Tag: Writing Tips

The Three Keys to Go From Preator to Creator

MarlonLeave a comment

I once had a conversation with a wannabe musician where they were bashing modern mainstream music by saying how unoriginal and uninspiring it was, and how if only he could make music, it’d be so much better than the “garbage” that gets massed produced these days.

After ranting and raving about the state of the industry he finally said, “I want to write music that’s original that no one’s ever heard before.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then what have you written so far?”

“Nothing yet,” he replied.

And without a moment’s hesitation, I retorted, “then mission accomplished.”

Sick burn, right? Somebody call the burn unit and get this man some aloe vera!

All joking and arrogance aside, though, this is an unfortunately common conversation I have had with some would be creators. I can’t even consider them as creators because they haven’t created anything yet. I like to call them “preators.” They’re always in the pre-planning stage of creating anything, but never actually put pen to paper or strike a single stroke of paint on their canvas.

All they do is blow hot air about how much better their work would be than the stuff that’s already out there. And even if they do create anything, their output is rather limited and unrefined, and with a little bit of work could actually contend with their imaginary contemporaries and rivals.

But they don’t.

Instead, they choose to cling onto their opinions and spout their “hot takes”—that are really just lukewarm at best—and spend most of their time criticizing established works that have been published, screened, and viewed by the masses. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to say something is bad than it is to actually do something that is better than the things that they disparage.

A true creator would respect the work of others who have put their skills and taste on display, and no matter how bad those displays may be, these preators would at least respect the fact that if there’s even the tiniest of an audience for this work they deem so bad, that it at least resonates with a tiny minority of people.

Whether you know a preator, or are one yourself, today I will discuss what it takes to go from preator to actual creator.

Here are The Three Keys to Going From Preator to Creator:

  1. Humility
  2. Courtesy
  3. Authenticity

The Key of Humility

Now before I get too far into the deep end of criticizing preators, I should touch upon the good interactions I’ve had with creators and my experience with turning preators into creators. Back in 2016, when I was a writing coach, I had the honour and privilege of working with some very bright and talented writers. They had great ideas, but had trouble executing them, and that’s where I came in to assist them in refining their ideas and habits so that they can finally find the confidence to put pen to paper.

Sometimes my fresh new suggestions for their stories were adapted, but most of the time a lot of my suggestions were considered, but my clients themselves came up with even better ideas than me. I was very proud of them for this and took as little credit as possible because ultimately they were the ones doing the work. All I did was provide the space for them to geek out about a project that they were passionate about while also asking just a few questions that would nudge them in the right direction.

How this was possible on both sides was thanks to a whole lot of humility. For them, it took a lot of humility to accept that their work needed some work and looked to me for some guidance. Then on my end, it took a lot of humility to accept that a lot of my suggestions were going to get rejected and sometimes even challenged. While it was gratifying to see my ideas show up in their next chapter, what gratified me even more was seeing them building something even better than what I suggested, and even more importantly, seeing them build something way better than what they started with.

To go from preator to creator is to accept that your work is not gonna start off as absolutely awesome. There are very rare cases where natural talent just allows someone to create a masterpiece from the get go, but in reality, 99% of the time, it takes a lot of hard work and practice to get proficient at any craft. You have to take classes or find some other alternative way to learn things, and with the advent of the Internet it’s even easier to find resources that help in this matter. From Skillshare classes, to free YouTube videos, or even hiring a Creative Consultant like myself, there is absolutely no shame in looking for help.

Returning back to the wannabe musician, he claimed that learning music theory would only stump his creativity and that he wants to break all the rules to make something truly magnificent and original. I’m sure in his mind, in all earnestness, he believed that that is what the current music industry needed. A huge break away from convention and something that’ll catch people off guard.

Well to that, I call BS because you have to know the rules before you can break them, and you don’t just do it for the hell of it. You do it if it helps the music improve. Yes, there are a lot of successful musicians out there that don’t know music theory, but that’s not the point. The point is that they still have to work hard at their craft to be in the position their in, which leads to my next point.

The Key of Courtesy

You gotta have respect for published works, no matter how bad some of them may be. If it’s viewable by the general public, that means a creator actually had the courage to put their skills and taste on display for the world to see. Creating is a very vulnerable thing to do because it can easily scrutinized and misunderstood when you intended something entirely different.

Look at Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin film, for God’s sake. The man literally apologized for disappointing some fans with its over the top campiness and not being what people wanted or expected, then admitted that all he wanted to do was make something entertaining. May that man rest in peace because he gave it his best shot and was met with horrible criticism for something he simply wanted to have fun creating. Horrible as that movie was, I was at least entertained by it as a kid and it had an awesome soundtrack. It should not define his career.

It’s super easy to be passionate about a piece of art that just works on several levels. For preators stuck in the pre-creating stage, what you gotta do is be unabashedly proud of what you love and are inspired by, and do what you can to learn why it resonates with you so much. Far too many people think they look cool for criticizing something bad like Batman & Robin or even the Twilight Saga, but that’s just low hanging fruit. You want to be original? Then have the courage to express your passion for something you love because that’s all too rare these days with the advent of clickbait YouTube and Twitter criticisms of the latest film, book, or show.

Once you’re comfortable with having courtesy to acknowledge the creators you love, make that courtesy common by also giving it to the creators you might detest or at the very least think little of. Creating ain’t easy, and if you’re a preator, you might even bash things to hell because you’re actually intimidated by how hard it is to contend with even that.

But instead of seeing as everything and everyone as competition, see them as inspiration for you to do something similar. Similar, but not better. That’s for the audience to decide, not you. Your job is simply to create something and to do so from a place that isn’t bogged down by ego and wanting to prove a point. There are only a handful creators who create out of spite, greed, and malicious intent, but most of them out there are creating things from the final key that will unlock the creators within the preators.

The Key of Authenticity

To get that authentic stamp of approval, a creator must also be authentic in their approach. Their goal should not be fame and fortune. Fame and fortune should be the natural byproducts of their hard work, but not the end goal. A creator’s goal is to create something from an intimate place of authenticity. It sounds a little woo woo right now, so let me elaborate.

We’ve already beaten the dead horse of that wannabe musician from the intro of this post, so let’s talk about someone else who actually does know music and plays it. There were these fellow metalheads I once knew who actually did have some musical talent. One was a drummer and the other one was a saxaphone player. While they were friends with each other and myself, they both had other sets of friends who they intended to make bands with. So as someone who has been in a few bands in the past, I was intrigued to hear what both of these guys would produce.

I was expecting either of them to record a shoddy smartphone video of them jamming with their friends or put something up on Soundcloud for me to hear, but you know what happened instead? Months went by where both of these guys were flat out living the preator stereotype of trash talking musicians who are signed by labels, all the while only talking about being in a band without actually being in one. While these were two different guys with two different sets of friends that could’ve been bandmates, their stories were pretty much the same.

All they did was complain about modern metal and how so many good bands are selling out to make money and become popular. What did these guys do though? They talked endlessly about how they were just talking with their friends about what kind of music they wanted to make. “We want to make something like this band used to make, but better.”

Once again, I asked one of my douchey questions and said, “oh, okay, cool. So have you guys written anything yet?”

And both of their responses were to the effect of, “well we’re just talking about it right now.”

Preators talk the talk.

Creators walk the walk.

The fact that they didn’t even get together to jam and see what their musical chemistry is like was baffling to me. It was just a bunch of arrogant dudes trash talking the established bands out there, claiming what they’ll make will be so much better, but have little to nothing to show for it.

For a preator to become a creator, you need the humility to know that you’re gonna be very amateur at first, and maybe even for a very long time. Then you need the courtesy to respect those who came before you and even seek help from someone to get some mentorship. And lastly, you need to just get started and do something. And do it without the pretense of being amazing or even better than what should simply inspire you to do what you do.

From Preator to Creator

As you begin to actually execute on your ideas, you will find that it’ll be harder and harder to criticize those who came before you. You’ll start to realize that it’s not that easy to create anything of quality or value, let alone anything at all. This is the place where I think creators need to be in in order to create from a good place, rather than one of ego. Because more often than not, ego prevents people from even getting started, and even if they do get started, impatience gets in the way and they begin to believe that all their hard work needs to be rewarded and it needs to be rewarded right now!

But that’s the thing about creativity; not everyone will understand or appreciate what you create at first. You need to be your own number one fan to keep yourself motivated. You can’t rely on the whims of a potential audience or even the encouragement of a mentor. The kind words can be things you prefer, but you gotta be indifferent from the influx or lack of positive reception and just do your thing.

If you take the time to craft these Three Keys to Going from Preator to Creator, I will guarantee you that you will have a whole lot more appreciation for the entire creative process, and if you don’t buckle from the pressure of it, eventually learn to hone in on your own process and maybe actually join the ranks of the greats.

The Top 4 R’s Creators Need to Know Retiring

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As outlined in a previous post, every creative project has its cycle that kind of resembles a marriage. There’s a honeymoon phase where everything is fresh, fun, and exciting. Then when things start to settle down happily ever after is only possible through commitment. Yet, despite the commitment creators put into their work, sometimes we reach a point where we might have to divorce ourselves from a project before it can be completed.

We all hope that we get to see our creative projects to the very end. For every completed work of art out there—published novels, movies with theatrical releases, music that the whole world can listen to etc.—there are probably thousands of other works that go left unfinished each day. This could be due to a number of factors like budget constraints, creators being swallowed by resistance, or in some unfortunate cases, death.

Because tomorrow is not a guarantee for any of us, we must try to do as much as humanly possible, each day, to see our vision come to life. Whether we get to the end of the project or not, it’s important to give it our all each day so that God forbid it’s our last, we would have had a lot to show for it rather than dying with the regret over how much we procrastinated. This may sound a little too morbid, and edging on the toxic productivity side, but I assure there are many ways around burning out from keeping this in mind, while also being able to create as boldly as we can each day.

Today we will cover The Top 3 R’s Creators Need to Know Before Retiring:

  1. Resilience
  2. Reward
  3. Reflection
  4. Recovery

Resilience

We often talk about the resistance that comes with creativity here on Your Write to Live. The resistance that our ego feeds us by filling our heads with doubt, perfectionism, and maybe some full on self loathing, which will all prevent us from sitting down and doing the work that is important to us. The positive antithesis to this resistance is resilience, which is your ability to withstand boredom, frustration, and distractions.

When a creative project starts to wear you down making you feel bored and/or frustrated, you need to develop the resilience to push through that resistance. If you are under the obligation to complete a project for a paying client and you have hard deadlines to meet, this is just an unfortunate blow to your energy levels that you need to take to see it to the end. But if you’re a hobby creator, there’s a bit more leeway to pace yourself and reduce the amount of work you do each day, but in no way should you quit when revelations in your work just might be on the other side of resilience.

When we begin to feel bored and/or frustrated by our creative projects, it is also easy to get distracted by unimportant things and end up using them as excuses for our early retirement for the day. Or maybe even for life if we let it get that bad. That means reducing your use of social media, not playing as many video games as you usually do, and most importantly resisting the urge to reward yourself too prematurely.

Reward


While it is important to resist the urge to reward yourself too prematurely, it is still important that you do reward yourself for your efforts. This can look like many different things based on your preferences, but personally for me, after a hard day of work I like to reward myself by playing video games or watching a movie. If I’ve engaged my brain enough in cognitively active work, it’s nice to finally sit back and engage it more passively with entertainment.

I’ve said before that the real reason why we can’t relax and enjoy things unless we’ve done difficult things is because of brain activity more than it has anything to do with our moral standing. To recap, it’s not about chastising yourself for not being productive, and that you don’t deserve to reward yourself if you haven’t been creating, rather it’s about having turned your brain on enough and emptied it out of its potential content before soaking in someone else’s artwork that makes entertainment more enjoyable.

Furthermore, as good as these post-work-session rewards may be, you must also remember to perceive your work as the ultimate reward to yourself. To your soul. You’re expressing something from every fiber of your being whenever you decide to engage your creativity, and that’s serious business, so give it the respect that it deserves by giving it your full attention.

Reflection

After you’ve created as much as you could for the day and rewarded yourself accordingly, then it’s time to reflect on the day. Think about all the hardship you may have faced during your creative hours and assess yourself as honestly as possible. Were there moments where you were just phoning it in because resistance was creeping up? Was the reward proportionate to the amount of the work you did or was it too excessive? And was the reward in any way valuable and appropriate to your purpose?

Ask yourself these questions and more so that for the next day, you know how to do better. Every day we create something, we learn a little bit more about ourselves. Sometimes it’s about how we handle the process itself in regards to how patient we might be with ourselves when faced with difficulty. Or sometimes our own work that’s meant to touch the souls of others ends up touching our own and opening our eyes to something about ourselves in ways that were not possible had we not took on the project in the first place.

If you’ve been around Your Write to Live for a while you know this, but if you’re new here I must state that that’s what we’re all about here: growth through daily milestones. So long as your growing in any amount of increments you’re capable of, small and large alike, that’s all that matters. So reflect on how you can grow from today’s work and allow these lessons to carry you for the next day and beyond.

Recovery

After everything is said and done then it’s time for some rest and recovery. I know I sounded morbid earlier saying how we don’t have much time on this Earth, so you better create as much as you can each day or it’s a waste, but rest and recovery is just as important as the consistent creativity we aim to strive for when it’s feasible and possible. You just have to be honest and realistic about where you’re at physically, mentally, and chronologically in terms of other life responsibilities.

It’s all about meeting a healthy balance between hard work and rest, never straying too excessively on one side for the sake of the other. Even if you’re under a strict deadline, it’s never worth your physical health to get something done, or you will literally put the dead in deadline. Likewise, if you’re always in rest and recovery mode when you’re more than perfectly capable to get back to work, you might die a little on the inside at the level of your soul. You’re a creator. You’re meant to create. Not doing so leaves with you a lot of unexpressed emotion and potential.

Take as much time as you need and no more and no less. For instance, as of writing this blog post, I have gone six straight weeks consistently writing in my journal, writing for this blog, and working on my passion project every single week day almost without fail. I may have missed one of these things on some days, but for the most part I’ve remained consistent. I can feel myself feeling tired from all the effort I put into stifling my resistance, so I know that next week or two weeks from now, it would be wise to either slow it down considerably or take a week long break to recharge.

As should you if you’ve done all you could to stifle your own resistance.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 10: The Gratitude Journal

Marlon1 Comment

One of the most overlooked, but also one of the most powerful kinds of journals you can write, is the Gratitude Journal. All too often we’ll journal out our problems and hopes for the future that we forget to take stock of what we currently have: The Present Moment.

It’s all we ever have and no matter how much loss we’ve suffered in the past and how much more we’ve got to gain in the future, so long as we’re simply breathing, we have a lot to be thankful for. Maybe you’re not where you want to be in life and maybe you’re suffering a crisis. The mere fact that you get to live and be given the opportunity to learn and grow from hardship should be appreciated.

It’s a strange concept, to be thankful for even hardship. But if you really think about it, without sadness and hardship, we would not have much appreciation for happiness and the good times in our lives. There’d be no contrast. And in the business of contrasting, instead of journaling out your problems all the time, take a moment to be grateful and acknowledge where you’re at.

“He who cannot be contented with what he has will not be contented with what he wants.” – Socrates

It was true over 2000 years ago and it’s still true to this day. Practicing gratitude can help reframe your mind toward abundance rather than always focusing on scarcity. We have evolved to focus on scarcity because human survival was much harder before than it is now, so we’ve still got a lot of leftover monkey brain residing within us. Not to say it’s entirely useless because starvation and poverty are real problems, but I think it’s safe to say that if you can afford the internet connection in order to read this post, there’s a high chance that you’re living a comfortable life, if not a luxurious one.

Yet that’s the problem, right?

Comfortability.

We work so hard to get to the point of comfortability because being challenged is difficult, we just wanna laze around and watch Netflix or play video games all day because they’re the most fun and easiest things to do. But then we tend to grow stagnant when we live a little too comfortably. So just as we need challenges to help us grow, we also need ample rest so we have the energy to tackle the challenges of life.

It’s a balancing act that we will never perfect, but will definitely try our entire lives to employ. You want to be journaling your problems out for the catharsis and possible problem solving that can come with it. And you also want to be writing about the things you’ve achieved thus far and be grateful for what you have in life, even if it may seem very little.

Harkening back to the Socrates quote, sometimes we get so busy chasing things that we think will make us happy that we somehow forget how to just be happy. We think that next relationship, that new job, or that new toy is what’s gonna make us happy, and maybe we get one or all of those things and then it’s like “so what now?”

That’s the tricky thing with life.

It’s good to have goals to strive for so that each day you live is filled with some sense of purpose and direction. But as that old cliché goes, “life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s cliché because it’s true. If you’re not moving toward an aim you are then aimless and begin to feel the weight of existential dread falling upon you.

So you work, work, and work, and you finally achieve your goal, and then you’re confronted with a whole new problem: “what’s next?”

Achieving one goal only opens you up to having a whole new set of problems you did not think possible, and since you have much more life left to live, then the process repeats. Until the very end of your days there’s always gonna be one more mountain to climb because it’s just what we do as human beings. We inherently do not feel like we are or have enough and so we strive to fill ourselves with more and more experiences and possessions—all of which are not bad things in and of themselves, but none of them really mean anything unless we take the time to be grateful for them.

If you have nothing pertinent to journal about, no issues to solve, then take a moment to write a Gratitude Journal because we could all use a little respite here and there. Give thanks to the people you love, the art that you’ve consumed, and even thank yourself for showing up for your daily practice. Life is very short and we tend to go from one thing to the next in a heartbeat, so giving ourselves a moment to breathe and feel that heartbeat, even for just a fraction of eternity, we are reminded that it is Your Write to Live.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 6: The Progress Journal

Marlon3 Comments

So we’ve been digging in pretty deep into our psyches with the last few posts on journaling. From part two’s focus on chronological journaling and part four’s focus on your Internal Family System, and not to mention a surprise hit entry on Shadow Journaling—I think it’s time to take it a little easier on ourselves today and focus on goal setting.

While I do think it’s important for us to contend with our shadow side and work out the worries of the day in a journal, we can’t always be digging that deep and getting that emotional because that could be very taxing. In fact, although I am a big proponent to expressing your darkest deepest feelings as earnestly as possible, there can be a point where it can be a bit excessive and you can become too identified with your problems as opposed to having them shed on the page.

To reverse that, we also need to learn how to write Progress Journals to keep track of our goals and ambitions. This can range from your progress in therapy, your progress in your novel, or anything else that you’re working on in life to give yourself a moment to take stock of your life thus far, especially when you feel stuck.

Even if you’re not feeling stuck, it’s even more beneficial to focus on your progress because if you’re not inhibited by any emotional weight holding you down, you can propel that much further in your goals by continuing to take stock anyway.

So why should you write a progress journal and how do you even do it?

What You Measure Grows

If you approach your life like it’s a game you start to notice just how much the quality of our lives are based on “high scores” in different aspects of our lives. How much money do we have in the bank? How many reps can we lift x amount of lbs of a dumbbell? How many words can we write a day?

It is important to jot down these numbers because then you could compare and contrast them throughout the weeks to see how you’re faring in a specific goal. So let’s take writing for instance. Say your goal is to write somewhere between 500-2000 words a day. If you have a word count tracker where you mark each date and total word count for that day, you can keep a tally of how well you do throughout the week.

(Keep your eyes peeled for a future post on Word Count Goals as I will share my own Word Count Tracker and how I use it.)

Some days you’ll be under par and some days you’ll be over par, and in a different section of your Word Count Tracker, you can even briefly mention how and why your word count was a certain way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that being under the word count is bad, rather maybe other things came up that day, and that is something you can mention in a Progress Journal

The whole point of a Progress Journal is to have an open, honest, and earnest conversation with yourself about how far you’ve come in the project, and what you have left to do. It even doubles as a perfect pre-writing warm up exercise because you get yourself thinking about your novel at the bird’s eye view rather than being honed in on the story at ground level. Sometimes it helps to get that broader perspective before you pan the camera down to where the novel focuses.

So keep track of your scores for everything in your life and write entries about how and why you were able to achieve so much or so little in the day. If you score low, it’s not about blaming external circumstances for getting in the way of your goals, rather it’s taking accountability over how you allowed external circumstances for getting in the way of your goals.

I get that a lot of us lead busy lives, but if writing truly is our lifestyle as we believe it is here at Your Write to Live, then we should always make the time to write. Much like anything else in life, it’s not that we don’t have time for certain things, rather we don’t make time for them unless we find them all that more important above everything else. And when it comes to self care and mental health, they damn well better be more important above everything else or everything else begins to fall apart if we’re not well taken care of.

But I digress!

The Progress Journal Manual

My Progress Journals before every writing session were always recapping what I’ve written the day before, or the session before if I have more than one that day, and meditating on what I have left yet to write. Sometimes I’d be focused on shifting my mindset toward being positive, and if I had that inherently intact for a day, then the fun begins where I’ve focused a lot on working out my ideas. This same approach can apply to other things too aside from writing. Even something like weight lifting or any other form of exercise you want to do on a daily basis, you can reflect on what kinds of thoughts and feelings arise as you’ve approached your goal for that day.

Sticking to the example of writing, though—since this is Your Write to Live, not Your Write to…Lift?—you could just as easily write about your perceived Writer’s Block. Doing so is what made me come up with the Shadow Journal in the first place, actually. I would get so deep into my head about why I have all this resistance toward doing something I know that I love, but can’t bring myself to do. It was no longer about the book itself, but myself, and how I have to contend with my own shadow almost every time only to realize that after each session, I come out stronger and smarter than I ever thought possible.

While it is best that you know how to regulate your own motivation for writing, there is no shame in asking for help and that’s why I’m happy to announce that I will be offering Writing Coaching services later in the year so I can help other writers cultivate healthy writing habits of their own that suit them, as well as provide a sounding board for their ideas.

Whether you can’t afford writing coaching services or simply want to do it alone, though, Progress Journaling is the next best alternative to keeping yourself in check and bouncing your ideas around to see if they are sound. You can even join writing forums online or a critique group in person, but I believe that the less people there are and the more intimate the experience is, the more value you can get from reflecting on your progress.

So if you’ve got a grip on the whole mental and emotional aspect of writing, then you get to have a whole lot of fun simply writing about your ideas for your current chapter. Progress Journaling is also a less structured way of outlining, though outlining chapter and GMC graphs are still important, and can lend you more freedom to write and retract some of your ideas as you write them.

Often times you will find yourself writing about a particular idea and realizing it sounds dumb out loud or doesn’t even getting used in the end anyway. Which then makes room for the good ideas you’ve been waiting for, and that’s the thing about ideas which I’ll write about next week: the fact that generating ideas is a muscle you need to exercise. The more you do it, the better you get at them.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 4: Internal Family Systems

Marlon2 Comments

One of the most useful journaling methods that have helped me is loosely based on Internal Family Systems. It’s the concept that within every individual is a plethora of different personalities all warring for dominance over their directing mind. You might be thinking about people with split personality disorder and how you would be so far removed from them, but actually what they suffer from is a very drastic disintegration of the self.

For those of us fortunate enough to not be clinically diagnosed with that mental illness, we still contain a variety of competing personalities within ourselves, which would explain why our thoughts and emotions are so complex. There are different versions of ourselves living within us that comprise of our entire being as a whole. It doesn’t make you crazy or anything, just human.

Due to varying factors such as culture, upbringing, and social circles, we all internalize different thoughts and opinions from our environment and all these ideas become a huge part of our personalities. Some ideas are stronger than others, while some are strong enough to contend with each other, and the goal of Internal Family Systems style journaling is to integrate these personalities, not disperse them.

I talk a lot about contending with your shadow on here and this is a more detailed and nuanced form of that. There are parts of you that you might be ashamed or even afraid of, and perhaps it is your resistance to their existence that creates their persistence.

(I totally didn’t mean to rhyme, I’ll try not to do that all the time 😉

What you resist persists, though. According to Freud’s theory of repression, the more we stuff down things in our psyche, the stronger they actually become in trying to take the center stage of our minds. This is possibly how split personality disorder can occur aside from the unfortunate randomness of neurological development in the brain.

So instead of trying to completely cast out certain parts of yourself, you befriend them and finds ways to make them work in your favour. Most especially if they run counter to another personality of yours that seems to be its complete opposite. In actuality, these two warring personalities are two sides of the same coin, and sometimes one side wins over the other causing discord within our lives.

By allowing these varying parts of ourselves to have an open dialogue with each other, our directing mind can have a better time at getting a clearer picture of who is saying what, and why they are saying it. Imagine your consciousness as the director of a play and all these different aspects of your personality as individual actors who you need to assign roles to. Then as the playwright, give them their lines and let them put a play on for you to get a better grasp of yourself.

What I am about to teach you is definitely useful in understanding yourself better through Therapeutic Journaling, but also your fiction, and you’ll start to see how and why as you read along. I’ll even go into further details afterwards, but without further adieu…

Assigning Roles to Your Personalities

Think of the most prominent thought patterns you have about yourself, your relationships, and the world. For simplicity’s sake you can call them protagonists. Then think about if you ever have other thought patterns that contradict your protagonist’s patterns. Consider those contradictory thought patterns as antagonists. In actuality, there is a little good and bad in each of them, but whichever way you slice it, what you want to do is give each pattern a distinctive name as to give them some character.

In turning these thought patterns into characters, having a distinctive name and visual representation of them in your mind will allow you to get a clearer picture of how and what they manifest in your life. Sometimes writing out your thoughts, contradictory as they may be to each other, is not enough, and so the more divided you are, the more important it is to try out IFS Journaling so that you can better manage the contradictions within yourself.

Drawing from my own experience, I’ll give a couple examples of some of the characters living within my Internal Family System and how I integrated them into my being in a healthier way than just resisting what I thought needed to be discarded.

Becoming Your Own Inner Parent

Little Marlon is the wounded inner child. He just wants to be loved, taken care of, and allowed to enjoy his hobbies without judgement and without the pressure of turning them into careers. He just wants to enjoy these things for their own sake. He’s also very shy around people, but also wants to befriend them anyway because he likes to talk.

Papa Marlon is the kind of father I wish I had growing up, and the kind of father I wanted to become when I grew up. He works in tandem with Little Marlon to give him compassion, leniency, and empathy. He comforts Little Marlon and knows how to talk to him so he can feel better, thus helping him develop his social skills and become more confident with other people. However, sometimes Papa Marlon is too soft on Little Marlon and lets him get away with too much when he needs discipline.

Inner Father is the internalized version of my actual father. Although my actual father could be loud, aggressive, and sometimes physically abusive, much to Little Marlon’s and Papa Marlon’s dismay, he is not wrong in asserting that children need to be disciplined. They need to know between right and wrong or they’ll go about life disrupting the order of things.

I originally saw Little Marlon is a weakling who I needed to forget all about and become infinitely better than. I also saw my Inner Father is a nuisance because he was the one bringing up shame in for me simply being vulnerable and sensitive. For so long I wish I could get rid of this weak and sensitive part of me as well as the one who was so judgmental about his very existence to begin with.

This is where Papa Marlon had to come in to empathize with Little Marlon to let him know he belongs in the Internal Family System because reconciling his sensitivity is actually what allows me to understand the sensitivity of others and treat it kindly. Papa Marlon also went head to head with my Inner Father during the years I studied psychology and childhood development, thus developing some resentment toward my actual father for some of the ways in which he failed me growing up.

Papa Marlon represented the moral stand I took in that if and when I have kids, I will never hit them or yell at them, mishandle their vulnerability, and outright ignore them throughout their lives. He is also how and why I was able to raise my God-daughter without raising my voice or laying a hand on her, and that was a great exercise in self restraint and learning to break the cycle of violence in my family.

However, I did get over zealous with peaceful parenting and at times had been too lenient with my God-daughter, who in many ways was the physical and present manifestation of Little Marlon; another fresh new child brought into the world who just needs some love and guidance to survive it so they can feel safe and sound. But at the same time can bring danger upon themselves and even us adults sometimes.

My Inner Father was right, you really can’t let kids step all over you, which is what I allowed to happen at times with my God-daughter and Little Marlon.

Papa Marlon and my Inner Father had to duke it out in what was one the most fundamental journal entries I’ve ever written in my life. What it all amalgamated to was knowing that you must be gentle and patient with children in order to foster a safe environment for them to grow in, but you also need to discipline them whenever they act out in unruly ways.

For a long time it was either/or for me. You either be kind to them or you beat them into submission. But thanks to the dialogue I wrote out between Papa Marlon and my Inner Father, the two were able to meet in the middle and teach me that you can discipline children without having to hit or punish them in any other way.

It took some time, but alongside raising my God-daughter like she was my own, while concurrently parenting Little Marlon, I discovered ways in which I can teach these children how to behave properly without having to resort to any aggressive means of discipline. A lot of the times, I learned that some of the things parents allow their kids to do was more of the fault of proper supervision, while at other times, it was just kids exploring the world and not knowing how to do so safely.

So for instance, to teach my God-daughter why it’s important to not run into the street, I comically simulated one of her Barbie dolls getting run over by a car and voice acting how in massive pain she was in. My God-daughter laughed at this depiction, which was a relief because in hindsight it sounds like I could have easily traumatized her instead.

But she understood even at the age of two what I was trying to teach her. So any time we went out for a walk, yes I mostly held her hand to keep her close, but there were times I’d let her go and she just knew to stay on the sidewalk.

The Internal Interpersonal Tournament

This was just one of many examples I could have shared with you, and while it was geared towards healing my inner child, other dialogues I’ve written for my Internal Family System comprised of a vaster array of characters that lurk in my psyche. There’s the Lovelorn vs the Casanova, the Anima vs my Inner Mother, and many more character battles that had to take place, and still take place within me that allow me to get a better sense of myself.

So to do an Internal Family Systems journal, you assign characters to certain thought patterns of yours and like a movie script, write our their dialogue and see in what ways they can resolve their conflicts with each other so that they can live in harmony within you, as opposed to discord.

After all, this is kind of what we do, as writers, when we write novels. All the characters we write about may be amalgamations of other people we know in our lives, but ultimately their words and actions are being born out of our very own hands. If that isn’t a more creative and emotionally distant form of Internal Family Systems journaling, then I don’t know what is!

But I digress.

Writing an Internal Family Systems journal can be a more direct, dark, and gritty form of getting the kind of self-knowledge you get from writing a novel with characters who all represent different sides of you. With an IFS journal, you remove the creative filter and write something raw, unhinged, and uninhibited. Just like the Shadow Journal, you will want to proceed with caution because the more honest and vulnerable you are, the scarier this kind of journaling actually is.

Though the good news is that if you can survive it, you will become a much smarter and stronger version of yourself that you may not have imagined possible before.