Writing Wednesdays
Something Unique To Say
By Steven Pressfield | Published: August 29, 2012
If you’re a writer or artist or entrepreneur and you sometimes think to yourself, “I have nothing unique to say,” you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why.
Jackson Browne has said that he writes his lyrics to find out what he thinks
First, that voice in your head is 100-proof Resistance. It’s bullshit. I get a lot of e-mails from the trenches and, trust me, Resistance is spamming you with the same boilerplate it uses on everyone, including me.
So that’s Reason #1 not to listen to that voice.
Reason #2 is a lot deeper and more subtle.
When we think to ourselves, “I have nothing unique to say,” we are thinking with our surface mind.
The surface mind is an idiot. It knows nothing.
The surface mind is our everyday brain, the one we use for crossing the street, making out grocery lists, and applying to the Kennedy School at Harvard. The surface mind knows only three things:
What has already happened.
What it believes can happen.
What it fears will happen.
No wonder it tells us, “Hey, stupid! What makes you think you have something original to say?”
The trick is that you and I don’t write or paint or shoot film with our surface mind.
I’ve quoted Jackson Browne on this subject before. He says he writes the lyrics of a song to find out what he thinks.
What he means by that is that when he sits down to compose, he doesn’t know yet what he thinks. It is in the process that what he thinks is revealed.
The process doesn’t happen in the surface mind. It takes place in the Deep Mind.
In our surface minds, you and I may indeed have nothing original to say. But we can’t say that about our Deep Mind.
Where do ideas come from? I don’t know. Nobody knows. But come, they do. Over and over.
Is the Deep Mind collective? Is it something quasi-Jungian that we all share?
I don’t think so.
I say that because ideas that I have somehow seem to be “mine.” They bear the stamp of my unique consciousness. And I’ve seen this, again and again, in friends and colleagues. Their crazy ideas are very much “theirs.”
So the Deep Mind, in my experience, is very personal. It’s yours alone.
One of the most profound differences between an amateur and a pro is that the pro trusts that Deep Mind. He believes in the Muse. Like Jackson Browne sitting down to write a song, the pro (because he possesses, oddly enough, “beginner’s mind”) launches himself onto the blank sheet of foolscap, believing that he will find something. He doesn’t know what. He’s waiting to see. But he is certain that something will come.
That something invariably is unique, and is interesting, and is original.
The great fun of writing or painting or shooting film or starting a business is in this process of discovery. These surprises that pop out of nowhere and that we gleefully take credit for, even though in our hearts we know we didn’t create them, we just stumbled onto them.
It may help, the next time you hear that voice in your head that says you have nothing original to say, to remember that that voice is not coming from the part of your self that you write from, or paint from, or shoot film from.
That voice is coming from the shallow end of the pool.
Stay in the deep end.
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Another valuable description of how Resistance tries to kill our dreams. I will print this and re-read it whenever I feel blocked or hear that surface voice in my head.
“The Muse always delivers.”
This is a perfect article…it came exactly at the right tome, because it confirms what I’ve been reading in Mark Levy’s book “Accidental Genius.” Levy’s book is all about free-writing as a brainstorming tool. Essentially, thinking on paper. I’ve been using it myself in the past couple of weeks…just sitting down to write without really knowing what I’m going to write about, and I’ve come up with some pretty good stuff (if I say so myself)!
Me too Fernando – that books goes hand in glove with these thoughts.
Thank you, Steve. I got three rejections in the span of fifteen minutes on Monday, and I was seriously doubting my own artistic abilities. I suppose I’ll just keep moving forward.
“Stay in the deep end” – love that idea. I tend to look at the surface mind (the shallow end voice) as simply providing a narrative for what’s happening in your life. It doesn’t care about meaning, it only cares about going over the detail and minutia, over and over.
Listen to it and that’s all you get.
Gah, can’t imagine much worse.
Oh, wow. “Stay in the deep end” is about as good as any advice I’ve heard for writing – and for life. Thank you. I adore Jackson Browne and I think I have a new understanding of why, reading this here. Thank you! xox
Wow, amazing. You did it again. I kinda makes me wonder though. Did you know exactly what you were going to write before you sat down to write this article, or did you discover it once you started writing?
Either way, thanks!
A little bit of both, Robert. Definitely discovery though!
This is a hard thing to grasp. I write comedy sketches and am always amazed that the perfect idea I had in my head changed completely by the time I’m finished with the sketch. At the end I usually forget what the original idea was, or I remember it and it seems so elementary, that I wonder what I ever saw in it.
This reminds me of your “What’s In The Box?” exercise. Trust that the elementary idea is just the kick in the butt.
I was thinking of that too. “There is always something in the box.”
This resonates in precise step with Incognito, David Eagleman’s book about current brain science, which I just started reading again yesterday. Serendipitous, that. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting.
This is a terrific model to explain why, when I bash that Resistance fellow to the ground, sit down at the keyboard, and start creating, it isn’t long before I’m usually having a blast as I discover all the neat stuff my muse has to say.
S.J. your comment made me think “oh, the ‘deeper mind’ the Muse.”
Steven, thank you for what you speak to in us.
Steven, we think alike. I was just finishing up a chapter of my forthcoming book, “Winning at Life” about writing for creativity with specific tips for how to overcome the outer mind’s editing function, the destroyer of creativity when I read this posting of yours.
I just posted my piece on my blog, http://mycoachjason.com/blog/?p=66
Any and all feedback are gleefully accepted!
Jason Wittman