The stories we tell ourselves about writing
We all have stories about writing and about ourselves as writers. Often, these stories stand between us and our finished writing. But they are just stories and we can tell ourselves more helpful stories if we choose.
My own story about writing is that I’m not a good writer. Having done some coaching on this (coaching is brilliant by the way, you really should try it!), I know my story started life as “I’m a good writer … good enough for an engineer”. Not a massively helpful story for someone trying to write journal articles in the social sciences.
Tina’s story was that a PhD is hard (if it were easy, everyone would be doing one) so that writing should be hard
Daria’s story was that she wanted to write, she needed to write but she didn’t want to embarrass herself with what she submitted, she didn’t want to come across naïve or unread, she didn’t want to be full of jargon but she did want to write something interesting for the reader that would add something new to her field.
All three of these stories are such clear road blocks. Of course we can’t write whilst we are believing these stories. The role of coaching isn’t to take a huge wrecking ball to these beliefs but to gently nudge these blocks and just check out if they are quite as solid as they appear.
Flip the script, nudge the blocks
For Daria we needed to flip the script. It was obvious what she didn’t want but we needed to articulate what she did want to see in her writing. After naming aloud what she did want, she found a renewed excitement about her writing and took a little bit of the pressure off herself
Tina nudged her block by saying if she did 100 words a day, that wouldn’t actually be hard and the progress would give her renewed joy over her writing.
In my case, I told myself I didn’t need to be a good writer. I just needed to be a person that does writing (and writing of any standard was wholy acceptable).
Our writing blocks are not permanent. They are not even part of us. They are just stories we tell ourselves. And who better to write a new story than writers like us?