#NaNoWriMo 2021: Get Out of Your Head
"It sharpens my focus: that is ultimately the best reason to engage in the writing process.”
I’m a big fan of the Five Books website, where experts on all sorts of topics not only come up with reading lists on their subjects, but provide detailed explanations for each of their choices. Recently, Mitchell Thomashow spoke about environmental learning, and in the middle of the conversation he said something about the writing process that I immediately wanted to share with you:
“In terms of myself, I’m in my own head way too much. It’s amazing to me how much I don’t see when I’m walking through the woods. Any opportunity I have, I try to remind myself to get out of my head and look at the world. Writing, interestingly, is one way to accomplish this…
Writing takes you to places that you didn’t know you had inside you. It brings a depth of experience and an enrichment that challenges you to go deeper into your own world, what you see and what you observe and what your own memories are. I find that the writing process deepens my awareness of what I’m looking at and what I’m observing. It sharpens my focus: that is ultimately the best reason to engage in the writing process.”
As you develop your writing practice, you’re not just improving your technical skills as a wordsmith. You’re also learning how to pay attention—to the world around you, and to your own thoughts and emotions. It’s a way of recognizing and acknowledging what you value most, and affirming its importance.
Ideally, committing to a writing practice enables you to not just to tell better stories, but to better understand yourself, and spurs you to change the direction of your life—to live with clearer self-awareness and firmer purpose. You’ll cultivate a better understanding of who you want to be and, because you’ll appreciate the urgency of that desire, you’ll do as much as you can to become that person, not just as a writer but in every aspect of your life.
That’s a pretty lofty ideal, I admit. And it doesn’t come easy. In that same portion of the interview, Thomashow says, “I often ask myself, when I’m thinking about my next book project, ‘Why do I want to do it? It’s so consuming, and you never know how many readers you’re going to get.’”
But, economic requirements of a capitalist society aside, you’re not writing to impress other people. You’re doing it for yourself.
CORRECTION: In yesterday’s email, I paraphrased one of W. Timothy Gallwey’s key principles as “performance is what’s left of your potential after dealing with interruptions.” After I sent the newsletter out, I looked at another post from the archives, and realized that Gallwey’s actual term was interference. A small, but significant, difference!