How to Navigate Your Creative Process
There are a lot of books and information out there about the craft of writing stories but not very much written about how to find, develop your ideas and navigate the creative process as a journey in itself. Yet this is one of the most fundamental things we need to understand to succeed as writers. Some people know this intuitively while most of us must learn or relearn it.
Whatever you want to write, whatever your “why” might be, understanding how the creative process is similar to the hero’s journey, for both you and your protagonist, is critical to your success. It all starts with knowing how to enlist your imagination to activate the unconscious as a creative partner in your writing. Then, the momentum of the journey carries you forward into a creative experience that asks you to be both playful as a child and disciplined in your craft.
Understanding the Creative Process
Understanding this helps you overcome many of the creative challenges you’ll face between your emerging story and your final draft. Stories rise from our experiences, from other stories and insights that touch us emotionally. As we have seen, many successful writers use personal material as creative fodder, and then modify it to fit a story structure. Stories based on aspects of our lives can be very powerful but also scary. Writing stories that have some basis in our personal psychology can trigger our inborn protective response of fight, flight or freeze. This is the stress response. This stress response is great for killing saber-toothed tigers or lifting cars off a child, but not so much for writing consistently or creatively!
Obstacles
Another challenge is that sometimes, no matter how much we want to find our voice, our inner critic can be a real downer. That’s why it is so helpful to learn how to dance with the naysayer and transform our blocks creatively. What is sometimes called writer’s block can cause us to just stop writing. We start projects but don’t complete them. Instead of sitting down to the hard work of writing, we believe our own excuses about why we’re not writing, struggling with doubt and fear. Then we beat ourselves up for not having enough discipline, forgetting that we are on a journey that tests and builds our character as much as we test and build our protagonist’s character.
If you’re like many writers I’ve met over the years, something may have stalled you, discouraged you or kept you from starting or finishing. Here are some of the reasons we encounter:
- The worry that even if you did finish, no one would care.
- Not being able to develop the story that excites you.
- Procrastination has grown into writer’s block, and now your barely-started novel just sits somewhere.
- Not knowing how to navigate the creative process and deal with the inner critic.
- The fear that you’re not good enough, so your message and potential stories remain trapped in your head—instead of getting out to those who need them.
- Your increasingly crowded calendar forces you to say “no” to your writing.
- Or, perhaps you’re one who has completed a manuscript but now you worry that it’s nowhere nearly good enough to publish.
Believe it or not these roadblocks—different as they may seem—are rooted in the same problem. They come from not understanding how the creative process works, most importantly, the role of the unconscious in creating and how to navigate it.
The Journey Forward
But there is a way forward: it can be likened to the hero’s journey, for both you and your protagonist. If you ready to accept the call to create, maybe a message has burned inside that you have wanted to share with the world. Maybe the joy of losing yourself in the pages of a favorite novel made you want to create your own fictional worlds, characters and stories. Maybe you have even dreamed of a career as a novelist. Whatever the spark that has been planted in your mind, including the desire to hold in your hands a finished manuscript, the goal is to take steady steps towards opening up your natural creativity.
Our lives contain many stories waiting to be told. By accepting your call to create, you can learn how you can find your authentic voice and the inspiration that you need to answer the call, and tell the story.
Along the way, we need to learn how to write your stories in a way that feels vivid and real We must transport the reader into the experience. Writing a story begins in the writer’s mind. If we want to make our story world feel real in the reader’s imagination, we must first learn how to make it real in our own imagination. We must open up to writing as a deep experience that unites conscious and unconscious gifts through the bridge of imagination. The journey through any project will make us stronger writers and people, The hero’s journey helps us (and our characters) find our bliss by testing and guiding us to meet the task that calls us.
Creative Process Techniques
Fortunately, there are techniques we can learn to help us imagine our stories more vividly. We can learn to create three-dimensional places in our imagination, places that we can enter and walk around in a daydream. We can learn to invent characters who feel like real people so that we can visit with them in our heads. In a Rolling Stone Magazine interview, Stephen King was asked if his imagination was more active than other people’s. Here’s what he said:
It’s more trained. It hurts to imagine stuff. It can give you a headache. Probably doesn’t hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more that you can do it, the more you’re able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don’t think everyone develops it.
We can train our imagination like a muscle to make it more powerful. And we can learn tricks to help it along. The result is what I like to call a vivid daydream that we can transmit to the reader. By writing in this way, we can make readers see what’s in our imagination. And it’s more than just mental pictures. As a writer, we can learn how to pull readers inside the daydream, how to make readers feel as if they’re living our story instead of just reading about it. That’s how we want to write and what I call writer’s magic.
How to Start the Story