Letting Go of Words, Work, and Writing

A friend wrote from Mexico last week. She said she was having a hard time letting go of the words she was writing.  There were sentences she liked in her essay and she didn’t want to delete them.  She suggested this might be something I’d like to write about.

And she was right. Letting go is one of my favorite topics.

I myself am not terribly good at letting go. You might even say I have a hard time with it. I carry extra weight. My house holds extra clutter. My brain is full of chattering monkeys at any given hour of the day.  And yet I’ve had the glorious experience twice in my life of spontaneously letting go of something that had been bothering me. 

The freedom, lightness, and expansion that follows is astounding. In the aftermath of the letting go, you just don’t care. And not in a bad way. In a deeply peaceful way. You’re certain that whatever is to happen will be what is supposed to be.

How did it happen?How did I achieve this amazing state?  Beats me. I’ve tried to replicate it many times. And, of course, the essence of letting go is elusive like that. The more you try to force it, the less likely it is to happen. So while I’ve not been able to exactly reproduce these wonderful experiences, I’ve come up with some ways to at least deal with them. And I will talk about those as they relate to writing.

Letting go of words, as in the situation my friend wrote me about.  You like those words you put on the page, damnit! And you don’t want to get rid of them.  The antidote: create a hold file, into which you carefully copy and paste those precious words and sentences. I do this for every project. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually gone back to the file and extracted something I’ve deleted. But it makes me feel better to know I’m not just flinging them to the winds of cyberspace.

–Letting go of negative self-talk, the kind that can keep us from the page and/or keep us from expressing ourselves once we get there. The antidote: well, this is a lifelong quest, so I don’t have one all-purpose answer. But I do have some suggestions. Meditation helps a lot. A lot lot.  Exercise helps, as does EFT (tapping) or any kind of work that helps you get out of your brain and frees you up to put words onto the page.

–Letting go of the actual work, as when it is time to submit to an agent or editor. The antidote: you just have to grit your teeth and do it.  Sorry.

Really, all three of these types of letting go are practices that we writers need to do over and over again So you might as well get used to the process. Oh, and if you’d like to read more about letting go in general, I found this article to be helpful.

Are you good at letting go? Or bad at it, like me? How does it affect your writing? Please leave a comment!

Photo from everystockphoto. I found a crow picture in honor of the crow who lives in the house behind me here in Ceret. You can see his photo here and here.