It’s not enough to dream about writing, you actually have to show up and do it, which can be the hardest thing, even when it’s the very thing your heart desires most. And it’s even harder to develop and share your writing once you do it. Yet if you’re here, you know your writing longs for something more—it longs to go beyond your journal and reach the hearts and minds of people.
I call this desire and process, the Restorative Writing Cycle.
There are stages in the writing process, certain times for certain things. All too often writers or want-to-be writers sit down and expect to inhabit all of them at once. This isn’t possible. It’s what makes it hard to find your voice, creates resistance and blocks, and makes it hard to prioritize and sustain your writing practice.
Each stage of the process has its own needs and requirements. You wouldn’t expect your newborn baby to be ready for college, would you?
A baby needs to go through stages of growth and development before that can happen. The same is true of a newly birthed piece of writing. It has to go through stages of growth and development before it can become fully itself and go out into the world, but it must start with desire, internal conception, and then being born in its alive, raw and vulnerable state.
The more you understand this cycle and how it wants, and needs, to operate in your life, the more you’ll relax into writing, discover your voice, and the more motivation and success you will have.
Restorative Writing is writing that seeks to connect to the deeper meaning of life in order to revive and restore our relationship to the precious invisible essence at the heart of the living world. It isn’t writing simply for the sake of writing. It’s writing that longs to be witnessed and known by others. It’s writing that uses words as a pathway to reach what lives beyond language so that we might reach across space and time and into the hearts and minds of another person and bring some deeper connection and understanding to what it means to be human and to be in this together. It’s writing that seeks to touch and express soul.
The support I offer to writers is rooted in understanding the writing cycle, more specifically, the Restorative Writing Cycle, and how it functions uniquely for you.
The Restorative Writing Cycle can also be called the “cycle of creation.” The cycle of creation starts with bringing essence into form, honoring and receiving its uniqueness, nurturing and allowing it to grow and develop into itself, and then finding structures that allow it to become fully visible in the world, to take on a life of its own.
The Restorative Writing Cycle parallels this cycle of creation and follows a sustainable rhythm: 1) agenda free, alive writing, 2) identifying your voice, 3) developing your work, and 4) finding an audience.
1) Agenda free, alive writing
Every writer wants to be good, to write well, and to say something important, witty, meaningful, profound. Every writer wants to be liked, admired, validated and acknowledged. But there is nothing that will freeze you more before a blank page than needing others to approve of and like what comes out of you, even you.
You must begin by letting go of your agenda, which at its root means, “list of things to be done.” This includes any thoughts or feelings you have about what the writing should be. Letting go of this allows your writing to be alive, raw, and ripe for discovery.
We create agendas because we believe they will keep us safe and in control. The blank page is scary. You don’t really know what will show up. But creativity is messy. Creativity cannot be controlled. You have to let go and allow alchemy, magic, and surprise.
2) Identify your voice
If your writing longs to go beyond your journal and out into the world in a broader way, you have to step into being seen as a writer and all that means to you. This includes seeing and hearing your unique voice more clearly and how it’s a reflection of your life’s path, calling, and purpose.
You can’t do that on your own. As I frequently say, “you can’t see yourself by yourself.” To see yourself more clearly, you have to be seen by others and learn how to receive what they (and the world around you) can reflect back to you about the essence of who you are. This is what allows you to truly identify your voice and fully claim yourself as a writer.
3) Develop your work
It can be challenging when you have stacks and stacks of material (piles of old journals for example) or a myriad of ideas and have no sense where to begin, what’s important, what might matter to someone else, or how to sort through it all and create something complete and ready to be shared with the world.
Intuiting and discerning what wants to be developed in your work is about taking your soul’s expression one step further. It’s about looking and listening more closely to what wanted to be written, expanding your capacity to grow and develop that, and to deeply trust yourself in the process.
Some things are meant only for the journal, others ask to go further, to be developed and shared. Learning how to listen to your writing and make decisions in this way is essential.
4) Find your audience
If your writing longs to go beyond your journal and out into the world in a broader way, you have to step into being seen as a writer by sharing your work with others and actively work with the inevitable vulnerability and fears of exposure it brings up as part of your writing process.
In fact, it’s the act of sharing your work with an audience that validates it and allows you to build your capacity to be vulnerable, work through your fears, and not only survive, but actually thrive and feel more confident in your writing regardless of the responses and results.
When you commit to your writing life and not just a “project,” you commit to the cycle of creation, the Restorative Writing Cycle, and you come to understand how this cycle uniquely works in your life so you can be in rhythm and flow with its ups and downs, its linear, simultaneous, and circuitous paths, its arrivals and departures, and you learn to trust yourself and your process completely.
By living the Restorative Writing Cycle from a place of sustainability and devotion, you also stay motivated with your writing and build a writing practice focused on your soul’s desire, not productivity, perfection, or outcome. And there’s nothing more nourishing and rewarding than that!