Happy Saturday!
After twenty-five years of working with other writers, I have identified the root cause of failure. It’s not talent or ability. We ponder over why some writers succeed, and many never make the grade. People who have little or no talent seem to get their work sold and produced all the time. It’s not fair! And no, it isn’t.
I believe that our own negative judgments of ourselves create most of the failures we experience. Self-doubt can destroy our ability to succeed. The cure is recognizing the secret self-judgments that cause this and then giving yourself permission to change your point of view.
The Word of the Day practice allows this change of perception to occur naturally because the daily repetition of a creative act builds self-trust and acceptance.
In Wednesday’s Word of the Day webinar, we focused on areas that each of us felt could be improved. One student wanted more humor, another more pain, another introspection, and one to “just get it done!”
We created Word of the Day clusters; as always, good answers came from our deeper creative selves:
The student who wanted to add more humor to her work learned that humor is not jokes; it’s a point of view. She was inspired to tell us a story that was hilarious! Giving yourself permission to have what you want is half the battle.
The student who wanted to add more conflict to her work discovered that she minimized her feelings in all areas of her own life because she unconsciously believed that expressing pain was self-indulgent! Now, she can face this false belief when she’s writing and give herself permission to find the true feelings of the characters in her story without judging them.
The student who wanted to add more introspection to her writing had just completed the first draft of her first project. After creating her Word of the Day cluster, she understood that she just needed patience with the process of writing and that more depth would come as she revised her work.
Finally, the student who couldn’t “get it done” realized that because he was writing about true events, he feared exposing harsh truths about family members. The words in his cluster suggested that he write the story out, not in English but in his native language and not in screenplay form!
For myself, my writing is often too choppy. I use as few words as possible, believing that ‘brevity is the soul of wit,” but I have taken this to an extreme. During the webinar, I created a Word of the Day cluster around the word “Brevity.” When the timer went off, I remembered as a young child, I’d written poems and was proud because I knew that that being succinct was the core of good poetry. I had a “flashback” to a time when I was humiliated and criticized for reading my first attempt at a sonnet aloud in class. I re-experienced that traumatic moment as if it had just happened! Since the webinar, I’ve noticed a softening when I write, and I’m thrilled to see that this long-term issue has resolved itself.
I love the Word of the Day practice and hope to share it with many writers and other creative people who want to achieve more in their work and their lives.
Please share this practice with your friends and colleagues and bring them to the next Word of the Day webinar.
See you on Wednesday, September 13!
Here’s to your writing success,
Professor Marilyn Horowitz
