001: Is The Story You’re Telling Yourself About Writing Hurting Your Process?
What is the story of your writing right now? Not the story you are writing, but the story you’re telling yourself about who you are and how you work as a writer. We all have a sense of who we are as writers, which shapes the projects we take and the way we approach our work. This story makes up part of our self-image, to borrow a phrase from psychology, and it’s more complicated than it seems. Actually, it’s multiple stories. Self-image is often a complicated, layered thing that involves not just our belief in who we are, but sub-beliefs around whether other people see us this way, how accurate those perceptions are, and which data from other people we take onboard and use to adjust our self-image or validate its accuracy. I’m not a psychologist, though. I’m a storyteller and an editor, and at the end of the day I work with stories, just like all of you. I’ve