In the past few months, I’ve gotten so many emails from creative people telling me they’re feeling isolated, alone, apathetic, and tired with everything going on in the world today. A lot of people have gone through big shifts in the past couple of years and they know they’re ready to step into their power and embrace their creativity, but the problem is, they just can’t seem to find the energy or guidance on how to do that.
I’ve published 5 books (3 nonfiction and 2 fiction) and there’s so much I wish I would have known before publishing, that I now know through the long, hard road of experience. Whether you’re going the traditional publishing route, or you’re choosing to self-publish, there’s definitely a learning curve to becoming a new published author. My hope is that I can save you the headache of figuring it all out on your own so that the whole process goes a bit easier for you.
In my last article, Why Are Writers So Susceptible to Toxic Ideas About Creativity? I talked about how easy it is to fall prey to the never-ending anxiety loops of the brain when we are disconnected from our own hearts. When you’re almost totally in the brain space, writing becomes much harder than it needs to be.
If this is you, you’ll know this is you, because writing just isn’t any fun anymore. It feels difficult and fills you with dread and makes you feel badly about yourself. This is the result of letting the brain run your creative show, and there is another result that is rarely talked about, but has an extremely damaging effect on writers.
In my last article, One of the Biggest (and Most Dangerous) Myths in the Writing Community, I talked about the dangerous idea that is so prevalent in the writing community that “creativity has to be hard.” This idea is so dangerous because it stresses writers out to the point where they are totally consumed with anxiety and they then bring a ton of resistance to their writing projects, or can’t write at all.
Today, I’m talking about WHY we are so susceptible to this toxic belief and why it can be so hard to uproot it from our creative practice, like a tenacious weed that just won’t let go.
The reason is because, as a society, we are almost wholly dependent on our brains. We use our brains to navigate our world, interpret all information, and make every decision, very rarely ever checking in with our hearts. We have been programmed and trained to operate in this way from an early age, and if we do, by chance, happen to be a person who has broken out of this way of doing things and has tried to find greater balance by reconnecting with our heart, we are usually shamed in some way, and told we are “too idealistic,” “too sensitive,” and made to feel that we’re even possibly just slightly stupid.
One of the biggest things I see all writers struggle with is the idea that creativity has to be hard.
Sometimes I see this in the way a writer works. They might set themselves up on a schedule—trying to meet a high word count every day, for example—at which they are bound to fail. Or they beat themselves up mercilessly for the messiness and flaws that they see in their first draft. Sometimes it’s more hidden, and while the writer might be trying to stay cheerful on the outside while they meet all their rigorous writing goals, on the inside they feel horrible because their inner critic is lashing out at them for not being productive enough, or original enough, or just plain good enough.
When writers who are struggling turn to the online world of writing for help with these types of problems, they usually only find a lot of blogs and articles that reinforce the very feelings that are making them feel so bad about themselves. There is just so much stuff out there telling us that creativity is not supposed to be fun, that creativity is work and you have to treat it like a job, or that we should always have an eye on how productive we are. We should track our word counts, days devoted to writing, number of rejection letters, and that we should take pride in feeling beaten down and discouraged because, on top of everything else, growing a thick skin is also something that a real writer has to learn to do, even if it’s unbearably painful.