Self-sabotage: Breakthrough Tip for the week of 10/10/2016

If you can’t find the time or energy to write, it is highly probable that no one else is keeping you from your writing. You may blame your partner, your kids, the job, the neighbors next door, our vicious economy – but in both the short and long runs, the one person keeping you from writing is you. Here are five questions for you to answer. If you can’t make the time to answer them, that is clear evidence that you are a self-saboteur/saboteuse. Take your time with each question. Read the first sentence. Sit with it for at least ten minutes. Then, write your answer for twenty minutes. Feel free to send us what you discover. We are all in this together.

 1. How am I still living out the messages from my childhood – being told my opinion didn’t matter or that I was a genius and didn’t have to study my craft or that I would never be as good as…? Those hidden blocks are in many of us. We also may have had a parent who snooped in our diary/journal or taught English or was an established writer. If none of that is true for you, you have still been bombarded your whole life  with media messages about who a real writer is. After you answer this question,  try writing a conversation with your creative self and ask it what it remembers.

2. Am I confusing getting high or loaded with being creative? Smoking pot can feel like a boost for your work – until you realize that weeks have gone by and you’ve never brought your great stoned ideas into reality. And drinking? It’s brought generations of writers, poets, playwrights and screen-writers to a dead end.  Coke? Ask Robert Downey, Jr. Only you know how to answer this question – and the answer is nobody else’s business – but sometimes asking a good friend will tell you what you don’t want to hear.

3. Have I fallen into the trap – happens a lot for writers who have the gift right out of the gate – of too much praise and exposure too early? It’s easy these days with what seem to be a near-infinite range of opportunities to have our work experienced by the public. And it’s easy to start chasing publication at all costs – yeah, so the website isn’t that great, but it’s “Exposure!!!” Then there is the trap of working for free – but it’s “Exposure!!!” Meanwhile, we are not developing our craft to its finest form.

4. Are you listening to the Big Biological Clock? Do you imagine that you can juggle your creative life and a partner and kids? Before you jump into those 35+-hour days, talk with friends and colleagues who are playing that balancing game. The sit-coms and diaper ads make it look so easy. We each have a finite amount of creative energy – though sometimes it feels like its endless – and that energy can only stretch so far.

5. Have you fallen into the Evil American Trap of “busy busy busy?” There’s no honor in racing from being the perfect partner/friend/parent to your day job to your work-out to your…  Here’s my take on this contemporary addiction. I wrote it for women, but I meet more and more male writers who are driving themselves into exhaustion. An exhausted writer rarely writes.

It is one thing to answer these questions honestly – it will be another to make the changes in your life that will honor the gift(s) you were born with.

 

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