In Praise of the Un-public Words

Getting unstoried & still finding your way on the page

It’s a “what’s the point of more words” day.

It’s an “it’s already too noisy out there” day.

It’s also the “I need to get the newsletter written” day.

It cannot be a coincidence that this happens the week that I released a podcast episode called A Story of Getting Unstoried.

I wandered through Substack with my cup of morning virtue. (I’m trying, once again, to break up with coffee and convince myself that the gritty mushroom stuff really is a pleasant, unique experience that does not make me miss coffee at all. I think I must resign myself to being a part-time powdered-adaptogens-in-a-cup kind of woman.)

As my eyes drifted over the Substack notes with their gorgeous pastoral scenes and the heart-deep poetry, and I dove deep into a few posts marked by biting political commentary and clever turns of phrase, I just felt the words drain out of me.

At least the public words.

Maybe I could write today. Maybe I could dare to shake off these self-imposed publication deadlines and do something radical and write something un-public. Maybe I could get free of the editorial guardrails created by my area of expertise and my creative persona. 

Maybe I could get free of mythology for a little while and try to write without the net of the ancestors. Maybe that would remind me that the more I free myself of the stories of the past, the more I understand about what it has always meant to be human.

What the writing coach in me knows about these days when you haven’t got a “public word” in you to share

We find what we really have to say when we release ourselves from the burden of trying to craft a thing that is already ready to be heard.

We all know about the beauty and the horrors of this new information world - which sometimes gives us access to knowledge, and sometimes even wisdom. In the midst of the ads and the bots and the AI regurgitations of what has already been said, there is true gold. 

We find at least a little bit of that gold every day. (At least I want to believe that we keep showing up to lose ourselves in the digital realms for something more than the dopamine hits.)

And, sometimes, as creative folks, we contribute our own true gold to the limitless digital cauldron.

But… only sometimes.

Sometimes, we are just in-process beings who need to write deeply personal haiku about snails and press the buttons to cancel that thing like we should have done five months ago. (In the productive procrastination time it took to write all this I remembered to skip that next shipment of mushroom chai elixir because I clearly do not need a subscription for a daily supply.)

I’m a writing coach. I hold space for individual clients and for writers around the world in my online groups.

Some of the writers I support are working on long term projects and aren’t concerned with the daily digital showing up game. Others - those who are in business or who are actively working on developing their “author platform” - are trying to find the balance between cultivating creative freedom and developing some consistency in their message. And there are others still who are part of the Writers’ Knot simply because they know that they feel better when they pour ideas onto the page.

In every case, writers benefit from rest and a good pause.

And, we benefit when we remind ourselves that this terrible wonderful blessing that allows us to essentially become our own media machines is more terrible than it is wonderful when we force ourselves to keep on pushing out words for the sake of making still private, in-process words public too soon.

Perhaps this is a long, long way of saying I am not sure I have anything new to say today beyond this: I made a podcast episode about getting unstoried (at least for a little while). 

It’s related to these ideas about the power of un-public words. A little. There’s a lot more to say about how we balance storytelling and meaning making, and what you might do when you find you’re hiding behind one or the other.

And, this post is seeking to say that we still have a couple of seats open in the Writers’ Knot.

We’re welcoming new members into both groups (7 PM ET on Mondays or noon ET on Wednesdays) through September 9.

This is the community where we make space to let the writing flow in its many forms - personal, in-process, for publication, and still un-public. We never run out of words to write or say to one another, and I am endlessly inspired by this global circle of creatives.

Maybe you’ll join us?