Tinkerbell’s Cousin and the Great Untangle
By Lisa Tener
When I offered in a Facebook post to take a volunteer on a “Meet Your Muse” journey free of charge, in exchange for fodder for
my SFWC column, Jess Robinson was first to raise her hand.
On deadline, I asked her, “How soon can you meet?” Thus, our call took place on a sunny Sunday morning amidst the chirping of birds in the background of our zoom call.
Jess reported that she’d been journaling continually, providing a steady writing habit and creative practice. However, she felt stuck when it came to working on her bigger writing project—what began as a 3,000 word essay that soon became 13,000 words and—once she realized she had a bigger project—turned into 100 pages. All that had come to a screeching stop a month and a half ago.
When I asked about her goal for our session, Jess shared, “Life went topsy-turvy the past six weeks.” She was looking for, “a reset.”
We came up with our questions for the muse. While I usually guide the writer to imagine a path in a meadow, leading into the woods to a clearing and a small building, Jess had earlier described a rail trail behind her apartment, so I asked if she’d prefer that trail. “Yes.”
I led Jess to imagine walking that trail from behind her apartment, into the state park by a lake. Did she see a small building? Yes. There was a shed, maybe a boathouse.
When she entered, she saw her muse, “a tinkerbell-ish fairy, maybe tinkerbell’s cousin, a little bigger.”
We asked her muse, “What do you want me to know about this project and where it’s going?”
The response: “That it’s gonna help.” It seemed intentionally ambiguous: “Help me? Others? Both? There’s a need for what I’m doing.” Her muse told her, “This is part of your calling.”
Next, we asked, “How do I get unstuck?”
“There’s a sit down on one hand and on the other hand, move through. It almost feels like a big ball of yarn I’m working through. I’ve got to untangle some of the threads, tugging on the threads present. I need to give it the time and the space to just keep working on pulling through. I used to make friendship bracelets. When the knots all come together was the image in my head just now, but if you left a bracelet half done, it could get tangled at the bottom and if you came back to it you had to un-tease and untangle. That’s what it feels like.” Jess “hmmm”ed at her muse’s metaphor.
I asked whether she needed to work through this on her own or would it help to have an editor.
“Not yet. The editor will come in handy, but I gotta do this next piece first.”
Next, I asked, “Is there any tool or structure or theme to help you with the untangling?”
“I’ve got everything I need. As I read it, it’ll come. I just need to sit down and read it and I’ll see the answers.”
The devil is in the details, so I asked Jess whether anything was getting in the way of sitting down and reading it? “This is a good time to at least start, even if it’s small because I’m just finishing up one thing and moving at the end of the month. I’m in pretty decent shape for the move. Even if I just start now…I don’t have to have it done by the time I move.”
I had Jess ask her muse about scheduling specific times for the project.
Her muse described the revision/writing process and the packing process as a “point/counterpoint” – writing/revision in the morning until 1 or 2 and, in the afternoon, a combination of “the Marie-Kondoing” and physical packing. “They will keep me balanced.”
Jess looked forward to time with her father Sunday morning, so she couldn’t start immediately, but she could use the hour before her dad’s visit to schedule time in her calendar for revision work. And, while her mornings would not be fully free for several days while she finished up a project, she could commit to an hour for the next few days – enough to bring something to her Wednesday writing pow-wow, where she’d been beta reading for her cohorts but hadn’t brought new work herself in some time.
When we asked her muse for any final words, “Yay. It’s all gonna come together.”
As Jess reflected on the advice from her muse, she felt inspired. “When I’m really on my game, I use the Pomodoro Technique. I plan it out and chunk it out that way. This is my favorite time of year—wake up, be outside, walk. This is when I’m, “Oh I got this.” So blocking it out, scheduling out – there’s a way I can do all of it.”
A day and a half after Jess’s muse journey, she sent me an update: “After meeting the muse in the shed, I got the scheduling down for the week on Sunday. Today, I started rereading my own words and can see where I need to go. So many notes! I like what I have to say and will have something new for my Wednesday Writers Unite group. It’s nice to find the creative spark as I find my footing again.”
Lisa Tener is a leading book writing and publishing coach, entrepreneur, speaker, and author of the award winning book, The Joy of Writing Journal: Spark Your Creativity in 8 Minutes a Day. Winner of the Silver Stevie Award for Coach/Mentor of the year and known as “The Creativity Catalyst,” she has helped thousands of aspiring writers through her coaching services and courses. Lisa Tener’s clients have signed five- and six-figure book deals with HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Beyond Words, New World Library, New Harbinger, St. Martin’s Press, Yale University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, HCI and other major publishers
Connect with Lisa on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook or her book coaching website, LisaTener.com.
