I’ve been part of a workshop on writer’s block for, wow, like 6 months now. Next week is the final week and I am going to miss my Thursday morning zoom call! Today, though, we were talking about habits, habit formation, and how not writing can just be a habit rather than necessarily anything huge and disastrous. One of my colleagues in the call linked to their post about Rule Transformations: it’s a straightforward and logical concept, but sometimes you (I) need to hear the same thing repeated over in different ways for it to sink in, right, so I thought I’d do a quick post responding to their post.
Basically the key steps are identify your current rules, question your current roles, and transform your current rules – then live it out. Simple, but simple isn’t always easy of course. And the hardest part here is actually identifying what your current rules are.
What are the rules I’ve set up that mean I haven’t written anything fictional in about a month?
That’s the hard question, and although I’ve been circling around this for weeks now, it took another comment from another colleague in the same call for me to really connect the dots. I have a lot of trouble accepting things I haven’t worked hard or struggled for. I didn’t realise this about myself* (although now it’s been pointed out, I see it acting out almost daily) until a great conversation with my psych a couple of months ago. Even simple things like avoiding buying a snack if I’m hungry while I’m out because if I’d gotten ready faster, I would have had time for breakfast, and there is perfectly good food at home that I can eat when I get there… never mind that my whole ‘out’ experience will now be miserable because I’m hungry, which is a problem I could solve for like $5. *all the self eyerolling*
* A coach I worked with once was fond of saying, “The jam in the jar can’t read the label.” Sometimes we really do need an outside perspective on ourselves.
Anyway I forgot that that attitude applies to my writing as well: writing is fun and enjoyable and very much not a compulsory part of my day, and therefore, my inner critical voice says, it’s indulgent, maybe even selfish (this was a narrative I had to work really hard to ignore* while leaving teaching – *GASP* YOU’RE LEAVING TEACHING WHERE YOU CHANGE LIVES TO GO WRITE BECAUSE IT MAKES *YOU* FEEL GOOD?! YOU HELLION.).
* And honestly it’s probably time I started doing some reparenting on this rather than just ignoring it, oops
So I need to have done enough in the day to DESERVE writing time, and at the moment, when I have capacity to do like two useful things a day and that’s it, it’s really, really hard to feel like I’ve ‘done enough’ full stop, let alone enough to deserve anything. I’m working on this mindset, of course – it’s that or go insane – but for whatever reason, yeah: I didn’t realise this was part of the reason I’ve not written the last month as well. (There are a few other reasons too of course because nothing in life comes from a single origin point, oy.)
So obviously, I’ve developed some sort of rule that says “You can only write when you deserve it”. Now that I’ve done the hard work of identifying it, it’s time to transform that rule. *sparkle emoji*
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