If you’re dedicated to mastering the writing craft... you may be missing out on discovering your most powerful storytelling.
Before you object: No, this isn’t a pass on learning writing skills.
But powerful, transformative storytelling is more than craft mechanics like dialogue, structure, character arcs, or even themes. It’s more than a series of interlocking parts with the goal of making readers feel or think a certain thing.
Deep storytelling is a living relationship between you, your story, and your reader. And as writers, it’s our responsibility to cultivate right relationship at each of these points of the storytelling web, instead of simply pushing a reader’s buttons to get a predictable response.
In this episode, we’re exploring how “unlearning mastery” (and reclaiming our own connection to the page) can help us create work that fully calls forth each reader’s individual humanity.
That’s how the act of storytelling becomes a relationship—and an encounter your reader will remember long after your book cycles off their Kindle carousel.
(After you tune in, check out the follow-up tips below to start cultivating right relationship in the most important part of your writing practice.)
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Writing in right relationship may ultimately be about the way your work is received and the impact it has in the world. But it starts with your own experience—with how you encounter your story when you show up to the page.
At the end of the episode, I posed two core questions for myself and for you:
Maybe you have an immediate instinct on what to unlearn and how to begin shifting your writing experience. But if not, here’s a more concrete way to feel into it.
Right relationship during the drafting stage is about being open and available to the storytelling process. So, to hone in on a powerful first action to take, consider how it feels when you aren’t open to that process—when you’re in a state of being closed.
Recall the last “bad” writing session you had (or take note of what happens the next time you have one). In the moment when things first start to take a turn, when you first realize this going to be one of those days... what are you doing or thinking that captures the feeling of being closed or cut off from your creativity and from the story?
This might be a physical embodiment like hunching or clenching, or even banging around your desk and the keyboard. It might be a recurrent thought like “I don’t have what it takes to do this” or “I’m a fraud.” Maybe it’s shallow breathing, or a certain type of sentence coming up on the page.
Whatever the outward symptom is—that’s the signpost for your first tangible act of unlearning mastery. How can you take that symptom of being closed and begin to shift and open it? What ideas come up (and out) when you invert, subvert, or otherwise disrupt that signpost of chasing mastery?
Bonus points: Record your tangible experiences of feeling either closed or open to your storytelling self. Watch for any patterns that emerge.
Bayo Akomolafe
If you’re intrigued by the snippet of Akomolafe’s work mentioned in the episode (and I mean, who wouldn’t be?), I recommend diving in with a couple interviews first. His writing style is incredibly lush and dense, as is his website—while both are beautiful and well worth appreciating, I found the pod episodes included here to be a more digestible introduction.