The Pressure To Be Great – WN 036

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 36: The Pressure To Be Great.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and I made a really difficult decision this week.

So I sat down for drinks with my good friend, Kate, who is a published author and has published several books and works full time, also as an editor. I was drinking a glass of Malbec and she had a Moscow mule, and I said, Kate, I’ve decided something. I’m going to write a book. And the reason that I told her was for a few reasons. First of all, she’s done it several times before. Second, I know she does it for a living and she takes it seriously. And I wanted to tell someone who would take it seriously. Third, I wanted the accountability of someone who’s been there and done that before.

I wanted her to know that I was going to do this, but mostly above everything else, I wanted to see the look on her face. I wanted to see her reaction. What I mean by that is I wanted to see if she would nod in encouragement or if she would burst out laughing, or if she would give me a raised eyebrow, like really Sarah. But before she could respond, I interrupted her, which I’m really, really, really good at doing, very good at interrupting people. I said, I want the truth. I want the honest truth. What do you think? Can it be done? And she said, yeah, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work. So that’s the big decision that I’ve made. Maybe the biggest decision I’ve made this year. And it’s more than just a decision to write a book. It’s a decision to put in what I know is going to be a ton of hard work.

I feel like I shouldn’t still be discovering things about myself because I’m a little bit past the soul searching, life changing, late teenage early 20 years. But I am, I’m still learning stuff about myself and about how the world works. And I hope that’s good. I hope it means that I’m not some kind of dreadful late bloomer, or maybe I am a late bloomer and that’s absolutely fine, but there’s a lot of stuff that comes before making a large decision like that. I think that one of those things rests very heavily on a decision that I made last year. that was the decision. Learn how to say no. One of my favorite episodes of this podcast was episode nine and it was called say yes to writing. And the premise of that episode was that when you say yes to writing, you say no to other things. You have 24 hours in a day, no more, no less. That’s just something you can’t change.

But more than that, you have a certain amount of energy that you can expend. So if I think about a pie chart of 24 hours, and I have a very dear friend who has a master’s degree in data visualization and hates pie charts with every fiber of his being, but it works as an illustration. In this case, the pie chart represents all of the energy that you have, whether you have a lot, or whether you have a little. That circle contains it all divide up the pie chart as to what you spend your energy on: going to work, going to meetings, eating food, going to your kid’s soccer games, making the food that people are going to eat, running errands, writing, or crafting, or sitting in front of the fireplace with a book. That’s everything that you’ve said yes to.

If you try to wedge another piece of pie into that pie chart, it’s going to overshadow something else it’s going to take over necessarily the time that you give to one of those things and the energy that you give to one of those things. So by deciding what you’re going to say yes and no to you’re sort of tidying up and perfecting and optimizing how you’re expending your energy within that pie chart. When you say no to something, you free up the time to say yes to something else. So I’ve had to say no to some things this past year. I thought it was going to be a lot worse than it was. So what I’m going to do is keep doing that this year. I’m going to be a lot better this year at saying yes to writing. Some of you might know that I’m taking a social media hiatus this month.

So if you’ve seen a diminished presence on any of my social media platforms, that’s why. By doing that, I’ve realized exactly how much time I fritter away on Instagram and Pinterest and all these other things. It’s not new. It’s not anything I didn’t expect, but it’s still a revelation when you discover it for yourself. So yeah, that’s one of the decisions that I’ve made this year. It’s not a New Year’s resolution per se. It’s just something that I’ve been meaning and wanting to do. And that I really can’t afford to keep putting off while I fill up my time and my energy doing things that don’t really matter.

It’s still important to remember that you can’t be productive with a capital P all the time and that some downtime is healthy. That’s the other side of it that I struggle with. There is a time when I was recording multiple podcast episodes a week and holding down a full time job and trying to make time to write and spending the necessary time with friends and family. Any time someone would ask me to watch a movie or just hang out, I would say, no, I’m not really producing anything in that time. Therefore, that time is not valuable. That is the wrong mentality and it will take you to bad places. It’s part of that work life riding balance that I’m still trying to figure out right alongside you.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, my podcast had its very first birthday a couple of days ago. February 11th celebrates the official launch date of the Write Now podcast. And it got me thinking about what I’ve done this past year with this podcast, about all the new friendships I’ve made. Those of you who have reached out to me, thank you. I love that you’ve reached out and I love that we’re forming a community of writers together, not to give anything away, but more to come on the community of writers. Today’s episode is about pressure, mostly the pressure to be great, but all of the other pressures that surround us as we reach for greatness. As we work toward getting our work published. As we work toward getting words, any words on paper or on the screen, I don’t think pressure is inherently good or evil. I think in itself it’s neutral. You may be pressured by people to do good and bad things, but the pressure itself is just pressure. It’s a force.

I never took physics, and I hate that I can say that. I actually really enjoy math, but I got scared away from taking physics in high school and I took the easy routes, or not necessarily the easy route, but it was a route that I knew I would be able to excel in without exerting much effort. Because sometimes when you’re a high school student in your junior and senior year, you maybe get a little lazy. I was a very good student, but I realized that I knew a lot about biology already, and I could take two years of biology instead of two years of physics, and that I could get AP credit because I would do well on the test. Look what a horrible person I am, not challenging myself in high school to the fullest possible extent. I’m sure you have no idea what that’s like.

So, because I didn’t take physics, I can’t explain to you how pressure actually works. Like physical pressure. I know it has something to do with force and maybe Newtons, but that’s about as far as it goes with me. But I can tell you that I felt pressure. I felt pressure this morning when I woke up with a sinus headache. I felt pressure when I went to a shop and realized that I perhaps don’t have the ultimate stylish clothes that I could have if I spent a whole bunch of money. I realized that there was pressure to look a certain way. I felt like there was pressure to feel a certain way. And of course, now I’m talking about social pressure.

There is pressure to try a perfume sample at the counter. There was pressure, probably quite justified and lawful, to pay for the items that I was holding before I left the store. There was pressure as I met a friend for coffee, pressure to order a fancy latte and a pastry instead of the plain black coffee that’s a little better for my budget and my waistline. There was pressure to sit down with my friend and smile and chat. There is pressure to begin with small talk before we could get into the real meat and potatoes of what we wanted to actually talk about. There was pressure to leave at the appointed time, pressure that grew and grew as the minutes takes by and I checked the clock realizing I have to leave in 15 minutes. I have to leave in 10 minutes. I have to leave in five minutes. There is pressure, as I drove away from the coffee shop, to follow the speed limit, despite the person who was driving right on my bumper, pressuring me to go faster. You get the picture.

So what do we do with this pressure? We’re constantly making decisions, whether we’re conscious of them or not. And we’re constantly either letting the pressure get to us or roll off our backs. I think a lot of how we handle pressure has to do with our strength of character and our values, and what’s important to us, what we believe in. Your beliefs and values and your strength of character is sort of the opposing force to this pressure. It’s what you exert back. If you at your very core are in alignment with the pressure, then it makes for an easy decision and you might not even realize that you’re making the decision, but if you’re feeling pressure that goes against what you believe in, then it becomes a little more difficult. Sometimes we’re really good at tricking ourselves and thinking about when I returned from coffee with a friend today, and I sat down to write, there was pressure to write, but there was also pressure to go do something easier, like bake cookies or watch the movie.

I know you want me to say that despite the difficulty I made, the decision that I felt was right, to write. But I chose to go and bake cookies and I tricked myself and I said, Oh, I’ll think about what I’m going to write while I’m baking. Even as I said that, I knew that I wasn’t helping release the pressure to write. I was just deferring it. I was just pushing it away to deal with at a later date, when it would come back stronger. I felt it disharmony as I stepped away from my writing desk and went into the kitchen. I don’t know if any of us at any time in our lives will ever say that we’re as strong as we want to be, whether it’s physically, mentally, spiritually, depending on what kind of pressure we’re dealing with.

I think there’s even writing specific pressures. I walked into a bookstore last week and I got both really excited and really discouraged at the same time. Do you ever get that feeling? You walk into a bookstore and there’s just this beautiful array of books spreading out in all directions. It’s like you’re walking into a kaleidoscope. I love walking into bookshops. There’s so many covers. There’s so many books. I kind of get this dual pressure, the pressure to write a book and have my book be one of those beautiful flashes of color on the bookstore shelves. But there’s also a little bit of a panic, a panicking pressure that sets in, and that’s the pressure to run away and hide because so much work goes into making a book and you know, who do I think I am to write a book?

There’s pressure to meet deadlines. I do my best work when I’m up against a deadline, and I totally blame the fact that I worked for a newspaper for a couple of years for that. There’s just kind of a high that you get from getting your story in at the very last minute. That’s pressure that helps me produce. There’s the pressure to write a certain number of words in an hour, in an evening, there’s pressure to just get published. Maybe a friend or a loved one is kind of concern trolling you a little bit and saying hey, did you get a lot of writing done today? Did you get a lot of writing done this week? You going to be ready to publish in a few months? Hey, how’s it coming?

There’s the pressure to be meaningful, to provide meaning to people, to live a meaningful life, to be the hero of our own story. There’s immense pressure to do that. And that pressure, I think eventually builds into the pressure to be great. The pressure to be the next Hemingway or the next James Baldwin or the next Maya Angelou, the next Rita Dove, the next Jim Butcher, the next Margaret Atwood, the next Shakespeare. I feel it when I sit down to write. I feel that sometimes when I start to write, and I know that the words I’m putting down in this first attempt, this first draft, this convoluted attempt at an outline that this isn’t something that J K Rowling would have done. She would have done it much better. So there’s this pressure to be great. For me it comes from inside. For you it might come from inside, or it might come from people around you, people who are relying on you, people who have expectations of what you can produce and what you will produce.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between pressure and expectation, wondering which begets the other, chicken or egg style. Maybe I just haven’t chased it far back enough, but I think that there’s something to be said in the part that we have to play in setting expectations and maybe lessening some of that pressure that can get so exhausting and so overwhelming. Because while pressure can drive you to do something, I think it can also chase you away, away from your potential and away from the good stuff that you can do. I think it’s really easy for us to chase ourselves into a place of sickness, an unhealthy place.

So here’s what I’m going to try to do. Here’s what I’m going to do with all these pressures that surround and overwhelm us. I’m going to take a step back, figuratively speaking, or maybe literally, depending on what kind of pressure it is, and I’m going to say one step at a time. Because you can’t think about the greatness that you may or may not become. You can’t become great until you start. And sometimes you can’t start while you’re paralyzed about thinking how you’re going to become great.

So that big block of pressure, chop it up into little pieces that you can handle, take the 50,000 foot overview and dial it down until you’re back on earth, until you’re grounded, figuratively speaking. Or maybe literally, if you’re still living with your parents. Tell yourself, I can do this one piece at a time. So as beautiful as it is, I need to wipe away that gorgeous kaleidoscope of hardcover books at the bookstore. I’m not ready for that dose of pressure yet. Now if for you that pressure is actually inspiration, that’s awesome. If that helps you produce and write well, and it inspires you rather than terrifies you, if it helps you to produce instead of paralyzing you, then think about that. Where’s the good pressure here?

I said earlier that pressure wasn’t necessarily good or bad, which is true, but you have a positive or a negative reaction to certain pressures. I think that positive reaction can be called inspiration, and I think that that negative reaction can be called a lot of different things. Crippling self doubt, paralysis by fear. It holds you back instead of pushing you forward. So think about what’s pressuring you to write, to do things other than write. Give it some thought, do you feel pressure to become great? If so, dial it back a notch. Where is it pushing you? Where does it want you to go? What’s the path that it’s showing you and is it even a path that you want to follow? For that matter, what does greatness mean to you?

I found that once I’ve been talking about abstract things for a long time, they all just sort of blurred together. But what I’m asking of you is to become very conscious of what’s pushing you toward and away from writing. What inspires you and what seizes you with fear? Once you’ve isolated the positive stuff, take it one step at a time. Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t let it push you into an unhealthy place. I think that that’s how most of the people who we consider great today became great. I don’t think that many, if any of them, decided that their end goal was to become great. There was something else there. There’s something else driving them. There was some other pressure, not the pressure to become great, but the pressure to make a difference, the pressure to change something, the pressure to share their story with a world that needed to hear it. So I encourage you to think about that this week, what pressure is driving you?

What pressure are you giving into? What pressure is leading you and pushing you, and what are you pushing back against? At the end of the day, pressure doesn’t control you. Your decisions about how you react to the different kinds of pressure determine how things turn out. So I thought about my decision to write a book this year, and I thought where does it come from? Where is that pressure coming from? Is it because I want to be great? Is it because I want to be recognized or receive an award for my work? I’m not going to lie. That would be nice, but that’s not why I’m doing it. That’s not the root of that pressure. I’m doing it because I have a story to tell and that story wants out. And I’m doing it because I want to give something to people, help and healing and hope and faith. I’m doing it because I want to give something good.

I think that you can do that too. I’m not saying you have to write inspirational Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of book. I plan on having plenty of murders and grisly, violent gore scenes, and maybe even a couple of spaceships, but when you’re writing from the right place and you’ve got the right pressure behind you, when you write to fulfill something good, I think that that’s when you produce something really meaningful.

This week’s book of the week is not a book. Oh, okay. It kind of is because I’m still working on reading Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey. But for those of you who have read the book, it is like a billion pages long. And it’s taking me forever, despite my enjoyment of it, by the way. It’s very good.

So what I’ve been doing is long story short, it has been advised that I lose a little bit of weight. So I’ve been going to the gym and at the gym I’ve been listening to podcasts. I know. Big surprise, right? But I’ve been really enjoying these new modern radio dramas. what I listened to this week was season one of the Black Tapes podcast. It’s a show put on by Pacific Northwest Stories and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from it if you decide to listen to it. But it is a sort of spooky show where a naive journalist gets involved with this stack of mysterious black videotapes in the office of a paranormal researcher who does not believe in the paranormal. The two of them go on an interviewing adventure and discover all sorts of fun stuff. It’s just a really fun revival of radio storytelling. I just found that I really enjoyed it and it made my workouts go super quick because I got absorbed in the story. So if you hate working out like I do, and you’re looking for a fun thing to listen to, and there’s not a new Write Now podcast episode to listen to go, ahead and check out the Black Tapes podcast. It’s a good time.

I received a couple of emails and notes this week, one of which had a really good question that I want to respond to. Calvin Westbrook left a message on the Write Now podcast Facebook page, and he says, hi, Sarah, I love your podcasts as they always give me a boost to get on with my creative projects. Could I ask you how you were able to get past the swallowing self doubt when you sit down in front of a blank page to begin your writing? Wow. I think that is one of the questions that plague all writers. And I think that what I want to tell you, Calvin, and anyone else who might be struggling with this is that sometimes you’ve got to shift your focus a little bit, myself included.

I want to say that I am not exempt from this, but sometimes it can really help to shift your focus. And what I mean by that is instead of sitting down and feeling that pressure to be great, (I always like it when questions tie in with the themes that I’m working with), that doubt is coming from the pressure to be great. You say no way can I be the next Hemingway. No way can I produce anything that great. Well, you’re not going to. Not on your first try, not in your first draft. So take a little bit of a shift in your perspective. When you sit down, remove yourself from the equation, or maybe remove your ego, which is something that I need to do a lot, because I have a huge ego, which is why I’m talking about the pressure to be great, remove that from the equation.

When you sit down, focus on the voice that wants to come out. Focus on the story. Don’t think about how this word sounds next to that word. Just set your ego aside. Not that I’m calling you an egoist, but we all have an ego and we all feel the need to be great. But put that aside for now, focus on your message, focus on your voice, focus on just getting it out on the page. If you listened to a coffee break episode that I did a little while back with Dean Barker, you can find it. It’s on iTunes. It’s on my website, Sarah Werner.com. He talked about how the first draft of anything doesn’t matter because it’s going to get revised so much over and over and over again. That first draft is just for getting your ideas out there. You’re not creating a masterpiece at this level. You’re creating a draft.

It’s okay for drafts to suck and it will suck. And that’s okay. Writing is hard work and it calls for tons of revision. That’s just part of what we choose to do when we choose to write a book. I’m telling this to myself as much as I am to anyone else. So when you sit down and you stare at that screen and you wonder what string of words can I put on the screen that will make an instant masterpiece, you’re putting way too much pressure on your first draft. You’re putting the pressure to be great on something that’s eventually going to get written over about a million times. So stop doing that, and I need to stop doing that too. Refocus, focus on putting words on the page, words that don’t have to be great Write Now. And let me know how that works out for you.

Calvin has also asked if I could shout out to his website and of course I’m happy to do that. Cal C -A-L-W Brooke, author.wordpress.com. So Calvin, best of luck to you.

I’m about to be in the same boat that you are. So I just need to listen to my own advice and we’re going to get through this together. If you would like to reach out to me with a question you can certainly do so via Facebook. I have a page out there for the Write Now podcasts that you can use to contact me. You can also shoot me a message on Twitter, either at my personal Twitter page or at my new Write Now podcast handle. You can also visit my website at sarahWerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Navigate to the contact page and fill out my little form. You can also email me at helloatsarahWerner.com. So lots of different ways to get in touch with me. If you follow my email list, if you receive emails from me, you can even reply to those emails and they will go directly to my inbox.

Speaking of email, I got a really, really lovely email from podcast listener, Margo, and I just wanted to share it with you because it was just really lovely. Margo says, hi, I don’t often email people I don’t know, particularly in cases such as this, but I have to tell you that I love your podcast. I’ve been a writer since I was very little. I considered myself a genuine writer, capital w since I was about eight, when I wrote stories about my anthropomorphic cats on my parents computer. But since that age, my confidence, my self discipline and my energy have been systematically beat out of me in various ways, whether it was through school counselors, reminding me that writing isn’t a legitimate career path or through my own hesitance to let anyone, and I do mean anyone, read my writing.

You talk about seasons on your podcast. And to some extent, that is how I would define the times in my life when I’ve been able to maintain short bursts of writing streaks. Typically, I would label my writing streaks more as storms as they are often fast, furious and almost uncontrollable. I find the time to write, I get the energy, I write like crazy. And then I realize that the rest of my life is falling apart as I’ve lost myself in my selfish desire to write.

I wanted to share this with you because of two things. I love, love, love Margot’s description of writing storms. I want to hold onto that image because I think I’m going to start thinking about it that way, because I love storms. I think a lot of writers love storms. For whatever reason I love them.

And I want to think of myself as sort of, I don’t know, coming forth with this force of nature. The other thing is, and this is something that I think a lot of writers struggle with, Margot talks about her selfish desire to write. I don’t think it’s selfish. I think that if you are facing these writing storms, if there’s something that’s boiling up inside of you, that needs to be unleashed like that. I don’t think it’s selfish to deal with it. I don’t think it’s selfish to write. Creativity is a force of nature and smothering it won’t do anything good. The third episode of the Write Now podcast is about writing as self care. And I think it’s important to tend to yourself through writing as it is, you know, washing your hair, brushing your teeth. So I really hope that this season for you does not feel selfish. I hope that you’re able just to give in to this season of writing and to think of it as a healing experience, as though you’re giving something to the world instead of taking something away from it.

I always have so many people to thank at the end of each episode, two of those people today being Calvin and Margo. Thank you for reaching out, for sharing your questions and your thoughts, and for being willing to be vulnerable. Thank you. I would also really, really like to thank my Patreon supporters who help make this possible. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform, and folks give a certain amount of money for each podcast that I produce. So you have them to thank today as well for today’s episode. These wonderful people include official cool cat Sean Locke, official bookworms Matt Paulson and Rebecca Werner, official rad dude Andrew Coons, and official caffeine enabler Ming Tun Tsu. Thank you all so, so much for your generosity.

Finally, thank you for listening. Seriously. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I love that you’re listening to it because I’ve told you now that I’m going to write a book this year. I’m going to do it. And in fact, once I stop recording, I’m going to work on it. It feels really good to say that. It feels really good to take a step back, to shift my focus from saying I have this pressure to be great, and instead say, I’m going to sit down and I’m just going to write.

I’m going to tell my story because it needs to be told. I hope that you say something similar to yourself this week when you’re staring at that blank screen. Ignore the pressure to be the next Hemingway. Focus on producing words that will make you the next you. Is that cheesy? I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. I just want you to write, and I know you can do it. With that, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go do some writing.