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Welcome to Monday Motivation - The Most Important Skill
This week I want to talk about the most important skill to develop as a writer. The skill that all other skills derive from. I'm sure as I say this, there are lots of different thoughts of what this could be. I wish I could talk with you, because the interviewer in me would love to know all of the answers to this prompt. I'd guess some people might say something curiosity, or structure, maybe even having a critical writer's eye. All of those things are important, but to me, the most important skill you need to develop as a writer is learning how you write.
Not how to write, but how you write.
What this is means is a tactical, nuts-and-bolts understanding of how your creation process works. In the same way a mechanic looks at an engine and sees all kinds of parts that add up to create one whole, your writing life is a number of disparate actions, thoughts, and processes that when added together will hint towards the results you are likely to achieve. That is because an engine, like your writing life, is a process. It is not a single part, but a sum of its parts. And these parts need to work together, they need maintenance, they need fuel, they need a skill operator. Somebody somewhere had the inspiration and creativity to design the engine, but it is the process of the engine that makes a car move.
Yes, creativity is magic, but creation is a process.
Accepting process as a critical part of my writing life took me a long time to understand. For a good chunk of my early days of writing, I was terrified of losing the magic, and so I only worked off the fuel of creativity.
But, what I learned is that creativity can be fickle. I'm using the word creativity here, but you can interchange that for the muse or inspiration. What I realized is that I sat down a lot with no inspiration and no muse. And yet, I still needed to create.
And so I threw myself into learning the craft of writing and I obsessively wrote and studied and went to an MFA, all to try and add more magic, more inspiration, into my writing. But, while my skill as a writer improved, my output and results didn't, partly because I'm not sure I ever learned how to control the magic. In fact, I still don't. But, I learned I could control the process, and oddly it was the process that produced the writing results I wanted. Not the magic.
Once it clicked that I had to learn how I write, it was like the proverbial lightbulb went off. And the good news is that it didn't take me very long to figure out how I write, and the results on my writing life have been tremendous. I'm not worried about losing the magic or even about harnessing it, because I have a process, and my process works for me.
There are two questions to answer to start unpacking this for yourself.
The first question is what is your standard for your writing time? Is your standard to sit down and crank with no distractions? Is your standard more relaxed? Is your standard 1,000 words a day? 10,000 words a day? Define what it is your expect from yourself first and foremost.
The second questions is to think about what had to happen for you to achieve your standard? Did you leave your phone in a separate room? Did you have a plan for what you wanted to write? Were you at a certain time or place?
These questions can help unlock ideas and steps you can take, but I'd also recommend approaching your writing life like a detective who collects clues. If you have a great day or week of writing, tkae a moment and try to understand why. Same as the other side if you had an awful week. In the end, this is a process of learning about you. So it is you studying the way you work. Be selfish with it, and see what opens up for you.
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