Tag: feel

Becoming More Myself

Laura Highcove

So I started writing a blog post for this week about a month ago. I came back to it a few times and edited it, but it was never quite feeling right. I talked through it with my husband to no avail and last night I realized what the problem was. The post was too much of a rant, me complaining about the world and my own opinion of how things ‘should be’. And when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that that’s just not my style. The whole reason I have such a problem with writing blog posts in the first place is because I don’t feel comfortable stating my opinions as ‘right’.

And I’ve struggled a bit with the idea that I’m only careful with putting my opinions out there because I’m a woman and yada yada. But that’s the same trap I found myself falling into for those years when I thought I wasn’t female enough. I was listening to people ‘out there’ tell me how I should react to the world around me. I thought because I don’t like jewelry, or bags, or makeup that I wasn’t female enough. It actually got worse with the “me too” movement because suddenly there were more opinions out there about what women should do or be like. At a certain point, I finally had to decide: ‘screw that’.

I think I’m finally making that same kind of distinction here. I write my journal entries that are basically just that, journal entries, because I want people to be able to read about the struggles I have in my every day life, see how I deal with them, and perhaps find something that will help them in their own lives. Giving my opinion on how people should deal with their feelings (that’s what the failed blog post was about) was outside of that. I don’t want to tell people how they can have a better relationship with their own feelings. I’d rather show them my own relationship with myself and my feelings and let people draw their on conclusions.

And finding that this is part of who I am has been a lot of trial and error in learning to distinguish between when something is hard vs when something feels wrong. I could never begin to tell anyone else how to differentiate that for themselves. The closest I’ve come is a set of posts I wrote a while ago that talk about feel and awareness.

Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

Though even in these posts I focus mostly on the process I used with a few suggestions of how it could work for someone else. These are the types of posts I like to write, I guess I just needed the reminder. Now I just need to wait until the next thing goes wrong in my life so I can talk about how I respond to it. Shouldn’t be too long.

“Best Practices” That Didn’t Work for Me

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

DIY MFA Book Club, Prompt #5: What’s one “best practice” that didn’t work for you?

I have a number of these “best practices” that just don’t work for me. I’ve learned to take any and all advice with a grain of salt, even the ones that seem so ubiquitous that there’s no way it isn’t true, like: “Write every day.” So let’s start there.

“Write every day.” – or, you know, on a schedule that works for you

I don’t write every day. I take Fridays off and other days when things are busy. For me, it was just important to set up a schedule and put aside time to write. When holidays roll around, or other “disruptive events”, I honor my reality and take off the days I need to.

I also don’t necessarily write new words every day. Much of my process involves rewriting over and over (I call this ‘smoothing’.). Some days I *have to* reorganize what I’ve already written before I can move forward with the story. That means sometimes I end up with far fewer words than I started the day with, and yet what I have is better.

“Stop writing when you’re on a roll.” – unless that means you lose momentum

The idea here is supposed to be if you stop in the middle of the action, when you sit down to write the next time, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off more easily. This one got me into trouble a few times because when I tried it, I found that the way my mind works is that once I lose an idea, it’s often gone completely. So I would be writing toward a goal, stop in the middle, and when I sat down the next day I would have literally no idea where I was headed. (Occupational hazard for discovery writers more than plotters.)

I have learned that I need to stop and write ideas, even in the middle of an ongoing scene, or else I will often forget it by the time I get done. And I always finish a scene, or at least a thought before I stop writing for the day. I’m learning to identify my natural lulls, which normally means it’s a good time to stop if I need a stopping point.

“Ignore your inner critic.” – when it’s a good idea

This is a tough one. Because a lot of times you do need to ignore the critic in order to move forward, and not get bogged down. But as you develop more skill writing, sometimes it is important to listen to this critic.

An example: I’ve been struggling with my most recent novel, a book two. I have a character in it that I absolutely love, but my inner critic kept telling me she was superfluous. I kept convincing myself that everything would come together with her eventually.

I finally had to admit that I needed to listen to my inner critic and get rid of this character completely. Her being gone left the main character more time to interact with the other characters, strengthening their relationships and tightening the plot. And truthfully, it’s better that I got rid of her now before I wove her throughout the entire story and made her even harder to take out.

“The only best practice is the one that works best for you.” – period

Luckily I had DIY MFA around to remind me of this one. And truthfully, now I roll my eyes whenever I heard an author say the best advice they have is to ‘write every day’. I would encourage you, as you grow more skilled at writing, to practice saying, “Something that has worked for me is …” Because there really is no advice that works for everyone, but there are people out there who will gain benefit from what you’ve learned works for you.

What if I am?

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

Some of you may remember my trip to Vegas for the MasterTreat earlier this year. I got so much out of that weekend that it’s hard to even talk about it all, but one of the main things was that I felt a level of confidence there for almost the entire weekend, that I had never experienced before. As a result I was able to look at many of the feelings I have on a deeper level than I ever have. One of them was confronting more specifically what my fear of public speaking stems from. The another was my modesty.

One of the things that happened at the MasterTreat was that in my confidence, I was able to repeat some of the advice I had gained from the mentors in my life. The result of that is that the other women at the table seemed impressed, and one of them even called me wise.

My initial response to that was, of course: Well that’s not true. And I made the excuse that I was just repeating what other, smarter people had said. But after that gut reaction, I decided I needed to examine that feeling, so I sat with those compliments for a while.

I let myself think about what it would mean if I was wise. Not in the grand scheme of the world, or compared to other people, but in that moment, for those woman, what if I am wise? And you know, there is a fear somewhere deep-seated in me that believes that there is something truly wrong about being confident in myself. And once I was able to realize that, for a little while I was able to let go of it and see myself as other people do. And then I was able to be that wise person that they saw.

I didn’t suddenly crack under the expectation. I didn’t break under the weight of my own arrogance. I didn’t drive away the people around me with my ego, and I didn’t lose my sense of right and wrong. And while the confidence I experienced that weekend faded once I returned to the ‘real world’, I had certainly developed a bit of feel surrounding it, and I now find myself far more aware of when I’m brushing off compliments as a reaction and when I may deserve them.

So I want to give you a challenge the next time someone pays you a compliment. Instead of brushing it off with a dismissive comment or an excuse; actually accept it. For just a moment, allow that you are smart or brave or creative or attractive. And you know what? All life is are moments lined up one after the other.

The Importance of Patience

Laura Highcove

Patience is something everyone needs more of. It’s a constant struggle in a world that moves so fast. Working with horses is a good, constant reminder of the importance of patience.

I was reminded recently how important patience is. We had a horse get cast at the barn where I work. For those of you not familiar with the term, ‘cast’ is when a horse rolls over in their stall and gets stuck against the wall in some way that means they can’t get back up. Horses are prey animals and survived for millions of years by running away from danger, so if a horse can’t get up, they can’t run, and so in this situation most of them will panic.

For the horse who got cast, this panic manifested as labored breathing, sweating, and thrashing, which was dangerous both to the horse and the humans (me and my coworkers) who had to flip over a thousand-plus pound animal.

Once we had successfully freed the cast horse and it had regained its feet, it stood there still sweating and shaking, (Thankfully it had not been injured.) and I was reminded of how important patience really is.

I have a gelding named Nick. He was born at the barn and has been trained since he was a baby to accept the confinement of a stall, or being tied to his wall. Nick used to cast himself a lot as a baby. He was still figuring himself out. His training in accepting confinement, however, taught him that being cast wasn’t a cause for panic.

In his world, he would bang a bit, realize he couldn’t get up, and then a human would come and see he was cast and flip him over. As such, Nick never got upset about being stuck. No elevated breathing or sweating and as soon as a person came into the stall he would lay there perfectly still. Even when we flipped him over, he would lay there and allow the humans to move out of the way before climbing to his feet.

It got to the point that when he got bigger and heavier, that he learned how to get himself out of a cast state. He could either flip himself back over, or push against the wall such that he was far enough away to then get up. It got to the point where I would hear him banging a a bit and I would walk up to his stall and tell him, “You can get yourself out. If you’re having trouble, bang around some extra and I’ll come help you.” I knew I could do this because he was not upset about his confinement. Nine times out of ten, he would bang around a bit more and extract himself. The other time we would come (because we were listening to make sure he was okay) and he would wait patiently while we extracted him from a particularly bad angle.

This makes me think of how patience works. Sometimes things happen to us as a human. Some circumstance pops up and we get all hot and bothered. We ‘sweat’ and ‘thrash’ and end up doing damage to ourselves and others, even if mostly mental.

When what we really should do is stay calm and ask for help, (We can do it more efficiently than a horse.) or have someone remind us that we can do it on our own. That person can even be ourselves when the situation calls for it. What doesn’t help is the thrashing and the worry which can often get in the way of getting un-cast.

So next time you find yourself somehow stuck, try calming down (feel free to cry a bit first if you need) and then look at the problem from a different angle. A lot of times you’re not as stuck as you might think.

How my Writing Taught me to be a Discovery Rider

Laura Highcove

I have been a discovery writer since before I knew what that was. I always balked at outlines in school and avoided them when I could. English papers were created with no rhyme or reason and not edited before they were turned in. (Okay, maybe sometimes I read them over once.) I never got very good grades on my papers and, as a result, I hated English class, much preferring math and science.

My writing has always been like that. I don’t know what I think until I write it. I can’t plan how my characters are going to react until I’m in the scene with them. As such, writing is like magic to me. I discover what is happening as a result of the decisions my characters make, as they each grow to be more and more real.

As I’ve become more serious about my writing, the one thing I’ve found is that I can’t just think my way through a story. When I try, I generally just get stuck staring at the screen. Sure I get little bits of inspiration (that I need to write down as quickly as possible before I forget it) but I never really plan things out in my head. Or if I do, when I get back and start to actually write down the words, I’ll find I forgot or misjudged something important and it has to change.

What works for me is to sit down at my keyboard and start writing. Sometimes I pick a character or a situation first, sometimes I put word after word until I realize what I’m writing about. And what I produce is a rough draft. It needs to be organized and cleaned. But because I have taken the action, I have something to work with, something to learn from. That is my process, and I end up with good results eventually.

However, when I started riding and I learned a new technique, I would listen to the instructor describe the process and then think through the process. I would talk about it. I would ask questions. Then I would try the technique, get it wrong, stop, and try and figure out what was going on.

Suffice it to say it took me a long time to realize that I needed to treat my riding the same way I treat my writing and become a discovery rider. I take the general idea of what I want to get done, trust the skills that I have learned, and then I go and try the new technique. I inevitably get it wrong, adjust, and try again.

Because all of that thinking and analyzing never helps. I am never better at doing something new by thinking about it because I have absolutely no feel yet. As I’ve said before, you can’t develop feel without getting in the thick of it so you make mistakes and figure out how it’s NOT supposed to be, which eventually distils into what it IS supposed to be.

I’m not saying to ignore instruction, either in writing or anything else, but sitting there and thinking about it instead of acting doesn’t do you any good. In the grand scheme of things, the only way you’re going to learn and get better is to do, and being a discovery writer and a discovery rider has taught me that.

What is something that you haven’t done as a result of over-thinking it because you’re worried about getting it wrong?

Analyzing my Awareness

Laura Highcove

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When I started Laura’s Morning Routine, I had planned to take the data and make a graph with it in excel. I expected to find some sort of beautiful pattern that I could analyze my awareness. Several months in I realized that I didn’t need to analyze the data.

If you’ll remember, this trio of posts was about developing awareness in order to learn feel and the only way to learn feel is to experience something over and over until you just know. I didn’t need to analyze the data because at that point I had learned the feel of myself.

What I Learned About Myself

1) I saw a shift in my mind and spirit right before my period. It allowed me to mark that on my calendar so I was aware of it and for the effects of it. In the past I would have a few days of depression, now it’s regularly down to no more than a few hours at a time.

2) I began to see patterns in my mental state based on events that happened. That probably sounds like common sense: When something stressful happens in my life, I am effected by it. What I learned, though, was my mind often attributed the stress to something completely unrelated to what I was actually stressed about.

In April of 2015 (while I was doing this exercise), I found out that one of my cats was starving to death because she had severe periodontal disease that my husband and I wrote off as ‘bad breath’. She had to have surgery to remove all of her teeth. You can read about my reaction to this here, which is when I had a real breakthrough in understanding about how my mind hid the true reason for my depression under myriad other complaints for three terrible weeks.

I only knew that something was wrong, however, because I knew what normal was for me, and I was still stuck in it until I reached out to my riding coach, who was able to talk me to awareness.

3) I became more aware of my mental states. While I would write down an overall number for each day, I began to be aware of different periods within those days where I was one number or another that would later shift. This is when I knew I was really raising my awareness, because it expanded to times when I needed it and not just the time I was actively practicing it. And when this happened, I began to figure out when I could then consciously shift my mental state, and when my mind or spirit really needed to be low.

4) I really got to understand that my emotions happen, they change, and that they’re supposed to. And with being able to see the overall data over weeks and months, I was able to put less weight on the way I was feeling in any given moment because I knew it would be changing. In truth, it helped the lows be less low because I didn’t focus on them as much, and made the highs higher because I would be aware of them and grateful for it.

The thing is, that without the experience of looking into myself and my life, I never would have been able to develop the feel about myself that I did. The numbers don’t matter, I threw them away at the end of the year, but the feel I had developed in creating them was invaluable. There is no way around this. If you want to develop feel, then you have to be aware.

So How Does this Apply to Writing?

That being said, here’s where I tie this all back into writing. I promised I would. I admit the post got away from me a bit, but I hope seeing my results will give you some insights.

I used my new-found awareness to track how productive I was in different environments, doing different types of writing, etc. I didn’t change what I normally did at this point any more than I changed my life at the beginning of the year when I was focusing on awareness. I also didn’t use numbers at this point (though you’re certainly welcome to, do what works for you.) but over time I became aware of what worked and what didn’t and collected those common elements.

Things that I Discovered:

Where: I can’t write facing a wall, I need space in front of me. Other than that it doesn’t matter much.

When: I write much better in the mornings and after dinner it’s really a struggle to write creatively, though revision can still happen late in the day.

What: Location doesn’t matter so much (as long as I’m not facing a wall) but the amount of distraction in the space does. New prose is harder to write with noise or activity of any kind (that includes music). Revision and smoothing, it doesn’t matter as much, though part of that could be because I like revision best so it’s easier to keep focused.

How: Writing new prose is best on my phone or netbook where I don’t have access to the Internet. Revisions and smoothing are better on my computer with the large monitor.

Once I began to get a feel for what worked, I was able to focus on changing things up. I would try a new place or a new technique I had learned. Most people suggest trying something new for at least two weeks to see if it works, but since I’ve learned to better distinguish the ‘this isn’t right’ from the ‘I don’t like this’, I often don’t need to spend more than a week or so trying it out. The important thing to keep in mind is to trust yourself and your feel.

I know there are those of you who might want to skip right to this exercise because the writing is what you care about. I get that and I wish you the best of luck with it. And you might take just a moment to ask yourself why you’re not willing to develop awareness in yourself. If it feels too ‘whoo whoo’ …I would argue that so does the concept of feel in general, but you know feel is real. If you don’t think you have the time …well if your goal is to become a professional author and have someone pay you for what you produce, then there is going to be time invested.

Overall, I hope that you were able to get some ideas or insights from this series of three posts. If none of this clicked for you, then great, you tried it and now you can move on and try something else. If you got something valuable then I’m so happy for you. Either way, feel free to leave me a comment and tell me what you thought. I look forward to hearing from you.

This post is last in a series of three:
Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness

Developing Awareness

Laura Highcove

In my past post, I walked about what feel is, and that to develop it, it helps to be more aware. If you missed that post, you can go back and read it here.

At the end of 2015 I decided I needed to be more aware of my depressive episodes. I knew they followed my period in some fashion but for the most part I would be miserable for several days until I realized my period was coming, and then I would be able to actively manage my depression. That was no longer working for me, so I made the choice to do something about it by developing awareness.

You may remember from my last post, the way my riding coach asked me “Did you feel that?” over and over until awareness had become a habit. So what I wanted to do was create an exercise where I could remind myself to be aware. I call my exercise: “Laura’s Morning Routine”. You don’t have to call it that, but you can if you like.

What I Did

Every morning for a year, I sat down and did two things:

1) I closed my eyes and I took stock of how I was feeling in that moment.

The whole exercise takes no more than five minutes. It was simply a set time for me to stop what I was doing and focus on myself for a few minutes. Since this was not something I had done before, I had no experience with what I felt like, and thus had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling.

As time went on, I began to notice when things were off my baseline. By taking stock at the same time in the same place each morning, I cut down on other variables. I got used to how I normally felt, and began to notice when things were different.

2) I rated the previous day on a scale of 1 to 5 in the categories: mind, body, and spirit.

I am a computer science major. I like beautiful, organized databases and so rating myself on a number scale worked for me. I chose body, mind, and spirit because I thought it would be interesting, then I defined each one thusly:

Body: Rated based on how much pain I was in that day. ONE was pain that got in the way of my day, THREE was how I feel normally (no pain), and FIVE was amazing. Over the course of the year I only had a few ONEs and no FIVEs. This measurement ended up being the least useful to me, but I didn’t know that when I started.

Mind: Rated based on how much chatter or negative self talk my mind was generating that day. ONE was a near constant racket, THREE was normal (not none, but manageable), FIVE were days when I was very positive, either extremely grateful and/or having lots of great story ideas.

Spirit: Rated on how much social anxiety I was dealing with. ONE were days I was withdrawn and did everything to avoid attention. THREE was normal (chatting with people when they were around). FOUR were days when I sought out interaction with people, FIVE were days when I would sing out loud with my music.

I would also make note of important events going on that I thought might influence my emotional state. This included my period.

Making your Own Exercise

I showed you what my own exercise looked like as an example and a guideline, but don’t feel the need to stick with doing everything exactly like I did it. The important points are to:

1) Set aside a time to do the exercise and try and make it happen in the same place and at the same time as often as possible. The whole idea is to get used to being more aware, so if you do it once a week it may be harder to build a habit of being aware, and if you change the time and location constantly it will be harder to build a baseline for how you feel.

2) Define your rating system so you know what it means. You can rate yourself however you want. You can have a scale from 1 to 100. You can rate yourself in .5 increments. You can rate yourself using fruits. The important thing is that you know what it means.

Please Note

Developing feel is not something you will see an immediate result from. (I did this exercise regularly for then entirety of 2016. Not saying I never missed a day, but I didn’t let myself miss many.) It is a lifelong pursuit, but then so is growing as a writer, so these things go hand in hand. I’m not telling you this to discourage you, but to encourage you. I don’t want you to try these techniques for a week or two and then think something is wrong when you’re not magically aware. It takes a bit of dedication, but the results will be worth it.

Now you may be thinking: “Okay, you’re having me gather all this data. What am I supposed to do with it. I should analyze it somehow. What if I get a ton of banana days and almost no limes. What does that mean!?” For right now I encourage you to give this a try for two weeks. Write down your data and don’t analyze it. Or at least do your best not to. Humans like to look for patterns in things and they like to know why. In my next post I’m going to talk about what you can do with the data you collect and how you can shift this exercise to help you become more aware in any facet of your life, and yes, that includes your writing.

This post is #2 of a series of three:
Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

The Skill of Feel

Laura Highcove

I have learned a lot of writing techniques over the years that have made me a better writer. But there is a skill I have learned that is arguably more important than all the techniques. That is the skill of feel. The interesting thing about feel is that it was under my radar for a long time, and when I did learn about it, it wasn’t in regards to writing at all. I want to shed some light on this not-often talked about skill that has helped my writing so much.

The Skill of Feel

During my first horseback riding lesson as an adult, my riding coach told me that I would learn a lot of riding techniques. I would learn how to ask the horse to go forward, to stop, to steer right and left, and the list went on from there. “Technique,” she said, “is easy to teach and easy to learn. It is also far less important than developing feel. Feel,” my coach stated,” is impossible to teach and very difficult to learn.”

So What is Feel?

In the simplest definition I can manage, feel is the knowing that comes from experience, and thus cannot be shared or taught.

Feel is knowing how much pressure to put into leg, seat, and hand aids when riding a horse to get the desired result.
Feel is knowing how to stay balanced when you ride a bike.
Feel is knowing a friend or family member is under the weather before they say something.
Feel is knowing where to put scene and chapter breaks for the best pacing in a story.

These are all things that a person just knows, but they cannot adequately explain how or why. Feel is what some people call a gut feeling or intuition. It’s the knowing that comes from experience. You already have feel in most aspects of your life and yet you are probably completely unaware of it.

You Can’t Teach Feel

When my riding coach told me that learning feel was difficult, I didn’t believe her. I was a good student and I was convinced I would learn easily. During my riding lessons, my coach taught me technique and I practiced those techniques. And while I was riding, my coach would often call out: “He’s dropping his shoulder, did you feel that?” To which I would reply, “No.” And later, “He was moving so rhythmically there, did you feel that?” “Maybe?” And it continued, over and over: “Did you feel that?” And for a long time, I really had no idea what she was talking about. Until one day she asked that question and I realized I did feel something different from what I had been feeling. It was the first time I was able to answer that question with: “Yes.”

What I Was Actually Learning

It was years before it occurred to me how I learned feel without being directly taught. Each time my coach queried: “Did you feel that?” she was actually reminding me, and thus teaching me, to be aware of myself and my horse while riding. The repetition of that question turned that awareness into a habit, and the more aware I was, the more I was able to feel.

How this Applies to Writing

I learned to increase my awareness while riding my horse, but I also took the same awareness and applied it to my writing. I began to notice when my good writing times were and where I was the most productive. I learned to distinguish between something being off in the story or something being off with me. And with that awareness I was able to integrate the writing techniques that worked for me and ignore the ones that didn’t far more quickly because I knew how things felt when they were working and when they weren’t. I could also more accurately pinpoint problems in my story, even if I wasn’t sure how to fix them quite yet.

So Now What?

The good news is you’ve already developed a lot of feel. You gain feel from experience and you’ve been living for a while now. The thing is, you aren’t doing it consciously. When you exercise awareness of yourself and the things that you do, you can develop feel more quickly.

In next week’s post I am going to lay out an exercise I used to help consciously raise my own awareness, which helped me develop feel. This exercise will be possible for you to do on your own and, with practice, will help you develop your skill of feel, which you will apply to your writing.

This post is part of a series of three:
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness