Today, I want to talk about learning how to trust yourself as a writer rather than relying too much on other people’s advice.

This is a question I receive in one form or another quite frequently from writers, particularly the writers who are just starting out and are trying to find that balance of honoring their own creativity and creative instinct—which is probably quite strong or they wouldn’t be interested in creating art and writing stories and balancing that against the need to learn and to understand the techniques and the tenants of the craft by seeking resources that can help you understand writing.

I say often that writing a novel is an extremely complex art form. Whether it’s a screenplay or whatever else—creating any type of story is a very complex art form. There are so many techniques and skills involved that you have to master if you’re going to pull off the whole. Part of it is understanding story theory, understanding the shape of story, character arc, story structure, and plot. Then you also have to learn how to execute those techniques: how to write good dialogue, how to write good prose, even just spelling, punctuation, and grammar. These are all part of the foundation of good writing. Then there are the little nuances of bringing characters to life, writing prose that’s entertaining and interesting and makes sense to readers.

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And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are just so many little skill sets that go to make up the big skill set of being able to write a successful novel or a successful screenplay. Put simply: there is a lot to learn about writing.

When you start getting serious, you realize, Oh there’s like stuff to learn here! You don’t just do it instinctively. There’s actually technique and and people who can guide you and help you figure out all this stuff you’ve been struggling with and that seems really hard. They can help you understand, for example, why doesn’t your prose or your story look quite like the ones you’re reading.

All the information any writer needs is out there. And it’s fabulous!

I clearly remember a day when I was probably in my in late teens, rambling around the library, and I found the writing section for the first time. There were, like, actual books that taught you how to write fiction! It was a revelation to me. I just gobbled it up and it was so exciting.

From there, however, it can be easy to get into a place where you feel overwhelmed by all the information. Again, writing is a complex skill set. There’s just so much to learn, and it can be very easy to feel like your brain’s going to explode (and not in a good way). There’s just so much information to take in and integrate just so you can write a chapter in your story.

You must find a balance between being willing to learn (i.e., being able to recognize your own ignorance and that there’s stuff to learn and people out there who can help you learn it) and feeling so overwhelmed by having to take in all the information or having to follow somebody else’s rules that you lose touch with your inner artist, your own inner compass of how to write stories, your own inner story knowledge.

Why You Can Trust Your Own Story Instincts

What is story? Story is just a reflection back to us of our arcs of psychological transformation. It’s a mirror of life. This means that, inherently, story is something every human has an innate understanding of. Nobody has to tell you what a story is. You know deep in your heart and your gut. You know what a story is—and particularly if you’re drawn to writing a story.

You’re probably deeply immersed in fiction yourself. You watch movies. You read books. You learn by osmosis what stories look like on a more intricate level. You come to the act of writing with an innate knowledge. It’s important to recognize that. I always tell people, “Trust your writing gut.” When you’re writing something and it feels really good—or it doesn’t feel good—trust that. You may not understand what it’s telling you specifically, but there’s a truth there, waiting for you to understand it.

It’s important as you’re going through that early process of learning lots of stuff from other people and hearing their voice in your head—whether it’s mine or some other writing instructor or your peers as you’re trading critiques or engaging with beta readers—not to get lost in the voices you’re hearing to the point that you forget your own innate and very accurate sense of story.

Now again, this is not to say your innate gut knowledge and instinct of what a story is and what makes a good story automatically translates into the ability to do it. The gut instinct doesn’t always translate into the mental realm. You have to gain a certain consciousness around what your instincts are telling you so you can bring mastery to the techniques.

One of the most important things to help you find your balance in a situation like this (or anything really) is understanding where you are in the context. If you understand the big picture, then the better you can understand where you’re at and therefore what questions you’re actually facing and what answers you need to be able to execute in your story in the way that you want.

One of the models I particularly have found helpful in my own life is the Arabic proverb that points out the four stages of growth.

You start out not knowing that you don’t know. Then as you progress through this state of complete ignorance (basically where where you think you know and really you do know nothing) to knowing that you don’t know. This is arguably the most powerful place to be because from here, you can move into a place of curiosity and learning and gathering information that’s extremely helpful. Then you move on to not knowing that you know. You’ve gained enough informational context that you have shortened the gap between your gut knowledge and your mental knowledge, so they’re both aligned and pulling in sync, but you still haven’t quite gained an awareness around that fact. And then from there you move on to mastery, which is knowing that you know.

If you can dentify where you are within those four stages, that can give you an understanding of how much reliance you can give to your own um understanding of any topic versus how much information you still need to glean and and learn and grow before you can reach a place where you shorten that gap between your own gut instinct and your ability to put words to and comprehend and bring a mental knowledge to that gut understanding.

The Dichotomy of Ignorance and Perfectionism

Something that gets writers hung up sometimes is this kind of dichotomy between ignorance and perfectionism. Really, though, it isn’t a dichotomy because very often these two things are the flip side of each other.

Perfectionism is very much a topic writers discuss because many of us do struggle with it. But I have found in my own life that really perfectionism and the harshness and the toxicity of that inner critic is really rooted in ignorance—either not knowing or knowing but not knowing that you’re knowing.

It’s an uncertainty. It’s like, “I don’t know what’s good enough and therefore it’s never good enough.” Sometimes when you’re stuck in that place of perfectionism,  there is a sense of, “I have to learn and learn and learn. I have to get all the rules right. I have to learn everything perfectly.”

There can be kind of an abandonment of your own gut instinct in that process—in replacing it with that toxic inner critic of perfectionism. Try taking a step back and recognizing that perhaps this is simply arising from a place of ignorance. And that’s not a bad thing. It allows you to move into that stage of knowing that you don’t know. And that lets you know exactly where you’re at.

There’s nothing wrong with that stage. In some ways, it’s the most powerful and exciting stage. You’re discovering everything. However, it can lead to an overcorrection where you flip the script, and instead of feeling this pressure of, “I have to learn everything. I have to pay attention to what all the experts say and make sure I get everything perfectly right,” you flip it into that space where it’s like, “Well, phooey on them. I’m just going to do what I am going to do because I know better than them anyway. What do they know?” That, in itself, isn’t usually any more helpful than the perfectionism.

Instead taking that step back and recognizing this feeling is just a signal that I don’t know something and that it’s a stage of not just learning more rules, more mental stuff, but instead trying to figure out how to shorten that gap between your own gut instinct and what you know.

Instead of Looking for Better Answers, Learn to Ask Better Questions

If that need to know is arising out of a sense that, “There’s some things not working in my story and I’m not able to execute something the way I want to,” then that lets you start working on better and better questions. That will help you find the answers you need instead of it taking this shotgun approach where you feel like you need to know everything.

If you feel like you’re just pressured to follow the advice of everybody else who’s out there who knows more than you do, then try to narrow that down into a place where you are recognizing yourself as a student rather than someone who’s less than or is feeling unworthy because they don’t know everything. Instead, you are now someone who has the opportunity to figure out AND use your gut instinct to narrow down, “What do I need to know?”

Another troublesome dichotomy is that of curiosity versus judgment.

A lot of writers I hear from who are anxious are thinking either, “I need more advice. I need somebody to tell me how to do everything there is about my story” or vice versa, “I don’t want anybody’s advice. It’s too much. I don’t want or need anybody to tell me what to do with my story.” In both of those scenarios, there’s this energy of feeling judged. But ultimately, it’s not really that anybody else is judging or going to judge your writing; it’s that you’re judging it and judging yourself.

Again, this can be that perfectionistic toxic inner critic talking. You have to learn to take a step back from this place of judgment. Art does not thrive under judgment, particularly the creative act. Judgment is not a place that enhances or allows for curiosity,  and curiosity is not only the best place from which to create art, it’s also the best place from which to learn. When you’re in curiosity, it doesn’t feel like there’s a teacher standing over you. Instead, not knowing becomes exciting.

Most of us are readers. We love to learn and get to experience new things and gain new skills. Moving into that beginner’s mind where you are not feeling like, “This is a test. I have to cram for this test and ace it.” You have to realize that becoming a good writing is a lifelong process. We’re all still learning. The very fact that story mirrors life  shows us it’s a neverending school. We will always be learning more. We’ll always be experimenting. We’ll always be refining. The best art comes from that place where we don’t quite know—where we’re following that true creative instinct within ourselves but we don’t know where it’s going to go. We’re open and we’re flexible to what might come. We’re in a place of curiosity.

That’s also the best way to approach any writing advice. Whether you’re watching my videos or reading my books or my website or my podcast or somebody else’s or you’re getting feedback from critique partners, wherever you’re receiving advice or looking for advice, the best mindset to engage with that is from a place of curiosity.

After all, just because somebody is out there telling you how to write a story doesn’t mean that they know what they’re talking about. And it certainly doesn’t mean that even if they’re right in some contexts, they’re right in all contexts because art is extremely varied. Again, you might be creating something that’s never been created before, and others can’t necessarily comment on that.

Now, obviously there’s also the other side of that where artists think they’re creating something massive and original, but really it’s just a mess. So again, you have to find that balance of humility and curiosity, of recognizing  where you are within the stages of growth—what you don’t know and therefore what you need to know—while still approaching what you don’t know with curiosity and approaching people and advice and teachers with curiosity. You have to ask, “What do they have to teach me?” rather than being this submissive mindset of, “They have all the answers and I need them.”  That can either put you in this submissive place of wanting them to tell you what to do or the flip side of that, which is, “I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do. Therefore, I don’t want any advice.” That ultimately isn’t helpful either.

Broadening Your Context as a Writer

Context is extremely valuable in understanding what you need to know, why you want to know it, and what you’re going to do with it. And the only way to gain context is to go out and gather lots of information. Context is the broad field, the map, and then you get the little pointer that says, “You are here.” If your context is tiny and it says “you are here,” you still won’t really know where you’re at. But the bigger your map and the bigger your context, the more sense it makes when it says, “You are here.”

The only way to gain that is to go on these discovery trips and to learn all you can. There is a period—it’s ongoing to some degree, but particularly in the beginning—where maybe you don’t know anything and you’re just reading and watching everything you can, whether it’s videos like this from people who have advice to offer or from fellow writers who are offering you specific critiques or whether it’s just really immersing yourself in the art form—in novels, in movies—and studying what they’re doing. “What’s working? Why does this work?”

Honestly, the single most helpful thing for me in my journey of discovery has been studying books and movies and paying attention to my own reactions. What is my gut reaction to whatever I’m experiencing in this story, whether it’s good or whether it’s bad and why? Why did this work so well? Why did I think this was such an amazing story? Why did this affect me so deeply, or why did this make me so mad? Why did this totally not work for me?

How to Create Your Own Personal “Cosmology of Story”

Fine tuning that not only helps you learn story by osmosis and not only helps you shorten that gap between your gut knowing and your mental knowledge, it’s a way to learn to hone and trust your own instincts, so that at a certain point you’re not as dependent on other people telling you stuff in order to broaden your context. You’re able to create your own cosmology of story, where you can say, “Oh yeah, that was that technique from that story. And I learned why that did or didn’t work.”

And then, of course, there’s the practice. You start putting what you’ve observed into practice in your own stories by writing it. And that’s a whole other ballgame. You may think you understand something, but then you try to execute it within your own stories and you realize there’s so many more layers to it.

Bringing the experiential aspect into your practice is the quickest—well, I won’t say the quickest because, again, it is a process—but it is the most efficient and the most effective way of really getting to a place where you do know and you do understand and therefore you can trust your own advice. Then when you go out and you’re encountering information or advice from other people, you can also trust your reaction to that. You can look at some bit of advice and say, “Well, that doesn’t resonate with me. So I’m gonna reject that.”

And you can trust yourself to do that. You can say, “I am trustworthy. I have the authority to be able to say ‘no, that’s not what I want to do with my art.'” And vice versa, you can say, “Wow, that’s great. That is such an insight. I never saw it that way.” Now, you an claim that insight in a way that makes it yours. It’s not “their” insight anymore once you have that reaction to something.

In my teaching, I don’t teach something unless I understand it from the inside out. The information comes in, but it has to be metabolized. It has to be digested until it becomes your own and you have your own understanding of it. When you have that feeling and you experience that insight, it doesn’t feel like you’re learning something new.

All learning is remembering.–Socrates

It feels like you’re remembering something you always knew. It’s that flash of recognition that says, “Yes, this is true. This makes sense.” That’s what you’re looking for, because when you can experience that—particularly in a physical reaction within your body—then you know that insight is yours. You know you can trust that that is the essence of your gut instinct responding to something.

Finding the Balance Between Becoming a Master and Being an Eternal Student

Bottom line: it’s really important for artists to trust themselves. It’s equally important to be humble, to be curious, to read widely, to study, to be willing to be a student before you can be a master.

For some of us mastery is a lifetime’s journey. We may never get there. But again, as is often said, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Related to this, I really like Anne Lamott’s quote where she says,

Being published isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is.

I think that’s pointing to the same thing—of reaching some end point where you’ve written the perfect book. It’s there and it’s done. It’s great. But what’s really valuable and interesting is the journey to get there, and that journey is ongoing because as soon as you reach a mountain peak, you realize, “Oh wow, there’s a whole mountain range out there that’s still to explore.”

Keeping that context in view—that big picture and that long-range view that there will never be an end to learning. There will always be more to learn. But the more you can consolidate yourself and shorten that gap between your mental acuity and your gut knowing, then you become an accurate guide for yourself on that journey.

And really all we’re looking for is that grounded knowing that we can trust ourselves and our own responses to whatever information that we learn. You’re the guide that goes with yourself no matter what. Ultimately, you’re the one who makes all the decisions. So you want to be able to trust your choices when you are creating your stories and your art.

So that’s just some thoughts on the topic that comes up in one way or another quite a bit in emails that I receive from people. I hope those thoughts were helpful again.

Happy writing!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you trust yourself as an artist? Tell me in the comments!

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