Surrender!

By Rosanne Bane

If I could show you something that creates resistance to your writing and, as an added un-bonus, makes you miserable, you’d get rid of it, wouldn’t you? That something is all your assumptions about how you’re “supposed” to write, all your ego expectations and demands for yourself as a writer.

In Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, Marsha Sinetar shares what a fellow writer has to say about her work habits: “I used to hate seeing myself lie there. It went against all my pictures of what I ‘should’ be doing and how I ‘should’ look. In my mind’s eye, I felt that I was supposed to be a starched and immaculate vision in white all day, a Betty Crocker of the typewriter, constructively producing neat and clean copy twenty-four hours a day, like perfect cookies from the oven.”

You may or may not envision yourself as a Betty Crocker of the keyboard, but I’m confident that if you take a look, you’ll find your ego has very specific ideas about what you should do and how you should look as a writer. I also think you’ll find those ego expectations don’t really match reality, which makes you dissatisfied with yourself (and provides ammo for the Saboteur’s attacks).

But don’t take my word for it; take five minutes right now to freewrite about what your ego’s expectations are. You can start with either of these phrases: “A writer should…” or “To call myself a writer, I should…”

I’ll wait.

When I did this freewriting with my Writing Our Way through Shadow class the other night, I realized that my ego thinks I should write effortlessly and perfectly from beginning to end and I should be able to do this because I should know what I’m going to write before I start writing. I should do my own quantitative research; I should already know all the relevant facts about a topic I’m going to write about. I should know how to write a query letter, I should know how to approach an agent, I should know how to network in every situation. And because I should know all this already, I should be able to do it all on my own.

Clearly this doesn’t make logical sense, but it is what came to mind when I let myself write the truth about what I think I “should” do and who I “should” be. Your ego demands may not make logical sense either, but that won’t stop them from ricocheting around in your brain, creating anxiety, frustration and resistance.

Those ego demands can really bite you in the butt! So it’s important you don’t stop here. Take five or ten minutes to write your True Ideal. What brings you joy in your writing? What is your passion, what gets you excited and engaged when you write? What is so meaningful and significant about your writing that it’s almost scary to admit even to yourself?

This will have more impact if you do the freewriting now. I’ll wait.

When I freewrote about what excited and engaged me when I write, I wrote about the thrill of discovering new connections between ideas. I love it when I can see how some brain factoid or some change management theory my friends in Organizational Development talk about applies to the process of writing. I can’t wait to share my new “A-ha” with other writers! I also love it when I see how a tidbit of information from geocaching or some other hobby of mine or a TV show I watched about physics or Julia Child fits into my fiction and a whole new scene just appears from nowhere.

The thing is, if I allow my ego demands to run the show, I’m never going to meet those ego expectations. If I’m supposed to know what I’m going to write before I write, I’m never going to write (because I figure out what I’m writing as I write). If I’m supposed to already know how to write a query letter, I can’t ask for help so I’ll never improve. If I’m supposed to know all there is to know about a topic I’m going to write about, I can’t allow myself to read and research and ask questions.

My ego is certain that if I surrender these ego demands, if I stop pushing and driving myself to be constantly productive and focused on what is relevant to what I already know, I’ll just laze around. But the truth is that if I’d just give myself permission to follow my self-indulgent inclinations, I’d end up reading interesting stuff and watching intriguing programs on Nova and PBS and Discovery. I’d let my thoughts wander and ramble, listen to the interesting new ideas and theories my non-writer friends are applying in their work, take a walk in the middle of the day, doodle and color and not do anything in particular. And in all this self-indulgent lazing around, I get excited and engaged, I learn and discover interesting things, and before you know it I’ve got a bunch of new “A-ha” insights that I can’t wait to share with other writers in my nonfiction or new scenes begging to go into my fiction!

If I insist on toeing the line of my ego demands, I only create resistance and make no progress at all. But if I surrender my ego demands, I not only get the thrill of following my passion, I learn something worth sharing in my writing, and I have the energy and insight to do the kind of writing my ego demands. 

Let’s do the math:

Insist on my ego demands = not fulfilling those demands and not having any fun

Surrender my ego demands = having fun and fulfilling those demands

Looks like a non-brainer to me.

What demands and expectations does your ego have for you as a writer that you can surrender for the sake of fulfilling your true purpose as a writer? What do you need to let go of?