Hello writers,

I am coming to you with a topic that’s been on my mind the last few months. As always, I am curious about the creative process and the many ways we all experience it through the ever-changing seasons of life. I tend to love content that challenges me in good ways, that highlights self-limiting beliefs I’m still carrying around, and re-centers me back into what’s important to me again and again. It’s so easy to get derailed, as is our sweet human nature.

Over the summer I read The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner. It was published the same year I was getting my MFA but somehow it slipped past me, though it should have been required reading. A close friend recommended it, said it was soothing, a balm to the sometimes disorienting experience of making public your most personal work. I read it hungrily, immediately pulled in by Lerner’s dark humor, her eviscerating way of naming the truth in her very distinct literary voice. I appreciate tough love, and even more I appreciate good writing. This has both.

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When I came upon this passage where Lerner is talking about motivation, I felt that little ping where I knew I wanted to share something about it. She says:

“I realize I should not be critical of anything that helps writers achieve their creative goals, but I am. I don’t think a writer, or any artist for that matter, should need a whip other than the one inside that drives him to create. The more you indulge in any neurotic notions about a set of necessary conditions that will enable you to write, the colder the trail will get. The problem is none of this is writing. It’s stalling.” -Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

Even as someone who teaches and coaches writers for the last many years, I agree wholeheartedly with this. The one-on-one work I do with writers (rare now, as it all goes into The Fountain) is very rarely about motivating them in the traditional sense. I tried that at first, and I quickly burned out because it does not work. It would go like this: I would implement deadlines and check-ins as if this was what was needed for them to write their words only to find that while maybe it provided a little juice at the start, it ran out quickly. A caveat, because of course there always is one when we discuss something as nuanced and personal as the creative act: sometimes, a writer just wants to feel someone is on the receiving end, and this is enough. Sometimes a deadline is enough. Sometimes a word count goal is enough.

But for many chronically stuck writers, most of the time, this is simply just not the issue of why they are not writing.

This is why my work focuses on the more psychological aspects of creating and the much deeper source of why we find ourselves blocked day after day from doing the one thing we say we most want to do. My work is to help writers get a handle on their own internal motivation, to trust the draw to the page and answer their specific call and the way we do that is not by making a schedule.

I’d like to think that if no one was waiting for my work, I would still write it. I’d like to think that there are deeper gifts to be unearthed than outcome-based checkmarks. You find very quickly that publishing a book does not repair you. It does not do the things for you perhaps you thought it might, and you also find that even if it does, the target is always moving.

These of course are the lessons you learn only by doing, and I think the promise of transcendence once a book is published is probably a healthy mirage to walk toward because it can keep the train rolling, and yes, there are many gifts of publishing to an audience, but once you do this, eventually, you have to define why else you might be in this game.

Needing excessive external motivation feels to me like a bandaid to a larger issue. With so much content—more content than ever, ever before—about writing support and coaching and tips and tricks, I worry that it’s all just distraction from the actual thing we all have to eventually face, which is ourselves sitting before the blank page again and again with no guarantee of external success. Scary! We have to cultivate a trust in the writer in us, a trust in something greater that elevates this act into something spiritual in nature, a sort of ongoing prayer, and we have to be willing to be radically honest with ourselves about our own self-sabotaging behaviors.

This topic was sparked for me too because someone made a comment to me about needing more reminders to write. As in, more emailed reminders of process tips and tools. This comment was sort of angled as a tip for me in how to be a better…steward of writers and their practices, I suppose, and it hit in two ways: one, I felt dismayed. How many reminders and nudges do we really require to get le ass in chair? Is not the tug, the screaming desire to write, the soul-led need, enough? (if not, something deeper is going on!) Also, yeah. I have a hard time acquiescing to the marketing needs of this current time which seem to require endless reminders and posts and emails about the same things before someone actually takes action.

I think for all writers there comes a moment where we must decide that this call is more important to us than many other things. And if we do decide that but find we can still not cultivate the practice we so desire, then we must look under the hood for the answers to what is blocking us, and not to our inboxes, or our feeds.

I truly do think that for those of us who have done enough inner work to be pretty unblocked around our practice, these tips and tricks and classes and accountability groups can really work and provide a lot of community and joy. But they can’t be a stand in for the other part, the inner relationship, and we must shine a light on the parts that stand in the way of our natural motivation, which I do believe we all have once we can clear away the debris.

That’s it for today. I hope fall finds you well and thriving and in step with your creativity. Now is the time to write. Now is the perfect time.

xo,

C

And speaking of creating! We will be running our Book Writing Intensive January 11-April 20th. You can sign up now for early-bird pricing. This is the 100-Day curriculum of my dreams, that was designed by Kim and I with all of this in mind, a true writing program to nurture all parts of the writer, especially the more hidden and difficult parts. Join us <3