<aside> 🍵 While it might be easy to understand the way that writing myths operate on us in an intellectual sense, they can often be insidious, and at an unconscious level they can prevent us from flourishing and thriving. I would love you to develop some healing tools that you can use when the harmful myths sneak into your precious writing time, and threaten to derail your important work. I have ideas to start you off, and I encourage you to personalise your tools to make them work for you.
At the end of this workbook, I have created a database for you to collect and add your own tools.
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<aside> 🍵 Intuition
If you find yourself pushing through all of the time, forcing your body to sit in a chair when it wants to stretch, blinking at a document that you aren’t really working on, and finding your mind wandering to anything but the writing at hand, then perhaps it is time to listen to your body and mind, and to allow them to rest or change what they are doing. Your body will tell you what it needs if you listen to it, and when you push past its limits, you might find that your work feels painful or even impossible.
Your body and mind will also tell you when they are ready to give you the gift of inspiration and bounty. If you listen, then you might find it is the moment to give up the sensible task at hand, and to find a moment to write a handful of sentences that come almost fully formed. Those moments can be worth hours of forcing yourself to sit in front of a screen.
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<aside> 🍵 Pleasure
**Writing should be pleasurable at least some of the time. I believe it is possible for writing to become pleasurable most of the time. You wouldn’t do any other voluntary activity that brought you nothing but suffering, so why should you accept that in your writing practice? Chances are if it feels like this, something needs to change so that you can recapture that sweetness, lightness, and tingling pleasure that writing used to bring you (perhaps as a child or adolescent).
In our productivity-focussed, capitalist world taking time for pleasure, daydreaming, resting, reading, researching, and absorbing is in itself an act of resistance and magic.
Exercise: Going back to the river. When you think of your current project(s) what was it about them that made you feel excited in the first place? Why did you begin? Try to soak and swim in that river of pleasure or excitement for a few hours or days and see if you can float your way back to the part of the project that feels good to immerse yourself in.
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<aside> 🍵 Cycles and Slowness
Everything in our lives would be improved if we had the chance to experience the seasonal cycles and if we had a chance to slow down. You don’t need me to tell you that this isn’t attainable in our current world. While you can’t necessarily work with the light, or hibernate through winter, or even take the rests your body needs, perhaps you can find ways to build in slowness and cyclical sympathy into your writing practice.
Can you find a time of day that feels good to work? Can you avoid forcing yourself to work after a long, tiring day, and instead book a coffee shop date with yourself for a time that works best?
Slow down to finish your project: This might sound counter-intuitive, but I know from my own experience, and from that of the writers I have worked with, that trying to work at breakneck speed leads to burnout and even abandonment of a project. Slow, incremental, experimental progress can be the quickest route to joy, and to completing your project in a sustainable way.
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<aside> 🍵 What are some tools and resources that you can draw on to heal from these harmful writing myths? Adapt the table below to use for your healing tools.
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