Part 2: The Non-Disclosure Agreement
About the same time I began writing my historical novel in the summer of 2017, I also – as I mentioned in my previous post – made a firm decision to not share it with anyone during the writing process. I took that step based on a strong feeling that I interpreted as a message from my inner self.
Now, as I wrote earlier, I am wary of my gut feelings, since I’ve learned through trial and error that they often represent the voice of irrational fear, rather than serving as reasonable sources of guidance. That’s why I always consult my inner self, too, when choosing a course of action. But this thought about keeping the novel to myself until it was finished – that wasn’t anything I’d consciously asked my inner self for guidance about. It just came to me once I began to write. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t go into deep inquiry about where that thought had come from. I didn’t check in with my inner self and ask, “Hey, did you send this along to me?” I simply assumed it had because, although the feeling to write basically in secret was strong, it wasn’t “gut feeling strong”. I accepted it without questioning it, because it seemed like just the way my inner self would have my back. Let me explain what I mean by that.
I have always really adored the practice of writing. I’ve consistently found it energizing and joyful to engage in that creative process, whether I was writing fiction, performance pieces, blogs about Reiki and spirituality, or non-fiction. But when I look back on what I created over the years, I can see that in all cases, I tailored what I wrote to meet the expectations of the people I considered my core audience. No matter what I was writing, I’d quickly gain a sense of what folks enjoyed most, and then allow that understanding to strongly influence whatever I wrote next. Even though many people considered some of my performance pieces controversial, the truth is that I rarely wrote anything that would risk alienating my core fans. They came because they enjoyed the outspoken, sex-positive persona I presented in my shows. So, I worked within the guidelines of that persona, never pushing my readers and audience far enough that I would lose them. Losing them was the last thing I wanted.
Cut to about ten years later. At this point, I was putting out weekly blog posts about practicing Reiki, and I also authored a book about Reiki as a spiritual practice. I can say that I truly wrote all of these from the heart, out of a sincere desire to offer something that might benefit those around me. Even so, I was, at the same time, still/once again writing to meet my (new) audience’s expectations. As I’d done in the late 90s, I was presenting a certain persona – just a different one now. Now I was the Reiki practitioner and teacher who had gained some valuable insights and was sharing them.
The point I want to make here is that for me, writing has always been inextricably linked with a lifelong project of doing my utmost to excel at whatever I was engaged in. My overarching goal was to stand out from the crowd, in the hope of gaining others’ approval and affection. So, when it came to writing, it wasn’t enough to just be a performance artist. I had to shock people with what I wrote. Nor was offering a humble little blog about Reiki sufficient. I had to write a whole book about it! (So much for being an advanced spiritual practitioner.)
I’d inaugurated this project early on in life, once I (unconsciously) adopted the false belief that approval and affection are something we humans have to earn. I concluded that you earn these things by 1) being perfect, and 2) expressing only views that others will approve of. There’s a big problem with approaching creative writing – and life, of course – this way: If you’re writing to gain approval, then one thing you avoid writing about at all costs is any of your qualities, thoughts, actions, or beliefs that might reveal to others that you are a regular human, or that you disagree with them about something. Do that, the faulty logic goes, and they will turn on you.
So, naturally, if your writing is undergirded – as mine has been – with the fear that you’ll be rejected if you’re totally honest in what you put out into the world, or if you make yourself vulnerable and show yourself to be, basically, human… If this is how you approach the creative process, then how can your own true inclinations ever manage to consistently make their way into what you’re writing? They can’t. At least this has been true in my case. Certainly, there has been some level of openness in my writing, and a lot of heart, I’d say. But a deep fear of rejection has always held me back from fully and boldly expressing my genuine feelings and thoughts, whether the subject at hand was sexuality or spirituality.
That fear of being spurned for revealing myself as the human I truly am, was so strong in me, that in the writing I did before I began working on my novel, I never trusted myself to make editorial decisions. I always had another person read whatever I was considering performing or posting, someone who knew my audience’s expectations. They could read a piece I’d written, judge whether or not it would fly with that audience, and offer suggestions about how to change it so it’d be most effective – suggestions I nearly always adopted.
This editing process most certainly did result in pieces that ended up more aligned with audience expectations than they started out. But it also resulted in pieces whose final drafts were less aligned with my true inner voice than the first drafts – first drafts which I had already self-censored, out of fear. Ugh. So, to sum up, here’s how I’d describe my creative writing process over the years: I consistently heeded others’ voices about what and how to write, instead of fearlessly consulting and honoring the voice of my own inner self.
This is exactly the pattern I was looking to break by writing my novel alone, in consultation with only my inner self. I did not want to fall under the sway of others’ views and advice and opinions as I worked on this new project. I wanted, finally, to write freely, free of all that outside influence. I wanted to be able to pour my whole heart into this novel, without worrying about the response. And so I began.
Right from the beginning, I fully believed that my inner self was guiding me. So, when the thought occurred to me early on in the process – again, I stress that it arrived unsolicited – that I should write the novel “just for myself”, I immediately accepted it as coming from my inner self. As I saw it, my inner self, which I knew always had my own best interests at heart, was offering me a gift. It was helping me protect myself from the impulse to cede control over my writing to others, and from the fear that had caused me to censor what I truly wanted to write.
So, I continued working on the novel, honoring this non-disclosure agreement. I discovered very quickly that, yes, indeed, I was able to write absolutely what I felt guided to write. Not asking anyone else to approve what was coming out onto the page – that felt glorious! There was one problem with this, however. Simply denying the fear inside me the conditions that had always allowed it to thrive in the past didn’t meant that it just shrugged its shoulders and slunk away. Oh, no. It just sat quietly in the background, biding its time. In my next post, I’ll tell you how this fear managed to reassert its hold on me, and how I finally realized what it was up to and gave it its walking papers.
Sue Downing 