Which Writing Self is me?

Do you know what’s propelling you forward and what’s holding you back in your writing and in your life? I do, thanks to a self awareness exercise** I do periodically. It’s helped me realise why it’s taken me over a year (and counting) to write the dreaded second novel while the first only took about five months.

The exercise starts with writing so you need a good hour at least of undisturbed time. You’re going to free write under three headings.

1. Ideal Self
2. Probable Self
3. Feared Self

For this exercise, just focus on You The Writer but, of course you can expand it to any facet of you and your life if you want. Imagine yourself 12 months from now and describe that person as if they are a character in a book. What are they doing? What are they working on? What have they achieved? Where are they? What do they look like? Whatever comes to mind.

For your Ideal Self, don’t temper it with reality. If you dream of writing from your beach hut in Thailand, your agent hounding you to do press interviews and Gillian Flynn begging you for writing tips, describe that. Reality will sneak back in when you write about Probable You – the You that’s the likeliest to exist and who has the daily slog of coming up with ideas, hitting deadlines and thinking about money. The hardest one to unleash is your Feared Self. What is the worst version of your Self that you can imagine a year from now?

You can stop here at the cathartic stage if you want, but the real insights come with analysing the three Selves for patterns. Try to let themes arise rather than predetermining them. Some ideas won’t fit into any category and that’s fine. I colour coded mine into categories. They ended up as:

• My feelings towards writing
• Recognition by others of my writing and me as a writer
• My second book
• Book promotion
• Making money from writing

I saw that I had dedicated more lines towards my feelings about writing as I continued through the three versions. My Ideal Self wasn’t very preoccupied with this because “writing anything feels like a break – even if it’s from other writing.” And “I effortlessly produce fiction and am well on my way to finishing my next big project.” Probable Me has most of her ideas “scribbled in a notebook” rather than finished and is “still learning to be a good enough writer to do them justice.”

Feared Self is having a much worse time. For her, “the process [of writing the second book] takes the shine off whatever talent I had. I rarely, if ever, get that flow when an idea comes and just starts creating itself. Even my blog posts are flat and I know it every time I press “publish”. I only get writing jobs that make me want to stick pins in my eyes […] I delete the bits of my blog that refer to me as a writer.”

For the second major thread running through my writing, I go from my Ideal Self being recognised as a great writer who is regularly approached to write for publications, to a more realistic Self making slow inroads into getting pitches accepted, to a Feared Self who people used to “think of as someone who looked like they had potential […} In fact, no-one even remembers I used to write better because no-one cared that much anyway. The publisher doesn’t return my emails.”

This was the big insight. I don’t want to finish my second novel because when I do, nothing stands in the way of me realising my worst fears about myself. When it’s written, I’ll have no excuses, nothing to blame for my lack of writing energy. Even worse, one uncategorised line shows how this will bleed into my regular life. “It [my non-writing] causes lots of arguments at home as I drift through each day.”

After the themes analysis, another way to do a rough calculation of how satisfied you are with your writing life is to gauge the distance between your Selves. The further apart your Ideal and Probable Selves are, and the closer your Feared Self to your Probable Self, the less happy you’ll be now.

What can you do about it? The motivational psychologists who researched the Ideal Selves of high school dropouts found that those who went on to achieve the most were those with clearly identified strategies for attaining their Ideal Self. So, for me, that means finishing the book and working hard to promote it while moving onto a project that I’m excited about again. A more detailed breakdown of how to get the thing written is easy enough to organise myself into; facing the fears is trickier.

Perhaps there’s nothing so startling about the results, but the journey is what this exercise is all about.

**The exercise is based on the work of psychologists Markus & Nurius (1986) into Possible Selves theory and its relationship to motivation. [http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1987-01154-001]

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Nicola writes  under the pen name Nicola Jane and has  a Choose Your Own Adventure style erotic novel, Follow Your Fantasy, out with Harper Impulse with the problematic second due any time now. She blogs at www.nicolajane.org and tweets from @NicolaJaneWrite. She currently lives between Madrid and London which is as close to settling in one place as she’s likely to come.

Tags: featured, inspiration, self awareness exercise, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips