#NaNoWriMo 2021: Awareness, Choice, & Trust
I borrow a concept from a famous tennis handbook to help you write more smoothly.
Tonight I’m tweaking a message I sent out last year, back when this newsletter had the occasional exclusive edition for paid subscribers—I think it’s got a message many of you who might be participating in National Novel Writing Month could find useful.
It starts with a passage from W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, which I believe is actually a very useful book for anyone who wants to develop a consistent and productive writing practice…
“Judgment results in tightness, and tightness interferes with the fluidity required for accurate and quick movement. Relaxation produces smooth strokes and results from accepting your strokes as they are, even if erratic.”
When I think about how this relates to our writing practice, I think about what I can see in my own technique. I think about what I want to say, I type the words on the computer screen. They don’t look right. I delete them and start over. I do it again. I get into a nice groove, then I realize I’ve written something that contradicts a previous sentence, so I go back and fix that. As I’ve confided before, I may not suffer from imposter syndrome, but I do doubt my work on a regular basis.
Ultimately, though, I believe in what I’ve done and what I’m doing, even as I acknowledge I have the potential to do more. If, as Gallway says elsewhere, performance is what’s left of your potential after dealing with interference*, I’ve still got plenty of distractions* I can excise from my writing process, including the ones inside my head.
Gallwey talks a lot, in both The Inner Game of Tennis and its followup The Inner Game of Work, about our two selves. To put it in our context, Self 1 is the hypercritical voice that tells us when we’re writing badly—or, if we’ve managed to write well, tells us we’d better replicate the circumstances in which that happened exactly if we ever expect to write well again. Self 1 loves to compare our work to other people’s and meticulously inform us how much worse ours is and why. Self 2, though, “knows” exactly what it wants to say, and “knows” how to express itself clearly; we just have to give it a clear path to do so, without Self 1 constantly trying to take over the process.
How do we give Self 2 that clear path, then?
In The Inner Game of Work, Gallwey highlights a triangle of awareness, choice, and trust. Here’s a version of that triangle I found in a paper that was rooted in Gallwey’s technique.
Awareness is… well, it’s not so much the story you’re itching to share with the world as it is your full recognition of that story. Sometimes our awareness is blinkered, and we can’t see the story clearly. We have an idea about what we want to say, but we’re not quite sure how to say it.
Then we realize that there isn’t one answer; rather, we have a choice. Let’s say, for example, that you’re stuck on a scene, unsure how to get from the setup to the payoff. You could write the scene this way, or you could write it that way, or… The big question is: Which of the ways you could write that scene would more accurately reflect your story?
That’s where trust comes in. You realize that you already have the story inside you, and you have the ability to share it. You just have to put in the effort. And if you get it “wrong” the first time—if you pick up the scene, some time after you’ve written it, and you realize it doesn’t quite get at what you wanted to say—you go back to the empty page, or the computer keyboard, and you try again.
But if you’re noticing what did work in your first draft, and hanging on to that while taking out the things that didn’t work, aren’t you just consciously course-correcting—and isn’t that what Gallwey would call Self 1 behavior, and urge us to avoid?
I had to think about that for a while when I was reading the book, until I realized that what Gallwey is ultimately suggesting—whether he’s talking about tennis, or I’m talking about your manuscript—is that you keep a mental image of what you want the finished “product” to look like, and then have another go at it. Don’t remind yourself of what you ought to do or not do as you’re writing that scene; just start writing and keep at it until the scene is done. Notice what’s happening as you write, but don’t judge. Just keep following through with the motion, over and over, and those repeated iterations will steer you towards the most effective approach to the scene.
Relax into the process, until it’s no longer something you have to figure out how to do, because you’ll have done it enough times that you’re running on instinct and intuition.
*Oops! In the version that emailed out, I used the word “interruptions” twice. Then I double-checked the first newsletter I’d written about Gallwey’s principles, and realized the word he had used was interference. So, a bit of post-publication fine tuning…