My Year of Rebecoming

The conversation, when it's not about weather, or real estate, is

Are you writing? No one's writing.

Everyone's in a funk, waiting for words.

I cut this out of a magazine in October and taped it to the wall above my desk. I don't remember who wrote it because I didn't cut the author's name out with her excerpt, as I'd hope another writer would do for my work.

Thirty years ago, my mother told me stories by Roald Dahl and Jan Brett and Norman Bridwell while I dreamed in her womb. As I listened to tales of big red dogs and big friendly giants, I imagine that my half-baked hippocampus, that shepherd's crook of creative matter, grew larger and larger, so that telling stories came as naturally to my Child Self as blood to a wound.

But our Child Selves grow; our priorities change; the person we started life as changes, too. I feel that much of one's adult life is spent in the pursuit of rebecoming who we were in childhood. For myself, this was the Me who showed up for her craft without fear of failure or criticism-- only joy. I even wrote imaginary literary reviews lauding my stories in the "press." Oh, to have her confidence now.

That being said, I desire 2024 to be my year of rebecoming her, of revolting against the comfortable, fear-based decisions that keep me locked in the windless harbour of imagined futures and limitless potential, and choosing instead to show up for this creative act that simultaneously nourishes my soul and strikes mortal dread into every limb and neuron when I force myself to sit down and confront a blank page. As Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) writes: Sitting down [to do the work] is the hardest part.

Which brings me to May 2022, when I received an email from Vocal Media announcing their Fantasy Prologue Challenge. I hadn't written creatively at that point for nearly a year, but something about the challenge prompt whipped up that old fearless fire. There weren't always dragons in the valley. There was so much one could do with that. Then, as now, I resided in the Okanagan Valley and saw an opportunity to inject an element of fantasy into my humdrum and distinctly un-magical environment.

And I did, with a dollop of Sci-Fi to boot (a genre as alien to me as writing for pleasure had become). I laboured daily over my entry, and it returned to me with a first place title (I turned white when I read the email; my partner thought someone had died). That congratulatory email was a "re-confirmation" of my abilities; it felt like: Oh! I guess I should probably keep writing, then?

Which I did, sporadically, entering a handful of smaller Vocal challenges in the months that followed. What I found was that, with every finalist-announcement-date that came and went without a complementing email, my belief in my writing whittled down until the non-placings felt like indisputable failures, and the voice that had (sort of) encouraged me when I won, said, I guess I'm not as good a writer as I thought I was. This is embarrassing.

Yes, I did succumb to that artistically-fatal mindset that tells us that if we don't subjectively "succeed" at every creative challenge we face, then we objectively "fail." This outlook is the dream-killer that would have made my child self laugh out loud before she continued to gas herself up in a "rave New York Times review."

My successes on this platform (and my perceived failures more-so), have brought this subtle, self-limiting mindset into the light for me. Our most dangerous enemy is the one we cannot see, and I see my enemy clearly, and without ill-will. Dissecting its perversities here continues to do the work of diminishing its power over me, which it can exercise unrestrainedly if left unchecked in what my therapist calls "Emotional Mind." This mindset says:

I don't feel like showing up today.

Writing doesn't feel important to me today.

My goal is to write a book, but beginning is too daunting, so I'll just start tomorrow.

I didn't win? That must mean the story was bad, which means I'm a bad writer, which means I should either give up or try next year when I've matured into a better writer by sitting around and thinking about writing.

Do you recognize the traps that these thoughts set for artists? Is the inner dialogue familiar to you? The comfort of recognizing one's private thoughts and emotions in another writer's work is a motivator that keeps me keen to write, even when I'm not maintaining the practice, that Oh, it's not just me! revelation. The potential of failing to communicate this goal may also be one of the reasons I'm so good at deterring said practice. The gut recognition of a universal human experience within a story, regardless of its fantastical elements, has a healing property to it. It's why I set The Bridge Burners in a familiar Canadian city with teenaged characters reminiscent of those I grew up with, and why I use my own creative battles to shed awareness on the normalcy of artistic self-sabotage. I want the writing I publish on Vocal in 2024 to provide a safe stage for exploring the subtlest of human emotions, impulses, and perversities.

While I don't feel it's necessarily a bad thing to be motivated by external factors like fixed-rule competitions with monetary incentives (especially when it kicks our butts into gear), it's not how I want my writing practice to look in 2024. This is the year of internal motivation: showing up because my Higher Self knows that the work is important to me, and allowing my Child Self to follow her internal compass without imposing fear-driven limitations that ask, What will sell? or What will everyone else like? The simple fact is, no one is going to like everything I write (including me). The goal is not the outcome, but the process.

I want to close by sharing my favourite example of internal motivation from my time on Vocal. In 2023, I wrote a free verse poem that I called Nohkom and dedicated to my grandmother, who passed away in 2007. I submitted it to a challenge, and imagine my wounded pride when it was passed over! I couldn't understand how Nohkom hadn't placed when it was as near-perfect a reflection of my grandmother-- who anyone would've been lucky to know!-- as I could've hoped to write. I read and reread the finished piece, but only found a handful of negligible edits to improve it. The poem was simply not as good as I thought it was, and I felt as though I'd failed my nohkom in some way.

However, I didn't let that inner naysayer run completely amok; I entered Nohkom into Vocal's 2023 Writing Awards in the Free Verse Poetry category. I was too proud of it not to share it, and the Awards allowed me one last stab at doing so. As it happened, my fellow Vocal users liked Nohkom so much that it passed through to the shortlist, and then on to first place in its category! I was elated-- and relieved. My inner voice had swung from I'll give this one last try, but if it doesn't place, I'm giving up on it, to I thought it was good, and this is the proof of it!

While I remain proud of the pieces that have placed since 2022 (The Bridge Burners, Qapkas, Nohkom), I will no longer allow an external motivator like winning a competition to determine how I feel about my writing. If I live by another's praise, I will die by their criticism. If I don't allow myself room for trying and "failing" and trying again, then I don't allow myself the room necessary to grow, outwards and upwards, into the writer I dream of becoming.

Here's to my (and your?) rebecoming in 2024. May we daily show up for our craft in body, mind, and heart.