“Signs may be but the sympathies of nature with man.”
—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, FROM JANE EYRE
Here, nearly at the end of Part One, if you are still wondering what the right path is for you, let me reassure you: There are signs that will point you toward the kinds of writing, opportunities, and people that you should include in your creative practice. I borrow from the words of Story Waters, founder of the blog Limitlessness.com: “Go where you are welcome. You do not need to fight against things.”
Have you ever found yourself working really, really hard to please someone, to earn approval, to receive attention or validation for your writing or your talent? And have you noticed that the harder you push, beg, or demand, the further away that validation or approval seems to go? This urge to “break into” or “bust through” the gates to get what you want can also tangle you up in a feeling of “I better hurry or there won’t be enough left for me.”
As a writer, you are probably prone to feeling pressured by the competition out there, as though you have to scramble to snatch up your success before someone else does. But if you refine your voice and vision and figure out what it is you have to say that no one else can in your particular way, no one will take your slot—because it exists only for you.
This is learning to live by what I call the “rule of welcome.” This means that if you find yourself banging your proverbial head against a wall for a long time without results, if you’re pushing too hard or feeling desperate, then it’s time to take a step back—and possibly several steps around.
You will know the feeling of welcome—it’s subtle, sometimes just the tiniest little tingle at the base of your spine that something is “right.” The feeling shows up at times when you find that writing, submission opportunities, and inspiration flow effortlessly. For me this feeling of “rightness” has become a litmus test for whether an opportunity or idea is worth investing my time. And I’m not alone; a good friend of mine who grew tired of hearing “almost” and “not quite” about her novels from agents and publishers eventually opted to work with a hybrid publisher that did not require an agent. She didn’t receive a big advance or huge distribution, but she did get to work with a team who helped put her much-labored-over novels into the world at last. It just felt right to her.
I believe in saying yes to as many new opportunities as possible (more on that in chapter thirteen, “Stretch Your Skills”), but I tend to pursue the ones that give me that sense of rightness. This is not to say that you will never have to work hard. On the contrary, welcome and work go hand in hand, but when the opportunity or idea is right, the work produces results as opposed to frustration and disappointment.
Don’t beat your head against walls, literal and virtual, where you will not gain access. Stop seeking approval. Press pause on attempts to be as others think you should be or as you feel you should be in order to achieve.
Instead: generate, create, deepen, practice, apprentice.
Here’s what I’ve noticed in my and others’ writing careers: Doors pop open that would otherwise have been shut:
When you feel the welcome sign—that buzzy little sense of certainty, familiarity, excitement, or rightness—it’s time to take action. Even if what presents itself seems like the smaller or less glamorous opportunity, that welcome sign is important and will usher you toward what you need.
The harder part, of course, is admitting when the doors truly aren’t opening after repeated and determined efforts. You need to learn to walk away from those doors and reevaluate. Ask yourself:
Once it becomes clear that an avenue will not open, stop trying for a time and reassess. What you can control is devoting more creative energy to your work, doing more research, making connections, reading widely in the genre you write in. What you can’t control is everything else: people’s decisions, approval, or willingness to take a chance; timing; and who got there “first.”
So don’t waste your time lamenting the doors that haven’t opened or never will. Instead, “Go where the energy welcomes you,” as author Story Waters says. In other words, seek synchronicity.
When you open yourself to synchronicity, you will begin to see a change in your writing practice. Renowned psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity in his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Jung believed that life was not a sequence of random events but a reflection of a much larger, more elegant or “deeper” order. This deeper order led to the insights that people live within “an orderly framework” and are the focus of this framework. The realization of this, he said, was “more than just an intellectual exercise.”
You might also see synchronicity as the phenomenon in which events line up in your life in such a way as to look like coincidence but feel like something much more meaningful. Say you’ve been toying with the idea for an essay about growing up with dyslexia, and then you go to see a movie that just happens to have a dyslexic character in it. It feels like a sign, doesn’t it? Or maybe you’re on a plane/in a café/at the gym and happen to start talking with this wonderful person who just happens to be a literary agent/magazine editor/fellow author. When you stay open and pay attention, synchronicity turns up everywhere.
No matter what you believe or think about the origins of life, we live in a world of beautiful patterns and unexplainable beauty. Our lives are like novels—we have such a short time to explore, discover, overcome obstacles, fight antagonists, make allies, and transform or discover our stories. What you do in your life can be empty and robotic, or it can be transformative, pushing you to new heights.
Since no one can argue for or against its existence, I advise you to see synchronicity in your writing life as a sign that you are moving into a place where you are welcome and that you are taking your writing life seriously and committing to your work. You may find synchronicity everywhere once you start looking for it: in conversations that lead to books that lead to new ideas that lead to blog posts that lead to writing projects that lead to new friends that lead to new resources that lead to Big Divine Inspirations.
Synchronicity is the way the muse speaks to you—it’s one part your subconscious mind making connections that your conscious mind misses, thus urging you toward opportunities, and another part the language of patterns, a quantum physics of creativity at work. Synchronicity requires you to be open and present. You must look for it. You must not write things off as accidental. Turn off your logical brain for just a moment. Just as quantum physics cracks open the underpinnings of reality more boldly every day by revealing that there is far more going on in the big cosmic soup than we realized—that atoms can be both particle and wave, that the universe expands despite gravity’s pull, that for all we know life is just a dream in a star’s heart—words can be scribbled ink on a page or digital pixels or emotions plunged directly into a reader’s heart.
Synchronicity requires attention on the part of the writer. I think it has a spirit of playfulness. It likes to make you giggle. It loves artists and writers of all stripes, because we are individuals who possess the ability to tap into its language.
Speak its language, my writing friends. Don’t box yourself into a category or a container or a set of expectations. Writers often want an audience, but we wait for others to tell us we’re worthy. We hope to squeeze through the tiny crack in the big gates on that hallowed road to fame and fortune, and squirrel away the words we should be sharing now.
There are other paths than just fame and fortune. Many others. Stay open. Write what you need to write, and share it with whom you want to share it.
Look for the synchronicity.
Allow the doors to fly open.
Do it now. Before your story is over.
I highly recommend you start a “synchronicity” notebook. You may call it whatever you wish: grand coincidences, goals that come to pass … it doesn’t matter how you frame it. Each day, record noteworthy events pertaining to your writing practice and goals. It could be something like “I picked up two books in a row today at the bookstore that shared the same name as my protagonist.” Or “As I was working on an essay about my mother’s death, I had this funny feeling to look through that box of old photos I’ve never opened; there I found a tiny diary she left behind that I never noticed or read before.”
The more you track these events and situations, the stronger your lens will become to look for signs that you’re moving in the right direction, and the more likely you will feel motivated rather than discouraged.
So far, the “Move It” section has been largely exercise based. However, this chapter is about going where you feel good and happy. Today I want you to do something physical that aligns with this feeling of welcome or flow. Here are some activities and ways to loosen your body that might fall into this category. I’m going to ask you to leave your adult mind behind for this one, because some of the most joyful people on the planet are children, who aren’t bound as much by our adult notions of being silly or weird.
The possibilities are endless, and you can vary any of these suggestions at any time.
by Rebecca Lawton, author of Junction, Utah; Steelies and Other Endangered Species; and other works
Many years ago I studied with a guitar teacher who liked to challenge his students with Bach duets. The music was full of arpeggios and scales that required full use of our fretboards. To help us increase our accuracy, we’d learn new economies of fingering that made grabbing notes easier. We’d set the metronome faster and faster, keeping up with the beats until we couldn’t. Then our playing would explode into a series of wrong notes, and we’d laugh, take a deep breath, and begin again.
Some scale tones weren’t reachable at the faster tempos, no matter how hard we practiced. When the pace was clearly beyond us, our teacher set it slower again. We found we could master all the music then, even the most demanding passages. “That’s the point,” he said. “You’re learning the difference between what’s difficult and what’s impossible.”
Writing challenges us the same way—not in speed necessarily but in range. There are the puzzles of research and language and sentence structure. There is simply mustering the energy to master our work. We may go, go, go until bam! We hit a wall.
Persistence in life is one key to success—falling down nine times and getting up ten. But persisting when there’s no hope of success is a fruitless endeavor. It’s admirable to keep trying in situations where satisfaction will be the ultimate prize, but it’s only frustrating if we’re only bloodying our noses and facing against a barrier again and again.
If you find that happening to you, stop. Rethink your approach. Take your work in a direction that does reward you.
You can decide to be like water, flowing where you’re ultimately bound. Or like the streaming notes of a musical composition, you can carry on in liquid lines to the last measure.
How to tell the difference between the difficult and the impossible? Two ways, I think: trust and practice. Trust your gut sense of progress. You’ll feel and hear your intuition saying, This is right, and then you can continue your life in that direction. Or, if you get information that says, Wrong way—a recurring situation, say, or an immovable attitude—you can change course. Life has other options. With practice, you’ll recognize them.
It’s the same on the page. Say you’re stymied by a piece you’re writing; it’s just not working and you’re out of ideas. You’re tired; you’ve been at it three hours. You can push on, rewriting until you’re defeated. Or you can give it a rest and return to it later with fresh eyes. When your mind and energy are clear, your beautiful gut sense will see the way through as it does with your life. The best parts will shimmer with vitality.
Most people I know have been in situations they’ve worked to improve, and some did get better. The situations that didn’t improve were best left behind: unappreciative bosses, unsatisfying work, unyielding ceilings to progress. Those sorts of barriers are not so different from intractable prose: Sometimes we just have to work a little harder; sometimes we have to listen to our intuition telling us to push the reset button.
Trust your gut about what resonates and what does not. Know that you’ll know what to cut and what to keep. Read and reread with your mind, heart, and intuition in tune with the work—at whatever speed allows you to really feel the energy. You will find the alive passages, and you can even choose to build on them. Those are the words you are meant to write; similarly, the life that flows is the one you’re meant to live. Whatever the tenor of your life and work, you can retain the living, flowing, energized parts and ditch the dead.
Life and writing are like playing Bach duets. Knowing the difference between the difficult and the impossible takes hard work, practice, and wise respites. With intuition sharpened and in balance, you can always—always—enjoy the pleasure of good-natured laughter, take a deep breath, and start again.