Everything all at once and also one thing at a time.

Writing a book seems like a straightforward project, until you start to write one.

You know how to communicate. In fact, most of the time, you’re pretty good at using your words. But once you started to write this thing, you quickly became overwhelmed by all the things you have to communicate.

Putting your story into logical sequential order can feel like a gargantuan task. 

You’re finally writing, tapping into something beautiful, big and/or intricate, something that so clearly wants to be written and wants to be shared. You made a mind map, and that was fine and flowy – lots of ideas to get down in bubbles all over the page – but how do you make the bubbles stop bubbling?

How are you supposed to create a whole emotional world on numbered pages, sentence after a sentence, as if it were data entry in a big spreadsheet?

It’s not a spreadsheet! It’s an experience!

The pages of your book are numbered in sequential order. Your sentences are ordered too – each one has to have a beginning, middle and end. A written book is data that goes into a big spreadsheet.* Even if you’re playing with the rules of syntax and linear time in your writing, you face this paradox.

You’re tapping into an energetic, emotional, unnameable, ever-changing, multi-dimensional source, and you’re inserting it into a kind of chart.

This is the magic of creative writing, and why writers call it a craft. Learning how to do this well is the purpose of an apprenticeship to your craft.

Pages and sentences are a linear reality. What you want get into words and on the page is a glitterbomb. A beautiful, complex, fascinating, entertaining, dynamic, sparkling swirl.

This is a good time to use restraint as a creative practice.

Pick a container, like a specific number of words, or paragraphs, or pages, or hours of the day. Be bold about this restraint, and don’t soften the edge of it. Pick a limit.  Be fierce and unreasonable about your restraint, like you’re an online form that won’t let you input your postal code unless you type it exactly the right way. 

Remember: Your creative work is a hologram. Every one of your words is a drop of water; you are writing the ocean. 

When you bring presence and intention into your practice, you connect to the source of your creativity. Every single word you write from that source will carry the energy of source. A limitation like an exact count of 3,333 words makes it possible (necessary!) for you to focus on what is present and specific. This presence and specificity will bring you back to source. Always.

Is it frustrating? Oh yes. This is why creative writing brings up feelings of boredom, fatigue, frustration, and confusion! Every transformative process brings up feelings, because the creative process is about change.

Each of those feelings is a message and instruction on your next creative step. (Successful writers also have these feelings, by the way). Here’s your cheat sheet:

• Anger and fatigue are signs of resistance, and that you need to let go and surrender
• Boredom is a sign that you’re disconnected or disassociated, and you need to lean into your curiosity
• Confusion is a sign that the old thing is becoming something new, and  you need to celebrate your creative process

I recently read this essay by spiritual director Christa Hesselink, who is writing about how we choose to use AI (or not). She spoke about the spiritual practice of restraint, and it struck me that the creative use of limitation could also be seen as a spiritual practice. She writes,

The spiritual practice of restraint has the capacity to make us fully present to the beautiful ache of being human and show us how we can live into our fullness, making the world we WANT to live in.

The creative use of limitation can bring us closer to our emergent nature, and our own creative force. 

Accept a creative limitation. Pay attention to the feelings you have. Understand their messages, and choose your next steps accordingly.

Give your writing permission to change you.

*h/t novelist and writing coach Heidi Reimer for that excellent novel-as-spreadsheet metaphor!

Photo credit (top): Tim Marshall on Unsplash.