Who is witnessing your work?

The following is a transcript of Episode 3 of The Divine Dissatisfaction podcast. Click here to listen to the episode.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog focused on TV shows that capture the creative process. I'll include a link to the post in my show notes, but essentially what I was talking about was my love for programs like Portrait Artist of the Year, Landscape Artist of the Year, The Great Pottery Throwdown, The Big Brunch, just to name a few, and how these types of shows allow us to witness process, to watch the artists in the process of making and to celebrate that devotion to craft and creation, whether it's cooking, painting, sewing, or pottery.

Ever since I wrote that post, I've had this question in my mind. Who is witnessing your work?

In many ways, it's different for writers than for some other artists because unless you're working collaboratively, witnessing the actual creation of the work in the moment of creation isn't really possible in the same way as it can be for other art forms.

Because as writers, we are often creating our raw materials, our first drafts are often the creation of what we're going to work with, watching a writer work isn't the same as witnessing other artists who already have their paint or clay or fabric or ingredients. There's a way in other art forms where watching process and watching the becoming of the work are perhaps more interwoven. You are seeing a piece emerge before your eyes as the artist works.

Whereas with writers, you can watch them–if they'll let you–but most of the time you're not seeing the story, or poem, or scene emerge right before your eyes.

For several years, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has had a series called Watch Me Work. She describes it as a performance piece, a chance for an audience to watch her work, work themselves alongside her, and then come together for questions with Parks about writing and the writing process.

I remember watching one of these sessions years ago. At that point, Parks was doing the sessions in the lobby of the Public Theater, the camera on her as she sat at a typewriter and wrote for 20 minutes. And you could watch on the video her facial expressions, her gestures, the moments of pause as she looked at a sheet of paper beside her. And you could also hear the variation in the rhythm of her fingers on the keys.

But the writing itself, whatever she was creating in that moment, was just for her at that particular stage.

And that is so often a necessary part of the process for writers in the early stages, especially, the work needs to happen alone. It needs to have that separation from the world, from the eyes of others, so that you feel free not to censor yourself or think too much about what an audience or a publisher wants, and instead you can focus on what the work itself is asking to become.

But even in the midst of that necessary aloneness, I think there's still a desire to be seen. And so that's really the question that's been on my mind, that question of who is witnessing your work, it's more about who is there witnessing you in the process itself, in the ongoing act of showing up and struggle and moments of breakthrough. Who is there alongside you as the work, and you as its creator, are becoming?

Part 1: The Witnessing of Others

In an interview, Cheryl Strayed said, "Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community."

It's true that writing often happens alone, but I found for myself that it's important not to feel lonely or alone in the writing life.

Community, being in relationship with other writers, is necessary to sustaining yourself as a writer.

It can be helpful to have writers you can trust with your work, people you can turn to for feedback when a draft is ready to share. But more than that, I think that it's helpful if there are those who can witness you throughout the entire process, through a particular season or stage of your creative life, and those writer friends who are there throughout almost your entire creative life, I think those relationships are even more necessary. Those relationships are the ones that really sustain you through all the highs and lows of a creative life, and they can hold space for the work and for you in a few different ways.

First, they can help witness your work by providing accountability. Having an accountability partner who you can check in with daily or weekly, even if all you send is the word "done" to signal that you showed up for your writing that day, can help you and your commitment to your writing feel seen.

Going back to Suzan-Lori Parks, she creates a space where people can watch her work, but she is also offering space for writers to work alongside her, and so another form of this kind of witnessing or seeing as accountability could be arranging working sessions with other writers.

Early in the pandemic, I started doing a lot of these calls. I was doing focus sessions through Firefly Creative Writing, and then on my own I also set up a lot of calls with writing friends, and we would do these working sessions where we would set a timer, and we would just write together for however long we had decided, and I still have a few of these calls each week where I connect with a writer friend on Zoom, and we work alongside each other, sort of working alone together.

Those calls will often involve us talking about what we've been working on or how the work is going to reflect on our process. So that's another way in which we can witness each other's creative work: holding space for our process reflections.

I find for myself, at many points in the process, it can be unhelpful to talk about the work itself. Depending on your process, it can take some of the energy or excitement out of the drafting if you're sharing too much of the actual story. That doesn't mean though that you can't talk about what's coming up in the process. You'll probably have an internal sense of what you can share with others and what about your process feels like you need to keep to yourself, and I'll talk later about how those insights could still be witnessed. But the things it does feel possible to share could be points of connection with other writers.

Someone you're sharing with might have experienced a similar challenge with point of view or navigating a specific narrative form or structure, or possibly a writer friend has had a similar period where they felt disconnected and uninspired. Sometimes when you share like that, your writing community might have suggestions, though the best advice I find is always the sort offered freely that isn't telling you precisely what to do, but explaining how they navigated a similar challenge, and their sharing of that experience sparks something in you. There may not be a solution, but there is a sense of possibility.

Even if you're not looking for advice, telling someone this is where I am, this is what I've been doing, this is where I've been finding joy in the work, this is where I've been struggling, and letting that be heard and received and witnessed is its own gift, and also an offering to someone who might need to hear it or who may feel they need permission to share in that way too.

In a similar way, writing a process essay or blog or social media post or having a newsletter or podcast or going on someone else's podcast and talking about your experiences of the creative process can be another way of having the showing up and the process itself being witnessed.

This might feel more complicated since it's much more public than a conversation with a trusted writing friend or mentor, so I think it's really important to think about whether you're ready to let more of the world in at that particular stage, and that kind of sharing might ebb and flow at various stages of your process or of a particular creative work.

Myself, I love reading about others' process and insights into the work, and never in a way that feels prescriptive or where I feel like I have to work in the exact way they're describing. Instead, these process pieces and posts always feel like such a point of connection and community, and I can really approach it with a spirit of curiosity, like, Oh, that's how it works for you.

Even though I'm, I'm reading or listening to these pieces, it feels like I'm in conversation with them, and it also brings me into conversation with my own process or creative self and all these different ways there are of connecting with our creative work.

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Another way in which others can witness your work is through the sharing of sections of your draft in progress, but this isn't for constructive feedback or critique. It's really just in terms of having people receive it, listen to it, hold the space, hold the experience of receiving your work, and maybe sharing what's resonating, if that feels helpful to you.

Again, this will really depend on what type of writer you are and how you want to work, and this won't be helpful to everyone, but small circles with other writers, with writing friends, where you can read something you've written, or maybe, you know, I've been in writing classes where we write together in the class, and then we share a little bit of what we've written, and it's held and witnessed and heard, but not critique.

That kind of sharing, I think, can really help you feel seen as a writer. In situations like this, of course, it's really helpful to have some guidelines, so you're ensuring that everyone knows that any comments are rooted in what the listeners love and what resonated and what they noticed, but without any sort of questioning or criticism of what's just been shared.

I found that this type of sharing in classes or courses where writers write together and then read even just a small part of what they wrote can have almost this sacred quality if the right space has been created to hold that.

It feels like a true moment of witnessing in the immediacy of the creative act, which, as I talked about before, isn't really something that writers often get. This type of sharing, just to be seen, not critiqued, feels almost like it captures the energy of whatever was coming through you as you wrote, and if you can find other writers or classes or writing groups who can hold that type of space for you, I think it really can be one of the greatest gifts of your, writing life.

Witnessing the work is often a role that I feel I fulfill when I'm working with writers. When I'm providing developmental feedback on drafts, one of the main things I feel like I'm doing is witnessing the possibility of the work, and then as a writing coach, a big part of what I'm doing is seeing and reflecting back to the writer, the showing up, the ways they're making space, all of the learning they're doing.

So often it's easy to minimize what we do do, to be dismissive of the time we've carved out for our creative work, instead of celebrating any moment, any time and attention we're able to give to our creativity. And so someone else, whether a writing friend, a mentor, or a coach, can be the one to help you pause and recognize how amazing it is that you can sit down and do this work in spite of everything else that's happening in your life and all of the messages you might be hearing about your voice, your words, your creativity, not mattering.

The witnessing of others, it reminds you that this, your creative work in whatever form and whatever time you're able to devote to it in this season of your life, does matter. It is necessary.

It's not easy, though. It takes a lot of courage, and to be that vulnerable and share things you've written, even if it is just to be heard or for positive feedback, requires a lot of trust in the people you're sharing with. So never underestimate how much being this open, this vulnerable, to letting yourself be seen, how much that actually asks of you, but also how beautiful it is when you find the people who can reflect you back to you.

Part Two: Witnessing Yourself

I've talked a lot about how others might be a witness to your work and process, but now I want to turn that witnessing inwards and to focus the rest of the episode on ways in which you can witness yourself.

Sometimes you're doing work that's too tender to share in any way. It feels too new or too raw, or you have a sense that what you're writing really is just for you at that stage. Perhaps it's a memoir piece where you really need to get the experience out of yourself, but you know that it's not something you could ever be comfortable sharing with someone else. Or maybe you've had a really hard time shutting down the voice of your inner critic, and you know that if you start sharing pieces, or the story, or even talking about what the story is, you'll be letting the world in too soon, and it will be impossible to approach the story with the sense of play and exploration and curiosity that it really needs.

It could also be that the creative project you're working on is bringing up a lot of insights about yourself or your particular patterns, but again, those discoveries feel too new to you. You have the sense you need to process them and work with them before you're ready to share anything about those, if ever.

Or maybe how you're working, your process, feels like something you don't want to talk about with anyone else. Writers, we can be quite a superstitious lot, and some of the rituals we might use in our process feel like they need to be kept to ourselves. If it feels like talking about them might mean they lose some of their magic, or like their power would be minimized, those are definitely practices that you want to keep just for yourself.

Even when it feels impossible, for whatever reason, to have others witness your work or process, you can still offer that type of seeing to yourself. Building in some type of reflective process can be incredibly beneficial. One main way to do that is through a process journal, and I've used these in, various ways.

I took a course with Caroline Donahue, and she mentioned the Some Lines a Day Five Year Book, which is what I currently use for my process journal. There's a page for each day of the year, and it's divided into five, so you can keep a record of what's happened on that day for five years.

What I do is jot down each day, what I worked on during my writing session, and then if I have something specific that came up, some realization or some struggle, I can also note that down. I can also note any breakthroughs, any excitement, anything about the work that day that brought me joy or helped me feel particularly connected to the work.

I'm now in my third year of using the book, so I have the experience also now of being able to look back and see on that day what was I doing last year or two years ago.

As I'm reading through it, I can see the similar patterns that come up. I can revisit insights that I had and perhaps forgot and need to relearn, see moments where I was blocked or uninspired before, but I also have evidence from other entries that those periods don't last forever.

Another option is to create a story journal for each specific project where you might write slightly longer entries about what work you've done, what insights you've had. I've done this with small notebooks. I'll have one for each story, for my novel, and then I'll use it to record ideas and print out some images, but then I also have a section at the back where I write reflective entries after each day's work.

I've heard the writer Alexander Chee speak about this type of journal as well, where he records what he's been working on in a doc using a format like a blog, so the most recent entry is at the start, so he can sort of start the next day's writing session, opening up that doc and seeing where he was the day before in the work.

He talks about it, as a space to also vent and complain about what's not working, and it's a place to ask and then respond to questions that are coming up in the work. He describes it as "a way of leaving a trail for myself about my own thoughts," which is helpful for any writing project, but especially when trying to hold a longer work, like a novel or a memoir.

I find for myself that noting the day's session in my process journal is a really helpful way of transitioning out of the writing space, a type of closing ritual.

I also find that a process journal can be helpful with changing some of the limiting or unhelpful mindsets I have around my writing. My tendency is too often to focus on what's not working, where I feel like I'm failing, where I'm not achieving what I set out to achieve. A practice that I implemented was noting down one thing, just one small thing each day that I liked about my writing or my process that day.

If that kind of daily reflective process in a process journal or story journal feels too overwhelming, another option might be to sit down quarterly and do a longer reflection on your process, or at the end of a particular stage of a project, when you finish a draft, you might try pausing to note what came up during the creation of that particular draft.

Again, it could be a kind of ritual around finishing that work or a significant stage of that work and both celebrating what you achieved and reflecting on the key learnings that can influence your creative work going forward.

Even yearly you could sit down and do a larger process reflection with some specific questions like, what time of day do I feel most creative? Do I prefer to write by hand or on the computer-and does that vary depending on what stage in the process I'm at?

Does outlining excite me or does it suck all of the energy out of my writing because I know too much in advance?

When have I felt most connected to my writing? What were the conditions like? How was I showing up for my writing in that period? And conversely, when did I feel most disconnected? What was different about that period? How was I showing up? How was I trying to work?

I often talk to writers about working in the way that works best for them, really stressing that each writer and their process is unique. If you're not making space for reflection as part of your creative process, it can be really hard to actually know that, to know how you work best, so hopefully you have some ideas now about how you could bring a reflective component into your creative practice if you don't currently have one.

And to do it in a way that, again, sparks possibility, that excites you, that doesn't feel like it's in any way taking some of the mystery or the magic out of the process.

To end, I, I just want to talk a little bit about writing incentives, mainly gold stars.

When I was writing the first draft of my novel, I was using a daily word count to motivate myself, and if I reached my daily word count, I had a tracking chart and I got a star.

Nothing else has really motivated me as much as those stars did. It was really inconceivable to me that I would miss a day and not meet my word count, and thus not receive that day's star.

I thought at the time that it was really all about my connection to school and achievement, and that is probably part of it, but what I can see now is how that star was an external marker of my showing up. I had decided that getting the draft written was important. I'd committed to do it, and that tracking chart was something that I could see each day, and see my internal commitment externalized. A simple, shiny star, but it was me telling myself, this is important, this is necessary, and look, you're doing it.

Part Three: Who is Witnessing Your Work?

Now that I've spent some time talking about this idea of witnessing and ways in which your creative process or your creative self can be witnessed by others or by you, I want to offer that question to you. Who is witnessing your work? Or a slight rephrase could be who is witnessing you work?

Who is there? Who is not there? In what ways are you currently being seen? And in what ways do you feel like no one is witnessing something that you actually need someone to be seeing?

These might be questions you kind of mull over on a walk, or perhaps this question around witnessing could be a journaling prompt if it's resonating with you.

Who is seeing you? Not in a critical way, not in a spirit of fixing you or problem solving, but simply there, holding space and witnessing wherever you are in this messy, beautiful, necessary, and transformative work of living a creative life.