16 May

Mindful Writing: Dealing with High Stakes

Posted in Mindful Writing, Process, Writing

It’s pretty normal to have a fear of failure but fear of success?  That’s just plain weird.  Yet in my writer-brain, somehow it’s far more terrifying to succeed at something than it is to fail.  Why?  Because success means higher stakes, and if failure does happen later on it hurts all the more.

It’s like the Earth in the picture, just floating through space, la-dee-da, until some huge meteor smacks into it.  If the Earth were just a barren rock, then the stakes would be low because the Earth wouldn’t have much to lose.  But the Earth has spent millions of years growing life from one-celled organisms to sentient beings.  It’s because of the Earth’s success at making living things that a meteor hit would be so unbelievably catastrophic.

It’s sort of the same with writing.  The more you write, the higher the stakes get because you’ve invested time and effort into the project.  If you don’t finish the book you won’t get rejected by agents and editors because you’ll never get to that point, so it’s actually a comfortable place to be.  But if you spend all that time writing and editing the book and then you get rejected, it hurts.  Big time.

This is where mindful writing comes in.  In mindfulness, you need to be aware of the things you can control and the things you cannot.  You can’t control whether people will love or hate your book, but you can control whether you actually finish writing it.  Success and failure are out of your control.  What you can control is whether you write the book.  After that, all you can do is accept the successes and failures when they come.

What scares you more: success or failure?  What can you do today that will take you one step closer to finishing a project?

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09 May

Mindful Writing: Accepting Failure

Posted in Mindful Writing, Process, Writing

We all have goals and high hopes that things will turn out a certain way.  As writers, we hope to see our work in print someday.  We hope for agents, publishers, reviewers, and readers to love our book.  We wish for a lot of things, but it doesn’t always turn out the way we’d like.  Sometimes our projects flop, people don’t like our work or we ourselves don’t follow-through on our goals.  Sometimes we… fail.

So how do we deal with these moments of hurt and disappointment.  How do we bounce back from from failure?  Two words: Mindful Writing.  Today, take out your notebook and take a few moments to take stock of the parts of your writing life where you feel like you have failed.  You can do this as a guided exercise, following the five steps below, or you can just read through and do the exercise later.  Here’s how:

5 Steps for Accepting Failure

1. Notice the disappointments.  Look at your writing life and write down goals you’ve failed to meet or places where things have not turned out the way you would have liked (i.e. rejections and other disappointments).

2. Recognize the things that are outside your control.  While some things may be outside your control–you can’t control who likes your work and who doesn’t–other things you may be able to control after all.  The key is figuring out which things are things you can control and which are not.

3. Take responsibility.  Look at the things you can control and take responsibility for areas where you failed to meet your goals or contributed to the disappointment in some way.

4. Say how you will not let it happen again.  Make a list of ways in which you will not let this disappointment happen or this goal be missed again.  Come up with real strategies to help you avoid this same failure in the future.

5. Let it go.  Don’t ruminate on the disappointment, but move forward towards your goal.  These things happen so just acknowledge, accept and move on.

On a personal note, for me the biggest failure I’ve had to deal with lately was working on my WIP and making my self-imposed deadlines.  I set some rather unrealistic deadlines and it took missing two such deadlines to realize that this method of self-motivation was not working.  At first, I beat myself up for missing the deadlines, but then I realized that I need to set more realistic goals.  But I would not have made this important discovery had it not been for mindful writing.

Have you faced disappointments in your writing?  How have you managed to bounce back?

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02 May

Writing Challenges as Mindful Writing

Posted in Mindful Writing, Process, Story A Day

Writing challenges are a great way to practice mindful writing.  I’ve talked about mindful writing in the past, and the idea is to be fully present in your writing and in the moment.  The question is, how do you do that when you’re doing a challenge?  If you’re pushing to write a whole novel in a month or a different story every day, you don’t have time to be mindful, you just have to cram in as much writing as you can.  Right?  Believe it or not, challenges like StoryADay and NaNoWriMo are actually great exercises in mindful writing.

Here’s why:

1.  You have to practice.  When you do a challenge like this, you’re reinforcing the daily practice of writing.  You’re showing up at the page every day and that’s the first step of mindful writing.

2.  You have to be present.  If you’re writing a story every day or trying to finish a novel, you can’t allow yourself to be distracted by other ideas or projects.  You need to focus all your energy on the project at hand.  This is great practice for mindful writing because if a new and sparkly idea comes up, you have to practice setting it aside so you can work on the current story.

3.  You have to bounce back.  If you miss a day or slip up during the challenge, you have to bounce back and keep writing.  You don’t have time to mope or beat yourself up for “failing” the challenge; you just have to write the next story.  This forces you to set aside those judging thoughts and go back to writing.

Remember: Mindful writing is about being fully present in that moment and in that writing project.  That means noticing when your inner critic is trying to barge in and letting those thoughts go.  It also means bringing yourself back to that project when your thoughts or ideas start to wander.

Are there any challenges you’re facing in your writing?  Is there a way you can use the experience to practice mindful writing?

4 Comments »

28 Feb

5 Steps to Mindful Writing

Posted in Mindful Writing, Revision, Writing, Writing Exercises

Mindfulness is the idea of becoming aware of our mind; we notice when it wanders and strive to bring it back to the task at hand.  Mindfulness is all about being present and living fully in the moment.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about mindfulness and its connection to writing.   In particular, how can we as writers, improve our writing practice by being more present in the moment?  Here are 5 steps I’ve discovered that bring me to more mindful writing. 

1)  Show up at the page.  This is the “being present” part of mindfulness practice.  It might seem like a no-brainer, but you can’t write if you don’t actually show up at the page.  These days it’s so easy to putter around and “look busy.”  You can tweet or post on Facebook that you’re writing.  You can hang out with writing friends and talk about how you’re going to write.  You can do lots of things instead of writing, but if you don’t actually pull out your pen and paper to write, you won’t get any writing done.  It’s that simple.

2)  Be aware.  Are you feeling overly judgmental about the current project?  Are you loving your idea a little too much?  Is your inner critic gnashing at the bit?  Notice your emotional impulses (especially fears and worries) as you write, then set them aside and keep writing. 

Tip:  I keep a worry jar on my desk where I write my fears on a slip of paper and put it in the jar.  This way, I get them out of my head and put them away for safe-keeping so that I can keep writing. 

3)  Draw on your Wise Mind.  Wise Mind is where Emotional Mind and Rational Mind intersect.  Wise Mind is where you find the resources to write mindfully and push forward in your work.  When you write, your Rational Mind might be worried about pragmatics: how tough it is to get published and why you should be researching potential agents before you write your book.  Your Emotional Mind will probably focus on emotions like: What’s the use?  Whatever you write will never be perfect so why bother?

Wise mind is the part of you that tells the other two to shush.  It’s the part of your mind that acknowledges that both Rational Mind and Emotional Mind do have a point but that they’re not right about everything.  Yes you need to know something about the business, but if you don’t write, you won’t have anything to sell.  And maybe your book won’t be perfect, but you can work at it and make it better, as long as you put words on the page in the first place.

4)  Sit with your discomfort (for a little while).  I hate mindfulness exercises.  I fidget too much and can’t keep still.  My left knee is always bouncing and I have a nervous tick where I start to laugh if I think people are looking at me.  Still, I make myself do them because I know it’s important.   I do my best to sit with my discomfort for a while, until it starts to melt away.

The same is true for writing.  I used to have this knee-jerk reaction whenever writing something would get hard: I’d start writing something else.  Now I force myself to sit with the uncomfortable project for a little while, to see if my decision to set it aside is one of pragmatics (the project just isn’t feasible) or based on my own discomfort.  If the latter, I try to work through the discomfort.

5) Practice, practice, practice.  This comes back to showing up at the page.  The goal with mindfulness isn’t to be aware of every thought every minute of the day.  The point is to be able to turn on the “mindful” switch and become aware when you need to be.  The same is true for writing.  You need to practice getting “in the zone” so that eventually you will be able to do it on command.

Contrary to popular belief, the brain is a muscle and you need to work it often.  As you become more accustomed to switching on this level of awareness–this mindfulness–you’ll be able to do it whenever your writing needs a boost.

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