The sneaky thing that might be standing in the way of your creative work.

Why the Self story is the most important story

Hello faithful readers,

I’ve been busy cooking up a different post for you all with a fun end of year theme, when I remembered writing this essay for The Shit No One Tells You About Writing substack around the time my book came out. I wanted to repost it here for you in case you missed it, and I hope it can serve you as you close out 2024 and consider what to bring into 2025.

Without further ado, please enjoy this dispatch from the field of my lived experience as a writer, and also my work as a writing coach.

the sly smile of a woman directing her husband on how to capture this photograph so I appear casual and candid as I serenely write, and also an excuse to show you my Black Friday purchase: finally, at last, the reading chair of my dreams

Why the story you’re telling about yourself might be stopping you from writing the story you want to be writing on the page

We writers are usually comprised of several selves—I have the capital ‘W’ Writer self (my preferred mode) who actually writes fiction; then there’s the Author self, who promotes and talks about that work to an audience; then there are the offshoots of those identities which have to do with teaching and, for the last five or so years in my case, one-on-one coaching. One of my beloved clients calls me her “book sha-woman.”

I love the coaching relationship for many reasons, but the main one is that in my sessions with other writers I’m able to witness common patterns. In general, people want to work with me to help hone their creative practice and feel supported in that. In the beginning, I structured our first sessions to identify their daily rhythms and what might be standing in the way of their writing. I instituted things like shared excel spreadsheets where they could log word counts, tips about using timers and habit stacking, scheduling writing time as if it’s an appointment, good old fashioned accountability check-ins. The list goes on—there are endless tips and tricks. Most of them really do work. But yet, armed with all these hacks, I still watched my clients turn up to our meetings not having done the work they hoped to do.

Then, years ago, in a session with a client, I had a huge, revelatory moment. I want to share it today because it has transformed the way I teach and write about writing, and I hope if you see yourself here, it might help you, too.

My client was a very high functioning person—a caretaker, a partner, had a full-time job, was very active in her community, etc. My client also harbored a lifelong dream of writing a novel. She had gone to school for writing, had formed community around writing, read like her life depended on it, and had a really great idea for a book. But when it came to actually writing…(sound the crickets.)

As she detailed her life to me, the little ins and outs, and all the reasons why making time for writing was impossible…and as I suggested ways she might make space (did she really needed to be the president for her kid’s archery team—maybe there was a less time consuming role that could still allow them to be present—was it enough to watch practices and go to competitions?) Did she need to organize her monthly book club or could that baton be passed to others? Could she maybe take a break from researching her family history on 23 and Me and compiling it into a detailed report for her family members?

It would be one thing if these activities seemed to be lighting this person up. If so, then great! But by nature of the fact that we were there to figure out how she might make room for her own fiction writing told me that something was out of balance and she knew it. She spoke of these tasks with the passion of a cardboard box.

But when I challenged this writer’s day to day, I felt her defensiveness turn on. I could see that this writer had really told herself a story about why she couldn’t write, and had worked really hard to corroborate that story (I’m just too busy!) by making herself in fact extremely, undeniably busy.

Undeniably important. Undeniably needed.

The light bulb was this, though: she had done more work crafting the story of why she couldn’t write than the actual story she wanted to write: her novel.

I wondered, sitting with her, what might happen if the energy she had put into this story of her life was put into the novel she wanted to write instead? What would happen if I suggested that her idea of busyness was a self-created shield to prevent her from doing her heart’s work?

Admittedly, I was a little nervous to float this idea. She was very convinced of her story, after all.

“Do you really want to write this novel?” I asked her.

She looked dumbfounded. “Of course I do. That’s why I’m here!”

“Well, then we better figure out what’s really in the way,” I said, taking a leap, hoping I was right, that her kid’s archery had nothing to do with this.

She sort of half-heartedly launched into another story about how after the fall she would maybe have more space…if she could just get through the next few months… But I could see something new had begun to smolder inside her. I just nodded and smiled. She trailed off. “Alright., what?”

When it really came down to it, this writer for a great many years (over twenty) had filled her life with things she thought she needed to do, but not things she wanted to do. The deeper question was why was she was doing this? Logically it made no sense. But we aren’t here to deal with logic, are we?

It has to do with something deeper that isn’t taught to us in our MFA classes and workshops on craft. It’s about fear, maybe. But what’s under that fear? We can’t just stop at fear, that wild merry go-round. Maybe it’s about the unrealistic expectations society places on women—patriarchy, anyone? Sure, sure, there’s always that. But what’s under that that we can identify and actually control?

I’d argue everything comes back to one thing: self-worth.

When I asked this writer directly, “do you think you are worthy of having a writing practice?” tears sprung to her eyes. This told me we were onto something. That we had begun the harder work, the true work, which is to go below the surface, into the heart.

“Are you?”

She shrugged. She shrugged! Bingo, I thought. The shrug heard round the world, the moment when faced with this simple question and she could not look me in the eye and say: “Yes.”

This, I thought, is why she’s not writing. It has nothing to do with her schedule. However real and daunting the story around the schedule had become, it seemed to crumble before us in that moment.

I think sometimes we resist this idea because on one hand it seems too simple, but then on the other it seems much too complicated. Because to get to the core of why we’ve constructed certain stories about our lives, we have to look at the softer little version of us who at some point picked up stories from others about what we were capable of, what we were worth, and what we could (or not) offer the world.

I asked her what she thought would happen if she shifted her roles a little, gave herself some breathing room? Did she have to get that extra training certificate at work, really? What would happen if she delegated some things? What would happen if she quit the damn book club? Did she like the book club, or was it kind of a drag? She wiped her eyes. “It’s kind of a drag.” We burst out laughing.

But what would happen if she shifted some of these things she had told herself she HAD to do? She wasn’t sure yet, but she feared that if she wasn’t so busy all the time, and really devoted her time to her writing, she would find out she wasn’t very good, she’d find out her novel idea sucked, her family would be angry with her, her kids would feel abandoned, her partner would feel distant, her community would think she didn’t care about them…the stories we’re deep and high stakes.

The deepest one that took a few more sessions to unlock: she worried she was just inherently not good enough and that success was for other people. And another biggie: If I say no to something, I will be unliked. I revised it: unloved. Unaccepted. Abandoned.

As any writer knows, stories are the most powerful things of all. These aren’t only stories. Stories are the governing forces of our lives. If you don’t think the ones you are telling yourself about yourself matter, I’d ask you to reconsider. Why wouldn’t we interrogate the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves? Why wouldn’t we do it regularly? Her stories were a fiction she had created with detail and precision and clung to as if they would keep her alive. But in fact, they were killing her, and ironically killing the literal story of her novel.

May Sarton said, “The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”

This writer’s gift was turned inward and warped. No matter what she did she always felt she wasn’t doing enough. This pattern would never end until she satiated that urge to write.

“I’d love to see you apply this same level of storytelling to your novel,” I said.

“Me too.”

So began the real work together. And only once she’d broken down this internalized narrative could she really start implementing the more practical tools and actually benefit from them. She had to practice saying no to things she didn’t really want to do. She had to first learn how to even register in her body that she didn’t want to do them. After all, they were all good things! She had to negotiate her story about what a good mother and partner is. Maybe a good mother could be someone who writes for three hours on a Saturday morning, and shows up for the game with hugs and cheers, but isn’t running the damn squad?

You’re a writer, I kept telling her. Not a general manager of rec youth sports.

Right, right.

“Put it in the novel,” I’d say when I could tell she wasn’t totally convinced. “Give it your character to handle.”

I’d tell her to literally give her worries and problems to her narrator and watch them dance with it. It’s a great way to sidestep writer’s block and also see your own story morph and play out. It’s a great way to have some distance from something and even build a little self-compassion along the way. On the page she could see that her need to be involved in every little thing was coming from a place of fear of not being enough and wanting to check boxes on outward measures of success, leaving her own internal boxes unchecked. She was starting to see the cost of this.

“What if nothing comes of my writing. Won’t people think, like, what was the point of all that?”

There was another story, the one about what people think of us. “None of our business,” I told her. She rolled her eyes. But I could see her taking in this new story. “I’d invite you to very much not give a F what other people think.”

We also had to work on her story about what a writing life looked like. She had told herself that to be a real writer that’s all you did. That you sacrificed everything and everyone. That you had to quit your day job.

“Please do not quit your day job,” I said. “Most of us still have day jobs, you know. Unless you’re Stephen King.” It’s true that nearly every single writer I know who publishes books, is balancing many other jobs and roles. It’s never one thing. So if you’re waiting for the moment you have no other responsibilities to write…listen, it’s hard to write from the grave.

The ice was melting. I could tell she was getting it.

“My mom always wanted to paint but she never did.”

I asked her what she thought about that. She said it was sad, that in a way she felt she could never truly know who her mom was because she never lived out that joyful impulse.

Joyful impulse! “Is writing joyful for you?”

“Yeah, I think so. If I can cut through all this other crap. I really do love it.”

I left our meetings feeling elated because it was all making more sense to me. This was why so many talented, capable writers seemed flummoxed as to why their lives weren’t matching up with their dreams. Why they were handing out their time like day old café muffins, cheap and easy, and not protecting it. It wasn’t that they hadn’t thought to protect the time! They had the right planners! They had taken seventeen classes on craft. It’s that they didn’t think they were worthy. The story became “I don’t have enough time” when really the story is “I’m not enough.”

It takes not only identifying our stories, but the work of reinforcing new ones. I’d suggest a practice that engages the subconscious, because this is where we quite literally rewire our neural pathways.

The first step is getting very honest. Journal for a few minutes: What stories are you abiding that no longer serve you? What are you telling yourself about yourself? Where are these stories coming from?

I’ll leave you with a list of common ones I hear, and you can see if you can spot why they are limiting:

I’m a slow writer.

I’ll never find mainstream success.

Other people are lucky.

I’m no good at plot.

I’m no good at or only good at…(insert thing)

I can only write in the morning.

I can only write at night.

I can only write under a full moon. (Okay, you get it)

I need to do a ton of research before I can start writing.

It takes me at least ten years to write anything good!

If I just find a really good writing group I can write.

I need a retreat.

I need more accountability.

I don’t have time.

We can all find evidence of truth in our stories. We can look around for proof, and probably find it, that we are right. My client could list all the ways she was literally very busy. But go a step deeper. Are you a slow writer or are you scared? Did someone tell you this once and it became part of your identity? There’s so much unhelpful noise about how hard writing is, and I’d encourage you not to jump on someone else’s bandwagon. Really ask, do you want to embody their story. Or decide on one for yourself? How can you say no to things in a way that serves your art while still staying engaged in your life in ways that are important to you? What will you do today that will bring you closer to your work versus further away? What stories are you telling yourself, about yourself? Let’s revise them and make sure they serve us now, today, for the writer you want to be, the writer you really are.

Happy writing,

C