Gut Navigation

Every writer’s secret power is their gut.

Our gut feeling (or intuition) can help us so much while developing our creative projects, because usually the gut will tell us something is wrong before our mind realises there is a problem.

The issue?

Having a quiet enough mind and enough faith in yourself to listen. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

For the last week or so, I've been doing something a little abnormal in my writing process. I've been working very closely with a handful of really newly written chapters. Usually I'll draft a chapter, fuck off, work on another part of the story, come back, edit it, and keep going back and forth like that until the chapters are in a place where I'm like, okay, this is good. For the last week instead, I have been working with newly written chapters repetitively over the last few weeks. So I've taken perhaps a few days off from the story to work on other things or just, I don't know, try and live as a normal human being. And when I've returned to the story, I've come back to these same handful of chapters. It's quite interesting because these handful of chapters are very simple compared to the other part of the story I have been working on for the last two years. It's quite refreshing, actually, because it's actually some sort of narrative which is pretty fucking straightforward and not, you know, mingled with backstory and character traumas. So it's been refreshing. And maybe perhaps that's why I have been going back to it so much. I think it's a little bit more complicated than that because I've actually been playing around with the outline for the rest of the novel quite a bit. But one thing I have noticed with working so closely with these chapters and not letting them rest is that I've gotten very good at sensing when something is off straight away. Like I used to make sure there was that gap, that time off away from chapters, so I could create some distance because distance allows you to see what's not working. But I'm finding with these chapters and the simpler narrative that's currently happening is that I'm able to see the mistakes a lot more clearly. Like I can basically work on a chapter and finish it in one setting, and then I will walk away from it. And within 10 minutes of walking away, I will have this feeling inside my gut that basically is telling me that this section, like it could be just even two paragraphs or even a sentence, is not right. And it'll stay on my mind. I think that's another interesting feedback loop is that it's not just in my body the sensation that something isn't right, that sensation is feeding into my mind and my mind's not letting it go. This is a bit tricky to navigate on the mind front if you have a very anxious and busy mind, because anxious and busy minds, as anyone with anxiety know, just love to chew in any sort of bone, whether it's good or bad. But I'm at a point where my mind is generally quite quiet. So if I have something like a piece of the story that my mind keeps chewing on, then I'm safe to assume that something has gone wrong. And I have found that I can go back to that chapter, if not on the same day, the day after, and make the necessary changes and not just make the necessary changes, but make it really, really good, like so much better than what I had anticipated. And I'm not saying this as a brag roll, I don't generally care about my efficiency and work ethic. What I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of talk in the writing community about how you need to step away from your work, take breaks, come back and do the edits. And there is definitely merit for that. I have been using that method for years and writing, and I still use it, and I will always say that that's something you should do. But it's always interesting to me because there's always definitely a new writer that will pop up and say, but I already know the changes I want to make on my first draft. Can I just go back and change it? And my resounding answer is yes, definitely. If it's on your mind and you already know what changes you have to make, please just save your energy and go and make those changes. You don't have to follow anyone's policy about taking a six or eight weeks away from your work if you already know the changes you want to make. If it is consuming your mind, if you've got that gut feeling inside of you that this isn't right, then go and change it. You're going to be expending so much more energy trying to deny yourself that right to go back to your work than you are if you just sort it out now and then get on with your life. It's just a complete waste of your own energy if you're just holding off to meet someone else's gatekeeping, essentially. In saying all of that, like I said, there is merit to stepping away and leaving the work for a longer period of time, even if you have a gut feeling that that particular section is wrong. And the reason I say that is because whilst in the immediate moment you might realize that that particular thing is wrong, you do potentially have that risk whereby if you make that small change to the part that you know is problematic, then you could essentially be giving yourself more work because when you step back from the piece entirely for a longer period of time, you might realize that there's a bigger problem in that section of writing that you can't see and that it will actually require a complete rewrite. And that so, and so editing that small bit really isn't worth your time. So that that's the flip side. You know, you you could potentially be wasting your energy by going back to it too soon and trying to make fixes that aren't actually going to be relevant in the future. Creation is always an expenditure of energy. I'm just gonna say that you cannot create without the expense of personal energy being taken away from you. And as I've spoken about before, creativity is a flowing process. It's it's like a river. It doesn't always have logic sense and it doesn't always have the same level of depth along the path. It is just gonna twist and turn and become something else at the drop of a hat. Your best bet, I think, then, is just to keep working with that flow. And if that flow is suggesting to you right now that, yeah, go back and edit the piece of writing, then just go back and edit that piece of writing, given a few weeks' time, once you come back to it after taking a longer break and you realize, well, that was a fucking mistake. Well, then it was a fucking mistake. Because I think sometimes we get so fixated on not fucking up our story and just doing it perfectly that in the process we actually create more fuck-ups. And that's a very human thing, really, because we have this huge collective consciousness of fear of failure within our society. And unfortunately, creators then put that towards their creative pieces, and like creative pieces are meant to be fun, they're meant to be fun to fuck up, rearrange, and then put back together again. So it's sort of sad that we have this mentality towards creation and that has to be perfect. So, what I'm trying to say is that learn to work with your gut feeling and learn, if you want to, to still your mind and clear your mind so that you can be more in tuned with your creativity. We talk about mental health, obviously having you know the benefit of just you as a being, but there's also something to be said as a creator, in the sense that if your mental health is good and your mind is clear, you'll also just be such a much more in tuned and efficient creator because you won't have all that noise in the background making you double guess yourself and and clogging up what is real and what isn't real in the sense of if something is needing to be fixed or not. And this is a skill that can only really be developed if you come back to your work frequently. There's a lot of talk about how you have to write every day to be a writer. I'm not even going to touch on that right now because otherwise this episode will be 10 times longer than it should be. But I will say that there is a benefit to coming back to your creative work frequently, not just because of the output and getting it completed sooner, but also because every time you enter that creative space, you are entering a space with yourself in that you create that strong connection within yourself and that intuition has a chance to grow. And the more it has a chance to grow, and the more you learn to sit with it and listen to it, the better off you'll be at being able to recognize when it is saying something that is worth listening to.