I have recently spent some time observing and analyzing the behaviour of successful writers, as I try to wrap myself around writing our book. What definitely struck a cord in me was to see what these people need to tap into on their journey to a successful piece of writing. The mood swings, the emotional ups and downs that take over in order to experience something, anything, that will profoundly affect them enough to transform it into words worthy of putting on a page. Feelings so raw that I wonder…is this emotional roller coaster a sign of slowly losing your mind, or is it the actual creative process to writing?
When I look inside myself immediately I think, “Yes, I am not nuts!”. For the longest time, from a “What the hell is he trying to pull out of me?” poetry-writing class in college to 12 years of business and marketing writing, I struggled with the emotions involved when writing any piece subject to criticism and scrutiny. The high of a potentially great idea; the anguish of narrowing down your approach; the fear of not being good enough; and, finally the anger and frustration of a blank page, almost giving up and calling it a day until…the overwhelming tipping point that almost always leads to a fabulous breakthrough. A flood of ideas, words and sentences that you could not imagine any other way. A piece you start to believe will be worthy of your blood, sweat and tears. Literally.
I have spent all these years fighting this behaviour and not really understanding what I lived, until I took the time to see it in others. What I believed was my own weakness, a false sense of lack of experience and an overall ineptitude of my craft, has already begun to transform into a growing acceptance of my creative process. The clarity and understanding of what I need to experience as a writer in order to produce a piece, that ultimately pleases the worst critic of all, me, is worth gold as I embark on my own journey of book writing.
What I put on the table for you to consider in all of this, no matter what your passion is, is before you chalk a good part of your career up to being questionable and unsatisfying, take the time to observe, clarify and most of all embrace your own process to producing your best work. Whether it be creative, scientific, physical or intellectual, we all go through it in some kind of way, and imagine the possibilities of showing up in this world if you can learn to harness exactly what makes you do what you do best.