the opportunity to share. I hope what I give to you is a little bit of wind in your sails, or some light along the way from the North as you keep heading toward your own North Star.

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Write From The Wound, Edit From The Scar

“If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something,
I can neither give nor receive.”

— Dorothee Sölle

I cannot recommend getting on your soapbox enough. I did that recently for an article I wrote for Publisher's Weekly on why biographies need a makeover - that was my original title, and I'm using it here, at least! It was, literally, for their “Soapbox” column. It’s been nearly two months since my biography about Virginia Hall, Code Name Badass, came out, and I had a little more I wanted to say.

I wrote it from a place of power, a sense of surety, of hard-earned wisdom on the other side of a challenging journey.

It can be so scary to put your words out there. I've gone viral before, and I recommend it about as much as I would recommend getting food poisoning while on vacation.

Having a piece that could once again be read by many people in the publishing industry was a horse I knew I had to get back on...but was a little scared to ride.

That quote at the top of this missive from Dorothee Sölle is a good reminder: If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to past experiences with writing that are painful, I can neither give to my readers, nor receive inspiration for the words I write.

There were several times when I was writing this piece that I remembered my adventures in online infamy back in fall 2019, which seems both like a million years ago and also like yesterday. I had to put my mindfulness practice to use, holding space for my fear and the inner critic while also gently guiding myself back to my words and the foundation of self-worth and grace it has taken me years to build.

When I talk about a writing practice, I mean practice. It's as much a spiritual endeavor as anything else. Practice never makes perfect; but it makes better. And that's good enough for me.

Writing From The Scar vs Writing From the Wound

While I was working on this piece, I also realized something really interesting about my writing and I wonder if any of you feel this way too:

When I teach or when I write nonfiction that will be read by anyone other than myself or my husband, I am most in balance when I write from the "scar." This is something one of my meditation mentors, Lodro Rinzler, often spoke about in our meditation teacher training.

When you teach (or write) from the scar, you've come into some wisdom about something. There's clarity, equanimity.

You're a lava rock, not the lava. Formed by whatever the event in your life was, but no longer dangerous, and wild in your mind about it.

When you write or teach from the "wound," you're writing from a place of unresolved pain.

You're angry, but not the cool anger of the Queen of Swords, of Cersei Lannister, of Rosa Parks on that bus - anger that has been skillfully wielded into the sharpest of swords. You're hurting and that is writing from a mind that is all over the place, that is dropping bombs from a drone. There might be innocent bystanders, and that might include you.

When I wrote my article that went viral two years ago, I was writing from the wound.

Honestly, it started out as a blog post I didn't think anyone would read. I wouldn't take back anything I wrote in that article: publishing has a long way to go to be transparent, respectful to the authors whose words it makes money off of. If I were Martha Beck, I'd say publishing needs a major integrity cleanse. But there were a few private conversations I wish I'd had with certain folks mentioned in the piece before it began circulating. And I wish I'd ordered the paragraphs differently, alert for the tl;dr people who tweet before reading. Ah well. Live and learn. C'est la goddamn vie, as one of my characters in Little Universes says.

When I wrote this most recent piece, I was writing from the scar.

This new piece is about publishing, too, but I could feel the difference writing it. First of all, I wrote it during the day, not the night. (Wound writing often happens at night for me - what about you?) I also had several people who looked at it before I sent it out. It was edited, since it was for Publisher's Weekly. I also just knew what I was getting into, and was able to channel my feminist anger with precision.

I'm guessing the wound piece will always have more reads, be more meaningful and helpful--it was raw and that's an energy that really grabs people. But when I write from the scar, it's harder for the patriarchy (this includes females, sadly) to dismiss me. It's the kind of anger that moves mountains--not the destruction of lava, but the slow erosion that so many of us engage in, one article, one book, one march at a time.

But here's an interesting thing I also noticed: When I'm drafting fiction or memoir, I have to write from the wound.

When I'm exploring, I have to be present for everything that's there. I have things to work out, to understand, about myself or the world, and that's a very vulnerable "wound" place to be. If I show up for it with all my bravery and with a strong, sturdy practice, then over time, an alchemical process happens:

Through my writing, the wound I'm working with becomes a scar - my words, the story, the craft of my art...it's all medicine for me. And then, when I share it (from the scar) it has an opportunity to help heal wounds in others.

For me, my best writing comes from the wound and my best writing comes from the scar.

Ergo:

Write from the wound, edit from the scar.

Part of being able to do that work is to have the capacity to receive what is being offered you, whether as a writer or a reader.

Notice, too, that the medicine you receive from your work has nothing to do with publishing, with book deals, with reviews. All the good stuff a book can give you happens before it ever hits a bookshelf. And if it never gets that far, you can trust it has already done its job for you, in you, and the world. (You heal, you show up better in the world, and that gets passed on.)

But our capacity to receive inspiration and this medicine is becoming vanishingly rare.

Many of my readers and the writers I work with are women and so I know they are all too familiar with giving far more than they receive. With, in fact, being so accustomed to that dynamic--imposed or otherwise--of giver, not receiver, that they may struggle giving themselves permission to receive. It feels wrong or selfish. And anyway, there's no time.

Then there's the modern world, how it grinds down our ability to pay attention, to receive those sweet moments of sunlight on leaves, the way laughter carries on the wind, the particular coziness of a good pair of house socks.

We lose these moments to our phones, the demands placed on us, our inboxes, those we care for. We lose them to advertising and podcast episode binges and content, content, content.

We lose them and we cannot get them back.

Here's The Good News: We can train ourselves to be more present for them from here on out. To increase our capacity to receive what our inner and outer world is trying to show us, to receive it with such particularity that we can get it on the page and give it to someone else.

Is it no surprise that my word for November 2021, for the month of American Thanksgiving, is not give but RECEIVE?

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A few things for you to RECEIVE right now:

1. The Well Gathering, free, from my heart to yours. Register here.

2. This gorgeous piece on the need for solitude from Maria Popova

3. This meditation I created last year on finding sanctuary in your writing.

4. A femme boost of the highest order in the form of my recent article for Publisher's Weekly on why biographies need a makeover.

5. My dear friend Liza from Eff This! Meditation has rebooted her long-missed newsletter - my very favorite thing that lands in my inbox each week. I always learn something, am delighted, and feel like I've gotten a warm hug. You can subscribe here.

6. My meditation mentor and another dear friend, Adreanna Limbach, has the best place going on Instagram. So if you're hit with some FOMO or comparison or rage or whatever...hop over to her space for the mindfulness haikus and stay for the reminders that you are enough, just as you are, you sweet pea of a person.

7. My buddy and pal in all things writing, Camille DeAngelis, has put up a hugely generous video series where she tells you all about what it's like to have your book become a movie starring Timothée Chalamet....and why you still matter as a writer even if that never happens to you.

8. I've been recommending this glorious book to my writer friends and will be sharing more about it at the retreat. A wonderful thing to slowly savor over the coming cold months.


With pumpkin spice love,

The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire

Whenever I teach my annual Mindfulness Immersion for Writers, we’re always looking to see what areas we most need to attend to with our mindfulness practice.

This year, I finally found a reliable quiz you can take and I offer it here as a way to help you assess what next best steps you can take to be more present for this go around of life.

As Mary Oliver said, "Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Devotion to….what? Ah, that’s what you’ll find out the more you awaken.

Let's see where you're at with your mindfulness, shall we?

The Quiz

Here is the questionnaire, called the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. It was developed by Ruth Baer, a professor and mindfulness researcher based at the Kentucky University. The purpose of this quiz is to measure the elements that help us be mindful in the course of our daily lives. The small things we do to be present.

Print it out and take it when you have some quiet time, perhaps with a nice cup of tea, a cat on your lap, and a cozy blanket at hand.

Here's a great article on what the questionnaire is all about.

Scoring Your Mindfulness Assessment

Okay, maybe I'm just not good with numbers (true story), but I found scoring this to be really really confusing. So I figured it out (actually the Zen Master aka Husband figured it out) and here's what you do:

• After you take the test, you'll see a key on the back. We're scoring each of the five facets of mindfulness. For each number in each section you just add up what number you put.

• BUT! For the ones with an "R" you reverse the number. Anything you marked a 3 stays a three. But if you marked a 4, then you only give yourself 2 points (2 is the reverse fo 4, according to this scale). Or, if you marked a 2, then you would give yourself 4 points. The same applies to number 5 and number 1 on the scale.
  

Here's an example:

For question #12, which is the first one with a reverse scoring, I put the number 1 on the scale to answer the question. But I don't give myself 1 point here, because it's reversed. I give myself 5 points.

Now, while it's very frustrating that there is no answer key here to tell us what the score means, the basic idea is: the higher your score in an area, the more mindfulness you have in that area.

40 is the highest mindfulness score in each area. The closer you are to 40, the more mindful you are in that area.

This is great data for us, because you can clearly identify what areas you might need to work on. And if we have a call coming up, we can dig into these results.

I also recommend taking this call periodically, to see where if there are any shifts as you dig into the mindfulness practices of your choice.

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Your Brain on Meditation / Neurological Benefits

This article is a good one, though it's over 10 years old. Below are a few of my favorite bits:


In a study published in the journal Neuro Image in 2009, Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22 meditators and 22 age-matched non-meditators and found that the meditators (who practiced a wide range of traditions and had between five and 46 years of meditation experience) had more gray matter in regions of the brain that are important for attention, emotion regulation, and mental flexibility. Increased gray matter typically makes an area of the brain more efficient or powerful at processing information. Luders believes that the increased gray matter in the meditators’ brains should make them better at controlling their attention, managing their emotions, and making mindful choices....

Like anything else that requires practice, meditation is a training program for the brain. “Regular use may strengthen the connections between neurons and can also make new connections,” Luders explains. “These tiny changes, in thousands of connections, can lead to visible changes in the structure of the brain.” Those structural changes, in turn, create a brain that is better at doing whatever you’ve asked it to do. Musicians’ brains could get better at analyzing and creating music...

Over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice focusing attention on your breath, the brain will restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm acceptance during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more resilient to stress. And if you meditate while cultivating feelings of love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you spontaneously feel more connected to others...

...concentration meditation, in which the meditator focuses complete attention on one thing, such as counting the breath or gazing at an object, activates regions of the brain that are critical for controlling attention. This is true even among novice meditators who receive only brief training. Experienced meditators show even stronger activation in these regions. This you would expect, if meditation trains the brain to pay attention...


After the mindfulness intervention, participants have greater activity in a brain network associated with processing information when they reflect on negative self-statements. In other words, they pay more attention to the negative statements than they did before the intervention. And yet, they also show decreased activation in the amygdala—a region associated with stress and anxiety. Most important, the participants suffered less. “They reported less anxiety and worrying,” Goldin says. “They put themselves down less, and their self-esteem improved.”

Goldin’s interpretation of the findings is that mindfulness meditation teaches people with anxiety how to handle distressing thoughts and emotions without being overpowered by them. Most people either push away unpleasant thoughts or obsess over them—both of which give anxiety more power. “The goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts or emotions. The goal is to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions and learn how to move through them without getting stuck.” The brain scans suggest that the anxiety sufferers were learning to witness negative thoughts without going into a full-blown anxiety response.

Quickie For Your Brain on Meditation

This article in Forbes has a quick run-down with linked medical studies that is useful to scan, as well.

Why We Need To Keep Meditating (Neuroplasticity, yo!)

This is a great article from Psychology Today that gets specifically into the brain science. I love how she talks about the body and increased empathy - so key for us as writers!

But I appreciate even more how she gets into WHY we need to keep up this practice:

However, to maintain your gains, you have to keep meditating. Why? Because the brain can very easily revert back to its old ways if you are not vigilant (I’m referencing the idea of neuroplasticity here). This means you have to keep meditating to ensure that the new neural pathways you worked so hard to form stay strong.

To me, this amazing brain science and the very real rewards gained from meditation combine to form a compelling argument for developing and/or maintaining a daily practice. It definitely motivates me on those days I don’t “feel” like sitting. So, try to remind yourself that meditating every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes, will keep those newly formed connections strong and those unhelpful ones of the past at bay.

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Help Is Here

These are my free resources for mindfulness and meditation.

But if you’re up for it, schedule a call with me or, if I have a meditation or mindfulness course, I’d love for those offerings to be of use to you.

All my free resources for writing etc. can be found on this page.

Here’s to attention and devotion!

This Weekend

Breathe. Write. Repeat.

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

— William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

Join Us

How To Do Right By The Miracle

I was recently on the Illuminate podcast talking about my favorite things…doing right by the miracle, mindfulness for writers, meditation, being in relationship with your writing, Virginia Hall as inspiration for all of us, and so much more. Click below to have a listen! 🎧

I hope it inspires you, gives you yummy books to think about reading, and gets your mind swirling with ways to do right by the miracle on and off the page.

Heather Demetrios is a critically acclaimed author, writing coach, and certified meditation instructor. She’s published books in multiple genres and today she’ll be talking to us about her latest book, Codename Badass: The True Story of Virginia Hall, one of the CIA’s first female spies and a WWII hero. Heather shares how we can apply lessons from history to our own lives, how to have a positive relationship with our creativity, and how we can all learn to “do right by the miracle.”

This episode is hosted by Mariam Muzaffar.

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How To Write A Bingeable Chapter

“
The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can.”

— Emily Dickinson in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862

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This is me getting my Ren Faire on and very happy indeed. I feel like it represents that Emily Dickinson quote above - for me, at least. A sense of personal power, of inner belief that your inner compass is calibrated, so even if you can't see North...the needle can. So you just keep doing you and moving towards YES. My word this month is ALCHEMY—turning metaphorical lead (shadows, disappointments, regrets, uncertainty) into gold (mindfulness for writers, words, equilibrium, joy in creation).

One of my favorite discoveries in the writing laboratory has been my process for writing a solid chapter. Out of all the craft miseries my writers run into, it's not knowing how to craft a chapter that earns its place in the book.

Over the years, I've developed a kind of magical approach that works for me and seems to work for the writers who try it out. It's word alchemy, and I'm willing to share my special recipe with you below.

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How To Write A Chapter

If you're familiar with my Unlock Your Novel workbook (if not, it's free for my newsletter subscribers), then you'll recall me yammering on about what I call "objectives." Let's start there. ("Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..")

Bookending Your Chapter With Objectives

in 10 Steps :

Objective, Pivot, Repeat

This is the single most helpful thing I could ever pass on to you, craft-wise.

I've never heard anyone talk about this concept in quite this way. When my writers revise their messy chapters and bookend with objectives, the chapter is SO MUCH BETTER. It might still need work, but it finally has a purpose, momentum, and it earns its place in the story. Plus, the writer isn't tearing her hair out, unsure if it's working. She knows it's working - a sailor who trusts her compass.

This isn't some kind of hoity-toity formula - it's just good common writing sense. It was me, breaking down what I was doing, what the writers I love do, and what the writers I work with do when their chapter is swinging for the fences and getting them that home run.

What is an objective?

"Objective" is a term I cribbed from the acting Method teacher, Konstantin Stanislavski. It's basically the desire a character has in a scene. So, when Romeo walks into the church with the poison in his pocket and the news that Juliet is dead is confirmed, his objective is to kill himself so he can be with her - in fact, he had that objective before he walked into the church. That way, the second he shows up on the page, he's bringing a LOT of generative energy with him. (Pro Tip: Think about what your character is doing just before the scene begins so that they can come into it with that energy).

Imagine if Shakespeare wrote that scene with Romeo not having that poison in his pocket. Imagine if he just had Romeo discover she's dead - first, we'd be like, dude why are you in a church the cops are after you and the priests in your town are shady. And then Romeo walks in and....what? Philosophizes about death? Braids Juliet's hair?

By giving Romeo a clear objective at the top of the scene (kill himself with the poison in his pocket), Shakespeare has:

1. Given Romeo something specific to do. The scene immediately has focus. Focus = energy. Energy = what John Gardner in The Art of Fiction calls "profluence" (a fancy MFA term that describes when a writer is giving the reader enough mystery to make predictions, enough uncertainty to want to see how things plays out, and enough action to look forward to, thus giving the reader the desire to turn the page and see what happens. It's a good thing. Have more of it in your work). This focus also allows us to know what the point of the scene is and track with the proto.

2. Given Romeo a ticking clock. Eventually, someone will come into the church and try and stop him. Also, he's sort of in trouble re: Tybalt. So he has to hurry. Now we have urgency. This increases pacing and adds tension and suspense. Tension + suspense = drama.

3. The thing Romeo is doing is scene-specific and emotionally resonant. It also dovetails nicely with his Character Keys. (This is something I talk about in Unlock and my on-demand Writing Bingeable Characters course. The Character Keys (to unlocking your novel) are their Desperate Desire, Longing, Misbelief, and Purpose). Scene specific means we're in the character's skin, the plot is generating from within scene, which means you are writing from within the moment. This makes the work more urgent, exciting, and present. It's highly mindful. And the reader can't put it down.

P.S. Romeo's Keyring is:

DD (Desperate Desire): To have true love.

Longing: To belong to a loving family.

MB (Misbelief): That he is nothing without this love.

Purpose: To open his heart to people, regardless of their family. (Re: Juliet, Mercutio, Tybalt)

4. The objective has given him STAKES. What is at stake is his life. Stakes are where my writers get really tripped up, but it's simply asking yourself, over and over: What is at stake if my character gets what she wants in this scene? What is at stake if she doesn't? Then, you put your stakes through the cards - that's British Secret Service speak for "vetting" them. If what's at stake doesn't matter much, then you need to revise the objective. Give them something they want in the scene that matters.

Note: What "matters" doesn't have to be life and death. Stakes would be high if Romeo really had to pee. Like, he wants this deep moment with his love and to kill himself and all, but he doesn't want to go down as the lover who pissed himself. So this scene could equally be intense if he was trying to find a bathroom in the cathedral. Is it a sin to pee in the communion cup?

5. So, you start your chapter with an objective, a clear desire for that particular scene (it may or may not be related to their Character Keys, but will still be tracking. Having to pee? Not Romeo's Desperate Desire key. But it still works). Problem is, a lot of writers stop there. They think that's enough. The character wants something and they either get it or don't. WRONG. Now you just have a character who wants something and then they winge about how hard it is to get with lots of internal moping and philosophizing and maybe they eat a sandwich. What you need are OBSTACLES to getting what they want. Remember: Tension + suspense = drama. Readers heart drama. So how do you get it? OBSTACLES.

6. Obstacles are what get your reader's heart racing like it's a Montague looking to kick some Capulet ass. A chapter without obstacles is boring AF so be sure to include them. Obstacles can be big or small. The key to them being filled with tension, suspense, conflict, and all those yummy things is that obstacles force your protagonist to pivot, strategize, and possibly change their objective. Stop being so nice to them. Make them work hard for the money!

When a character has to pivot and strategize and maybe even change their objective because of events, it gets really exciting. Let's talk R & J again.

Romeo drink the poison, he's dying, but just as he's dying JULIET WAKES UP OH HELL. Now, he's out of options, he dies (spoiler alert and if you're a writer who doesn't know that, I have concerns). But guess what? Now JULIET has to pivot! She has an obstacle.

She thought she was so smart. She went into this scene unconscious, but with a plan - fake her death, then be with her beloved. But now he's dead. What to do? She pivots. Ah! He has a "dagger." So what does she do? Yeah, we know: she dies. Great obstacles and boy did Juliet pivot.

Note: When we watch characters react, we get to see and learn a lot more about them. This is the heart of show don't tell. As we say in the theatre, "acting is reacting." We want active characters, not passive ones. Active characters take what's coming at them and it's interesting for us to see what they do.

7. These pivots create plot and story. Things move forward or back, as does your character's growth as they move toward the climax, what I call the "enlightenment," when their misbelief is overcome and they get their unconscious need (you can't always get what you want, but if you try some time, you find you get what you need). Note that a chapter always needs to move your character either forward through their arc, or back (as in, a setback). This is how a book is built, one freaking fantastic chapter after another.

8. So your character is pivoting and then you get to the end of the scene. This is where I often cry writer's tears (and then need a glass of that good Irish stuff of the same name). So many chapters I read flop at the end. They kind of just...stall. There's no profluence, nothing to read for. There's no unanswered question, no clear guidance on what to look forward to. RED FLAG! MAYDAY! But I've got you. All you need to be sure to do is to END YOUR CHAPTER WITH A NEW OBJECTIVE.

Now, your character wants something else and they will try to get it in the next chapter. Sometimes, it's even carried over and is the first objective in the next chapter, which is very efficient writing indeed.

And because you've done such a stellar job of showing us that you can deliver the goods, we're excited to see them go through the whole dance of desire all over again, so we turn the page instead of pick up our phone.

This thing they want at the end of the chapter, just like the first objective, doesn't have to be big, it just has to have a generative quality that requires some form of action in the future in order to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the objective.

Chapter ending objectives can be, but aren't limited to:

- a resolution (they come to a decision based on events in the scene)

- a reveal: we learn something big, get the next clue, find out who the killer is, etc.

- a choice (a choice was presented and they took the road less travelled and we can't wait to see how it plays out)

- a death (always good profluence): This can be literal or a breakup or the loss of something important.

The character must have a choice hanging in the air: to be or not to be, that is the question.

- a cliffhanger (not necessary, but flashy and fun sometimes)

- an unsettled-ness, an unanswered question, uncertainty of a kind that is interesting (example: a chapter ends with the parents saying, "you're grounded for a week" and the kid walks up the stairs smiling because....Mom and Dad are out of town next week. Hello, party! Now we have to read to see what happens!)

If R& J were a novel, we know that the chapter would end with Romeo drinking the poison just as Juliet wakes up. That chapter is his POV, so he'd say, "Thus with a kiss, I die" and then her eyes would open. His objective would be: DON'T DIE YOU DUMBASS. Alas. The chapter would end with Romeo gasping for breath, seeing her alive. If you stop reading there you must be a Death Eater.


See how this plays out in the next chapter:

Romeo's objective to stay alive (the bookend that ends the chapter, where his initial objective had been to die....nice twist, that) leads us into the next chapter - will he live? Will Juliet somehow magically have an antidote? Hell no. That apothecary wouldn't have given her a freebie. His poverty - but not his will - consented to this crazy plan.

The objective leaves things uncertain, and so...we turn the page.

The next chapter is in Juliet's POV. Think of this dual-POV as a relay race. Romeo's objective (don't die!), is the baton he hands off to Juliet. Her objective is - wake his ass up! He can't be dead. We are star-crossed!!! She runs with it, but not far: he dies.

So the objective that is bookended with this scene is Juliet being awake and having to immediately pivot from happy aliveness to keeping her man from dying. Her objective when she went to sleep was to surprise Romeo in Mantua and live in a trailer park, happily ever after. But now that objective is gone, then her next one (keep him alive) disappears too - he's dead. She needs to pivot again. She needs a new objective.

So you get Claire Danes ugly crying and looking around and all those candles and Leo looking so hot, and then she sees the dagger. Pivot. Strategize. This is interesting, right? What would you do? The clock is ticking.

If her parents know she's alive, they'll totally make her marry Paris and who cares if he is Paul Rudd, he's not Leo. She sees the dagger (gun). Pivot. Strategize. Romeo is dead. He died for me. His gun worked on Tybalt, so...In for a penny, in for a pound.

Objective at the end of the scene: Juliet decides to kill herself. And then she does.

9. Notice how you kept reading R& J after the death scene. Why? Your characters are dead. Why bother? PROFLUENCE, that's why. (Remember, that's the desire to keep reading.) We hope there is a mistake, we have to see someone actually confirm it. And when we get to the end, and everyone is mourning (for never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo) we are like AW HELL NO.

Shakespeare got us to keep reading after they died because he knew we'd want to know if it was really true, and we want to see the community react. We want to see what this means for Montagues and Capulets. Juliet's choice to die in this relay race hands the baton over to the Prince and co., who now have to clean up this mess and make sense of it all.

Objective for them: Figure out what the fuck happened.

And so the whole play ends on a massive objective: the community, understanding it was their fault these kids are dead, strategizes and pivots away from their turf war and decide things have to change. New Objective: to have peace between the warring families. We don't know if this will work. I mean, they're Italian. Let's be real. The Montague and Capulet boys only know how to look hot while waving about swords. So this loose end keeps the profluence rolling along. The curtain goes down and yet the show must go on: we still get to imagine all the ways things might play out in Verona. I'm thinking some Nurse / Apothecary fanfic? Balthazar and Paris?

10. I gave you an example of the end of a play, but imagine we were doing the balcony scene instead and there were more chapters to come. Objectives are the gift that keep on giving because they set you up for the next scene, the next chapter, and you can write the whole damn book objective by objective. (And this way, you don't have to go around looking for birds to write it bird by bird).

What happens? Juliet goes back up to the balcony after a pool party of two. Romeo is like, ummmmmm....

R: "Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

J: "What satisfaction cans't thou have tonight?"

R: "The exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine."

J: "I gave thee mine before thou dids't request it!"

Look at all this profluence. Yo, they got ENGAGED. New objective: find a way to get sneaky married.

Old Will has set himself up for the next scene - this thing writes itself! All Shakespeare has to do is just keep passing the Baton of Objectives (which is obviously made of Valerian steel) from the beginning of a scene (that's "chapter" to you novelists) to the end of the next chapter to the beginning of the next one and so on, until we get to that fateful moment in the church when they get married and then again when they die (in your book, that would be the climax of the novel).

Below, happier times in said church.

And there you have it!

Try working in this way for yourself and see what happens. And if you dug this, then you're really going to have a blast in my Writing Bingeable Characters course.

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Whatever obstacles are coming YOUR way, I hope you get lots of opportunities to alchemize your lead into gold.

Fly, my pretties, fly !

Want to change your thought patterns? Here's how.

“I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present. ”

— Martha Beck

A Daily Empowerment Practice To Rewire Your Thoughts and Banish Limiting Beliefs

*** Please note: for a download of the Be-Do-Feel-Have PDF, be sure to sign up for my newsletter! 

The process I’m about to outline was inspired by an interview mindset coach Jim Fortin gave on the Mind Your Business podcast, where he spoke about reprogramming your mind for better performance. Now, just writing that sentence made me feel a bit gross – raise your hand if you’ve had it with the mass buy-in of boss girl culture, hustle, and high-octane performance. I know I have (even if it continues to intrigue me). So before I get into the goods, I want to dig into how we might come at “growth mindset” work from a place of integrity, and give you a quick hint about what’s to come.

Growth Mindset For Writers

In a nutshell, Fortin offers up a template of four statements that you write every single day in order to rewire your brain and create new grooves for thoughts that will help you reach your goals so that you don’t keep walking in the trenches of the thoughts and limiting beliefs that are running you and ultimately keeping you from your goals as a writer.

I work with the statements myself and find them to be in alignment with other thought work I’ve done along the lines of Martha Beck or James Clear. I like the succinct nature of the statements, writing them each day, and it jives with what I believe to be true in my own direct, lived experience with mindfulness and meditation. I also think the science checks out.

But.

Mindful Growth Mindset – Is it Possible?

As a mindfulness practitioner and teacher, there is a lot about growth mindset and self-development (“self-help” for those of you who are tired of adapting to new lingo) that does not play well with a spiritual practice of being present and learning to sit with discomfort and what is in order to become more awake in this lifetime. It certainly doesn’t pair well with teachings on impermanence and a path to freedom that necessitates releasing yourself from attachment and clinging to anything and anyone. Finally, a lot of growth mindset is embedded in the ego…not so helpful for anyone working with the concept of one-ness / emptiness / no self that is the most confusing part of Buddhist psychology for writers, and one I’m only just beginning to wrap my head around in a workable way.

One of my biggest issues with many personal growth practices is that they don’t start from a ground zero that assumes you are whole, you are enough right now just as you are, and that you probably already have and are what you’ve been looking for. They assume you lack something and that you need a practice to get the thing. I think you’re whole, just as you are, and we just need to shine a light on some of the places within you that have yet to be fully explored.

But my very biggest issue with this work is how it’s often only available to those who have a surplus of resources: time, money, personal bandwidth.

If you’re reading this, you likely live in the developed world and have access to basic needs. Otherwise, work like this would be on the bottom of your list of priorities. The elephant in this particular room also needs to be addressed: As a middle-class, educated American white woman, any talk about growth mindset also feels…yucky. I’m able to access these concepts from an immense place of safety and surety and power, and so I want to put on the table from the outset that if you’re a BIPOC writer or from a country that lacks the riches of the US or are personally struggling financially, I recognize the discomfort that comes with this discussion for both of us, and the pain it may cause you. Please know that I am carrying this as best I can in the work we engage in together. I see you. I see me. And I’m working from a place of clear eyes and a full heart.

All of this to say:

This healthy aversion to podcasts like the one that inspired this exploration we’re on might have kept me from listening to the Fortin interview at all, had it not been for my dear friend, the author Camille DeAngelis, who shared how engaging in this work for a solid year was transforming her mindset and her life, with wonderful real-world results for her writing and creativity and livelihood. She encouraged me to check it out for myself. I decided to interrogate the idea of neural persuasion and growth mindset in a deeper way than ever before and found myself falling down a rabbit hole of exploring my discomfort with all things law of attraction, The Secret, manifestation culture, and magical thinking. (My mind always goes to, So what, people with no water in Africa just don’t “want” it enough to manifest a well in the middle of their village?)

It took me a while, but I found a way to line this work up with my integrity.

By the end of my deep dive (which, by the way, is only really scratching the surface of the ocean of wisdom out there), I felt that much of what Fortin said in this podcast checks out and is highly workable, but only if I tweaked his practice to reflect a mindful, feminist value system, with a heart-centered and inclusive approach.

Subconscious Transformation & Neuro Persuasion

Fortin is an expert in subconscious transformation and “neuro persuasion” –basically known as “subconscious reprogramming” of the neural pathways in your brain. In mindfulness, we might talk about these pathways as the neural thought grooves we create, the storylines that run us, and what the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “habit energy.” These are the trenches in our mind where our limiting beliefs and misbeliefs have their guns trained on our self-confidence, engaging in daily attacks to weaken our personal power.

James Clear digs into this territory quite a bit in his wonderful book Atomic Habits, as do other experts on growth mindset. It’s not so much that the concepts Fortin presents are entirely new; it’s the simple power of the process he outlines in working with them that I have personally found to be so effective. When I’m working with a writer who is overcome by limiting beliefs, I offer this work up; it invites a great deal of clarity and aids in cultivating a healthy creator’s mindset. This, in turn, provides a firm mental foundation from which the writer can build a sustainable and flourishing writing practice. Like meditation and mindfulness, neural persuasion is a tool that can help you navigate the ups and downs of the writer’s life with a bit more elegance and a lot more joy.

For the purposes of our exploration, I’m offering a few of the delicious tidbits from this otherwise somewhat problematic podcast episode (two rich white guys talking about manifesting wealth without acknowledging any of their privilege or the real obstacles people face = yuck). But I never throw the baby out with the bathwater, so.

Below is the link to the interview, if you want to listen for yourself – don’t say I didn’t warn you! And for those of you who are trying to create more pockets of silence in your life for optimum flow and creativity and general mental hygiene….perhaps don’t click. (Ahem. You know who you are!)

https://www.mindyourbusinesspodcast.com/blog/114

Brain Science

As I mentioned above, the idea of this work might feel like another manifestation / Law of Attraction thing, but it’s not – or, at least, not in the way I do it. (While I believe our energy does attract some of what comes into our lives, I find a reliance on manifestation problematic and just plain bullshit on many levels).

This work that Fortin presents in regards to neuro persuasion is based on the premise James Clear shares in Atomic Habits, as well: in order to change the concept you currently hold of your identity, you have to change your thoughts. For example, working from an identity of I am a procrastinator to I am a writer who writes every day requires a serious mental shift in self perception. Easier said than done.

We talk about this all the time when I get into mindfulness for writers. This is ye olde brain science: neural plasticity, neural pathways, prefrontal cortex, etc. Meditation is one way to carve new neural pathways in your brain – the thought work we do, like changing the genre of your thoughts, is getting rid of old pathways (stories that aren’t true) and creating newer, healthier ones.

This is a great article on Vox about neuroscience and the ways our brains can be tricked or trick us:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/20978285/optical-illusion-science-humility-reality-polarization

Fortin shared the oft-cited concept that “You are where your attention is.” This is territory that has been covered very well in both sports psychology and performance coaching. I myself have written about this in my “Sports Psychology For Writers” post. Nothing new to see here, but it is true. If you have the thought, “I’m a procrastinator,” then your focus is on shame and blame and nothing changes. But if your thought is, “I’m someone who is resilient” then suddenly you are much more capable of busting through your procrastination. You are where your attention is – it can be on procrastination or resilience. Choose your own adventure.

Fortin suggests that most mindset transformation techniques don’t work because they focus on the left brain – the analytical, logic brain – which is at the conscious level and therefore much harder to change. But if you go into the right brain – the subconscious, intuitive, flow space we love and cultivate so much as writers – then you get into the place where you can actually reprogram your brain.

Research shows – and this is true, I’ve heard it time and again – that our brain does not know the difference between real or imaginary images and events and stories. If it sees violence on TV, it logs it the same as if it had happened IRL. This is terrible for trauma, but good for affirmations and brain reprogramming at the subconscious level. Your brain does not know the difference and so you can reprogram it to believe you are who you want to be. Within reason, of course. Too much so-called “reprogramming” and you end up in a room with white walls and a locked door.

And, then, there’s my big pet peeve with this work: affirmations that are basically asking you to lie to yourself all the live-long day. (“I am a millionaire. I am a NYT Bestselling author.” “[insert your wild dream here]”) Maybe those things will be true for you someday and you know on a deep gut level you can make it happen, but if hey aren’t true right now and you keep repeating those phrases over and over, you’ll likely just feel like crap because you know they’re not true and so not only are you lying to yourself (how unkind!), you can’t even believe the lies on any level, which is why these types of affirmations rarely work and only result in self-delusion, frustration, and depression.

So, a personal side note before engaging in any kind of work like this:

I’m putting on my feminist and mindfulness hats here, since Fortin left those at home for this interview…

You are already enough. You are already whole.

So my come from with this work is that we are returning to who we are, our highest self. Not becoming someone else. This work is never meant to take you away from home base, or lessen your self worth, or create a sense of comparisons or ideals.

Just like with my You Have A Process work that I do one-on-one with my writers, our goal with neural persuasion is to access your true desires, your process, what works for you, makes you happy, makes you aligned with your integrity.

Affirmations are tricky: it’s all about intention, and that idea of returning to self, or accessing highest self – not, as is so often the case, about telling yourself yet another untrue story about yourself or your life, only to be totally devastated when you can’t “manifest” properly.

This work is all about accessing who you already are on your very best day.

For example, if I say, “I already have a bestselling novel” that is 100% bullshit. I do not. That kind of affirmation is not what I’m about. But if I were to say, “I have already written a bestselling book” (if you have a manuscript) or “I have a bestseller in me” (if you haven’t completed the book yet) – now we’re getting somewhere. Can you taste the difference with these statements, and see why one is bullshit and one is waking up to your potential?

The truth is that if I do the shadow work, the inner work, the meditation, the mindfulness: then I will get to a place where I truly can see that I already have written a bestselling book (or that I have one in me) – it’s just that the sales part is not up to me. But I wrote it. I did my job. And so I go out into the world like a boss lady who has written a bestselling novel, because I have.

I know it’s worthy of that (this is not dissimilar from the Martha Beck “Defrosting Your Thoughts” exercise I wrote about). The fun part is that I’ll probably get much closer to that cool seat on the list because, energetically, I’m putting out much less desperate vibes. And people are drawn to confidence. And, I’ll put good effort into promoting the book and befriend my scarcity instead of believing that there aren’t enough seats at the table. All of this means more people see the book, word of mouth increases, I feel good because I know I’ve done what I can and am working from a place of personal power, where my worth isn’t tied up in my book or it’s sales. Personal power is attractive. We don’t know what it will bring into our lives, but it will bring something useful or delightful or interesting. You can bet on it.

Bonus: Let’s say the book doesn’t ever hit the list. How do you think I’ll feel? I know I wrote a book worthy of being a bestseller. I feel and have been projecting confidence, and that has likely brought some incredible experiences and opportunities and people my way. Let’s just say I’d feel better than if I hadn’t done this work and assumed I was invisible and my book would tank. Actual bestseller or no, with this mindset, you always come out ahead.

Hope is the thing with feathers. So fly, baby, fly.

A Caveat: Manifestation? Um…No. And Yes.

I have to put on the table one of my biggest reservations about anything involving affirmations or manifestation or Law of Attraction: It often feels reserved for those most privileged and it suggests that people who are legit suffering are only doing so because of their mindset. That being said….Fortin has a point in this interview. Even if you’re really down on your luck, your mindset is the best chance you have of changing the narrative, whether you’re in a refugee camp or Hollywood. Still, it’s much harder in a refugee camp, and there are far fewer ways to change your situation, not to mention trauma.

But you are not in a refugee camp, probably. You are likely from a background where you have enough to care for yourself that you can even read this (and high-five for your grit if you made time to read this even when you are experiencing a severe lack of resources). Most of you are lucky to have the bandwidth to do this work and because we have the opportunity, we should take it because it will ultimately help us do right by the miracle, to, as Alice Walker says, pay our rent for being on earth through our activism (and writing good books is always a form of activism in the fight against darkness and despair). If you were very woo, you might even say that if enough of us engage in doing right by the miracle with deep intentionality, then we could actually raise the vibration of the planet. (I’m on the fence about that concept, but I do see the ripple effect of good vibes in my immediate vicinity when I do the hard inner work of not being an asshole all the time, so, yeah, I’m open to it).

Reprogramming Your Mind

This work is fundamentally about reprogramming your subconscious mind. Fortin talks about how most people work from where they currently are to where they want to be – but that’s a backwards strategy.

You have to work from a place of arrival, of having already stepped into your highest potential and have the thing you want – you’re already her, remember? You’re already there. You’re at the fire. It’s just that all those limiting beliefs are the smoke that keep you from seeing your true self. This work is about clearing away that smoke.

Don’t forget: the mind can’t tell the difference between real and fake. So the more you do the work of truly believing something that is true to be true (even when your mind wants to tell you otherwise), the more the subconscious mind gets on board and believes it too. This affects your behavior and ultimately gets you much closer to what you want.

To be clear: You are not lying to yourself. You’re not tricking your brain. You are not saying things you don’t believe.

That being said, some of this work could be aspirational in nature – but more on that later.

James Clear, sports psychologists, and other performance experts all say the same thing: In order change a habit, you have to first start with your identity. If you want to be the kind of person who wakes up early, then you have to believe you are a person who wakes up early. And then…wake up early.

But the believing part is the hard part, and that’s where this important work of subconscious neural rewiring comes in. You’re basically hypnotizing yourself. You’re telling yourself a new story about yourself, but it’s a true one. Your conscious mind just doesn’t know it yet, so it keeps acting out in the same old behavioral patterns, running over those same old neural pathways of habits that are keeping you from what you want.

This actually ties in super well with my love for Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Mapping and the concept of Core Desired Feelings. Because you’re taking your focus off the goal and focusing on your feelings, your self.

LaPorte’s question is: What do you need to do to feel the way you want to feel?

Fortin wrote the prequel question to that: Who do you want to be, and then what do you need to do, to feel the way you want to feel?

We don’t want a thing, we want a feeling.

Every NYT Bestseller I know is miserable. So why would I want to be on the list? I don’t want to be miserable! What I want is the feeling that I imagine the list would give me: the security, the validation of a seat at the table for a little bit longer, the money, the hope that more of my words will be read by more people, and that I can maybe change the world for the better, just a little bit.

But there are more ways than the list to accomplish those things, no?

I’m not interested in being Icarus. I want to be Circe, who felt invisible, lived on her island, made friends with lions, and found her inner magic. And turned bad men into pigs.

So Fortin (and LaPorte) are saying: People are doing mindset reprogramming backwards, which is why most self-development mindset Jedi stuff doesn’t work. They focus on what they want, but you won’t have what you want without changing the way you show up in the world.

Practical Magic: The Be – Do – Feel - Have Formula

So we start with a question, this from Fortin:

·      Who would I be, what would I do, how would I feel if I already had_________________?

That blank is for you to fill in: the thing you really want.

Note: we’re not talking small potatoes here. We’re talking the big thing. It might be quitting your day job and being a full-time writer with a bestselling vampire series.

It could be a certain amount of money that feels Bezos-level safe to you. You couldn’t spend it all if you tried.

It could be a partnership, business, government position…whatever.

Basically, it’s the thing that, if you were Jerry Maguire, you would say it “completes” you. This is something some of you might need to do a bit of work on as you engage in neural reprogramming because nothing completes you. In fact, you complete yourself. You’re complete already—the rest is gravy. Don’t believe me? Name one thing that you thought completed you in the past and then later realized did not. See? Nothing but you completes you.

Say it: I complete me.

I’ll wait.

The concept around this statement Fortin is working with (Who would I be, what would I do, how would I feel if I already had_________________?) is that we begin to reject the ineffective “Have – Do – Be” mentality.

This is where you have the thing you want, so you do the work you want, and you are the person you want to be – which doesn’t work because it’s backwards…you don’t have the thing you want, that’s the whole damn problem. So you’re always stuck at Step One.

Instead, we work from a Be – Do – (Feel)- Have mentality.

You be the person you want to be by changing your identity re: James Clear in Atomic Habits. If you want to be the kind of person who writes every morning, then you would say, “I am someone who writes every morning and so I have a regular writing practice.” Then you need to actually get your bum in the chair every morning. If you manage that, then you feel like a person who commits to what she cares about and then you have that regular writing practice.

I call this practical magic. It feels like a spell, but it’s really just healthy mental hygiene and good habits. (As opposed to magical thinking, which is just saying affirmations and hoping that writing practice you want will manifest).

So, keep that in mind: Be - Do - Feel - Have

Your Be-Do-Feel-Feel-Have Formula

I don’t know if Fortin calls his formula this, but I like it, so that’s how I’ll be referring to it from now on.

Write the following statements every day, first thing in the morning. It may take a while to get to the statements that feel “right,” so you might have different ones each day for a while.

1.     Being: “I am____________________________.”

2.     Doing [verb]: “I_______________________________.”

3.     Feeling: “I feel___________________________.”

4.     “I already have___________________________.”

*** The “already” is key because it has to be something you truly already have. Again, this isn’t Law of Attraction or lying to yourself. You’re getting clear on what you already bring to the table, and this work amplifies that. For example, my #4 statement is:

I already have made my mark on the world.

I bet any of you could say that, and it’s all to varying degrees. (Just consider the Butterfly Effect). The reason I’m doing this work is because I want to amplify that—I want to make a larger mark on the world. By reminding myself every day that I have already made my mark on the world, I release my fear that I won’t make my mark, I release my desperation to mark my mark before I do (As in Hamilton: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”). So, now, I can rest in the assurance that I’ve already done what I have set out to do. I just want to do more of it. This allows me to come from a place of abundance, versus scarcity. And notice there is no icky residue to this work because I’m not lying to myself. In fact, I’m opening myself up to the truth of me, and claiming it.

My current Be- Do – Feel - Have Formula as of August 2021:

1.     I am a luminary. 

2.     I do right by the miracle. I help girls and women connect to their highest selves.

3.     I feel essential.

4.     I already have made my mark on the world.  

Breaking Down the Be – Do – Feel - Have Formula

With the statement you choose, you’re being committed to the outcome you want, and taking responsibility for it. “I am” statements are going to be the easiest way in here.

Example: “Being”

I am a luminary.

Definition of Luminary: a person who inspires or influences others, especially one prominent in a particular sphere

You don’t have to choose a noun, but it seemed to be most helpful to me. Up to you!

I had to dig deep and think, Who am I when I’m at my best, most highest self, deeply aligned with my integrity and purpose? On my death bed, on my gravestone, what do I want to be known as? What identity would include my writing, teaching, coaching, spiritual practice, personal relationships, ethics, activism, etc.?

To be fair, my friend Camille DeAngelis came up with the word for herself when she did this work and said I could use it, too, and it was way too good to pass up. 

A Note On Word Choice: This is important! If you haven’t read The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte, I highly recommend it – she has so many delicious exercises about choosing the word that feels juuuuust right.

For example, you might be trying to decide between visionary, luminary, light-bringer, trailblazer…So you’d write them out, live with them for a bit. Look them up, look up synonyms. You might decide on one for a week and realize it doesn’t fit. You’re a writer, so you know words matter. You have plenty of time to find the right one. Have fun with this!

So you really want to go beyond the basic: “I am a bestselling author.” What about: “I am a thought leader?” See if you can really find a holistic statement.

Fortin, Laporte, and others working in the field of beginning with identity to goal-set, motivate, and cleanse your mindset makes it clear that if you don’t alter your ways of being, you won’t get what you want. So you want to focus on being, not on what you want.

Example: “Doing” [verb of choice]

I do right by the miracle. I help girls and women connect to their highest selves.

For me, doing right by the miracle means paying my rent for being on this earth (as Alice Walker says) and I do that through helping girls and women connect to their highest selves, be that in my writing, coaching, teaching, or advocacy work. Notice that I’m using active verbs here, in the present tense. I could get more specific if I wanted to, but this works for me now. You might say, “I write books that help the world heal from hate and oppression.”

You want to think about what characteristics you would need to have in order to be a visionary or luminary or thought leader or healer or whatever your “being” is. Those qualities you bring to the table with your being are what you list here for your “doing.” This is a practical endeavor, sleeves rolled up and doing the work of your life.

Example: “Feeling”

I feel essential.

I like to think of myself as an essential worker, and feeling essential is important to me – I don’t want to do work that is just about me or for me. I want to be of service (it’s my love language). So feeling essential helps me know I’m in my integrity, following my North Star, being of use to others (While also honoring my own desires, etc. – I’m not talking being a martyr. I love doing what I love while at the same time impacting others positively). If I’m not essential to whatever work I’m engaged in, then that’s a red flag for me personally. I think about how my Army midwife friend felt so proud of being able to use that phrase “essential worker” during the early days of COVID and had a T-shirt that read, I am essential on the front. That’s a good feeling!

It could help to revisit the Desire Mapping concept of Core Desired Feelings if you’re a bit stuck on this one.

Example: “I already have”

I already have made my mark on the world. 

Admittedly, this one is both selfish and service-oriented. There is a part of me that wants to leave this earth having made a good impact, a little part of me that is eternal. Well, as long as Earth exists, anyway. My writing feels like that. But it’s also service-oriented: the idea of leaving the world a better place because I was on it, and that the work I do has a ripple effect the size and impact of which I will never know, but believe is, for the most part, a good one.

Fortin says the key here is that identity drives your way of being. So if you already have whatever it is you want, then you both are the person you want to be and do what you want to do and feel the way you want to feel.

Again, this can get a bit wonky: Are we lying to ourselves? No. Because we’re doing the work, the inner work, the shadow work, the work of waking up.

We’re starting with “be.” We are human beings, not humandoings or humanhavings.

And, remember, our little feminist spin on this is that we already are these things and have these things. It’s like we’re dusty mirrors and this work is cleaning off the grime so we can see ourselves better and live as our highest, truest selves in the world.

As I mentioned before: When I hear people talk about affirmation work, a part of me cringes because it feels like a lie. But read my statements. You know me. At least well enough to be willing to read this long-ass manifesto. Look at my four things. Am I lying to myself?

No. I believe all these things are within me and have been expressed in real life in different ways, but I don’t always live like I believe it. For example, sometimes I doubt if I’m essential when my books don’t sell. This is where inner critic, self-doubt, etc. comes in. And that’s why we do this work.

If I tell myself the truth—that I’m essential—and I tell myself that every day, it’s a lot harder for the inner critic to tell me I’m worthless.

Inner Quality Transfer / Conversion

This isn’t something Fortin gets into, or if he does I don’t remember it, but it’s something I work with my writer on a lot:

We all have characteristics, identity aspects, inner qualities. For example, you may be loyal or hardworking, or creative.

When we do this work, though, we’re often trying to get to a place we don’t feel we’re at yet. But here is where the mindfulness comes in: you’re already at that place. There’s just a lot of fog around and you can’t see it. Or, you can work with the dusty mirror metaphor.

But let’s say you don’t quite get that, and what you want to put down is something aspirational. You are so used to the concepts of affirmations, that this whole Be – Do – Have isn’t quite clicking. (In fact, if you struggle with character desire, this is probably why – so pay attention and use this on your protagonist!).

This work doesn’t work if what you put down is purely aspirational, something that isn’t true about who you are, but you really wish it were.

However, you can transfer or convert a quality about yourself that you have in one area of your life and work towards bringing it into another area of your life.

If you’re doing the inner work, the aspirational stuff is actually already true. You just need to wake up to it. You don’t see what you’re capable of yet, but something in you thinks you can do this, that it’s in there. And you just need some new neural pathways to make it happen.

Example of Inner Quality Transference

Let’s say you want to be committed to your writing, but you really feel like a procrastinator. You rarely sit down to work, you talk more about writing than actually doing it.

Part of you is tempted to have your “I am” statement (your identity) be “I am committed to my writing”….but you know you’re not. That’s the whole problem. To say that would be a total lie because you’re not. That’s the old way of Law of Attraction thinking that just doesn’t work, right?

But let’s do this: Is there an area in your life where you have demonstrated the quality of “commitment”? Your relationships, your day job, your spiritual practice? Somewhere, I know, you must be following through.

Okay, so we revise this statement to make it true:

“I am someone who commits to what she cares about.”

Yes?

Now, you do the work of neural persuasion—this is how new thought grooves (neural pathways) are created in your mind. This is how the big shifts happen. Every day, you write this statement I am someone who commits to what she cares about. It’s true, but your goal is to believe it to be true, to climb out of the old mental thought trench you were in that you are someone who isn’t committed, who is in fact a procrastinator (that’s an alias, a fake identity—you can let it go now).

Over time, if you really work with this every day, you’ll dig that new neural pathway in your brain. You’ll find, perhaps through concerted effort or very little effort on your part, that you show up to your writer’s seat on the regular. Why? Because you’re a person who commits to what she cares about. And you care about your writing. So showing up is now just what you do. It’s who you are. It’s your identity.

Is it magic? Nope. Just noticing the qualities in yourself that are already there and trusting and amplifying them. Giving them attention. Tending to them like new houseplants.

Revising Your Be – Do – Feel - Have Statements

It takes time to find the statements that are just right. It might involve a lot of journaling and revising, changing a word here or there. Don’t worry. Just keep working with the statements each day, revising as needed. You’ll land on the ones that work for now. And you might need to revise them again down the road, with new areas of your life that are aching for some neural pathway renovation.

You also might find that as you revise these statements you get further from ones that feel pie-in-the-sky grasping, materialistic, clinging aspirations to ones that actually resonate on a deep, spiritual level with you.

Reworking This To Reflect A Mindful Approach

***This work gets a bit janky and complicated for me as a mindfulness practitioner, because our focus is being in the here and now, accepting whatever the moment is offering up to us. But this work seems to be telling you to do the opposite. In fact, Fortin himself said, “You need to work from this place, to see things as you want them to be, not as they are.” I disagree with him here. Big time!

I would rephrase this to be, “You need to work from this place, of trusting that you are already your highest self and that your brain is telling you stories that are keeping you from re-connecting with her.” You are already complete, whole, and perfect. You are everything you need. You are just across the river and you feel like you’re without a boat right now, stranded from the who is you on your best day, as your highest self. This work is the boat so that you can be her on the regular. As one of my writers told me: “Once you get to the other side of the river, you realize there never was a boat.” So true. You are your own ship and the captain of it. Ahoy!

Fortin says, “Where is your attention and where do you keep your attention?”

He gave a classic example: If your attention is on “I have no money” then you will have no money – you are accepting your unconscious paradigm that you are a person with no money. But if you attention is on, “My money is out there waiting for me and I just need to find it” now we’re getting somewhere. Now you’re working from a place of hope and motivation. Your money is out there, even if your pockets are empty. Make sense? Sure, this reads like You Are A Badass At Making Money – but that book actually did kind of kick my butt in a good way. Sometimes we need that. Even if we’re rolling our eyes at the same time.

The idea here is that in repeating these phrases, writing them each day, you are literally rewiring your subconscious neural patterns. Just like meditation, you won’t necessarily realize at first that’s what’s happening in there. So you want to pay attention. Journal as things shift for you. Notice how you show up differently. Notice if you are in Be- Do – Have or in Have – Do – Be. (( Remember, you want to be in a Be – Do – Have mentality ))

Naming Your Baseline

And, finally:

Fortin suggests coming up with a baseline that you will not allow your bad habits to go past. It’s your line in the sand. Your integrity gut check. (Please read Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity!). His idea is that if you don’t have a baseline, then you’ll allow your unskillful behavior to continue and you’ll never get where you want to go. I think that’s a fair point. We all slide, but what is the point at which you say – nope, you shall not freaking pass.

My baseline: Do right by the miracle.

This means that each day, I strive to be hyper-aware that I have one life, that I am so lucky to have this life and all that my personal incarnation comes with, and that it’s my duty to do right by it. As Alice Walker said, “Our social activism is the rent we pay for being on this earth. “ When I notice I’m on autopilot in my day, when I’ve lost track of what matters, I immediately course correct. I have to. It’s my line in the sand.

So what’s your baseline? My advice is to keep it simple. Write it somewhere that you’ll see on the regular:

My Baseline:

And there you have it!

I know this was a lot to read, but I really wanted to make sure this didn’t seem like just another mind Jedi thing that you would try and discard. It’s a great way to connect with your higher self, clarify your goals, and give you a map on how to get there.

Perhaps you might think about how long you want to do this for. Fortin says at least 10 days. My buddy did it for a year and is still going strong and seeing results.

Have a think, then write your commitment in your journal, so that you can really endeavor to do this thing and see if it works for you:

I will write / use Be-Do-Feel-Have for_____________________________________________.

Here’s to hugging your highest self when you reach her across the river.

Further Reading

Blog Posts

For reference, much of this kind of thought work is also touched on in various ways over the years in my following blog posts:

“Sports Psychology For Writers”: https://heatherdemetrios.com/blog/sports-psychology-for-writers

“What Happens When A Writer Loses Her Jump”: https://heatherdemetrios.com/blog/what-happens-when-a-writer-loses-her-jump

“Defrost Your Limiting Beliefs”: https://heatherdemetrios.com/blog/defrost-your-limiting-beliefs

“How To Change The Genre of Your Thoughts”: https://heatherdemetrios.com/blog/change-the-genre-of-your-thoughts

Books

The Desire Map (Danielle LaPorte)

Atomic Habits  (James Clear)

The Way of Integrity (Martha Beck)

The Soul of Money (Lynn Twist)

The Light Seer’s Tarot (Chris-Anne): Wonderfully nourishing & inspiring!

Don't Give Up

“We age very quickly out here. I and all the others are about a hundred years old. We’ll never be the same again. ”

— Virginia Hall

Well, CODE NAME BADASS is out in the wild . 🎉Four years of the joy and burden and confusion and terror and wonder and pride and despair and hope of this book has culminated in something that can go from my hands to yours.

I never felt like more of a badass and a dumbass simultaneously while writing this book - and I actually think that might be a sweet spot for creativity.

Beginner's mind + audacity = Badassery

Have a think on that and see if it's true for you.

Below is an excerpt of the audiobook of Badass - what say you? I'm in love. 😍

Artist Burnout: No, you’re not crazy

I put that Virginia Hall quote at the top because it made me think about myself as a professional writer, and all of you - whether you are published or not.

We writers age quickly, don't we? It's rough out here.

I'm reading William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist, which is true and painful but also very comforting, in a weird way. I'm not crazy: this world is getting harder and harder for artists to not only make a living, but to make anything at all. PSA: Don't read this book if you're feeling hopeless or low. DO read this book if you're feeling gaslit or totally flummoxed by the gig / artist / publishing / creative economy.

There is a lot of pain in our community - comparison, disappointment, rejection, dry seasons, highs and lows that thrash us about - but I have ways to work with it that I think will help you too.

One of the main struggles I and the writers I work with share is time poverty. And part of that is because of the attention economy (I'm also reading Jenny O'Dell's How To Do Nothing - highly recommend once you've finished Code Name Badass!), which is why my mindfulness for writers and You Have A Process work is so important.

If you think you might need some support - a call, a process inventory, longer mentorship - it might be a good time to consider some writing support from yours truly.

Part of the reason it's so hard to get to the writer's seat, to stay in it, or to maintain hope is the fact that we do age very quickly out here. The shine is off the apple. Writing and publishing is fucking hard, it just is.

Are You Putting The Cart Before The Horse?

So many writers only attend to craft, but that's actually the smallest part of the writer's job. The biggest part is all the shadow work, the inner work, the discipline, the mindset. That's not to say craft and story isn't hella important - it just means that there is way too much time given to that by writers who don't even know what their process is, what to do when they are stuck, or who haven't set up the conditions for flow and productivity.

Are you putting the cart before the horse?

Here's one thing I know: Being vulnerable and open about our struggles while at the same time holding fast to why we write in the first place and creating more inner expansiveness is a good way to feel a little less run down.

The above picture of me was taken by my husband a few days ago. I'm working on a new book - an adult novel about war correspondents - so we took the Annie Liebowitz Masterclass. He was playing with light. I was playing with trust. Openness. The belief that I deserve a seat at this table and that I am perfectly capable of making my own damn table if need be. The confidence to look directly into the camera and not blink. To not apologize for my presence. And giving us both the opportunity to experience presence.

This month's word is GALLANT and during our free workshop for this week's Second Sunday Well Gathering - be sure to register - we'll be getting into what being gallant looks like. (If you’re reading this after the fact, or can’t attend, you can access the workshop through my newsletter subscription on my Well Archives page).

What would be brave for YOU? How do YOU express courage?

We can't all be kickass spies like Virginia Hall, but there is so much I've learned from her about ignoring people who say no and doggedly moving forward toward that which calls you. Her ending wasn't necessarily a happy one - the no's kept coming all the way up until she retired from the CIA - but she managed to do so much more than she ever would have if she'd settled. If she'd told herself no.

When is the last time you told yourself no?

What would it feel like to say yes? To expansiveness, to time, to words, to stepping away from the burned-out-ness of online culture?

Thank all the gods for women like Virginia Hall, who give us someone to look to when we're not sure if we can be gallant.

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

How To Have Courage On The Page

This month, my word is GALLANT. (Isn't it delicious? I feel like I raise my chin and square my shoulders just saying it. Try it out loud. Instant badassery).

This post is about how to have courage in the writer's seat.

We're not putting the cart before the horse and talking about courage on the page itself: that's Level Two. We're talking about the inner gallantry you need to:

• Get to the writer's seat in the first place

• Hold your seat when the going gets tough

• Not attach your self worth to your performance in that chair

I'm going to break this word down for us a bit in this missive, and then we'll get deep into the tools that will help you channel your inner gallantry à la Virginia Hall of my upcoming feminist spy biography, Code Name Badass in the September Well Gathering (catch it on the archives if you’re reading this post after the fact).

Be sure to sign up for the September Well Gathering, where we'll be talking all things GALLANT. (And please feel free to share the registration link with friends and on social!). There will be a recording if you miss it.

Given what’s happening in the world today, I'll also be sharing one way you can help our Afghan sisters - keep an eye out for that. None of this work we do on ourselves and on the page is worth a damn if it's not helping others, right?

I was recently on the Yoke & Abundance podcast talking about Virginia Hall and what she overcame to become one of America's greatest spies, and how that inspired me in my own life, as a writer. I'm really proud of this conversation - we went deep into mindfulness, gallantry, what to do when you keep hearing the word NO. I hope you have a listen and get some good benefit from it.

I know that many of you feel - as I do - that writing is, first and foremost, a spiritual practice. It wakes us up. And then our words can help wake up others. In this episode, I talk about ways we can do that important work of awakening.

How To Channel GALLANTRY in the Writer’s Seat

1. showy in dress or bearing: SMART

This is me in Lyon, France, doing research for Code Name Badass. I had to dress the part of being gallant - my black sunglasses never fail to make me feel invincible - because inside I was feeling like an underprepared agent about to parachute into Nazi territory.

I was so in over my head with this book. And being in France wasn't the fab experience I'd hoped it would be, mostly because my imposter syndrome kicked in HARD. Here I was writing a feminist biography about a woman who had a notoriously awful French accent and prothetic limb and STILL got her ass over to France to fight fascism, and meanwhile I'm asking my husband - who speaks less French than me - to please do all the talking because French people intimidate me.

I was so ashamed of my fear of speaking, and frustrated that I was letting the imposter win: the one who told me I wasn't qualified to write this book, that I had no idea what I was doing, and - de la merde! - I was the worst thing of all: gauche.

So what did I do? I put on the outfit I felt most confident in, a red lip, my black sunglasses and I got my ass out of the apartment and into town. This was taken near the Lumière Brother's museum (the OG film makers) and while I was there my confidence was restored - I could read all the museum placards, even though they were in French.

Sometimes, you have to dress like a badass to feel like a badass.

So if you're struggling in the writer's seat, consider your environment:

• Change out of your damn pajamas.

• Get some funky writer glasses or clothes or tattoos - anything that makes you feel the part of a writer.

• Have a writing space that takes itself seriously.

• When people ask what you do, tell them you're a writer. Full stop. No qualifications. No, "But I'm not published." See how that feels.

2. a. splendid, stately
b. spirited, brave
c. nobly chivalrous and often self-sacrificing

The Zen Master (husband / Zach) took this photo of me at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. We weren't even halfway through my research trip (with Le Chambon and Paris to go, not to mention archival research in England), but I'd seen so much: the traboules - secret passageways all throughout Lyon that the Resistance used; the place where the Butcher of Lyon tortured countless people - and was rallying his Gestapo to search for Virginia Hall; rendezvous points Virginia Hall had with other agents that were in full view of the public, including the hotel she stayed in right around the corner from what would become the Gestapo headquarters (#zerofucksgiven). I'd seen plaques all over the city that honored the fallen. I saw the train tracks that carried French Jews to Auschwitz.

Given that I was still terrified to order at a restaurant, I wasn't convinced I would have been as gallant as the French resistants and their foreign spy helpers if I'd been a Lyon resident in WWII. But I hoped I'd be, if the chips were really down, and not just the steak frites.

This is a picture of me thinking about all of that, gazing across the city, and hoping like hell I had some gallantry in me.

So how do we channel that intentionality and desire for gallantry in the writer's seat?

• Do the inner work: the mindfulness for writers work, shadow work, the clarity work, the work of assembling tools in the war against self-doubt, comparison, and the inner critic.

• Learn what your process is and make it work for you, rather than trying on some other writer's process. If you'd like help with that, click here to learn more about my You Have A Process mentorship.

• If you missed the August Second Sunday Gathering in The Well, click below for your Be-Do-Feel-Have formula PDF. This instant download will give you a process for rewiring your mental pathways in the direction of gallantry. This stuff has already transformed my life in a big way. Subscribe below to get your download (and so much more!):

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3. courteously and elaborately attentive especially to ladies

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After Lyon, we went to Le Chambon, a tiny village with a huge heart. During WWII, they sheltered thousands of Jews and the whole town was named Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Center. Many people lost or risked their lives to protect their fellow humans. This is where Virginia Hall set up shop for her second mission in France. I'd come to take pictures of her drop sites and safe houses.

Then we got into a car accident. While I'm sure we weren't the first Americans to get in trouble on these roads (especially during D-Day) I felt like a dumbass - not at all gallant like the spy with a wooden leg who'd bicycled through past these same fields to catch ammunition out of the sky.

Luckily, everyone was okay, but our Citroën was totalled. So there we were, standing on a deserted country road in the Haute Loire, trying to get a tow truck (in French, naturally) on a Sunday evening.

I shouldn't have been worried: this was Le Chambon we're talking about.

Within an hour, a wonderful couple showed up, got us sorted, and brought us back to our Air B & B. All love, no attitude. Just concern and care. And THEN the wife half of the couple who owned our Air B & B got a sitter for her little baby and drove us around the next day so I could visit the sites I needed to, and THEN she drove us for two hours to Le Puy to get a new rental car. Oh yeah, and she, her husband, and their baby stayed at their friend's house, sleeping on couches, so we could have their house for an extra day.

So what does it look like to have a sister's back in the writer's seat? To be "courteous and elaborately attentive, especially to ladies"?

• Cultivating self regard. See that picture of me above? That was after the accident. I leaned on my mindfulness (my #1 tool as a person and a writer), tapping into the deep knowledge that all things are impermanent, including plans and cars. And then I slept. Self care. How are you being unkind to yourself in the writer's seat? Are you pushing when you need to slow down? Are you not listening to your body? Do you have an ergonomic set up? Gallantry towards yourself is the most important courtesy you can extend. It's when you care for yourself that you can best care for others. (Put your oxygen mask on first).

• Community. Writing is not a lone wolf activity. We need to be gallant toward one another, be it as a CP, doing the kind of work I do with all of you in The Well, donating to fund opportunities for women and girls who have less privilege to gain access to the writer's seat and be healthy and safe.

• One way to do this? Support the Greek NGO I work for that serves mostly Afghan women and girl refugees in the Mavrovouni refugee camp in Greece, formerly Moria before it burned down. I'm in charge of our new storytelling initiative, The Calliope Fund, to end gender-based violence by getting creativity materials into the hands of women and kids when they come to the center so that they have the tools to tell their own stories. We're also trying to set up shop in the camp itself, and extend the fund beyond Greece. More on all of this soon, but in the meantime....

Please email me if you'd like to donate bulk materials for art supplies, would like to arrange a sizeable donation, want to run a fundraiser for the Calliope Fund on your own or through your business, or would like to volunteer.

Gallantry In Action

Above is Virginia Hall, long before she ever became a badass spy.* The hunting accident that caused her to have her left leg amputated below the knee had yet to happen. But look at her direct gaze, that stance. She always knew she was gallant, didn't she?

That self belief in her ability and worth is what carried her through literally shooting herself in her own foot, being told "no" by everyone from the President of the United States to CIA big-wigs.

The work we do now on ourselves is how we can have that same belief in our own gallantry so that when the going gets tough in the writer's seat, we're up for the task.

Mission accomplished.

Don't forget that quote above from Toni Morrison: "I've always known I was gallant." Here's to cultivating that deep inner feeling of your own gallantry, and then letting it find expression in the writer's seat.

*Hall photo courtesy Lorna Catling

Finding Your Writer's Edge

“A ship is safe in a harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.”

— John Shedd, Salt from My Attic

There I am, having my first proper diner breakfast in over a year. It's also me finding my edge. This photo was taken a few days ago, when I would normally be writing. But my husband and I are moving to St. Paul, Minnesota at the end of the month and we had to go to Verizon to get Midwest phone numbers, officially changing our relationship status with the East Coast. Minnesota is my husband's beloved home state...and my former geographical nemesis. More on that later.

When your whole life is being upended, what's the next right thing? Pancakes and coffee - this writer's version of Bird by Bird when she's once again moving on out.

This relocation to Minnesota (Minn-eh-SOH-tuh) was not an easy decision to make. For one, I am cold all the time. For two, I lived there before and vowed never to do so again (see #1). But I am older and wiser now, and much more up for an adventure worthy of Sansa Stark. I got New York City and Asia and Europe out of my system. For now. Besides, it's very hard indeed to resist moving to a state whose motto is "L'Étoile du Nord"....The star of the North.

When you're finding your edge in the writer's seat, in your creative life, in your soul and mind and heart, it's often very uncomfortable. This is because you're calibrating your compass to whatever True North is for you. And that often involves shifts, changes, sacrifices, or a real come-to-Jesus meeting with yourself, as we'd say here in North Carolina.

Finding Your Edge

In yoga class, "finding your edge" is what a teacher may say to cheer you on, to remind you not to phone your practice in. It's them challenging you to leave it all on the mat...and to caution you against hustling for your worth and letting perfectionism drive you over the edge.

The idea is to go past your resistance and fatigue and bad habits, to a place where you are growing, but not pushing. Reaching, but not pulling. You should never be in physical pain when you're finding your edge - but you'll probably be sweating more than usual.

On the meditation cushion, I liken finding our edge to the concept of holding your seat when you'd rather just throw in the towel and try again tomorrow. Or returning to the breath as your object of meditation when it's much more fun to worry about your future.

In the writer's seat, finding your edge might be trying something new, even if your inner critic is whispering that is a terrible idea, or having the courage to set boundaries around your creativity with others even though saying "no" is just about as terrifying as the prospect of NOT saying yes to yourself. Or it might just be leaving your phone on airplane mode while you’re writing. (Mindfulness for writers 101.)

“The Edge Effect”

Over the weekend, on my writer's sabbath, I came across this little gem in a National Geographic profile on Yo-Yo Ma, one of my favorite creators on the planet:

So here's me, a native Angelino of Greek heritage who currently lives in the South, moving to one of the coldest, most intense climates in the world.

What will this "edge effect" of these two very different landscapes colliding produce on the page?

How will it challenge me to shake things up, to get more comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort, to lean in to the cold, rather than resist it? I mean, I was a competitive figure skater as a kid - I'm well-acquainted with ice.

If Yo-Yo Ma is right and edges are where creativity flourishes (he's a genius, so I'm betting on him), then:

Getting out of our comfort zones and finding our edge in whatever new terrain we inhabit is exactly the container our creativity needs for flow.

The math supports this:

Creativity = two different ideas combined to make a new thing

Example: Peanut butter + chocolate = Reese's Peanut Butter Cups aka Heaven In Your Mouth

BOOM. CREATIVITY UNLOCKED.

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The Edge Is In You

Moving to a place where "frozen tundra" is a fair description six months out of the year is me finding my edge as a writer because I'm finally acknowledging that no one place is ever going to be the place that ignites my creativity. Why? Because that fire and inspiration and drive is in me, wherever I go. I've lived all over the world, searching for that one place that would make me feel like a heroine in a novel. (To be fair, a MN winter is very Tolstoyan). But Oscar Wilde had it right, as he often did:

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music.
Your days are your sonnets. ”

— Oscar Wilde

If we spend all our time trying to Goldilocks our creative lives, waiting for the right time, the right place, the right conditions to present themselves...we'll never get to those places our North Stars are pointing toward, because there is no juuuuuust right if you look anywhere outside yourself.

What does that mean?

When we find our edge, we realize that the conditions for optimum creativity are already inside us, whether we're wearing fifteen layers of long underwear or a bikini.

Your edge is right on the path that points you to your very own étoile polaire. Your Essential Self is the cartographer, guiding you up those mountains your inner critic thinks you can't climb.

So this month, my word is EDGE. Finding it, thriving in that space of delicate balance between pushing my boundaries while being good to my body and my mind.

Mindfulness for Writers: Finish Your Book Visualization

Below is a meditation I created to help you find your edge. Finish that book, whether it's only a dream in your heart or you're nearing the finish line of the first draft or that millionth revision.

This is a juicy visualization where you will actually feel the experience of completing the manuscript. If I were Mae from Little Universes, I'd say this was a simulation for finding your edge.

This summer, as a I navigate the gnarly weird energy of moving house and writing my first novel for adults and anticipating the publication of my first biography, which is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, I take comfort in the fact that all of you are out there

reaching

stretching

expanding....

into your own edges.

To a summer of sweating out good words together!

Defrost Your Limiting Beliefs

In her book Finding Your Own North Star, life coach and sociologist Martha Beck shares an exercise she’s adapted from Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. What results is a new take on affirmations: Here, we’re not trying to trick our brains or even worry about shifting our energy or what-have-you. Instead, the affirmation simply serves as a key to unlock the truth of a situation so that we can learn from it, move past it, and use that insight as a way to still achieve our dreams and goals. By getting to the truth of a situation, we gain new perspective, seeing things as they really are, instead of allowing ourselves to be run by untrue stories (or desires) that are running us.

Beck, who claims this is one of the most effective tools in her arsenal of self-help wonders, says this:

“This exercise isn’t meant to realize your dreams in exactly the way you expect. Its effect is to free your imagination and revive your hope by embracing the possible.”

Defrosting Your Limiting Beliefs

Directions: Grab a sheet of paper, your journal, whatever. At the top, write a dream you have that feels impossible or at least not attainable for a lot of reasons. It could also be a dream where you feel like the ship has sailed (a writing residency or program you weren’t chosen for). Something you may have totally abandoned. It doesn’t matter how improbable it is, just something that is emotionally tender for you.

Take a few moments to arrive in your body, the space, this activity (no cell phones, please!). Breathe.

Now:

Draw a line down the center of the paper.

On the left, you’re going to write number one and then this affirmation:

“My dream is coming true.”

On the right, you’re going to write whatever your brain “blurts” out in response. You will keep doing this (see below) until you feel you’ve reached some insight into this situation that allows you to view it from a different perspective. It kind of reminds me of the Meisner acting technique, where, through repetition, your finally arrive at the truth.

Here’s a personal one for me:

Dream: MY BOOK DIDN’T RECEIVE ANY STAR REVIEWS

1. My dream is coming true.                            My books are never going to get recognition.

2. My dream is coming true.                            Not possible. The reviews are out—the ship has sailed.

3. My dream is coming true.                            You’re invisible.

4. My dream is coming true.                            Obviously you’re not A team for publishing.

5. My dream is coming true.                            You’re never going to make a living or the list.

6. My dream is coming true.                            You’ll have to quit because low reviews = bad #’s.

7. My dream is coming true.                            Kirkus doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

8. My dream is coming true.                            Just because you didn’t get a star doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve it.

9. My dream is coming true.                            I deserve a star for my book.

10. My dream is coming true.                         I wrote a star-worthy book.

Okay, so hopefully you see the healing that took place for me as I wrote this list. Wow! Sure, I didn’t get the star—the reviews are out and that’s a done deal. But I went from being run by the story that I’m invisible and the star heralds ultimate failure, to this new thought lane built on positive self-regard and optimism:

Me: “My book didn’t receive any star reviews.”

Me: “So? You wrote a star-worthy book.”

And sure, there are still the realities that there can be career ramifications for not getting a star, but let’s blow your mind for a moment:

Once you’re coming at a lost dream from a place of relative peace, you’ve built a foundation for doing the deeper work of questioning the stories you tell yourself even more (untrue or limiting beliefs / thoughts).

For example, I could still know not getting a star could herald diminishing popularity as a writer—it is a business, after all…or I could call up every book I know of that is wildly popular and didn’t receive star reviews. Which one is likely to keep my head in the game and my eyes on my own page?

So while this dream is done, I no longer feel certain my career is over or that I will never get a star. I ALSO know I deserve one, which takes the sting out and lets me keep my head held high. That sense of surety is certainly going to show up in my author presence as confidence and that will go a long way toward readers wanting to read my book because we all want to read the words of writers who know what’s what about themselves and reality. And it will telegraph to my publishers that I might be a good candidate for events and pitches to media. Which could then lead to more visibility. Which could then lead to…something shiny and five-pointed  for my next book.

Then, I could go even DEEPER and begin working on recognizing the ebb and flow of success and failure and realize that, like creative blocks and detours, this TOO—not getting a star—is part of the process. And look at all the times when I did get a star and it didn’t help my book do better or make me happier. Or the friends who have stars, but it’s not enough for them. And then I get a REALLY cosmic perspective and think about what a star review is in comparison to an actual star and then who CARES about the review?????

And then: enlightenment. Obviously.

The Real Lesson

Because the universe has magical timing, just after I sent this work to my writers as an assignment to do themselves, I opened my email (to send it to them) and saw that something had come in from my publisher…a starred-review for my book. WHAT?!

Here is the real kicker: Because I had just finished this thought work I didn’t care about the star.

This is where this work really gets cooking.

It’s one thing to adjust yourself to a disappointment and think Onward! But you unlock a whole new level of self-worth when you get the thing you thought you wanted / needed to feel validated or safe (fill in your own story here) and suddenly realize that all that glitters isn’t gold. You are enough.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy about the star in terms of how it might support my book’s livelihood, but it meant that I didn’t connect that star to my own self worth or believe that it made my book better or made me believe in my book. I already knew my book was star-worthy: the reviewers were playing catch up, and this was old news.

And this is the real gold star of this work:

You reclaim your personal power when you recognize that these things you want, while they might be nice, are not going to make you happier or more fulfilled.

I recommend doing this work whenever those inner gremlins come up – it’s not a one and done. In order to reclaim our power and step into it, we need to have this vigilance. The world is going to tell us we’re lacking. We need to write a different story.

Here’s to revising!

Embodied Writing

“Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life. ”

— Tara Brach

Listening to writers describe the actual work of their craft — not the conception of a story in their mind but the daily work of pounding out a novel or essay or poem letter by letter — is akin to being in the audience of a highly experimental piece of modern dance.

Center stage: the writer sits, hands poised over the keyboard. The work may seem cerebral, all of the heavy lifting occurring in the creator’s imagination, but it’s anything but.

Writing as an Embodied Practice

Writing is an embodied practice, where all parts of the physical self align with the mental, which then fuses with the more ephemeral muse/soul/flow that ties the process together.

The language writers use to express the act is only sometimes metaphorical, and often very real, incorporating all five senses:

Butt in chair.

Kill your darlings.

Knock out a draft.

Listen — to your characters, your gut, the whole wide world.

One of my favorite Zen teachers will often say, “Can you taste it?” when she’s dropped a dharma bomb on us, as though truth has a flavor.

One of the most vital parts of my process is to read my work aloud — and trust me when I say this is a highly physical act, requiring copious amounts of tea and Ricollas. (I write long books).

Hook up a heart monitor to a writer when they’re deep in flow and you’ll see a spike in their heart rate. Listen to their breath get shorter, feel their hands cramp and sweat and ache. Watch how their toes curl when they get to an especially tricksy section of the book. Feel their stomach turn into a mess when they realize that, once again, they haven’t found their way through the thicket of their story. Hear the defeated sigh slip past their lips. Watch them get up and stretch their aching back, massage their sore forearms and fingers. Crack their stiff neck.

All of that, however, is just the nuts and bolts of writing, of the body taking up space to do the work.

The best writers are the ones who are fully in their own skins, who recognize that writing is not just something that happens in the head or heart, an alchemical process that is then transferred onto the page. The best writers inhabit their whole selves and bring the totality of their being to the page. What results is writing that is more visceral, deeply present, steeped in specificity.

Here’s the thing: you’ll never be comfortable on the page if you’re not comfortable in your own skin.

And you’ll never be able to breathe life — real, bloody, messy life — into your characters or the subjects of your work if you are not fully awakened to your own life. Read any Mary Oliver poem and tell me I’m wrong.

To get inside the skin of your characters, you have to be inside your own.

And for many writers, that doesn’t feel like a safe place. We’re bogged down by society’s ideas of what our particular makeup of self should be (gender, race, all the things). We’re stymied by what love we did or did not get from the world at large via social media, unsure where the line is between brand and self. Our worst fears are confirmed about how we look or what we’re about when we refresh our feeds, again and again, and — still — no comments. No likes. No love.

We disregard our well being so we can clock in more writing time, giving up much needed forays onto woodsy trails and meditation cushions and yoga mats or bicycles or rough-and-tumble wrestling matches with dogs and kids on magic living room carpets. We drink too much or smoke too much or bitch too much. We can’t be alone. Or we must always be alone. And in all of these spaces, the body is disregarded. Pain ignored — pop a few more pills to make it go away. Stress levels rising — have a glass of whisky instead of a nice long, hot bath.

We wonder why we’re run down, why we’re creatively blocked, why the words don’t sing.

What results from ignoring the body is writers who aren’t awake.

And readers need writers who are awake, writers who can help them wake up too. But when we ignore the body, we imprison ourselves in limbo, a half-life, a dream. This is not fertile ground for compelling work on the page. So how do we wake up to our bodies, to our living, breathing life?

How do we train our wily, wonderfully imaginative minds to value the practice of embodied writing?

Mindfulness For Writers

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

— Henry David Thoreau

The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. Why? Because, as meditation teacher Tara Brach says, “physical sensations…are intrinsic to feelings and thoughts and are the base of the very process of consciousness.”

Getting in our bodies is chapter one of our whole story.

Without that, the narrative is utterly confused.

“There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one the thing? Is is mindfulness centered on the body. ”

— The Buddha, from the Satipatthana Sutta

First, like any newborn creature, we open our eyes. We pay attention. We notice that the tree outside our window is flowering — when did that happen? We observe the way the people around us move and talk and sit — ah, there’s that gait you were trying to find for your protagonist. The woman at the drugstore in aisle five does that curious shuffle you couldn’t quite describe in your last writing session.

We feel — everything. We give ourselves permission to sit with difficult emotions, to interrogate what fear and love and sadness and confusion do to our actual physical bodies. This clarity of our own expression of emotion transfers onto the page. Gone are the clichés of clenched fists and flared nostrils. You now know that anger, at least your brand, is experienced as a crinkling in your chest, as though all of you was a rough draft that got crumpled up and thrown in the wastebasket. What does the wind feel like on your face? What does a strawberry actually taste like? What is the particular sensation one experiences directly after orgasm?

Specificity is the watchword for embodied writing.

We listen — to our bodies, to others. We don’t drown out the world, as writers are so often encouraged to do. Instead, we enter into the flow of it all, then rise above the waves with our newfound knowledge and swim to the shores of our pages, explorers with a tale to tell.

An Exercise in Embodied Writing

This comes from my days in Method Acting - we call this “substitution.” You can use any emotion you wish, but I often choose to use fear because it’s easily accessible for most of us.

1. What do you fear most?

2. How does this fear manifest in your body? What are the physical sensations?

3. How does it disrupt your usual thought process? (For example, does your mind go totally blank?)

4. Now, what does your main character fear most?

5. Holding lightly to the physical sensation you experience when you are feeling fear, write a scene in which your main character is feeling fear. Hers might manifest differently, and that’s okay: but see if your felt experience of fear can inform putting her felt of experience of fear on the page.

6. When you’re finished, be sure to do some of 4-8-12 Breathing so you don’t hold that strong emotion in your body. I like to do 10 rounds. (Breathe in through your nose for four counts, hold for 8, exhale through your mouth for 12 counts. Do that ten times).

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It isn’t so very difficult to be all in. To dance your book or sing your poem.

The more you wake up to yourself, to the lived and felt experience of your own life and the world around you, the better you’ll be able to help your readers enter into their own blink-of-an-eye existence.

Open your eyes. Blink, and you’ll miss it all.

How To Change The Genre of Your Thoughts

“Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are. ”

— José Ortega Y Gassett

When Our Imaginations Turn Against Us

We writers are really good at telling stories. Problem is, we tell a lot of stories to ourselves about ourselves that simply aren’t true.

I’m invisible, I’ll never write this book, I’m lazy, I’m creatively blocked, etcetera: These are all fiction, but we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that these limiting beliefs are fact—non-fiction.

In order to turn our limiting beliefs into invitations for skillful inquiry - and a nice dose of reality - we need to change the genre of our thoughts from fiction to non-fiction.

How To Change The Genre of Your Thoughts

Step One: Identify the stories you tell yourself (“I’m invisible, I’ll never be published, I’m not a good writer, I procrastinate all the time, etc.”)

Step Two: Separate the story threads—you likely have lots of thoughts that surround scarcity, other thoughts surrounding perfectionism, etc.

Step Three: Put each grouping of thoughts under an umbrella label (or, an anthology, if you will) - keep it playful! It’s more fun that way and this mindfulness habit has a better chance of sticking if you keep it light and easy. All stories you tell yourself about being a procrastinator? Give them a story name. “This is my Couch Potato Story.” All stories about being a perfectionist? “This is my gold star story.”

Step Four: Whenever you notice the thoughts under any particular story umbrella come into your mind, label them. For example, any time you have a thought that you are 100% lazy, just note it playfully: “Oh, look – there’s my couch potato story.”

Do this labeling for a week. Simply noting the stories is peak mindfulness for writers. You’re aware of the story patterns in your brain, when they come up, and maybe even how they land in your body. You start to realize how often you’re filling your head with limiting beliefs and you might even begin to see how those beliefs are affecting your writing practice.

After a week or so, when you’re really mindful of the stories and labeling them like it’s no thing…

Step Five: When the thoughts arise, assess whether they are “fiction” or “non-fiction.” Spoiler alert: most of your limiting beliefs and negative self-talk are fiction.

Step Six: This is where the magic happens. You’re going to revise your story, changing the genre from fiction to non-fiction.

Here’s an example from one of my stories, “The Madwoman in the Attic.”

I name all thoughts that tell me I’m not working hard enough, that I don’t have enough hours in the day, that I’m behind, that I need to hustle for my worth or the gold star through overwork under this story umbrella.

.

.

.

Thought: “There aren’t enough hours in my day.”

Mindful Noting: “Heyyyyyy, Madwoman. I see you up there.”

Fiction or non-fiction?: “This thought is fiction.”

Change the Genre to Non-Fiction: “There are enough hours in my day and if I don’t like that, I’m going to have to take it up with the universe because everyone gets 24 hours. Problem is, I’m trying to pack more work than is possible in my 24 hours.”

Inquiry: Now that I know that my issue is me overloading my day, I see an invitation to inquiry: What’s taking up all this time when I’m pretty sure I planned my day well? I have a planner! I’m organized! What the what?!

I decided to look over my days and figure out where I was leaking time (kind of like your car leaks oil and you have no idea because you’re, you know, in the car):

I discovered that I wasn’t having clear enough boundaries with my email. Sure, I’m careful to be intentional about when I check it (#mindfulness), but I noticed that I felt compelled to answer those emails, even when it meant cutting into my writing time.

(See how easy it is to have your writing time slip away?)

Action Step: I decided to respect my time more and put a little disclaimer in my email signature: I’d respond to emails within 24-48 hours, M-F. This gives me a healthy break from my inbox on both Saturdays, my writer’s sabbath, and Sundays too. Plus, it gives me a buffer as needed.

When you look at the tasks in your day, those seemingly small pockets of minutes REALLY add up.

Now, when my Madwoman tells me I don’t have enough hours in the day, I know that’s an invitation to look at where my time is leaking, or how I’m not using the time I have well. “Heyyyyyy, Madwoman. I see you. Time to revise.”

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Story Alchemy: Changing Genres In Action

Let’s do another example:

You didn’t write today and you think, “I’m not committed to my writing.” This is fiction. You obviously are because you’re reading this blog post and only writers committed to their writing bother to improve their writing practice. So, you need to change the genre of your thought in order to not be run by this limiting belief. The less this belief runs you, the more bandwidth you have to create—it’s not taking up all that space, so you get to convert that worry energy to creative energy.

Step One: Recognize the thought

Step Two: Note that your thought is “fiction”

Step Two: Name the story umbrella that thought lives under

Step Three: Change the genre of your thought

• Fiction: I’m not committed to my writing.

• Non-fiction: I didn’t write today because I decided to go on Amazon instead.

Which one is more workable for you? I’m guessing the latter. If you have the thought that you’re not committed to your writing, there’s nowhere to go from there other than throw a dance party to Morrissey with your Inner Critic.

By changing the genre of your thoughts, you have a realistic assessment of your performance.

You’ve noted something that’s not working for your writing practice - going into your Amazon cart instead of into your story - and now you can determine best next steps.

This might mean that tomorrow, you turn off your WiFi during your writing session. Or you reward yourself with your writing session with a little retail therapy. Whatever you decide to do, you’re no longer being run by a fictional story.

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Exploration: Revising Your Stories

Mindmap or journal about the following:

• What are the stories you’re telling yourself?

• Is there a larger narrative, an anthology, if you will, that all these stories rest under? For example, I have a writer who always feels behind and she calls the stories she tells herself about this “My White Rabbit Story.” (re: Alice in Wonderland)

• Try changing the genre of your thoughts on paper to see how this process plays out.

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How To Apply This Concept To Your Characters

I plot from the inside out, meaning that all plot comes out of what I call the “Keyring Of Desire” in my Unlock Process: Desperate Desire, Unconscious Need, and Misbelief.

Any kind of work I do on myself—this sort of self-development inquiry we’ve been working with today—can be applied to my characters.

• What are the stories your character tells herself? (Misbelief)

• How can she change the genre of her thoughts? And how would this affect plot / story once she does? This relates to Unconscious Need - what the proto needs, but doesn’t realize she needs (also known as the wound they need to heal over the course of the book to recognize their innate wholeness) - because the most emotionally satisfying climaxes are the ones in which the protagonist changes the genre of her misbelief about herself or the world from what she thinks is fact to fiction. Thus, she taps into and receives her Unconscious Need. For example: Story: I’m worthless. Genre Change: I’m not worthless, but the people around me are telling me I am.

• If you’re struggling to figure out your proto’s Desperate Desire - what they are consciously going after in the book - take a look at their stories and flip them on their head. The stories are a key to what they want in their life, but don’t yet have.

Pro-Tip: Any self-development work you do can also be applied to your protagonist and secondary characters.

Here’s to telling true stories so that you can write great fiction!

Resources & Further Reading

“Sports Psychology For Writers” : https://heatherdemetrios.com/blog/sports-psychology-for-writers

Why Meditation Will Transform Your Creative Life

The writing life is hard.

(And beautiful, expansive, wondrous—all the good things, yes, but right now I want to talk about why it’s hard. Bahhumbug).

Before I started meditating, I was a Type-A hustler workaholic who has literally said the sentence, I don’t understand hobbies. And meant it. (Now I have some hobbies - thank you, Mindfulness, for letting me know it’s okay to have a little fun in life. Still Type A, though).

For so long, all I knew was striving.

Working myself to the bone for my dream of being published.

I wanted the gold star.

I always wanted the gold star.

Now, I think they’re shiny and nice, but I don’t care as much because I’ve begun to understand that you start out with a gold star and simply have forgotten you have one.

Mindfulness helps you rediscover that shining place in you that’s been dark for quite a while.

My Nervous Breakdown

My first book was about to come out and I was finishing up my MFA while drowning in the incomprehensible world of publishing—what do you mean they don’t market the book they bought? Why do they get to keep the draft for nine months, then demand the revision in a matter of weeks? No one likes my tweets, I am invisible, I am worthless, I hate this, I don’t even like writing anymore.

Enter: the nervous breakdown.

Mine happened by degrees, preceded by a manic hustling for my worth (Love me! Love me!) followed by a deep, dark depression in which I was highly functional, yet growing increasingly panicked by creative blocks, decreasing advances (when they don’t market your books, they don’t sell – funny how that works), and a terrible fear of failure. Medication didn’t work and the thought of quitting it all was too awful to bear and seemed impossible, anyway, since I owed several major corporations novels I had yet to write, but had been paid money for…money which was quickly disappearing because I’d moved to New York City and quit my day job. The dream! The nightmare.

Enter Meditation

So I went to the Cape to get some rest: I’d had a total meltdown after a panel and I could feel myself unravelling. The friend I was visiting made me lay down on a couch and listen to a guided meditation. I was desperate, and me laying on this couch was proof of that. It was a weird one—angel stuff and not my thing—but: that shit worked.

Oh, I’d meditated before: on a cliff overlooking the sea in India, at a Korean monastery at dawn (in scratchy monk’s robes thankyouverymuch), in yoga studios at Venice Beach, and in way too many acting classes.

I’m a spiritual misfit, a longtime seeker—this whole going inward thing wasn’t new to me.

But meditation? Nope. I was convinced my mind would not be able to do it. To quote my first agent in an email she once sent me, “Wow, you are a whirling dervish on steroids.” That was a pretty accurate description of mind. (Which means if I could meditate, I bet you can too).

Who else out there can’t stop the spinning, the ideas, the endless thinking, thinking, thinking? Because, I tell you, it’s exhausting.

But then I lay down on that couch and—the reeling slowed down. It didn’t stop. But it slowed down. More dance, less steroids.

I didn’t have an epiphany, or a major spiritual awakening. I just realized that this was good for me.

What Meditation Isn’t

I understood instinctively that meditation wasn’t a way to check out, but a way to check in. The teachers I began to work with over the next months and years showed me that meditation is a tool for working with our minds, to understand them. To observe them. To befriend them. If you’re looking for entertainment, a chill-out session, that’s just a Band-Aid solution. The real healing is in the silence. You and your mind.

When I first began meditating, I thought it was supposed to transport me to some non-thinking bliss state, but that’s not it at all (though some meditation styles go that route, that’s not the kind I’m talking about here). In this space, we release expectations. We let go. And, oh man, letting go for someone like me feels so freaking good. Sitting there, following the guided instructions, they seemed…manageable. Like something I could maybe do. And after I got up off that couch where I had to find my spirit guide and talk to an angel, I felt more grounded, more connected to myself.

And I wanted more. (Without the side of woo, though).

The poet Mary Oliver tells us that, Attention is the beginning of devotion. And I suppose that’s what my meditation journey has become—a practice of attention.

Which, if you really think about it, is all writing really is. For quite a while now, meditation—and by extension, mindfulness—has become a central part of my life, and my writing process. It’s been incredibly transformative, so much so that I got certified to teach it and share the practice with the writers I coach, the students I teach, and anyone who will listen to me yammer on about it. Sometimes, the characters in my books start meditating, too.

One of the writers I work with told me that a bit after she started meditating, a friend glanced at her and said, “You look free.”

Students tell me that they are flowing more, less blocked, don’t snap at their kids as much, and can handle the stress of agents / editors / rejection much better.

People, this WORKS.

The author Mary Quattlebaum was the first writer who showed me that this practice could support my writing when she began a workshop I was taking during one of my MFA residencies with a guided meditation before we began some exploratory work.

Just a few minutes of sitting there in the silence unleashed creative flow.

The Benefits of Meditation For Writers (Abridged Version)

In my own experimentation, I’ve found this to be true, as well. If you need the neuroscience data to back it up, here you go. The cool thing is that there is so much connection between flow states and meditation (see link), so when you’re meditating, you’re actually in the writer’s gym. Pretty nice, right?

 My work on and off the cushion with mindfulness and meditation—and the feedback I get from the writers I work on this practice with—has proven to me time and again that this practice is the very best thing out there (that I’ve found, anyway) to help you navigate the ups and downs of the writer’s life. It even helps you with craft and story. (More on that later, too).

Meditation helps build our resilience muscles, so when those rejections and bad reviews come in, we have a bit more perspective when we handle them—they don’t rock our worlds as much as they once might have.

It helps us have better focus when we sit down to write, gives us more flow (seriously), and provides a host of other benefits. Here are a few I have personally experienced:

– The end of major creative blocks

– More flow

– More focus

— More resilience

– Depression and anxiety management

– More perspective during tough times

– A healthier response to my inner critic

– Better attention to detail (craft)

– Deeper connection to self and others

– More awareness of how my mind works so that I can work more skillfully with limiting beliefs and other gnarly creatures of the mind

– Greater emotional intelligence

– Cosmic perspective

– Less hustling for my worth, thus more focus on my creativity

– End of my nervous breakdown

— More compassion and a stronger empathy muscle

– Hope

— A bit o’ ye olde inner peace

— Better habit formation

— Actual, for real, self love, which I like to call “self regard”

Next Steps For Getting Your Butt in the Chair…and the Cushion

I look forward to sharing my insights and journey with you here on the blog and perhaps even in one of my online courses or one-on-one mentorship.

I would absolutely LOVE to hear how this practice is helping your own creative life, so do drop me a line and let me know how meditation supports your writing practice. I know many of you out there are meditators and have much wisdom to offer us.

Free Support

I want to make this practice as accessible as possible - this is good medicine that must be made available to all. So, here are ways you can access support from me at no cost:

• My twice-monthly newsletter is all about the mindfulness. I often share guided meditations, exercises, worksheets, book recs, and more. There are also loads of free downloads you get as a subscriber. Get on the list here.

• Thousands of writers around the world listen to my meditation “writer dharma talks” and guided meditation on the free Insight Timer App. Links for this are on my mindfulness resource page.

• For female-identifying writers, join me and your writing sisters every month for The Well Second Sunday Gatherings, where we use a new word each month as a theme to guide us in all manner of explorations - everything I teach uses mindfulness as a base. These are recorded, so anyone on my newsletter has access to the archive, which is also on my SoundCloud page.

• This blog has loads of practices embedded in the posts: exploratory work, how-to’s, mindful mindset for writers, and more.

Here are two posts I want to leave you with:

This first one is about a really practical way that mindfulness has supported me off the cushion as a writer.

This second one is a piece I wrote for LA Review of Books that gives you a sense of the spaciousness found in this practice, and what it might open up for you on the page.

Don’t believe me? If you read my novel Little Universes you’ll see just how much this practice can impact craft. Meditation and the concepts that stem from mindfulness and my own Buddhist practice are threaded all throughout this book. It’s the best thing I’ve written to date, and I credit my practice with that.

Sounds pretty nice, right?

Got five minutes? Close your eyes. Follow your breath.

I’ll see you in the silence—

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*This post has been altered from the original, which was on the Vermont College of Fine Arts “Wild Things” blog, the official blog of the Writing For Children and Young Adults MFA program (my alma mater), where I had a weekly Mindfulness Monday blog from 2018-2019.

Sports Psychology For Writers

Whenever I’m working with my writers, I often feel like I’m back on my childhood ice rink, only I’m the coach and they’re the skaters. I’ve written before about the ways in which being a serious athlete in my early childhood shaped my mindset as an artist. Other than my adolescence and early twenties in the theatre, I can think of no better training than individual sports for navigating the ups and downs of the writer’s life, particularly the inner life, where creatives find some of the biggest pitfalls of their practice.

If you’re struggling with the inner critic, self-doubt, fear and the many slings and arrows of the writer’s life, I think you’ll find these tips I’m about to share from Yankees sports psychologist Lauren Johnson to be incredibly helpful. From practical suggestions for mindset shifts to quick productivity and performance hacks, it’s clear that if the jocks and artists had let themselves sit at the same table in the school cafeteria, they would have had a lot more in common than they ever could have imagined.

In Episode #467 of The Pomp Podcast, Lauren shares stories from the dugout about the challenges faced by some of the country’s top athletes—familiar plot lines to any of us who have dealt with crippling fear, anxiety, or procrastination. It’s no surprise that she often cited James Clear’s stellar book, Atomic Habits, which I often encourage my writers who struggle to get to the writer’s seat to read.

You don’t need to stretch before you read this post, but it will give your mental muscles a good workout.

Changing your Habit Energy

As I listened to Johnson discuss habits that up an athlete’s performance, I found myself thinking of the way Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh uses the phrase “habit energy” to discuss the ways in which we engage in the habits that keep us stuck. You checking your social media every time you have a few spare minutes instead of daydreaming about your novel? Habit energy. You saying yes to going out because you feel bad saying no…even if that means you don’t get to write that day? Habit energy.

These habits become so rote that they have an energy of their own, unconscious and highly destructive to the creative’s life. This is where mindfulness for writers comes in—and sports psychology.

Johnson leans on Clear’s Atomic Habits to talk about how we develop habits - such as a writing habit, or a habit of getting to the batting cages every morning. We develop habits through repetition and - good news - we can rewire our brains to become accustomed to these habits (hello brain plasticity!).

She asks this all-important question:

“Can you still show up when you don’t feel like it?”

Doing a little versus doing nothing goes a long way, whether you’re a writing struggling through a novel or a Yankees shortstop who needs to work on his slides.

That’s why I always tell my writers that five minutes of meditation is better than no minutes. Half an hour of writing is better than none at all. Two-hundred words will do when there isn’t time to knock out two-thousand.

When you do a little of something each day, you’re rewiring your brain. And here’s the good news: Half the time when you sit down to do the thing even when you don’t feel like it, you find yourself sticking around longer than you intended.

Success: Focus on Process, Not Outcome

“We have to redefine success to be in our control. ”

— Lauren Johnson, Yankees sports psychologist

What does redefining success to be in our control look like exactly? It looks like finding what you can control versus what you can’t. So many writers focus on publishing—which they have zero control over. Even if you were to self-pub, there’s no guarantee you’ll find a deluge of readers. But if you focus on how much time you spend writing that book and base your idea of success on that? Now we’re cooking with gas.

We need to focus on PROCESS rather than OUTCOME.

You can’t control whether or not your book will sell, but you can almost always control whether or not you show up to write.

And so: We re-define success based on process. Perhaps for you the win is writing every day at the time you planned to write. You measure your success based on how often you wrote, not on how many words you wrote, or how many offers for your book you get. (Technically, we can control word count, but then we find ourselves focusing on outcome - word count - and so we end up writing what I call “empty calories”: words that aren’t inspired and are going to be deleted. They were only written to give us a false sense of security, where we trick ourselves into thinking we’re moving forward with our book, when we’re really just treading water).

Sometimes, the best writing you do happens when you’re staring into space, waiting for the dots to connect.

That kind of waiting takes a lot more courage than the writer who sits and bangs out 2K words of gibberish just to color in a square in their productivity planner.

When we focus on process rather than outcome, we can now evaluate our performance based on variables we can control, which means we discover clear areas where we can improve. And if we can improve, then we stand a great chance of getting that outcome we’re dreaming of.

If we focus on outcome, it’s very difficult to find a workable next step. Either you get the thing or you don’t.

Example: Focusing on Outcome

Goal: By the end of the writing session, you will have written one chapter (outcome).

Either….

• You don’t finish the chapter. You got stuck on what your character really wanted in the scene and now you feel like a failure. What can you improve on next time so you can finish a chapter in one sitting? (Answer: Um, that is a really hard question to answer, given the thousands of variables involved in the construction of a chapter / plot / character).

OR

• You finish the chapter come hell or high water. Woohoo! You get the gold star. But wait…the next day, you read the chapter and it’s terrible. All you did was write a bunch of empty calories so you could hit that word count. Now what?

Here’s what happens if you focus on process

Goal: By the end of the writing session, you will have not checked your email, phone, social media, or done any Internet browsing. You followed Neil Gaiman Rules: you can write or stare out the window.

Either…

• You don’t finish the chapter. Gah! You checked your email JUST ONCE and got totally sidetracked. That’s okay: You’ve learned your lesson the hard way. Tomorrow, you’re turning off your Internet and your phone is going to be outside your writing cave AND on airplane mode. As the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says, “We can always begin again.” Tomorrow is a new day. You got this.

OR

• You don’t finish the chapter. But! You followed Neil Gaiman rules and when you were staring out the window, you got a big fix for your plot. You can’t wait to dive back in tomorrow. You feel really good as you get up from the desk. Sure, you didn’t write a ton today and you would love to finish this book before you die, but it was so COOL to have gotten so much out of one session. Productivity unlocked!

OR

• You finished the chapter! It was AWESOME because you were so in it, so focused, and so in flow. No interruptions = no problems. Today was a gold star day.

Do you see how when you focus on process you are both more kind to yourself and have more workable solutions for when you hit roadblocks? Do you see how focusing on process puts you in the driver’s seat, rather than handing over all your power - and perhaps even your self worth - to some rando editor or agent in New York?

Engaging In A ”Biology of Courage”

This part of Johnson’s podcast interview was super cool. She spoke about a study on body language and how “feeling and actions don’t have to be the same to co-exist.” A typical example is looking confident in your power suit even when you feel nervous as hell at the job interview.

In order to get the players of the Yankees to engage with a biology of courage, Johnson has her players do their victory fist pumps throughout the day, basically signaling to their body that they’re victorious. This sends a chemical reaction through their body - suddenly, they’re starting to feel a little more badass, even though they struck out in their last game. The next time they go up to the plate, that feeling has stuck around: their body knows what victory feels like, so when that fast ball comes racing toward them, they’re a little more likely to believe they can knock it out of the park.

For us writers, I like to engage in visualization exercises, like in this Finish Your Book meditation I created to help my writers combat their Inner Critics.

What will you do when you finish this book? Will you pump your fist, clap your hands, have a dance party? Will you type, The Motherf*cking End after the final sentence, as I once did on a tough book? (I had a plan to do that and couldn’t wait to type those words before sending the draft off to my editor - it was highly motivating).

I wonder what would happen if every day you sat down to write, you practiced typing The End. You turn on the song that you’ll dance to when this book is finished and dance to it. It’s going to be a lot harder for your brain to tell you that you’re not going to finish this book. And even if it does whisper that in your ear, it’s going to be harder for you to believe that.

Because your body already knows what it feels like to finish.

Meeting The Moment: “Threat Mindset vs Challenge Mindset”

This concept Johnson shares of having a threat mindset vs having a challenge mindset is also related to the biology of courage. When we’re in a threat mindset, we experience panic and overwhelm. We’ve all been there. (Every writer ever: “Man, this book isn’t working. Oh my god, what if someone else writes this same book before I can finish it? And what if I can’t sell this book because there’s already one out there like it? Maybe I should delete it and start something totally new oh my gooooood.”)

When we’re in a challenge mindset, our body will respond physically to prepare us to meet the moment. Our job then, is to work on getting ourselves into a challenge mindset.

We do this with the victory fist pumps I mentioned in the last section.

We do this by reframing our thoughts. (“I’ll never get published” becomes “I’m not published yet. But I will be.”)

You can turn your habit into a healthy challenge by using a habit tracker to track how often you get to the writer’s seat. Or put a quarter in a jar every time you mindfully took yourself out of a threat mindset by reframing your thoughts and getting back into a challenge mindset.

The challenge mindset is you as Rocky in that workout montage, only you’re at your laptop and punching the air.

Revising Your Identity

Our beliefs and our actions drive our identity—this isn’t news. But what you might not realize is how much the story you’re telling yourself about who you are is shaping who you will become. This is something we talk about a lot in the meditation world. The stories we tell ourselves are false constructs of our minds, and the sitting we do helps us realize these illusory thoughts for what they are and dismantle them so that we can go forth and kick some ass in the present.

If the story you’re telling yourself isn’t helpful, then we need to revise that.

Johnson asks her players two questions when they’re in a slump and struggling with performance:

- What kind of person do you want to be?

- What action do you need to take to be that person?

Then, it’s simple math:

You take this identity of who you want to become and you support it with daily actions that solidify and create the belief that you are this person.

Do you want to be a writer who writes every day? So write every day and now you are a writer who writes every day. Guess what? If your response is, “But I don’t have time to write every day” then I, putting on my coaching cap, would ask if you had five minutes a day to spare. Just five. Yes? You have five minutes? So write five minutes a day. Now you are a writer who writes every day.

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““Mental toughness doesn’t make you invincible, it makes you adaptable.”
”

— Lauren Johnson, Yankees sports psychologist

My writers often come to me either struggling to own that they’re a writer (they’re effectively in the writer’s closet) or they no longer believe they are a “real” writer or a “good” writer - they’ve hit what a Yankees player might call a slump.

In both cases, these writers are dealing an identity crisis. They no longer have a sense of who they are as a writer, what they bring to the table, or if they even belong at said table.

In the interview, Johnson discusses an instance with a player who was struggling to speak up in team meetings or in one-on-one sessions. He didn’t know how to advocate for himself, and because of that, he didn’t get the help he needed from his coaches or therapists. This affected his performance as an athlete. After some digging, Johnson was able to trace his reticence back to a teacher in his childhood who said he didn’t speak well.

Okay, so now what? We get why he’s this way—how does he pivot to become the kind of player he wants to be?

Before they could work on a plan to get him speaking up more, they needed to know the answer to an essential question:

What kind of baseball player did he see himself as? How did he want to show up?

Once they figured that out, they were able to work on a plan to get him speaking up more so that he could get the help he needed, contribute more to his team, reach his goals, and up his performance.

Desire Mapping: Goal Setting From The Inside Out

I do something similar with my writers when I ask them to identify what wellness maven Danielle LaPorte calls “core desired feelings” in her book The Desire Map.

This is a life-changing, intentional, intuitive way to set goals. Rather than imposing goals on yourself (I want to be on the bestseller list, etc.), you instead focus on how you want to feel. Then, as you go through your day / week / month / year / life you keep checking in: am I feeling my core desired feelings? Yes - onward! No? What shifts need to be made so that I can feel the way I want to feel? She tells you to keep asking:

What do you need to do to feel the way you want to feel?

I love this approach because it honors the divine feminine. It’s in the right brain, honoring our intuition and our feelings. The great thing about this is that it’s workable. It’s in our control, to a large extent. It’s focusing on process, not outcome.

(So not only can the artists and jocks have lots to talk about at my imaginary school cafeteria table, but the woo-woos and witchy types could pull up a chair too).

Example:

One of my core desired feelings is ease. So when I’m writing, if I feel like I’m pushing, if I’m getting stuck, I sit back and think, “Okay, what do I need to do to bring more ease into my writing practice?” Maybe I read some poetry beforehand. Or take a break and do some walking meditation. Maybe I do some mind mapping to get the ideas on paper. Ease.

Explore:

1. How do you want to feel? Choose 3 to 5 core desired feelings.

(LaPorte has some great word lists in her book, but you can always just bust out a thesaurus and keep digging until you find the words that feel juuuuust right.) These words should NOT be aspirational. Go deep and dig for what you really want to feel. Maybe the word “joy” comes to you, but you’re a glass half-full kinda gal. Joy might not be your jam. But release just might be.

2. Now, what kind of writer do you want to be based on how you want to feel? Stay in your own lane here. You do you. Don’t try to be some other writer. Close your eyes and imagine you as the kind of writer you want to be. In other words: how do you want to show up for your writing?

3. Finally, what do you need to do to feel the way you want to feel?

If one of your CDF’s is “Curious” and you want to be the kind of writer who adds to the conversation, then what do you need to do as you write your book to bring in a sense of curiosity? Maybe you need to go to a museum, get a subscription to National Geographic, learn a new language because you’re going to follow your fancy and trust that your writing will take you where you want to go. Maybe your protagonist needs to be a bit more curious.

Hint: You can do this work with your fictional characters too.

This last question is the biggie. Rather than imposing goals on ourselves and working toward them (outcome), we focus on how we want to feel (process). If we feel the way we want to feel then we have succeeded.

You don’t need anyone to validate you. You’re performance is based on things in your control.

Your Daily Check-In

Johnson suggests answering the following questions at the end of each day in order to look at where you’re at and seek areas where you might bring a bit more attention. The key to this inquiry is that we’re looking to see our patterns and our strengths. This isn’t about berating ourselves or focusing on the “wins.” We’re just getting curious.

1. What did I do well today?

2. What can I improve?

3. What did I learn?

As writers, it can be really challenging to track our improvement because we don’t have the same standardized bars to hit as an athlete might. There aren’t competitions with measurable elements that can be scored or race times or numbers of repetitions.

Our industry is incredibly subjective - even if you were to get a National Book Award, that is by no means an indication that you’re the best writer in the country. This is why focusing on outcome is counter-productive and only serves to twist us into knots. Most of the NYT Bestselling authors I know aren’t very happy. So. Maybe you don’t actually want that? I’d take happy over being on some list any day.

What do you need to do to feel the way you want to feel?

Now, go do it.

The Five Love Languages For Writers

Valentine’s Day may not be everyone’s favorite holiday, but—for many of us—the sight of all those hearts make it hard not to think about love. So I’m leaning in for this month’s theme and chose the word DEVOTION to guide us as we look toward deepening our writing practices and moving a step further into 2021.

I adore this word: it’s fervent and filled with longing and depth and it has an edge too—I’ve never known devotion of any kind without a bit of grit thrown in.

As a writer, your significant other is your work, whether you are partnered or not.

You dream of it, you can’t wait to be with it, you sometimes LOATHE it but keep coming back for more. You fight. You make up. You sometimes settle on a policy of detente. But you are MFEO (Ahem: Made For Each Other), and both of you know it.

But what do you do when you and your writing are in dire need of couples therapy? Or at least a better way of communicating with each other. Forget Mars and Venus: sometimes, it can feel like you’re on opposite sides of the universe.

This month, we’re getting into the messy beauty of you love affair with writing, and working on tools to have a healthy, lifelong relationship. I’m rooting for you two to die in your sleep together at the ripe old age of 150.

There is so much I can’t wait to explore with you in this month’s Well Gathering - these (free) second Sunday workshops are becoming an anchor for me already. I love preparing for them, getting under the hood of a word and seeing how it can help us grow in our craft, in our art, in the way we live our lives as writers.

I’d be lying if I didn’t mention how DEVOTION dovetails nicely with a personal devotion I’ve had to my upcoming biography of WWII spy, Virginia Hall. Many of you have heard me talk about how tough it was to write this book—this was the deep end of the writing pool for me and it was only by being utterly committed to telling her story, and to the way I wanted to tell it, that kept me going. It was painfully difficult, but I’m glad I didn’t give up and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.

This is a more obvious reward for devotion—an actual book on actual shelves, but it doesn’t always look that way.

More often than not, devotion happens in the wings, not with the world watching and golf-clapping, but in the quiet, private spaces of our lives.

That’s where the good writing happens too.

What does being devoted to your writing look like for you?

There have been many times when I felt like I’d lost my way with a book or was simply so discouraged by the odds and by publishing that the only thing that got me through was my deep love of writing and reading and stories. Far too often, I see writers whose joy is snuffed out by comparison, self-doubt, hopelessness. To this day, I find bookstores are no longer the safe havens they once were: here’s my best illustration of why it’s tough to go to them once you’re a published writer (and how mindfulness is the ace up your writer sleeve Every. Damn. Day.)

Writing can be an enchanted garden full of wonders, to be sure, but that’s not why writers come to me. They come when it’s midnight in the garden of good and evil. One of the first things we look at in our work is the writer’s relationship to their writing.

Did you know you’re in a committed, lifelong relationship with your writing? Are you a good partner, or are you and your writing in a bit of a bad romance?

When you shift your perspective and think about your writing like a relationship, suddenly you begin to realize, wait, am I bad partner? Am I not listening, am I not present, am I just penciling my writing in? OH MY GOD DOES MY WRITING WANT A DIVORCE?

Breathe.

It’s going to be fine. You two are MFEO, remember?

Love Languages For Writers

If you don’t already know what your love language is, find out here. It’s a free quiz based on the work of Gary Chapman, who wrote the book on this concept. I've found the results to be accurate and - not gonna lie - it's been really helpful in understanding my relationship to and with others--including my relationship with my writing. The 5 Love Languages are:

Receiving Gifts

Acts of Service

Words of Affirmation

Quality Time

Physical Touch

Below will give you a cheeky sense of what this looks like IRL:

Meme: The Secret Nerd Base

I learned that my love language is heavy on Acts of Service, with Receiving Gifts coming in a distant second. Quality Time and Physical Touch were way down on the list for me.

Acts of Service is the primary way I both like to give and receive love (consider this newsletter an act of love). The way I show my devotion to my writing, then, is to serve it through my attention, my discipline, my commitment. I make a lot of sacrifices for my writing. I often put it first and go WAY out of my comfort zone if that is what a book demands of me. It tells me to jump and I ask how high.

I give the gift of my presence to my writing because its primary love language is Quality Time. This means that in order for my writing to feel the love, I need to hang out for as long as it takes my story to come alive under my fingers. No rushing. No pushing. And certainly not checking my phone or allowing other people - via social media or texts - to hang out with us.

When I look at my writing as a relationship instead of a transaction for my benefit alone, I find that there's an invitation for more expansiveness, gentleness, and pleasure in the process. It allows me to focus on process, rather than outcome. This shows up on the page with writing that has more soul, because it's imbued with the fruits of this mutual devotion.

Applying Your Love Language To Your Writing Practice

Another connection I made when thinking about my writing in terms of the love language is how, for me, it's really important that my writing is an act of service to my readers. I want it to be a light in the darkness and a vehicle through which my readers can better understand themselves and their place in the universe. (If you haven't written a writer's artist statement, then this would be another good exercise, especially through the lens of love languages). Having this clarity of purpose helps me in a million ways, from which stories I choose to write to how I show up as a writer.

If you're struggling right now and, for example, learn that your love language is Physical Touch, how about trying to write by hand for a bit and see what that opens up? If Receiving Gifts is your love language, consider how you can see your writing time as a gift you give yourself - or maybe buy a pretty new notebook to write all your ideas in. These are just a few of the ways you can apply your love language to your writing practice. And - don't forget - your writing's love language is most likely Quality Time (but feel into it - maybe it's not!), so it will feel loved when you give it the gift of your devoted attention.

Devotion to your writing is a two-way street: if you love it, it will love you back.

Sue Monk Kidd wrote, “Practice until you make it a song that sings you.”

You and your writing—one flesh. The song that sings you.

Here’s to making music together.

Mindfulness For Writers In Action

Below is an Instagram story I put up after an insightful experience I had at Shakespeare & Co in Paris back in 2018. For me, this is the best way to illustrate how the practice of mindfulness has transformed my life as a writer.

How To Read Like A Writer

The best writers are readers first

If you’re a writer who doesn’t read, please do yourself (and your readers) a favor and step away from your laptop until you’re willing to put in the work.

While you’re at it, ask yourself why you want to be a writer in the first place, if you yourself have no interest in picking up a book. I guarantee that if you’re not reading, then the writing isn’t good, and the world certainly doesn’t need any more bad writing. If you are reading, but not reading like a writer, you’re missing out on the scribe’s secret weapon in the fight against bad writing.

The trick is, once you’ve stepped into the role of Writer, your relationship to the books you read must change. When you were only a reader, you could gobble down whatever was in your hands, gorging on story, lost in the worlds and words other writers were creating. Sure, you may have underlined your favorite bits or dog-eared a chapter or two, but that was only because you loved them, not for any scientific or academic purpose. When you got to a part of the book you didn’t like, you either gave up on the book entirely or pushed through, waiting for the dopamine hit of the next love scene, the next sparkling insight, the slam bang climax. When you were finished, you set that book aside and picked up the next one. That was then, Writer: this is now.

If you want to improve your writing, then you can’t treat your reading like a Netflix binge.

In order to grow in your craft — and to continue that growth well into your publishing days — you must read like a writer who’s been asked to beta read this book in manuscript form. My students are loathe to do this: they’re afraid of “ruining” reading. They don’t want the novels they pick up to be assignments. They don’t want to lose the magic. While I understand that fear, it’s unfounded. Sure, writers you were eager to read before you looked at their work more critically might lose their shine. Then again, once you start paying attention to the mechanics of story and craft, your pleasure in the books that are well-executed more than makes up for the disappointments.

Reaping The Rewards

The dividends you’ll receive from becoming your own writing teacher — for that’s what you are when you’re reading like a writer — are enormous. While I still advocate for writers to get in some kind of classroom or work one-on-one with a mentor, as well as have a writer’s group, that will only take you so far: Reading like a writer allows you to become self-sufficient, figuring out for yourself how to improve in the areas you struggle in by breaking down how the masters do it — and honing the ability to articulate why bad writing is bad so you can avoid those mistakes yourself. Think about it: you probably learned story structure and the cadence of your chosen genres by reading. Why not take that practice to its logical conclusion?

How To Read Like A Writer

Read Widely

Dive into all genres, not just the one you write in. Read good books, bad books (sometimes you learn even more from these), new books, old books. Read poetry and graphic novels and picture books. Be omnivorous. This exposes you to new forms and styles.

Read Mindfully

You’re reading on many levels when you read like a writer, and this can take some getting used to.

In a way, all books are like a palimpsest.

There are layers upon layers beneath the words on the page: the writer’s craft and story know-how, the way they’re interacting with all literature that came before it, what was happening in society when the book was published, the writer’s socioeconomic background. I often say that all fantasy, for example, is in conversation with Tolkien and Homer. Just as all dystopian work is adding to a discussion Orwell, Huxley, and, later, Atwood are continually having.

Regardless of what genre you’re reading, you’ll be, first and foremost, looking at craft and story: language (word choice, voice, use of metaphor), story, plot, character, structure, pacing, dialogue, POV etc. This can be overwhelming at first, so my recommendation is to customize what you’re looking for, based on what you yourself struggle with as a writer.

Read for the things you need to learn more about

Are you terrible at action scenes? Then pay special attention to the execution of action in the books you’re reading (and choose books that will feature them a lot). Do you struggle with telling and not showing? Focus entirely on the ways the author you’re reading successfully — or unsuccessfully — accomplishes this.

Your Reading Checklist

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s a start. You want to pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t working. It’s useful to take notes as you read or you can just flag or underline the following as you go (and anything else you’re specifically reading for). Save analyzing the work until after you’ve finished it.

Things To Note When You’re Reading

• When you really like something

• When you have a niggling feeling — something feels off, but you might not know why yet

• When you’re taken out of story (John Gardner calls this “breaking the fictive dream”)

• Confusion

• Boredom

• Increased blood pressure or other physical signs of excitement or emotion

• Questions

• Prose that stops you in your tracks in a good or bad way

• Clunky writing

• Pacing

• Places where you have to re-read for clarity

• Dialogue that feels stiff

• Moments when you can’t suspend your disbelief

• Cliches

• Missed Moments — places where the writer didn’t go deep enough in a scene and so leaves the reader unsatisfied

• Craft elements that work or don’t work

The Annotated Bibliography : Giving Yourself An MFA

The final step in reading like a writer is culling all your observations after the last line and piecing them together in an intentional way.

It’s not enough to just think about your observations in passing as you read — you’re far less likely to have solid and actionable takeaways for your own work if you don’t get intentional about this last step.

When I was getting my MFA, students were required to write an annotated bibliography for every book we read. A page or so of literary analysis.

Hands down, this was the most valuable takeaway from my program because it set me up to be my own teacher for life.

The bibliography ensured I could articulate what was and wasn’t working in the books I read and, by extension, my own work. We couldn’t just say something was good or terrible or interesting. We had to show WHY. In doing so, the takeaways stuck and my own work improved.

In analyzing all elements of craft and story in a book, we were able to begin noticing how writers did what they did and then try to do those same things (or avoid them) ourselves. It helped us recognize the difference between what was simply subjective (you might know something is well done, but it’s just not for you) and what is a craft failure. Take note of your own personal reader guilty pleasures — if you adore love triangles, own it: but be able to demonstrate why one you read was well executed…or not. Go through the above checklist and figure out what that niggling feeling was about — aha! It was a pacing issue that took you out of the story! Look at how all the elements work together to form the whole.

When you read like a writer, you unlock the mysteries of good story for yourself — and your future readers.

What Happens When A Writer Loses Her Jump

“Mental toughness doesn’t make you invincible, it makes you adaptable.”

— Lauren Johnson, sports psychologist for the Yankees

Mindset and Performance: A Drama In 3 Acts

Losing The Jump

Most of you probably don't know this about me, but I used to be a competitive figure skater.

I didn't quit skating because it was too expensive, although that was part of it. And I didn't quit because I was moving away from my rink and my coach, although that was part of it too.

I quit because I lost my jump.

A jump I could land in my sleep (the notorious Axel, if you must know), a jump my body was trained to land. A body that would get to the rink at 5:30 in the morning to jump and fall and fall again, a body my single mother and grandparents had scrimped and saved to have molded by coaches that cost $1/minute. A body that contained a heart that loved skating as much as that girl from The Queen's Gambit loves chess.

I had to quit doing the thing I loved most in the world because my mind had convinced me I couldn't do it.

Despite the heartbreak of walking away from the sport my family and I had invested so much in, my years on the ice taught me a very hard and important lesson about how much our mindset plays a role in performance. It's a big part of why I became a writing coach in the first place - we're the scribe version of the sports psychologist. It mother-loving KILLS me when I see a talented athlete crumble to pieces simply because of the games their mind is playing. It kills me when I see writers do it, too.

As I tell the writers I work with: 99% of your problems have nothing to do with your craft. It's your inner critic and the fear, self-doubt, comparison, perfectionism, and resistance that you have to watch out for.

This past weekend, my husband and I were glued to the TV, watching Nathan Chen rocks his quads and get a fifth National title - what the what?! My husband was a hockey player, but he respects the toe-pick. (Cue The Cutting Edge in-jokes). The former ladies two-time national champion, Alysa Liu, was one of the first women to land a quad in competition, but this year she'd had a growth spurt and ended up in 4th place, no longer able to land the quad that had given her such an edge. At only 15 years of age, she'd lost her jump. Boy, do I remember how shitty that feels. One minute, your body knows exactly when to snap in and out of those revolutions in the air and the next you're having your ass handed to you by a piece of ice.

A skater can lose her jump for a lot of reasons, such as an injury or growth spurt, but one of the easiest ways you can lose your jump is getting psyched out.

Just watch former champion Gracie Gold's performance at this year's nationals and you'll see that in action. Watch her body as she skates to the center of the rink before her long program. Watch how terrified she is.

Performance & The Mind / Body Connection

Out in the Cold: Letting Your Mind Win The Gold

Skaters aren't afraid of falling. Hell, that's just a day at the rink. So what is it about those jumps that make them hesitate or pop out of the revolutions? They know they can land it, their bodies know they can land it, but their minds say NO. They get stuck in a story they're telling themselves, in comparison, in anxiety that results in a spiraling panic.

Right when they need to be most in tune with their bodies, at the height of their flow, they let the inner critic in: suddenly, the skater ditches her body to hang out in her head--which has no idea how to maneuver on a blade thinner than a pinkie nail.

The bulk of the work I do with my writers is training how to get our bodies and minds communicating, how to turn that NO to a YES, how to build up the courage to go for that quad, even if we're not certain what will happen once we get into the air.

Quick: what does flow feel like in your body? What does it feel like when you're running on empty? Next: How often do you force yourself to write when you're on empty? Yeah? How's that going for you?

It takes training to get your jump back - or to land it in the first place. No skater slumps into the rink once a week around noon, doesn't stretch, has an hour to spare, and expects excellence. It's the same for us writers: if we want to be good, to be better, to reach our goals, we need to train.

We need to develop mental toughness and the ability to adapt to whatever life throws our way so that our writing isn't the first thing that goes out the window when life gets messy or complicated.

At the same time, we need to bring more ease, spaciousness, playfulness, and curiosity into our practice. Discipline might look like recognizing that you don't have a single story fragment to work on, that your well is dry, and so instead of opening that document and forcing your words out for the day, you instead court flow and patiently wait for your story or character - your jump - to get back into your body.

Trust me when I say that pushing yourself when you've got nothing will end in tears.

My coach told me to lay off the jump. That I was developing bad habits by attempting it when I wasn't squared away mentally. He wanted me to work on other skills - my skating craft, my other jumps, my spins. I ignored him because I so desperately wanted that jump back. I should have heeded my coach's advice. Not only did I lose the jump forever, I lost skating too.

The last time I attempted the Axel was in competition. I fell on my ass while "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago played over me, in a costume my mother had hand-sewn each sequin onto. I looked up and saw my coach shake his head - he would stop working with me not long after. He knew I didn't have the mental toughness to skate across ice dyed with the Olympic rings. I knew that too.

I don't want you to be out in the cold like I was with your writing, standing alone in the center of a block of ice realizing, this is it, it's over before the music even stops playing.

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How To Get Your Jump Back As A Writer - Or Land It For The First Time

Finding Gravity

Writers who’ve lost their flow (their “jump”) tend to respond in one of two ways: they either push themselves too hard and end up creating a misery of bad habits and dissapointments or they give up entirely, skating off the ice for good. Below are a few ways to get your “jump” back:

• Watch my favorite skate of Nathan Chen's: What would it feel like and what would it take for you to feel and perform this way in your writing seat? Journal and see what you come up with. What shifts might need to happen, what limiting beliefs are keeping you from finding your place in the air?

• Find your center so you can find gravity with meditation. A little mindfulness for writers goes a long way.

• Fill the well. You can’t write on empty.

• Court flow by getting curious. Rather than push yourself (that never works), see if you can reconnect to what makes you write in the first place, re-identifying with the spark that induces flow.

• Being a world-class athlete takes training and discipline. I like a simple habit tracker to help me see really clearly whether or not I'm getting my butt in the chair (and on the meditation cushion, too).

• This podcast with the Yankee's sports psychologist, Lauren Johnson, was killer. Ignore all the weird advertising for Bitcoin at the beginning. If you don't have time, no worries: I'll be writing a blog post about this soon. She's got some REALLY nifty and simple takeaways to get your mindset back on track and your butt in the chair, as well as healthy ways to measure and track growth and success. Big ups to my writer who sent this my way - you know me too well!

If your story or characters feel out of reach, just remember: they're right inside you. Your body remembers. Trust it. Trust yourself.

If you need some help in the kiss and cry, click below:

Why Being Curious Will Turn Your Writer Self On

“A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.”

— Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

Curiosity is an invitation to loosen up and show up: for this moment, this year, this life.

Curiosity courts flow.

Curiosity invites spaciousness and repels constriction.

Curiosity is playful. For craft and story, it's an invitation to the magic "If" to the powerful character development inquiry "Why?"

Curiosity is magical. Synchronicity! Enchantment! Wonder! Possibility!

All these things await when you get curious.

Curiosity is permission

All of my books are filled with things I’m curious about and just need an excuse to go down the rabbit hole with. Instead of feeling like an armchair traveler in the spaces I long to explore, I’m suddenly given permission to go deeper. I’m just doing my job and sometimes that means obsessively reading about reincarnation or learning paramilitary strategies used by the French Resistance.

Being curious for my writing fulfills that part of me that loves efficiency and focus. I get to go really deep, indulge in my obsession of a thing, put on the skin of a character who gets to be an expert in it and not feel like I’m wasting time. Please note: Being curious is never a waste of time. I’m just one of those people that likes a reason to do something. Being curious, whether it’s for your writing or not, is paying attention, and, as Mary Oliver said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Quick:

Write down three things you’re curious about.

Are these things showing up in your work? Why not?!

This is the perfect opportunity to indulge your curiosity - and write it off on your taxes!

I find that when I invite what I’m curious about in my work-in-progress, I create richer characters, stories, and worlds simply because my book is full of things that light me up, turn me on, and flood me with energy.

All of that shows up on the page in tangible and intangible ways. Got a flat character? Give her your obsession and see how interesting she becomes. Boring setting? How about your book takes place in a setting you’re into: radio stations, Budapest, your favorite coffeehouse. Plot going nowhere? I bet if you went down the rabbit hole of what went down on Apollo 13 - like you want to - you might get an idea or two.

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How Getting Curious Led To My Biggest Book Deals

I was in a writing class where the teacher had a simple prompt: “Write the first chapter of a book where a character has a problem.”

The first thing that popped into my mind was a jinni stuck in a bottle. I wrote the scene - which lead to a fantasy trilogy for HarperCollins, the first of which was Exquisite Captive.

I even took that prompt in a totally different direction when I got curious about a tabloid magazine cover with a reality TV family pictured on its glossy front page. I wondered what it would be like to be on that show and not want to be, but to be a minor given no choice in the matter. This led to my very first book deal, a two-book deal with Macmillan that began with Something Real, a novel about a girl who is stuck on her family’s reality TV show. It also resulted in the PEN Discovery Award and critical acclaim—all because I got curious in a CVS line.

I think I can rest my case that curiosity is a writer’s secret weapon, no?

Curiosity Is Dangerous

“You might say that if it were not for Eve’s transgression, humankind would still be abiding in the uncorrupted Garden of Eden. Or, if you relate to the story as I do, you would say something else. You would say that Eve looks awake—curious about everything, at home in her body, and in vibrant communion with nature.”

— Elizabeth Lesser, Cassandra Speaks

The oldest stories have told us that curiosity is dangerous, a sin, the ruination of all—and that curiosity began with woman. Ladies, take a bow.

I like how Lesser turns the old tired story about Eve on its head, how she infuses it with truth and throws out the lie those old scribes were scribbling about womenfolk. The great sages all equate paying attention - just another term for curiosity - with being awake, present, enlightened.

So basically, Eve beat Buddha to the punch.

According to myth, the goddess Hera gave Pandora “the most dangerous gift of all, a woman’s curiosity” (Lesser, 36). I say we own that gift, amplify it, use it like it’s our favorite mug or sweatshirt. It is a gift. And it is dangerous - it shakes things up. It creates more space for women in this world and for characters who have questions about the ways things are and ideas about how they could be.

I like dangerous. The best kind of art has a little danger in it: audacity, grit, and swagger on the page, that’s what I like. You don’t get that without being willing to risk one of your nine lives when you sit down to write.

Curiosity As Writing Process

I have a way of working with writers to own their process, understand it, and make it work that I call You Have A Process. We get really curious about how they write, what happens when they flow, when they’re stuck, what sparks them and turns them on or off. This is intensive, transformative work that invites the writer to discover how she works best - not how some craft book says she works.

It’s an inherently feminine approach (this is not a binary - we all have the feminine within us). We talk a lot. We go deep. We look at the stories we tell ourselves and have been told. We get specific and then we test it all out in the laboratory of the writing cave, with our books as the experiment.

It’s a highly effective approach to inviting satisfaction into your writing process, to actually finishing your book, to enjoying the process because it is yours and it works.

One writer I worked with discovered that dialogue is her way in. She didn’t know that whenever she got stuck, she always got unstuck by getting her characters talking to each other. So guess how she starts off her writing sessions?

Another writer I work with was frustrated by her process. She hated how meandering it was. How much she had to journal and think out loud to get anywhere. But as soon as we followed her through the seed of an idea to its fruition—using the very process that works for her—she realized her problem wasn’t her process: it was comparing what worked for her to seemingly more productive / efficient ways so many craft books talk about.

Now? She’s jamming on a great book and enjoying her process along the way.

What these two examples have in common is that we got curious. We didn’t impose new structures, rules, strategies. We just looked at what was already working, how the writer works, and what wasn’t feeling great. We came up with tools to help each individual writer access her own inner wisdom, tools that she already knew worked for her when she was stuck or flailing. Then, we worked to help her trust what she knows to be true: she has a process, the process works, and her writing and creative heart are better for trusting it.

Stay tuned for my upcoming course on this, or email me to connect about one-on-one mentorship.

Why The Old Ways Are Making Writers Stuck

·       The culture (predominantly masculine) likes: deadlines, outlines, a plan, a clear product, PROOF. It likes us to hustle for our worth.

·       The feminine (intuitive) likes: SPACIOUSNESS, exploration (not necessarily with a specific end in sight, say, the New World), discovery, synchronicity, enchantment, ease, playfulness, POSSIBILITY.  With the feminine it’s the means, not the ends that our true satisfaction comes from. 

·       When we focus on a masculine approach ONLY, we miss out on the deliciousness of exploration. And the thing is, if we impose ways of writing that don’t work for us, if we force that, we just get more stuck. We dig our own holes. And then we wonder where in hell we got these shovels in the first place.

·       Note: We need integration of the masculine and feminine so that we can enjoy the process and write the stories of our hearts, but also have the discipline to get them out into the world. Having a holistic approach, a dedicated writing practice, and the tools to access your inner wisdom when you get stuck or bombarded by the inner critic will help you get closer to your writing goals…and enjoy the journey along the way.

·       Holding space for the process, listening, acting as a vessel or, as Anne Lamott might say, “the designated typist” is where the real juiciness comes in.

Now might be a good time to ask yourself if you’re forcing a linear, rational, masculine approach when you secretly long for more expansive, open, exploratory work.

Here’s the kicker: when you do things that feel good and intuitive and yummy, you’re actually being more productive, courting flow, and getting the results you’ve been hoping for. Forcing yourself to write in a way that others say is “right” but is wrong for you only results in madness.

Curiosity = Adventure & Access

My curiosity as a writer has given me unprecedented access to people and places I could never had had otherwise.

My upcoming biography of WWII spy Virginia Hall, Code Name Badass, got me security clearance to visit the CIA and access to de-classified intelligence archives in London. My most recent novel, Little Universes, allowed me to get on the phone with one of the nation’s top astrophysicists to talk all things dark matter. What?!

My books have taken me as far as the Moroccan Sahara and as near as my innermost self, as I explore the things I’m confused, saddened, or angered by.

When we engage our curiosity, we allow our books to be our teachers. This is where curiosity gets really interesting. I firmly believe that the books we’re jazzed about at a particular time are there to teach us something. Maybe it’s about ourselves, others, writing, the world—but it’s something. Often a few somethings.

Now might be a good time to ask: How is my book my teacher? Get curious. This will deepen your relationship to the work itself, and invite in unexpected possibilities for story, craft, and process.

“A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them...Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you.

”

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

I wrote a whole blog post about Twyla Tharp’s concept of scratching for new ideas. You can check it out here.

There are so many ways to get curious, whether you’ve got no idea, a new idea, or feel stuck.

Curiosity is the key that unlocks flow. It’s the “Drink Me” bottle of writers the world over.

““Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ”

— Rilke

Curiosity Gets You Unstuck

A few years ago I found myself adrift. Very Dante: Midway on my life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost.

For the first time in what felt like forever, I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to write. I was panicking, sitting in a Brooklyn coffeehouse surrounded by writers, all of whom looked very in flow and productive (but, let’s be honest, were probably just on Twitter).

I opened Wikipedia and decided to type in the first thing that came to mind - the thing I was most curious about at the moment: “The Circus.” This led me down a fantastic Wiki hole of circus history, my fascination growing with each click. By the end of that writing session, I had a whole plot for an inter-generational saga about a Russian circus family. It’s a big, ambitious project, one that is on the back burner while I wrap my mind around the enormity of the research (and language barrier) involved. But I can’t wait to write it. I’m so damn CURIOUS.

I call this my Brooklyn Coffeehouse Eureka Moment, and this strategy has served me every time I’m scrounging around for ideas. I bet it will offer up story gold for you, too.

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“Make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Make. Good. Art.””

— Neil Gaiman

Be The Mad Scientist

Curiosity is concerned with questions, not answers. It loves why, why, why. Questions = ENERGY, the more questions, the more energy, the more discovery = the richer your stories are.

When you invoke curiosity, mistakes are welcome. They tell us what’s not working so that we can discover what will work.

Some of the most curious people in the world are scientists. I’d argue they are perhaps the most curious people. We have much to learn from them and how they approach their work.

Scientist:

A science experiment that goes wrong is seen as important data that ultimately furthers research. Scientists know what doesn’t work and they are CURIOUS about why it didn’t work. They “work the problem.” (See the famous scene in Apollo 13 when they realize the astronauts are running out of air. That’s working the problem).

Writer:

A writing experiment that goes wrong often results in the writer hating on themselves. They feel frustration, overwhelm, like they’re behind. They aren’t curious about why something didn’t work, they’re focused on the next thing they think will work, and focused on beating themselves up. THEY DON’T WORK THE PROBLEM. So the problem just gets bigger.

How To Work The Problem When You’re Stuck On Your Story

A Few Journal Prompts

o   How do you get curious as a writer? (Research? Collage? Sidewriting? Tarot?). These are tools to draw from when you’re stuck.

o   How do you experiment as a writer? Or do you play it waaaaay too safe?

o   Go down the rabbit hole of your story / thing you’re curious about – what do you find there?

o   What do you do with what you find?

o   When do you notice yourself feeling panicky and overwhelmed, like the book is taking too much time, that you’re wasting time, etc.? What do you do when this happens? What could you do instead?

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Curiosity Improves Story & Craft

Curiosity = Story Gold

When you follow what YOU are curious about, rather than looking at the market or trying to impose a story on yourself, you will discover something that is fresh, intensely yours, addictive, and DELICIOUS. That’s a book that’s hard to NOT write and one a reader will find difficult to put down.

I have much to say about how approaching your work-in-progress with curiosity will have a tangible effect on the page - and if you become a newsletter subscriber and snag my Unlock Your Novel workbook, you’ll begin getting wildly curious about your characters and creating emotionally resonant plots as a result.

Curiosity As Inner Work = Mindfulness For Writers

Often when we get stuck it’s because we’ve stopped being curious. We’ve become Serious Writers Who Have Outlines and Plans Dammit.

This stuckness can result in a dry well, a creative desert. The way out? Curiosity, of course. Just like Alice, you have to escape what’s dragging you down by sliding down that old rabbit hole.

Rather than jump into shame, problem-solving, guilt, etc. when encountering fear, the inner critic, failure, overwhelm, and other creativity gremlins, we can get curious about what’s going on with our creative lurches and stumbles – this is a much more skillfull, workable approach then many of the ones we commonly reach for.

o   Step One: Get into the body. What does it feel like, this constriction. Get to know this feeling. It will be your red flag when you are going off the rails, a reminder to invite some gentle, mindful curiosity into the situation.

The R.A.I.N meditation method will help greatly with this.

o   Step Two: What information are you gathering? “What’s the next right thing?” Go do that.

Curiouser and curiouser....

Your Relationship To Curiosity : Word Contemplation Practice

Read through this short contemplation, then close your eyes and work through it. Alternatively, you can grab a journal and begin engaging in some free association with the word CURIOUS - mindmapping, doodling, random notes…all is welcome.

• Think of the last time, or a particularly vivid moment, when you felt / experienced CURIOSITY. It doesn’t have to be related to writing, though it could be.

• Bring the fullness of this memory to mind in as vivid detail as possible. Picture yourself in the space, using all five senses. Really arrive there.

• When you’re ready let the background of the memory fade and home in on the physical sensations of your body in this moment of curiosity.

• What does curiosity physically feel like in the body? Do you experience a quickening, a rise in body temperature? What’s happening in your chest or the tips of your fingers? Listen to your body.

• While still holding your attention on the body, take a look at your mind. What quality of mind does curiosity cultivate within you? Do you feel bright, manic, muddled, whirling, peaceful?

• Make these feelings and images as vivid and specific as possible. You are encoding, like a kind of muscle memory, what curiosity feels like for you.

• Now, let all those images fade and take a moment to sit with what it feels like to be CURIOUS with your eyes closed. If you’ve been journaling, then set that aside, close your eyes, and just feel the sensations in your body, not attaching any stories or images. Just feel into curiosity.

When you’re ready, jot down insights, impressions, and questions in your notebook or journal.

You may notice that the same sensations you feel when you’re curious are similar to the ones you feel when you’re in flow.

Coincidence? I think not.

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In this month’s Well Gathering, we got into all things CURIOUS, as it’s my guiding word of the month for January (and one of my two words for 2021 - the other is SOURCE).

You can snag the workshop recording, First Line Workout worksheet (one my absolute favorites!), and lecture notes on my newsletter subscriber portal. Not a subscriber? Become one here.

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See you down the rabbit hole….