July 13, 2011

Have you ever considered the fact that unhappiness is the first step along the writer’s path?

“Toddlers are bursting with the anxiety and helplessness of having feelings that they can’t get anybody around them to understand. They don’t even have the right words in their heads yet – it’s all emotion and frustration. That’s also an accurate description of writers in step one.” This is how Nancy Pickard and Lynn Lott describe the first of their Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path: the journey from frustration to fulfillment. [I highly recommend this book, by the way.]

This unhappiness may feel like an itchy feeling under your skin. It may feel like an urge to change something. Call it restlessness or discontent or creative tension. “Unhappiness,” say the authors, “to one degree or another, is where all creativity begins.”

Message in the Misery

If you’re starting to feel that itch to change something in your life, you’re moving into Step One. Maybe you don’t feel unhappy exactly. Maybe you’re just restless. But if this tension is trying to tell you that you’re a writer who should be writing, it can very quickly turn into discomfort and then misery if you don’t pay attention to it.

Even published writers in a long-time career can feel this unhappiness or tension when it’s time to make a change. “Every important turn on my writer’s path has been preceded by unhappiness,” Nancy Pickard admits. “The more major the turn, the worse the misery.” (I can certainly identify with that! I get bored first, then I itch to try something new or more difficult or different, and then I get fed up with whatever I’m currently doing.)

If you’ve been writing for a long time, this unhappy first step on the writer’s path may have more specific origins. It might be the misery of being in a day job you’d give anything to quit so you could write full-time. It might be the misery of a writer’s block that just won’t budge – perhaps for months. It might be the misery of when your proposal has been rejected by a dozen editors or agents-and your spouse has told you to get “a real job.”

What About You?

There are many signs, according to these authors, that you are in the first step along the writer’s path (the first of seven). Can you identify here? What does the beginning of a project – or the beginning of a writer’s life – feel like to you?

I had always assumed that the beginning (for other writers) was a time of great excitement, a happy eager time. I was glad to find that I wasn’t the only one who felt just the opposite!

How about YOU? How do YOU know when it’s time to get creative?

4 Comments »

1. 

   Kristi,

   I have to admit when I first read this some time ago, I couldn’t imagine how feeling miserable was a positive sign for anything, and the title of this post alone made me take notice and read it.

   For me, what I got out of it is that I’ve let past failures cloud my thinking and afraid to start over again.
   No t because I don’t want to. But I need and want to move on.

   You ask some deceptively simple questions, but ones you owe it to yourself to answer, honestly.
   So how do “I” know when it’s time for ME to get creative?
   Easy. When I start hating the business I want to be in, and as weird and childish as that sounds, that’s the point I’ve been stuck in a long time, despite my efforts to keep sadistic negativity at bay.
   About what you said here-

   “I had always assumed that the beginning (for other writers) was a time of great excitement, a happy eager time. I was glad to find that I wasn’t the only one who felt just the opposite!”

   I do know what you mean though, Kristi, sometimes being naive about your passions is a good thing, it’s much easier to take chances when you know little of or don’t care what market guides and industry insiders say, you don’t drive yourself mad when your mistakes just outshine the strengths you know are there, and that others have too, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to forget what I already know.

   I know being too serious and wound up did me. and sadly those who tried to help me, far more harm than good, but since I still want to be published commercially, I don’t see how I can just brush off the years of market study, ranting agent and editor blogs, and nearly all the writer’s I’ve ever met like I was being told lies only meant to hurt me?

   I knew then as I do now that’s never been true. It was still a pain to hear, and still is, but that doesn’t make it a lie.

   But sometimes I feel like the reason I stay stuck in my current depressive state is because I’ve feared that my wanting to be published (For pay) makes me seem insincere about how much I want this, that I only care about the money, but that’s just WAY far from the truth.

   I don’t have to own a pizzeria to love eating and making my own pizza.

   I don’t have to make movies to love movies.

   I don’t have to be a sketch artist or art history buff from Europe to appreciate, and have serious tastes and preferences for artwork.

   I know all that.

   Seriously.

   I get it…

   But I want both!

   I do write for the fun, I’ve never said I didn’t, but I don’t want to be a charity with everything I’m good at all the time, and I don’t know how to say that to anyone without being vague or sounding like a Scrooge, and I apologize if this sounds harsh, but it wasn’t meant as a dig at Kristi or anyone else, it’s just the clearest and most honest way I can put it.

   Again, I’m sorry if this comes off rude, unlike some people I’ve known, I don’t think you have to be cruel to be honest, but sometimes the truth can’t be bathed in unbridled positivity, and that doesn’t mean you enjoy being negative, as many accuse me of, okay?

   I hope to get back to my blog soon. I’ve been on yet another unplanned but necessary hiatus from the web as well as writing and I hope others out there understand how I feel, even if this sounds brattier which was never my intention.

   Take Care, Kristi.
   Great post as usual,

   Taurean

   Comment by Taurean Watkins — July 14, 2011 @ 1:37 pm

2. 

   Taurean, thank you for the lengthy post! I got some private emails about this too. See Friday’s post for more. (And NO, you didn’t come across as rude at all!)

   Comment by Kristi Holl — July 15, 2011 @ 10:25 am

3. 

   Thank God I wasn’t rude!

   I’ve really been working at watching how I come off as that’s been a problem for me in recent years.

   I was offline for both technical and personal reasons and now feel ready to start again.

   Comment by Taurean Watkins — July 15, 2011 @ 9:09 pm

4. 

   It is for both those who write and those who want to that Nancy Pickard and Lynn Lott have published Seven Steps On the Writers Path The Journey From Frustration to Fulfillment . Instead they tell us there is a writing path that were probably already walking and then help us examine the stages of this path and discover for ourselves both where we are and where we need to go… The authors thesis is that each writer inevitably hits each step on this journey and that furthermore each step is important and should be dealt with head-on…

   Comment by Mona — July 29, 2011 @ 11:47 am

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