Do you want to grow as a writer?
I know you do, simply because you are a writer. I know because you are here reading this post, either because you subscribe to this blog and others like it as a way to mainline writing knowledge on a regular basis, or because you stumbled onto this post in a search through the jungles of the Internet for the answer to one of the many, many writing questions that press down upon us all.
Many of those questions (and the available answers) are craft-based. How to write a story? How to write a good story? How to craft convincing plots, characters, theme, dialogue, narrative, action, romance, mystery, you name it? We seek to further our growth as writers in part to abate the misery of our own inadequacies in the face of such a complex art form, and in part because we are as fascinated by the patterns and techniques of story as we are the stories themselves.
I don’t believe this type of craft-focused growth ever finds an end, but it does, after a time, create a relative mastery. So what then? Where does the true and deep growth come from then?
Storytelling as an Exploration of the “Shadow”
A few years ago, I wrote a post in which I talked about four levels in our climb up the writing mountain. In it, I talked about how I felt I had reached the stage, in my own journey, where “I knew what I knew.” I wrote the post with a certain amount of satisfaction, of course. But deep in my heart, I also wrote it with more than a little fear and trembling—because what came next? Was writing just going to be easy and fun and a total breeze from that point on? Was it all downhill from there?
Of course not. My storytelling instincts were honed well enough for me to feel the foreshadowing. Hello, False Victory. Hello, Third Plot Point. (And if you know story structure, you know what that means.)
What I found beyond that plateau was a total paradigm shift in my relationship to my creativity. It is still ongoing, and even now I do not yet have a clear view of the next mountain. I have always believed mastery is the unconscious made conscious—to the point where the conscious understanding eventually reintegrates with the unconscious as “knowing instinct.” I now believe that is what lies beyond the stage of “knowing what you know.”
Basically, it feels like unlearning everything you learned. For me, I sense it means moving into a creative process that is less obsessively ordered.
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