Write Anyway
How to Keep Showing Up for Your Writing No Matter What!

Chapter 1
All Rights Reserved

“It’s been a tough week,” Jean says during check-in of the Writing Habit class. “My son went into rehab. For the third time.” There are murmurs of sympathy, but no one interrupts. “For process this week, I journaled for five out of the five days I committed to. For self-care, I said I’d walk or workout five times; I walked everyday.” This is greeted with murmurs of appreciation.

“The journaling and walking really helped,” Jean continues. “You know, the first time someone goes into rehab, you’re so relieved and optimistic. Finally, someone who knows what to do is going to help. The second time, you’re still mostly optimistic. The third time is different.

“I realized while walking one day that this isn’t something we get to check off the list and move on. My son will have to deal with his addiction the rest of his life. The whole family will. I can’t wait for my life to go back to normal. This is it. I can’t put my book on hold any longer. I wasn’t perfect, but I did write four out of five days this week.”

Now I do gently interrupt to reframe. “No judgments, remember? You’re five for five on process, bonus seven for five on self-care, and four for five on writing. That’s great! Way to go, Jean! Way to write anyway!”

The rest of the class joins me in applauding and celebrating Jean’s success, just like we’ll applaud every one of them for their week’s accomplishments.

Some people can write no matter what’s going on: a family crisis, in-laws visiting, work stress, a string of rejection letters, a furnace that quits in Minnesota in February, kids involved in multiple activities, aging parents who need care, their own physical ailments. Do these people have more will power than the rest of us? More discipline? Are they less susceptible to distractions or just more self-centered?

I can’t speak for all writers, but the students and coaching clients I work with who consistently write no matter what aren’t any more disciplined, focused or self-centered than most people. They show up for their writing and themselves because they’ve learned how to harness the power of habit. They’ve learned what’s going on in their brains when they’re feeling resistance and what they can do to move through that resistance. They think I’ve helped them figure out how to making writing part of their lives, but the truth is, they’ve helped me refine my coaching and hone the basic practices that create sustainable habits. I thank and applaud them all!

This book is for all of us who love to write and yet avoid our writing.

We sit down in our writing space, only to pop out of the chair to get a drink, a sandwich, another book to research. Or we sit down at our computers to write, but first we have to check and respond to email and somehow an hour goes by and we never quite got to the writing. Or we somehow never quite get to the writing space at all. We distract ourselves with a multitude of other things to do and think about. We keep promising ourselves that someday soon we’ll go back to the novel, the poems, the essay about great-aunt Ruby. And while we’re promising ourselves we’ll return to what gives us such joy, some small part of us knows that we’re lying.

Why do we have such a love-hate relationship with our writing? What is it about writing that both attracts us and repels us? Why is it so difficult to do the very thing we love to do? Why, when bliss is just a moment away, do we look for something we have to take care of before we write?

Resistance Is Normal

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve published for years or you’re still looking for your first publishing credit, every writer experiences resistance of some kind from time to time.    

I’ve surveyed nearly 500 writers so far and over 95 percent of them report experiencing some kind of resistance. Writer’s block is the best-known, but not the only – or even the most common – form of resistance.

Ninety-five percent of writers who completed the survey report that distractions keep them from their writing. Eighty-five percent report that procrastinating and postponing get in the way. And another 84 percent acknowledge feeling initial inertia (defined as the “I just can’t get started” feeling).

Resistance shows up in many different ways. Forms of resistance identified in the writer’s survey include:

·    Anxiety or fear about writing (70% of survey respondents experienced this)

·    Wanting to write, but not being able to (68% of survey respondents experienced this)

·    Sitting down to write and suddenly remembering ten other things you have to do right now (60%)

·    Keeping your schedule so full you don’t have time to write (48%)

·    Delaying or failing to meet deadlines (39%)

·    Editing your first page over and over and feeling unable to move on (33%)

Resistance is normal. It’s part of the writing life. What makes or breaks us is not whether we experience resistance (we will!) – it’s how we respond to resistance. Most writers respond badly: we criticize ourselves, we push and drive, we threaten and bully ourselves, we question our ability, our commitment, our character. We must stop doing this! It is completely ineffective. And it drains the joy out of writing.

Resistance Can Be Resolved

Resistance is not about laziness, lack of will power, or the failure of intellect and imagination. It’s about neurology and psychology. When we know what’s happening in our brain and in our mind to cause resistance, we can learn how to effectively respond to resistance.

The best response is to write anyway. We need simple practices that bring us to our writing space regularly. We need commitments that are meaningful enough to engage us and small enough that we know we can keep showing up no matter what!

Write Anyway will give you the information, encouragement and pragmatic tools you need to move through resistance and get your ideas on the page and into the world. This book explains in layperson’s terms our best understanding of what’s going on in a writer’s brain when she or he experiences resistance. It combines the insights of recent neurological research with a Jungian perspective of how shadow interacts with creativity, a perspective I’ve gained from nearly 20 years of experience in teaching creativity, coaching creative people and studying the creative process.

As a teacher and coach, I’ve challenged and encouraged thousands of novelists, playwrights, poets, memoirists, nonfiction writers, songwriters and storytellers to bring their unique perspective fully into their communities. I continue to survey and interview writers across the country about how resistance has affected their writing, how they have tried to overcome resistance and what actually works for them. (If you’d like to be part of this survey, click here.)

I’m going to give you proven, workable practices and methods. I’ve seen them work for students, coaching clients and colleagues. They’ll work for you, too. If you keep showing up and write anyway.

Another Word for Showing Up is Habit

For over ten of the eighteen years I’ve been teaching creative process to writers at the Loft (the country’s largest and oldest literary center), I’ve taught a class called The Writer’s Habit. For many writer-students, this is their first Loft class, their first experience with writers teaching writers, their first bold claim that maybe they are writers.

Other writer-students turn to the Writing Habit after taking several craft-focused classes at the Loft in fiction, CNF (creative nonfiction), poetry, children’s literature or other genres. Some have MFAs or advanced degrees in writing or literature. Some are trying to complete their dissertation. Some are or have been professional writers who discover that they’re great at meeting deadlines their bosses and editors set, but they need a different kind of structure to keep them accountable to the writing projects they’re most interested in, the speculative projects that haven’t yet captured the attention of an editor and so have no deadlines.

Whatever their backgrounds and experiences, they all think they need more ‘discipline.’

“I hate to disappoint you,” I tell them, “but I’m not big on discipline. I find that habit is much more effective. That’s why I teach the Writing Habit, not the Writing Discipline.”

To me, discipline implies white-knuckled will power, the insistence that I will do such-and-such or I will refrain from doing such-and-such. I used to be better at discipline when I was younger, when I had more energy and fewer distractions. Now, I rely on habit.

Habits carry me; discipline I have to drag along. Discipline requires constant vigilance; habits let my attention wander to more interesting creative ideas and activities. Discipline requires energy and effort; habits are what I do without doing, in a Taoist sort of way.

One of the common things I hear from my Loft students is a bemused confession that, even though they love to write, they seem to have an unending supply of excuses for not writing. They are dazed by how much time has passed since they were consistently writing. They are surprised that they aren’t writing regularly even though it’s been months since they finished the thing they thought they needed to get out of the way before they could get serious about writing – the Master’s degree, getting married, getting the kids out of diapers, completing the major project at work, getting the kids into grade school, paying off the car loan, getting the kids off to college, retiring.

That’s where we start: with the awareness that what they’ve been doing isn’t working or isn’t working well enough to satisfy them. I promise them they can have a writing habit based on three basic practices that make it possible to show up for their writing. Then, and only then, can they return to the joy that comes from doing what they love to do. It’s still difficult at times, because resistance is omnipresent, but they know how to show up in spite of the resistance.

If you have the awareness that you want more joy in your writing life, I promise you that you too can discover how to write anyway.