What It Means to be a "Resilient Writer"

resilient writers radio show Feb 16, 2024

In Season Three of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I tried to ask every writer I interviewed what they felt that meant. What did it really mean to be a resilient writer?

And so there's some fascinating things that came up that have really made me reflect more on what it means to me to be a resilient writer, which is why I'm in this at all.

You know, I always joke: they're going to take the pen from my cold, dead hand. And it's not really a joke. Like I want to be writing when I'm 95, 97, 104, however many years I'm lucky enough to get.

I want to be writing until the end. That's my dream. But that means that I'm probably going to have to cultivate the art. of being a resilient writer. So it's really worth it to me to be thinking about what does that mean? Like, how do we do that on a daily basis?

The writing life is a life that is filled with rejection for sure, but it's also filled with self doubt. We often find ourselves wondering: Is this story any good? Am I good enough as a writer to really honor this story? And we ask ourselves a lot of questions and sometimes we, we often get in our own way.

Thinking about what it means to be a resilient writer is a way for us to think about what it means to us to hang in there when things get hard and also to enjoy the process. So I'm really grateful to my guests from this season who answered this question for me, and in this episode I share some of their responses.

Listen to learn:

What the tools and resources are that support our resilience
How accomplished writers feel even after they’ve published award-winning and/or best-selling books
The relationship between resilience and adaptability
How to cultivate resilience as a writer

Here’s a sneak peek:

[02:56] I want to be writing until the end. That's my dream. But that means that I'm probably going to have to cultivate the art. of being a resilient writer. So it's really worth it to me to be thinking about what does that mean?

[05:05] Finding the resources. We don't have to just go: “Oh, the writing life – it's so hard.” We can figure out the tools and resources to make it easier.

[07:10] He said, “I don't think that you reach a kind of promise land where it's like, now I know I feel confident and everything I write is burnished. gold. It always feels like you're in the middle of uncertainty, but that's what it is. But getting to write and trying to learn to love the process and the uncertainty, it to me is resilience.”

[08:34] Learning to enjoy the process, focusing on the process, is key to resilience.

[10:10] We want to always be learning and growing. And that means that nothing will ever be perfect. Nothing will ever reach the kind of glimmering, glistening vision for it that we have in our heads. But as long as we're learning and growing along the way…that's the whole job.

[12:06] But like, how do we persevere? We persevere by adapting, by saying, okay, this is the situation. I had planned to get in three writing sessions this week. And I could only get in two, or I could only get in one, or my sessions were all cut short and oh, well, I'm adapting. That's okay. I'm letting it be okay.

Links from today’s episode:

Extreme Healing: Reclaim Your Life and Learn to Love Your Body

The Writer’s Flow Studio

The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson

What It Means to be “A Resilient Writer”: The Resilient Writers Radio Show -- Full Episode Transcript

Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to the Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.

Because, let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process. so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them.

Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it.

So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Well, hey there, and welcome back to another episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. It's been a while, it's been a couple of weeks. I intended to do this episode back in January, and things just blew up. I had a fabulous book finisher's boot camp experience with over a hundred writers. And then my daughter broke her leg and things kind of turned chaotic on me.

But I'm back at it now and really pleased to be with you again for this episode. This is a special episode for me because it's something I think about a lot. So I thought for the end of Season Three, let me do an episode on what it really means to be a resilient writer.

As you know, this is The Resilient Writers Radio Show and in Season Three, I tried to ask every writer I interviewed what they felt that meant. What did it really mean to be a resilient writer? Now, I didn't get everybody. There were a couple of people I interviewed that I forgot to ask. I was so in the conversation as we were concluding that I forgot to ask the last question, which was, what does it mean to you to be a resilient writer? But for most people I did.

And so there's some fascinating things that came up that have really made me reflect more on what it means to me to be a resilient writer, which is why I'm in this at all. You know, I always joke: they're going to take the pen from my cold, dead hand. And it's not really a joke. Like I want to be writing when I'm 95, 97, 104, however many years I'm lucky enough to get.

Let's be real, right? So thinking about what it means to be a resilient writer is a way for us to think about what it means to us to hang in there when things get hard and also to enjoy the process. So I'm really grateful to my guests from this season who answered this question for me, and I'm going to share some of their responses now.

And I'm going to keep asking this question, what does it mean to you to be a resilient writer? So, first I want to share with you what Mari Ruddy said. Now, Mari is the author of a bestselling book called Extreme Healing: Reclaim Your Life and Learn to Love Your Body.

Mari said in her case, she said, I love the word resilient because it relates to still showing up despite having type one diabetes for 42 years, despite having cancer three different times that she's a writer, that she has a purpose and she can hang in there and can keep showing up.

And this is a quote directly from her that I love. She said, and then I have a whole lot of tools to keep doing that. And then I keep finding community and I keep finding people to connect with, to keep the vision moving forward. That's what resilience means to Mari. I love that. I love the emphasis on tools, right?

Finding the resources. We don't have to just go: “Oh, the writing life – it's so hard. We can figure out the tools and resources to make it easier. And also Mari's a big big community person. She's big in terms of her physical activity that she does in her own community. And she's a part of The Writer's Flow Studio and host community there.

And so she's amazing that way. And so I love the idea that community is at the heart of resilience as well. And then I interviewed Gary Barwin and Gary, Gary rather, Gary is someone who works in multiple genres. He writes novels. He's just had a book of essays out. He's a poet. He works in visual poetry and some experimental stuff.

And I just, I love everything he does. And I love the spirit with which he does it. That's often it comes through in his writing as a kind of tenderness when you think about humanity. You know, there are some writers that no matter what they're writing, there's an appreciation for the depths of humanity that come across.

And Gary is one of those. So he said, you know, It's really, it's just keeping going because it won't ever feel like you know what you're doing or that you're achieving greatness. It always feels different. Now this is someone who has been a bestselling writer, an award winning writer, and he says it won't ever feel like you know what you're doing.

And he talked about having written a lot of terrible things. You know, he was working on a book of selected poems, and he looked at some of the stuff he wrote when he was in his early 20s. Younger and a lot of them were terrible, but some of them were good. And so he said, you know, if I keep going and trust in my process and the process of continuing knowing also that you can't trust how you feel about things in the moment, because the mind and the ego play tricks on you all the time and they're going to continue to do so.

He said, I don't think that you reach a kind of promised land where it's like, now I know I feel confident and everything I write is burnished. gold. It always feels like you're in the middle of uncertainty, but that's what it is. But getting to write and trying to learn to love the process and the uncertainty, it to me is resilience.

And he said, you know he talked about you know, maybe the Dalai Lama manages not to feel that way, but everybody else is just kind of mired in their own. ego and their own insecurity and their own wonder about things like, are other writers better than me? And why am I not as good? And he said, everyone just feels that way.

So it goes up and down. And he says, I think that, you know, focusing on the process gives you a lot of energy and helps you be resilient over the long haul. He says, it's nice to get things published and nice to be recognized. Of course, there were things, those are things to celebrate. But it's really about the process of just writing and being able to keep writing.

If you get to write it all, in whatever way, that's amazing, right? So that was Gary Barwin. And I love that perspective because I think that we spend so much time in this space of creative uncertainty as writers. And it's a really hard space to be in. It's hard for our brains to hold that space of creative uncertainty.

Learning to enjoy the process, focusing on the process, is key to resilience. So that was Gary. And then I spoke with Stephanie Kane. Stephanie wrote this really great memoir that was a memoir in, I think of it as a memoir in fragments. It's an unconventional way of doing a memoir. And I really loved that.

So she said, I think it can mean resilience in your personal life, but also in your practice. I'm all about letting go of those ideas that we hold that we realize aren't serving us. And one of those is, if you don't write every day, you're not a writer. But also the idea that you can, in fact, go back to it and continue to look critically at your work and continue to kind of Get back up after bad reviews and engage in the process and learn from those things.

And thinking about writing is that continual job, and she quoted Margaret Lawrence, who said, when I, when I say work, I only mean the writing. Everything else is just odd jobs, she says. I think it's just a matter of being committed to continuing to evolve and learn from everything that goes wrong along the way.

I love that. There's something that I say in my Bootcamps and with my First Book Finish folks that we need to take on this idea of being a writer who's learning and growing all the time. Because we don't want to become stagnant, right? We are artists whose medium is words. And we don't want to become stagnant.

We want to always be learning and growing. And that means that nothing will ever be perfect. Nothing will ever reach the kind of glimmering, glistening vision for it that we have in our heads. But as long as we're learning and growing along the way. That's the whole job. That's the whole thing.

Debra Martens sort of echoed some of the things that Mari said, and I thought this was fascinating because there were a couple of folks I interviewed in this season who needed to think about resilience in a different way because of a chronic illness or other condition that they were dealing with.

Debra said perseverance is important. But I think in my case, it's adaptability. She said to be a resilient writer is to be adaptable to whatever is thrown at you. I don't think I could have kept writing if I didn't have that adaptability. To suddenly be in a place where there's power outages every day or water shortages every day, or someone's going to come to you when you're trying to write and ask you, you know, what should I do about such and such, or having to evacuate or finding rats in the bathroom or all of that.

She talked about how, because she moved so often as an expat, she was always moving and removing and setting up her life again and again. She said, if I only had one way of doing my work, I wouldn't get any work done. To be adaptable in that sense over the years, the time of day even has changed for her.

She used to be a morning writer, now she's become an afternoon writer, and it's just to be aware of how things are pressing on you and how you can adapt to that situation in order to persevere, in order to keep writing. I love that Deborah focused on this because I think it's easy to say, well, just keep going, just persevere.

But like, how, how do we persevere? And we persevere by adapting, by saying, okay, this is the situation. I had planned to get in three writing sessions this week. And I could only get in two, or I could only get in one, or my sessions were all cut short and oh, well, I'm adapting. That's okay. I'm letting it be okay. And what matters is coming back tomorrow. So I think that Debra really got to the heart of something important there.

And then Esther Schultz was a fascinating conversation to me because she's someone who wrote a book after being, and published it after being encouraged by her mother in law, who's since passed away.

And so she talked about just to keep going. She said, there's so many obstacles that are going to come up in life. And so many times when I was younger, I would have said, I want to write, but I don't have time. It's not in the cards right now. I don't have time. And I had someone tell me one time, well, time's going to go by no matter what anyways, you might as well be doing what you love.

And so for Esther, it was going back and getting back up when you have those setbacks or you're doubting yourself or when the tears are flowing and you're thinking to yourself, what am I doing? No one's going to read this garbage, right? It's how you keep going. Which is in part by remembering why you're doing it, which in her case she said is because she loves it so much, loves creating characters and loves to tell stories. And this is how she keeps going even when it's hard, remembering that she loves it.

Ellen Baker was a writer I spoke to earlier this season and actually at the time her book wasn't out, but it's out now. It's called The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson. It's so good. Like so good. If you want a book where you can like, you know, pick it up and fall into it and you look up and like the whole day is gone and you didn't put it down.

It's that kind of book. Highly recommend it! Anyway, it's out now. You can get it. And Ellen said, I think resilience has to be part of the equation when you're a writer because you're going to encounter setbacks, you're going to encounter rejections, you know, and Ellen told us the story in her interview she told us the story of trying to get her.

Prior to getting her first book published, having so much rejection and she thought she'd made it, you know, she had an agent and she was like, woohoo, I've made it. And then she went through this whole decade of another set of rejections and setbacks. Ellen said, I think resilience is part of the fabric of being a writer.

If you want to keep going and you want to keep doing it and it matters to you, then you just weave that in and you realize that the work is what it is. A lot of us feel we're born to do it and we don't want to not do it. So we keep going. And I think. That is what resilience means to me. So I just want to say thank you to everyone who I interviewed this season on the podcast.

These interviews are such a joy for me. I realize in the process of doing it that we are not alone and that so many of the issues that we face as writers. They are not unique. They feel unique.

We are doubting ourselves. We are sad because, you know, we got ghosted by agents, or the agent couldn't sell the book, or somebody said something negative about our writing and we constantly doubt ourselves.

We have times when we feel unfocused and scattered and can't really settle to work. And we just have to keep coming back to it. And it reminds me of focusing on the process and enjoying the process over Obsessing about the product, which is not to say that I don't strive for excellence in my writing life. Of course, I do.

And of course, I want all of you to learn and grow and become better every day. That's part of resilience as well. But. Sometimes it's hard, and that's okay. And often we're in this space of just constant creative uncertainty, and that's a hard space for our brain to be in.

Our brain loves certainty. Loves, loves, loves it. And so that space of uncertainty where we're thinking, Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do about the ending, or I don't know if, you know, how I'm going to organize this set of poems, or a set of stories, you know, all those questions that we have living in that creative uncertainty can be challenging.

And so every little thing that we can do to help us stay in that space and keep going is important. And to me, that's what it means to be a resilient writer. So I hope you'll join me in becoming a resilient writer, thinking of yourself as a resilient writer. Thinking of yourself as someone who's constantly learning and growing as a writer and they'll take the pen out of our cold, dead hands.

Okay. All right. This is the end of Season Three. I am about to start recording Season Four of the podcast. Really looking forward to that. I have some exciting interviews lined up for you next season and I will see you again on the next episode of the resilient writers radio show. Take care.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.

Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show. Definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.

What It Means to be a "Resilient Writer"

Listen to learn:

Here’s a sneak peek:

Links from today’s episode:

What It Means to be “A Resilient Writer”: The Resilient Writers Radio Show -- Full Episode Transcript

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