Latest / No Mess, No Magic / Nine Unsexy Truths About Being a Writer
Transcript
- Monica Hay: Hello and welcome to No Mess No Magic with Monica Hay. This is my second time filming this episode because apparently I wasn't happy with the first round. Let's do this again. It has taken me a very long time to start this podcast. I'm not necessarily proud of that, but I have been overthinking it a lot. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna practice what I preach and I'm gonna start and it's gonna be messy and that's okay. You might be wondering who am I and why is the podcast called No Mess, No Magic. I'm Monica Hay. I am a writing coach who specializes in helping writers overcome resistance. procrastination, perfectionism, writer's block, all those fun things that stop us from writing. I also have a writing buddy and critique partner matchmaking program where I help pair writers with their aligned writing partner or critique partner. You can either have a writing buddy where you don't swap pages with them and you just want support and encouragement, or you can choose to have a critique partner who you do swap pages with. ⁓ ⁓ don't know why I find it so hard to talk to the camera sometimes. I might not continue doing these episodes on camera. ⁓ might just do them ⁓ my mic, but we'll see. And I have a cat in the background, but he is gonna get sick of me talking, so he's probably gonna leave in a minute, because he doesn't like when I talk. ⁓ okay, so I'm Monica. ⁓ live in Amsterdam with my husband and my two cats. We left the United States about two years ago to move here. And I cuss a lot, so you know. I run a popular bootcamp called the Overcome Writers Resistance Bootcamp, which I believe I've served over 2,000 writers in just that bootcamp alone. I run a community called the Writers Way Community, and it's full of really lovely people. A lot of them are neurodiverse. Something else I should probably mention is I'm ADHD. I was late diagnosed. That said, plenty of the people I work with are not neuro-spicy, so. You're welcome here no matter how you identify. else should I talk about? I'm actually incredibly bad at talking about myself ⁓ what I do. I feel like my brain goes blank. But what I really like to just tell people is that I am here to help you show up for the mess, which is why ⁓ ⁓ this podcast No Mess No Magic. The name for this podcast is inspired by the fact that So many of us get stuck in perfectionism and then we end up procrastinating because of our perfectionism and that can look a lot, that can have many forms, perfectionism can have many, many forms. But I try to encourage people to show up in the mess, not only if their life is a mess, so their personal life, their career, all these different things, not only just their life being a mess, but also for writing messy. A lot of the people I work with are learning to embrace messy drafts and embrace these imperfect shitty drafts because often they rewrite the same 50 pages of the manuscript over and over and nothing is ever good enough. That's where I was many years ago, rewriting the same 50 pages of my first book, never happy with it. until I finally learned how to embrace letting it be shit. I am a big proponent of a really messy first draft. I don't love the term shitty rough draft because I think people assume like, ⁓ my work is shitty. But I think we can reclaim that term and make it our own. Like I like to say it's a shitty draft because it takes the pressure off that draft for me. I also think that people have to understand that through the mess is what gets you to the magic. I used to be the kind of person who I really wished that I could be more efficient in my writing process. And that led me ⁓ to learning all these different craft tools so that I could outline my and not waste time. ⁓ And... What ended up happening was I actually lost time because I was trying to optimize for the most efficient process ever. And I banged my head against a wall for two years trying to figure out how to outline the book that I wrote last year. I finally had to accept the outlining and that process was not working for me. But I was so obsessed with trying to optimize things and trying to get it right the first time that I lost sight of that. I lost sight of letting myself be messy. And it really destroyed my love of writing. My first book, I wrote it and then I rewrote it from scratch and then I rewrote even more again. And I thought, ⁓ I don't want to have to do that this time. I want it to be faster. I want to have an outline this time and I want to do it right as if there's a right way to write. There isn't. And after those two years of being so unhappy with the process of trying to outline, I finally accepted, hey, maybe this book isn't meant to be outlined and I just have to write a really messy draft. And I finally did that and I got the draft out. I wrote the draft. And so what that taught me is that Truly, my magic and so many other writers' magic comes from embracing mess. And that looks different for everybody. For me, it's about learning to just show up in the mess of my life, but also be okay with things not being what I think of as good enough. It's about learning to practice, learning to show up with uncertainty. The mess is where the magic lies. And so often I think when we try to optimize for efficiency, we end up actually losing the magic because we were just so obsessed with like, have to get this draft done. I'm not saying efficiency is bad or the optimizing for not wasting a lot of time is bad, but there becomes a point where it's maladaptive and where you start feeling like you don't have any joy. Okay. Let's talk about the first one. One, and if I'm looking this way, it's because I have notes, because I like to have a little outline for my podcast episodes, not for my fiction writing. One, it takes longer than you think to get good as a writer. Writing will take years of awkward drafts, years of invisible growth. The gap between your taste and your skill can sometimes feel really brutal. And this feels very defeating for a lot of writers. This is something that... I've seen this throughout my practice for a very long time, this feeling of people wanting to give up in the gap. And this kind of goes into a meme I saw, it's actually more of a cartoon I saw, where this guy is learning to play a piano and he's playing a piano and somebody next to him is like, stop, you're not good at it. And he's like, that's why I'm doing it. So I can get good. That's the point. That's why I'm practicing. We as writers don't give ourselves enough grace for being bad at writing. So many of us grow up writing in school. We're writing all the time for school or we're stories for ourselves. And then when we become adults, we assume like, ⁓ I should just be good at this. I've been doing it all my life. And... while you have been writing all your life, you might not have been writing fiction or nonfiction or whatever you're currently writing all your life. I know for me, when I wrote my first fiction book, I had written my first book when I was 15, but it had been so long since I wrote that book and I had grown so much that it felt like I was, you know, still a beginner. And I still see myself as a beginner, honestly. I think of myself as a beginner in a very loving way of of saying like, have so much to learn, I have so much beautiful creativity in front of me. And when people assume like, ⁓ I've done so much writing throughout my life, so I'm not a beginner or like, I should be good at it by now, you will always kind of have to learn to embrace the suck, which leads me to my next point. These points are very intertwined. This is... something Amy McNea taught me from inspired to write on Instagram. I love her. I love her work so much. I've followed it for many years. She wrote a book called We Need Your Art, which I highly recommend, where she talks about the need to embrace the suck. She says that we have to create a relationship with our sucking, and this is where most writers give up. Writing is uncomfortable. Drafting is messy. Revision can be very humbling. Submitting is vulnerable and also humbling. This is part of the process of being a writer. And the truth is, this takes years of resilience, of writing, and endurance, and stick with it-ness. Because there will be times when you love your work and you are so happy with it. And there will be times when you feel like it's fucking shit. Okay? And so when people tell me like, ⁓ my God, you know, I'm so frustrated. Like I just want to press the skip button. Like there's no skip button from being in the beginning of your process to becoming a writer that you want to be. Because even as you improve as a writer and improve as an artist, you will still be hitting against this wall of I want to be better, I want to be better. I mean, I see this with artists all the time. Like my dad was a very prolific artist throughout his life when he was around and he would destroy his old work, I think because he was like unsatisfied with it. Not necessarily saying you should do that, but he would get so frustrated by his old work because he would cringe at it. But you know what? Like that work got you where you are now. If you didn't do that work, you wouldn't be the artist you are today. And it's the same with writing. Like if I hadn't written that book at 15 and I hadn't written the book since then, I wouldn't be the writer I am now. And so there's no wasted writing. There's no wasted time. there will be times when you're not happy with your art and you feel like it sucks, but you must learn not to abandon it in those moments. Okay? You must learn not to ghost your dreams, please. And I think... When it comes to this, there's this conversation around like, well, means my first ideas, my first pieces are gonna suck. Like, what does that mean for me? It means you can make them better. It means you can make them better. And it means in the future you'll make even better stuff because you're showing up. I often also hear like, ⁓ gonna take so long to get good. Like when I tell people about how it takes years of writing and practicing to get good, people are like, I don't have the patience. And I'm like, you do. You do deep down. Because the time, the years are gonna pass whether you're writing or not. So why not be writing some messy shit in the meantime? Right? I think when people get stressed about man, I want writing to feel like this easy thing. A lot of writers come into writing assuming like they should be good at it immediately, but also assuming that they need to get better at it very quickly. First of all, there's no like guarantee of because you like were good at English lit as a child. that you're gonna just be good at writing books. It's a skill you have to learn. It's just like any other skill, like learning to play piano or learning to paint, learning any kind of art form, it takes practice. And that practice is going to take you from being a beginner to being a master of your skill. But you have to be comfortable in that practice. You have to learn to be comfortable with the discomfort. in that. Number three of unsexy truths is one that you might not wanna hear. And it's that if you don't make time to write, you will not write. No one is coming to save you. No one is going to hand you a window of protected creative time. of us ⁓ are adults with jobs, ⁓ partners, aging parents, have dishes, have taxes, have laundry, we have chores. We a million things on our plate. Recently I did, I started a writing challenge for myself because I hadn't been writing as as I would have liked. ⁓ the truth is my life is very chaotic right now, which is why. I won't go into extreme detail about it because ⁓ don't always want to share everything about my personal life, but things are chaotic for me. And then I also injured my wrist. And so I was like, man, I wish I could wait for life to slow down, but it's not going to. There's no slow down on the horizon. And so I had to accept, you know what? I need to write in the mess, which is why I created Writing Inside the Mess on Instagram. You can still join if it's March and you're listening to some March. I've invited people to join if you'd like. And basically this is about showing up for your art five minutes a day. And I'm doing it for 30 days because I know that my writing life isn't just gonna suddenly be like easy to prioritize. Because I'm running a business. I live in a foreign country. I'm learning Dutch. There's so many things I'm doing that make it so it's impossible to show up to write. And so I have to carve it out. I have to intentionally carve it out. And you're probably the same way. You probably have... your own adult responsibilities, because being an adult is rude. Right? Being an adult is rude and, you know, there's gonna be a million things that you have to do. I really want your writing to be one of those things. But in order to make it one of those things, you have to do it on purpose. You have to carve out the time. Number four is one that I don't think is talked about enough, and I think there's actually a bit of shame around this, is that a huge part of writing is actually learning to sit with and tolerate discomfort. It's about sitting with uncertainty, not knowing if it's good, feeling like it isn't good, not knowing if it's gonna work. There's a lot of self-doubt, perfectionism. Your brain hates uncertainty and it will try to distract you from it, right? If you can increase your capacity to stay in discomfort without spiraling, your writing life changes. And when I talk about this, it seems very obvious, but I think a lot of writers feel shame for the fact that it's uncomfortable. A lot of writers have this image that when they show up to write, it's supposed to be like this magical perfect experience. Like, you know. They go to a cabin in the woods and they have like hours of focused time and everything's amazing. And they just write for hours and hours and like get into the flow and it's perfect. And there's no discomfort at all because everything is perfect and everything is working out. And there are plenty of times where that might happen to you throughout your creative life. We live for those moments. But that's not gonna be the majority of your writing days. The majority of your writing days are gonna look in different ways, but some of them are going to be where you sit with discomfort. You sit with thoughts of this is not good. Man, I don't know what to do with this plot problem. For me, it's thoughts of Why aren't you good at this by now? When I was a child, I was not a gifted kid, I was the opposite, I was a dumb kid. My brother was a smart one. And I always felt like I wasn't good enough. I didn't know I had ADHD, I was undiagnosed until I was 29. And so I just assumed that I was dumb and broken. And the only thing I was actually good at when I was a kid is making up stories and writing stories. And so now, when I sit down to write, Sometimes my brain will bark these really painful, uncomfortable things at me that say like, you should be good at writing by now. Why aren't you good at it? It's too late. Or this is the only thing that you had when you were a kid. So why have you not figured it out? That means that you have nothing. You're nothing. You have nothing left. If you haven't figured this out and you haven't made it, you're nothing. And these thoughts are thoughts I've learned to... work with when I show up, but it's also part of the discomfort because I have to learn to work with these thoughts. I've had to learn over time to have a conversation with these thoughts, not to let them control me because these thoughts are uncomfortable, right? If I show up and I suddenly have these thoughts, it's painful and I want to stop writing because your brain likes to go toward pleasure and away from pain. So when you go into your writing and you have all these mean thoughts going on in your head, often your brain feels uncomfortable and so you don't want to bother. There could also be other reasons for the discomfort. It could be that you're hitting, you know, a plot problem in your manuscript. It could be that you're like, man, ⁓ scene isn't working and I feel like... Like what's going on here? It could be that you write your book and you realize, ⁓ I have to rewrite the whole thing. It happened to me. Those things can be uncomfortable. You have to learn to tolerate that discomfort and sit with it and learn to not let it make you spiral because you will be so powerful if you can do that. If you can actually sit with that discomfort and learn to work with it, you'll be so fucking powerful. Number five might be a little bit controversial. And it's that studying craft books is great. Learning the craft is great. But the only way to improve as a writer is to write. And this often requires trial and error. You can read craft books, you can outline, you can do so many things to try to be more efficient, quote unquote. But the only way to actually improve is to write, is to... write badly, repeatedly, through the boredom and through the cringe. think it's the same with going to the gym. You can watch people go to the gym and you can learn the basics. You can have a personal trainer show you what to do, but you actually have to do it. If you want to that muscle, you have to actually get in the chair or do the exercises yourself. And I often see people get stuck here when they're newbies. I see... writers who are like, okay, I want to write a book. And they start studying everything they can about the craft, but then they never write because they always think there's something new to learn and that, ⁓ I should do more research. I should learn a little bit more about the craft. Learning craft is great, but it's not a skip button to actually learning how to write by writing. It just isn't. And I know this is annoying because, you know, we want to write. and to get good at it, and a lot of people are very impatient because they're like, I wanna write a book and get published and make money. I get it. But the only way to get there is to write and to practice. There's a skip button for I'm gonna, you know, become an amazing writer in two seconds. Yes, there are outliers, people who are very gifted, but those are outliers for a reason. They aren't the average person. And this takes me to my sixth point, which is that you actually have to learn your own process. There is also not a skip button for learning your own writing process. You'll be taught several different methods for writing that are all valid. There are as many different methods for writing as there are writers. You'll be told you have to outline, you don't have to outline, by the way. But the only way to know what works for your brain, in your writing process is through trial and error. It's through experimenting. It's through failing again, experimenting again, failing, succeeding, experimenting more, failing. And a lot of people find this process to be very annoying because they're like, I just want it to work. Why isn't it working? The thing is there's no manual for your brain. Like you can't... no manual to be like, I'm gonna look up the manual for my brain at this bookstore that doesn't exist. And so you can't know what's gonna work for you unless you try it to see if it works. And if it doesn't work, you pivot, right? What I sometimes see, and I'm kind of talking a little bit about outlining versus which I think there's a spectrum, I would call myself on the spectrum in general in this, but for me, I love the discovery process of writing. And outlining ruins the fun for me. Outlining feels like I'm pulling teeth. But what happens with lot of beginner writers, I think, is that they'll start wanting to write a book and they'll read a lot of craft books. And for some people that works really well and then they soar onto their career. For some people like me, who maybe are more intuitive, I think all writers are intuitive, but I think for some writers who really struggle with outlining and different types of methods for doing your actual book and deciding how you want to tell the story. For some writers, they need to be able to write it in whatever way their intuition tells them to write it. And these writers often start thinking there's something wrong with them or that they're broken because so much of the industry teaches you to like have this perfect plot or like to have this perfect beat sheet. There's nothing wrong with those things. But if it's not working for you, if you're banging your head against a wall for years trying to make it work for you, then it's not giving you the results that you want. Right? And so I myself, since I see myself as a very intuitive writer, there is a really lovely book by Becca Syme called Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive? Where she talks about how a lot of intuitive writers, people who are more discovery writers and wanna... and discover the story as they write. They don't want to make any crazy plans with the story. These people tend to start freaking out when things don't work for them with craft books. And what she says they really need is to just iterate their process. That means giving yourself information. That means trying things and trial and error. If you can see yourself as a more intuitive writer, I highly recommend that book. It's a fantastic book. And she touches on so many different points that I think are really helpful for people who do struggle to outline. do feel kind of like the rebels in the writing space. Again, I'm not saying that outlines are bad or that craft is bad. I love my fair share of craft books. I have read them, I have tried many different things. And from my experience in the industry, truly, you will have to learn your own process in order to write. You can take what you learn and leave the rest. Number seven is that writing friendships and community really matter. It's what keeps you in the game and what keeps you sane in this industry. The writers who keep going in this industry are the ones that have friends and critique partners and a creative ecosystem. This industry is not one to navigate in the dark, all right? And what I have seen in my own life, as well as my clients' lives, is that the people who have support from other writers, other creatives, are the ones who don't give up. Because they have someone to lean on, they have someone to help them get through the hard times. When you're isolated, it gets very lonely very quickly. So don't underestimate the power of community. Number eight is one that I think might be a little controversial and not enough people talk about this. It's that if you get any level of visibility online, when you publish your books, you know, you become a public figure as an author, you are going to get assholes that you'll have to deal with and there's nothing you can do about it. I hate this truth, but it's the reality. And I think a lot of people are afraid to talk about this because they don't want to offend readers. I'm not talking about readers who review, all right? Like readers have the right to review. I review books. I do it. private account nobody knows about. But I have friends who write LGBTQ books ⁓ get people ⁓ emails to them they're homophobic or yelling at them about how fucked up their book is for promoting the gay agenda. I have a client who's in suicide prevention ⁓ writes a really important blog about suicide prevention. She gets hate email. people who are so mean to her in her email. And she's trying to save lives. So there will be people who will come at you on the internet. A lot of times these people don't even know that what they're doing is harmful. There's a lot of different personality types in the world. I'm really into the Enneagram. If you've ever heard of the Enneagram, it's like the numbers one through nine. It's not the Myers-Briggs, it's different. And I'm a three. A lot of people who do this kind of stuff, they don't, I don't know if you can hear my cat sneezing, they don't realize that what they're doing is harming you. They don't care, right? They just see it as like, yeah, this is constructive criticism. I once had a woman tell me that she hated my voice. Straight up just told me that, and I called her out on that, and she's like, I'm not being cruel, I'm just being honest with you and giving you constructive criticism. So. I'm actually very grateful for being an entrepreneur and that I have learned this lesson very quickly and very early on because I think it's kind of shocking for writers when they publish books and they suddenly get like, they'll obviously get an onslaught of love, of course. But there will also be people who are not nice to you. They'll tag you in really mean, cruel reviews. I saw somebody recently, maybe it a few months ago, post this really intensely mean review about a book I loved that I read years ago. I'm pretty sure she tagged the author. And she even said, yes, I'm tagging the author because they deserve to see this. It's very cruel. but they don't see it that way. They see it as like they're entitled to their opinion and they're entitled to make sure that the author sees it. And so this is the reality of the online space. And I don't say this to like stop you from writing. I say it because as somebody with rejection sensitivity dysphoria, which is RSD for short, it's part of ADHD and neuro spiciness. Someone with that, I have had to learn this. and I've found ways to manage it and cope with it. And I want you to understand that you're not alone when this happens. Okay? And that's why I have it under unsexy truths, because this is something that does happen to writers and authors. It just does. I wish it didn't. I wish that people knew how to be kind on the internet, but that's just not always the case. The last one is discipline without self-compassion will lead you to burnout. The long game of writing requires compassion for yourself. It requires being kind to yourself. It requires grace for messy seasons. Being a dick to yourself is not going to get you to your goals faster. There's actually evidence to suggest that when we are nice to ourselves, we are using our prefrontal cortex and we activate our prefrontal cortex, which helps us with decision making and rational thought and also helps you write the book that you want to write. Whereas if we're mean to ourselves, we actually activate our fear response, which in general makes it so that we are way too stressed and anxious to show up to write because we feel shitty. Okay, the brain loves to go to pleasure and away from pain. And when you're mean to yourself, it sees pain. If you can bring some pleasure into how you show up, which can mean self-kindness, self-compassion, self-love, it actually helps you show up for longer and gets you results faster. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know it might not be the most fun episode, but I still think it was an important topic. Let me know in the comments if you're listening on Spotify what other topics you'd like me to cover. In this podcast, I don't really have a plan. I'll probably end up doing interviews with other authors, other writers, other coaches. I might even have a... A whole series called Make Craft Make Sense because I find craft to be a very strange topic that I have a very love-hate relationship with. And so for me, I want to learn more about craft and learn to respect it more because I know that I have had a relationship with craft that was very toxic in the past, but I'm open to learning and I'm open to learning some really cool stuff about craft in the future. So I might have a whole series on that in the podcast. But otherwise, what you can expect is me to just talk to you, have interviews. Cuss a lot. Tell you some shit I've learned over the last 10 years. And I'm really grateful that you're on this journey with me. Thanks for listening.