In this episode we dive into the essence of the creative quest – from emulating and mirroring your favorite authors to eventually finding your unique voice as a writer. We discuss how learning from the masters and those we admire is not about copying their work but about absorbing skills and identifying the qualities we desire in our own writing. We also touch on the potential pitfalls of comparison, the fear of never being able to write as well as those we admire, and how this could potentially stagnate our growth as writers. We explore how this process can sometimes be non-linear, looping back on itself or skipping stages, making the creative process more of a quest than a cycle.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about our experiences with this, and to gain insights that might help you navigate your own creativity quest. Make sure you download the accompanying worksheet to further delve into this stage of the creative journey.

Resources

• Five Seasons of the Writing Process – Overview
• Episode 4: Seasons of Writing – Spring!
• Episode 18: The Creativity Quest
• Episode 19: Carrying Inner Disquiet
• Episode 20: Releasing
• Episode 21: Emulating and Mirroring

Ep. 23: Mirroring to Find Our Own Author Voice

Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
0:02
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

Gina Hogan Edwards
0:43
Hi, listeners, welcome back to another episode of Around the Writer’s Table. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards. I am an editor, a creativity coach, a retreat leader and I am passionate about supporting women in finding their voices. I’m here with my co-hosts today. And I’m going to allow each of them to introduce themselves. Melody, would you like to go first?

Melody, A Scout
1:04
Hi, I’m Melody, A Scout. And I help my clients find their sense of home by restoring balance and harmony to their lives through plant spirit medicine and my book Soul of the Seasons.

KimBoo York
1:18
And I am KimBoo York. I’m a genre novelist and former project manager. I help writers create holistic productivity in their creative lives.

Gina
1:26
Thank you, ladies. It is wonderful to be here, as always. I love these conversations that we’re having, and in the last few episodes, we have been talking about what I was formally calling The Creative Cycle, which now we’re going to refer to as The Creativity Quest, because we don’t experience the process of creativity in any sort of linear or sequential fashion. 

So thank you for being here. We’re going to dive in today to sort of a second part in a way, or a companion discussion, about the stage of Emulating and Mirroring and how that relates to the seasons. So, briefly, Emulating and Mirroring is very much a learning stage, a muscle-building stage, where we are absorbing our skills and learning as much as we can about the process of writing by working with our mentors and by identifying in the masters and those writers that we admire the characteristics that we know that we would like to learn how to do well. 

So, Melody, tell us, if you think about that short definition that I just gave you, which season do you feel correlates with that the best? 

Melody
2:50
The first season that popped into my head regarding this phase of The Creativity Quest is the season of Spring, and maybe even late Spring. Spring is when all those new ideas are popping off onto the page. It’s our first draft. We’re excited. We’re getting our story out on the page, and we’re talking about finding our voice in this. We had a great discussion about that in our last episode. And it is the point in time where we have a real need for structure and support as we get ready to move into the next phase, a Summer phase, and that’s the maturation process. 

And during this time, we’ve talked about getting stuck in this cycle, and I would love to hear some experiences both of you two have had on what it was like to get, maybe, stuck in this phase or a tendency to get stuck in this phase. To me, it’s new, shiny. It’s fun. I don’t put much limits on what I’m writing during this time. If it goes off into the ozone, don’t care that much. Let it go sort of thing. 

So KimBoo, can you tell me anything, a little bit about what it looks like for you to get stuck or cycle around in this phase?

KimBoo
4:24
It’s interesting, because when you talk about the issue of mirroring and emulating, and in the last episode, we talked about how we do that to learn techniques and learn ways that other writers do things. And I did talk about getting stuck when I was so-called studying Mark Twain and then ended up writing like Mark Twain. And so that’s one example of it. 

But when you were talking just now, thinking about it, I think for me, in a more negative way–and this gets back to, god, I don’t know how many authors I’ve read–but the latest ones, definitely Victoria Goddard, which I mentioned in the last episode as well. But I look at an author who’s doing something I want to be able to do and I get stuck because… I don’t know… lack of vision, a lack of personal confidence, lack of having the ability to see my way through learning how to do that thing, and mastering it and making it my own voice. 

And that has certainly, and we can call that impostor syndrome. We can call that perfectionism. But oftentimes, it is a lot of comparison-itis in the sense of, you know, “I have these great ideas. I have these things that I want to be working on.” And I look at what other people are doing, and instead of emulating and mirroring and learning from them, I get stuck in the idea that I’ll never be able to do something that well. 

So I’m– there’s a lot of levels to that, but that was something I was thinking about as you were talking. What is my definition of stuck in this space, and that would be it. I don’t know.

Melody
6:03
I knew that you are not alone.

Gina
6:06
No, you are definitely not alone, and I love hearing that because I know comparison-itis has been a big thing for me too, and I think that can, that in itself can actually keep me stuck in the learning stage. So I keep thinking, Okay, if I just read one more novel by Eudora Welty or one more Joan Didion memoir, then I can use language the way that they do. So it’s really easy then to sort of use the excuse, if you will, of learning to sort of stay in this stage. 

I’m curious, though, KimBoo, based on the description that you just gave, we talked about in the last episode about how writers specifically are not good at using this Emulating and Mirroring as a purposeful practice to get better at their writing in the same way that say painters would, in terms of looking at the different characteristics that a specific artists uses, the way they use color, the way they use light, brush strokes and those kinds of things for a painter to find their own style. We don’t do that with writing, and I wonder if we might be-–and this is a question for both of us, actually—I wonder if we might be less prone to comparison-itis if we had done some of that sort of deliberate practice when we were first learning how to write.

KimBoo
7:43
Ooh. Ah, I think you’re right. I think if I had had a more focused, well, back to the Mark Twain issue, and if you didn’t listen to the last episode, I read a lot of Mark Twain under the guise of studying Mark Twain, and what I ended up doing was internalizing Mark Twain and writing like Mark Twain instead of my own voice. But even at that point, I wasn’t really cognizant of trying to break down, like, what is the sentence structure? What are the words that he’s using? What is the beats? What is the style? And I think maybe if I had been more cognizant of that, and more focused on learning, than just trying to randomly absorb the essence of the writer, I’d probably have walked away with a much better understanding of what’s going on. 

I think that’s fascinating, and I would love love to see some writing teachers start incorporating some of that a little bit more because, yeah, I think if you know how the pie is made or the cake is made, or whatever, you’re not as upset about the fact of making your own because you’re like, “Yeah, I know, I know what it took to make that right. I can, I can do that. It won’t look the same, but it’ll be my cake, made with the same type of stuff.” Terrible analogy, but you get my point.

Melody
9:13
Sounds like a great exercise for a writer’s retreat.

Gina
9:19
I think there are definitely courses and professors who will take a work of say Eudora Welty and break it down and analyze it. But what I don’t see happening is that deliberate, “Okay, now let’s practice that…” whatever that particular thing is that they’re studying, whatever characteristic that they’re studying, as opposed to just observing it and recognizing it in another writer’s piece, actually attempting to do that thing.

Melody
9:55
Oh, you know, that reminds me of a comment—I wish I could remember where I’d heard it—but it was talking about visual arts more. And they were talking about certain artists broke the rules, so to speak. And one of the instructors would often say, “You need to learn the rules before you break them,” which landed, landed with me, because being a lifelong pantser—I stuff at rules, sort of thing—that seems to me, I’ve come back to how valuable that is to know the structure, to know, that’s why in the season of Spring, structure, and form and planning are so important. Not to have such a close grip on what you’re doing that your creativity isn’t coming out, but have something you can build, and when you move into the season of Summer, where you’re going to push the sleeves up and do the hard work, you can rely on that. It is a comforting place to have that structure, to have your vision clearly in mind, because then you can hold up what you’re doing. It comes much easier, because you can hold up what you’re doing towards your framework, towards your vision. Then it makes the choices on what to include, not to include, where do my characters go, becomes much easier, because you’re working within that structure. And in the past, structure and discipline have been dirty words. They seem not to mix with the creativity process. So I know—

KimBoo
No, I’m gonna interrupt there, because I think that’s an important point to make. A lot of times in our culture in society, we were told creativity is freedom of expression and freedom. And to bring up the analogy, again, of classical artists studying the old masters, there’s a certain approach to art, which is that the restrictions you have on a project actually help you be more creative, because you have to start thinking outside the box. And so we think of strictures and a lot of people think, “Oh, I have to have an outline. I have to get up and write for an hour every morning. I have to write 500 words a day. I have to…” and they put all these other types of structure on it, thinking that’s what it means to have structure, when what we’re talking about is understanding your own internal structures of the arts. Understanding what makes you creative, understanding how to apply the rules that you’ve learned, or to break the rules that you’ve learned in a way that informs your own creativity. 

Sorry to go off on a tangent on that, but it’s just as somebody who works in the productivity sphere, I hear too much, “Oh, you just need to create some structure.” And yeah, you do. But you have to do it in a way that fits your, like you were saying, Melody, your vision and your goals.

Melody
13:19
Oh, absolutely. And, it brings to mind a subject that I can pontificate on endlessly.

KimBoo
13:29
Thanks for the warning!

Melody
13:32
When people talk about freedom of speech, and social media platforms and the right to say whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. However, if you do not have some basic framework of decency and kindness, your vision of who and what you want to be as well as the vision of who and what you want your group to be, we can see the results of that when you take all the rails off. And people mistake the freedom of speech as a freedom of consequence. 

KimBoo
Yeah. 

Melody
And the same goes, I think, with the writing and creative process. You can have the freedom to write and do and express however you want and copy or not copy and break all the rules, but there are consequences to doing that. And—

Gina
We don’t live in a vacuum. 

Melody
A vacuum, yeah. And it shows up in your work as well. The things not hanging together well and things wandering about the page and about life and the ionosphere. So, yeah. Gina, can you tell me a little bit of, if you’ve had any experience of working with that in the editor/editing phase of the process, what you find when that comes in.

Gina
15:08
Often I will have a writer come to me, especially if they are a new writer, with a piece that holds incredible potential in terms of, maybe, the kind of story that it is, maybe it’s got a really strong plot or some really interesting characters, and they may be all over the place in terms of something like—and, of course, I’m speaking particularly right now about fiction—but they may be all over the place in terms, and this is just one example, but of point of view. And this goes right back to what you were saying, Melody, of “you have to know the rules in order to break the rules,” and the idea that in our culture, we don’t think that there is a relationship between creativity and giving ourselves some boundaries or some structure, when I think it is exactly the opposite. 

When we pick a genre to write in, that’s giving ourselves some boundaries. When we acknowledge that we don’t live in a vacuum, and that we have to, in some way, match the readers’ expectations of what that genre is about, then that creates another boundary for us. And it is actually freeing to know that we don’t have to worry about anything outside of that boundary, if we have chosen to write to a particular audience or in a particular genre, or in a particular way. And related to what you said, KimBoo, about the structure actually gives us more freedom, because the great thing about being a creative person is that it’s limitless. And we can write about anything, especially if we’re writing fiction. We can write about absolutely anything that we want to write about. But that’s also the thing that shuts a lot of people down because they have too many choices to make. 

And so this is kind of getting us off of the idea of Emulating and Mirroring and Spring, but I think there’s a lot of relationships with the whole process of writing. But, I think creating some structure for ourselves, knowing this is the kind of style that I want to write in, or this is the kind of methods that I want to use to characterize the people in my story, or this is, these are some of the tools that I want to use when developing a setting in my story. We discover those things by looking toward the writing masters, and if we deliberately practice what they have done and then use that in a way that is uniquely our own, then that’s when we start to find our voice and to create our own internal boundaries of how we want to write.

KimBoo
18:19
You know, I’m, as you were talking, Gina, and I’m kind of throwing this on to Melody because as you’re talking about Spring and you’re talking about structure, the thing that immediately hit me was a garden. Because if you just wander out the door and start throwing seeds everywhere, where you might get a few of the seeds, maybe…

Melody
18:40
It’s been done.

KimBoo
18:42
It’s been done. That’s probably how agriculture originated. But if you’re trying to create a certain type of garden, or if you’re trying to create a certain type of experience for that garden, or you just want some herbs, a herb garden that you can use for the kitchen, you don’t care how it looks, those are all different types of structures, and you have to understand the different ways that those things come together. So I was just thinking of them in relation of Spring when it’s really important to you know, you know, putting up the trellises… and I’m not a gardener, y’all. I’m winging it, Melody. Melody, I’m gonna shoot it over to you because you understand. Surely you understand this analogy that I’m trying to make. Okay, approach it better than I. 

Melody
19:25
It’s a great, great example actually, because and why people hire me because they may even know what they want. First, they may or may not know what they want. Maybe they do know what they want. They don’t know how to get from here to what they want. And so with my experience and my education, I look at the framework, the structure of what we have to work with in their yard and in their garden, and then we can help build what it is, the vision that they want. And I mean, it’s a plug for editors, because I don’t really want to know how to edit. I highly esteem Gina and others who are good at that. But I don’t want to fill my head with that. 

KimBoo
Ditto

Melody
So it’s good to rely on the Masters, people that have gone before us, have done it before and could say, “Yeah, that’s an interesting idea. But that’s not going to work there.” So it also, but it also brings to another mind, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know anything about it. I’m glad through my discussion with both Gina and KimBoo, and others, that I have learned more about the editing process. So I understand it. I can understand when they have a conversation with me, and we should know it well enough to have a general understanding so when we start going off the rails, we can recognize that ourselves, which brings to mind, at some phase in the maturation process as writers, not just with our work, that maybe we should start emulating ourselves.

KimBoo
21:38
Full circle. 

Melody
21:41
Truth in ourselves. And we talked about this a lot when we talked about the seasons of the writing process, the value that you will be as a result of doing your inner work shows up in our outer work in our writing process. When we get stuck in a certain phase of the writing process, it is not at all shocking to find we often get stuck in that phase in our personal lives.

Gina
22:11
Hmm, I love the idea too, that—and I don’t know if you explicitly meant to suggest this, Melody, but this is what I took away from reading in between the lines of what you were saying—the idea of using Emulating and Mirroring to discover what we don’t want to do, what doesn’t feel right for us. Because that’s part of the learning process, too. Right? Yeah, we’re trying to build skills, but we also want to be familiar with what it is that we don’t want to have in our writing.

Melody
22:45
Yeah, it’s an important early phase. Because when, the first time someone asked me, “What do you want?” I was just dumbstruck, and my response was, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” Because I had no idea what I wanted. And I felt like I was not in control of my life enough that what I wanted mattered anyway. But I came to see through my inner work, let me back up a little bit. I was starting, I was getting very clear on what I did not want, and that was a helpful first step for me. Because you can eliminate a lot of things, if you know what you don’t want, and you can get closer to the truth of getting what it is you do want.

Gina
23:38
And that’s boundaries again. That’s creating your own self-imposed boundaries, because you know, “I don’t want that in between the lines. I don’t want that in my life. I don’t want that in my writing.”

KimBoo
23:51
And it’s all one element of the maturation process, not just age-wise but as artists, because when you start out, you want to do the thing that your favorite artist or your favorite writer does. And then you eventually come to realize, well, no. You kind of want to do something like that, but you want to do it on your own, or you want to do it your own way. So yeah, definitely, definitely part of the whole process there.

Gina
24:17
And I mentioned in the last episode, too, that getting stuck in the Emulating and Mirroring stage can become, over time, very dissatisfying, and if we don’t acknowledge what’s happening, and move on to the next stage, which I’m going to touch on here in a minute, then we might actually loop back into the Carrying Inner Disquiet, where we’re in the phase of not writing, of having this thing that really wants to come out but not giving it an access point to do that, and so we carry around this thing that starts to feel like a burden inside of us that we’re just not letting out and that’s where the the disquiet comes from. 

If we successfully move through the Emulating and Mirroring phase, just like we move from Spring into Summer, then we move into the next stage of Assessing and Acknowledging. And as we’ll talk about in our next episode, that is where our creative voice really starts to show up. This stage is doing a really honest, deep dive and looking at what we’ve learned, what we may still need to learn, recognizing what our growth points are, and recognizing where our weaknesses are. So we’ll talk about that in episode 24. Is that right?

KimBoo
25:41
Yeah.

Gina
25:42
Starting to lose track now. 

KimBoo
I know. Right.

Gina
Amazing, amazing.

KimBoo
25:46
And honestly, that’s gonna wrap us up. We’ve covered so much, and we’ve talked about so much. And there’s so much more. I mean, we always talk about these things, and we’re like, “It’s only gonna be like a 20 to 25 minute episode.” It’s 30 minutes every time. We can’t get around it. It’s just so interesting, ya’ll. 

Gina
And we still got stuff to say.

Melody
I’ve got all these notes.

KimBoo
26:09
But we appreciate y’all coming in and visiting us around the writer’s table. We do have the worksheet for these two episodes on our website, so you can download it there. There will also be a transcript of this episode for the page for this episode. You can also catch us on all the main distribution channels: Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts, wherever they are. Please leave us a review or rating, thumbs up hearts, whatever people are using these days. 

We will also have included some resource links, both in the show notes and there will also be some links on the worksheets. Get you back to prior episodes. Get you prior worksheets that we’ve been working on for The Creativity Quest. All of that’s going to be available for you. 

We do appreciate you listening. We have a spot for you to make a comment on our website for the episode, the webpage. Visit that. Give us a comment. Let us know what you like, what you might want covered. We really appreciate it. And I guess we’re gonna be seeing you next time because we’ve got more to talk about.

Gina
27:18
Thank you all. Bye. 

Melody
Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Dave
27:25
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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