Welcome to another episode of Around the Writer’s Table! While Melody is off dealing with a big move (ack!) Gina and I are diving back into the world of the Creativity Quest, a paradigm Gina has been shaping and exploring together with us. As always, this journey isn’t linear; it’s more like a dance, sometimes two steps forward, one step back.

In this episode, we’re focusing on the guidepost, “Inviting Authentic Existence,” which is the ‘I’ in the CREATIVITY acronym. If you’re new to this concept, you only need to know that each of the guideposts represent key aspects of our creative journey.

The “Inviting Authentic Existence” guidepost signifies a shift from inner exploration to a more outward engagement with our creative process. It’s about embracing your values, beliefs, and autonomy as a creator. Think of it as extending invitations to new ways of being creative, even if it feels like unfamiliar territory.

We’ll explore how reactions from others and self-reflection play a role in this stage, and what it means to feel “sovernty” in your authorial voice. So, stay tuned as we venture deeper into the Creativity Quest!

RESOURCES

• Story Camp women’s writing retreats
• KimBoo’s House of York on Ream:
• Gina’s HiSTORYtelling Hub on Ream
• Gina’s Quill on Substack
• Episode 19: Carrying Inner Disquiet
• Episode 20: Releasing
• Episode 22: Emulating and Mirroring
• Episode 25: Assessing and Acknowledging
• Episode 27: Taking Ownership 

Ep. 29: Creativity Quest: Inviting Authentic Existence

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.

KimBoo York
0:42
Hey, y’all. It’s KimBoo. And we are welcoming you back to Around the Writer’s Table. We’re at episode 29. 

Gina Hogan Edwards
What?

KimBoo
Yeah, I know, right? And we’re continuing with The Creativity Quest. We’re moving into a new phase on this one: Inviting Authentic Existence. So, Gina is going to be talking about that. But first, let me tell you that we are missing one of our members, Melody. 

Gina
Awww.

KimBoo
I know, right. Melody is actually in the middle of moving and she’s got a lot on her plate. And so we offered to just do a tandem one, just Gina and I doing this episode, so that she can have a little bit of the pressure off. Because moving is always fun. Not. So it’s just Gina and I for this particular episode, and we will try to hold it together without our other third musketeer to help us through the whole thing, but it’s gonna be an interesting one. I’m looking forward to it. 

Of course, as always, I’m KimBoo York. I am a romance novelist and former project manager. I help writers and solopreneurs, and writers who are solopreneurs, find time, mojo, and motivation to write using my skills with productivity and coaching. That’s me. And so the other host today is Gina.

Gina
2:03
Hi, KimBoo. I’m glad to be here. Thank you, listeners, for being here. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards. Oh, I’ve done a lot of things: editor, creativity coach, retreat leader. I’m a former WomanSpeak Circle Leader. But everything that I have done has been in support of women and finding their voices and leaning into their creativity.

KimBoo
2:27
And honestly, y’all as we’re recording this, it’s early-ish October. There is a Story Camp retreat coming up at the end of the month. It’s my first one. I’m so excited to attend, Gina. I really am. You’ve talked about these with me for years. It’s the first time I’m getting to go to one of your retreats. I am so excited. I just I can’t even…

Gina
2:48
I’m so excited. This is one of my favorite things to do are these retreats, and of course, during COVID, we weren’t able to do them. And I was not sure when COVID was over if we were gonna go back to doing them. But yes. We had one in May [2023]. It was fantastic. So we’re doing another one at the end of this month, and I can’t wait.

KimBoo
3:08
And you’ve got another one coming up in May [2024] after that, because you’re doing these pretty regularly. So I don’t know if there’s gonna be any spaces left, y’all listeners. You can’t sleep on this opportunity when it presents itself. So be sure to follow Gina on her website and on Substack and everywhere, so that you’ll be up-to-date when she’s got spaces free for this awesome retreat. 

So okay, enough about that. We’re moving on. As I said at the intro, we’re talking about The Creativity Quest, which is a kind of a paradigm I would say, Gina, that you’re developing and working on about the different phases. It’s not fully linear. There’s, if you’ve listened to previous episodes, you know that sometimes you repeat stages or phases you go through and then you have to repeat. And then you progress. It’s like two steps forward, one step back sometimes. Sometimes you blow through them all and life is great, but we are still moving through it. 

So Gina, I’m going to hand it over to you to kind of explain a little bit more about The Creativity Quest for first time listeners and get into this particular stage of it in Inviting Authentic Existence. What the heck does that mean?

Gina
4:13
Yeah, so I’ll just recap very briefly some of the… we started out calling them ‘stages’ and ‘phases,’ and you know, this paradigm is something that’s been under development ever since I really started analyzing myself in terms of creativity and what the experience of being a creative person is like and then working with clients as an editor and a coach and seeing the journeys that they were going through. And so as you said, it’s not linear; we repeat stages. So far, what we have talked about—and there are previous episodes on each one of these, so we can’t possibly go into every one of them in one episode. But we’ve talked about Carrying Inner Disquiet [Ep 19]. We’ve talked about Releasing [Ep. 20], and then Emulating and Mirroring [Ep. 22], Assessing and Acknowledging [Ep. 25]. And then the last episode was on Taking Ownership [Ep. 27]. And that brings us to Inviting Authentic Existence. And so I’m calling these now ‘guideposts’ rather than stages or phases. Yep.

KimBoo
5:20
You mentioned that last time. So, my bad. Guideposts.

Gina
5:23
Oh, no, that’s fine. That’s fine. We’re kind of, like I said, this is all sort of in refinement, I would say, as we talk about it. And it’s been really helpful for me to hear, as we’ve talked about each one of these guideposts, how you and Melody have experienced them. 

I am working on a book that my intern is helping me with. It’s going to be on each of these guideposts and on the creative quest as a whole. And so if you haven’t noticed yet, the stages that we’ve talked about, the guideposts that we’ve talked about, we’ve been, the first letter of each of these, actually, when we get done with all 10 stages is going to spell out the word ‘creativity.’ So we’ve done C R, E, A, T, and today we are on I, which is Inviting Authentic Existence. And what the heck does that mean, Gina? 

KimBoo
Yeah, Gina. What does that mean? 

Gina
So something that I’d like you to know about this stage is, it is one the, I hate to say the first five, because we don’t experience these linearly, but the ones that we’re discussing as the first five, C, R, E, A, T,, were primarily internal, lots of inner work going on with those. So when we move into this first I: Inviting Authentic Existence, we’re now starting to engage more outwardly in terms of our creative process. 

And there are aspects of this guidepost, which are going to show up in more depth in a future guidepost. So think about the word ‘inviting.’ You’re welcoming in. So you may not yet be ready to fully embrace all of these things that I’m talking about, but you are beginning to invite them in. 

So you’re beginning to have a better understanding and beginning to embrace your values and your belief systems and how those relate to your creative work. You’re starting to recognize that you have autonomy in your work, and you’re beginning to feel more sovereign in it. There’s still, you know, a little bit of unsureness. Is that a word? You’re still a little unsure. Uncertainty, yes. But there’s a willingness, there’s an openness to this sort of new way of being as a creative person. 

And it may feel, it may feel new, in a totally, a blank-canvas way to those of you who are just beginning your creative journey. But it may feel like a new phase in your development as a creative person if you’re revisiting this as someone who’s been a creator for a long time. But you’re beginning, you know, it kind of feels like a new place in a way, a place that you’ve never been before. So it’s kind of a little bit of a new world. 

There might be some new rules. There might be craft that you’ve never experienced before in terms of your knowledge and your skills that you’re putting to use. This is a little bit of unfamiliar territory. 

This is a place where you’re beginning to get reactions from others about your creative process, how you’re showing up in the world, and about this new way of being that you’re entering into. And keep that in mind. Keep that in the back of your mind for when we talk about the next guidepost in our future episode. Because that does feed into what happens when you experience that next guidepost. 

In terms of some of the inner work, there can be a little bit of celebration about where you are in this stage, as well as acceptance of consequences. And what I mean by that is, there’s still a lot of exploration going on. There’s still a lot of experimentation in terms of the craft itself. But there are also the possibility of those of you who are seeing you enter into this sort of newness, there may be a little bit of judgment around that. And again, that is going to take us into the next phase that we’ll talk about in a future episode. But this is kind of this setting the stage. 

So tell me KimBoo.

KimBoo
Oh, no.

Gina
Any of that resonate with you? As I was describing what this stage feels like, did it take you back to an experience that you had previously? or the beginning of your creative journey? What kind of rang true for you?

KimBoo
10:25
The word sovereign stuck out with me when you were talking, and having sovereignty over your writing style and your voice. And I don’t know if this is what you really meant by this, but what it, when I thought about that, it really made me think of the journey of finding my voice as an author, and being able to let go of trying to be something else, embracing who, what my voice really is as an author, as opposed to constantly striving to find that voice through Emulating and Mirroring, which we talked about in an earlier episode. So we’ll definitely have a link to that in our notes, because I think it’s an important one. 

But that’s what came up for me was the idea of sovereignty over my voice as an author and having, I don’t want to go so far as to say confidence, but having a certain groundedness.

Gina
Yes.

KimBoo
In saying, yes, this is my voice. Saying, no, this isn’t my voice. But also being able to say, this could improve my voice if I stretched outside of my comfort zone a little bit. And this is something I want to try and work on, as opposed to, I just need to try all the things and see what fits.

Gina
11:43
Yes. You landed on it. Exactly. Precisely. That’s exactly what I meant by sovereignty. And again, there’s still some uncertainty here. It’s not like you’ve arrived as a creative person. It’s not that yet.

KimBoo
Do we ever?

Gina
Yeah, really, do we ever? Because there’s plenty of more guideposts for us to travel through. You mentioned letting go of trying to be someone else, and what other people’s expectations are of you. There’s also, at this stage, hopefully, if we’re journeying through it in a positive way, a development of some resilience, because one thing that also comes up in this guidepost is the ability to let go of other people’s judgment.

KimBoo
12:37
Ooo.

Gina
12:40
And that’s something I think all of us struggle with at every phase of our creative journey. But this is the spot at which you recognize that in order to move forward, that that’s something that’s going to have to be let go of, is that concern over what other people think of your work. 

KimBoo
13:05
And this really, I know, this overlaps a little bit because this is about creative writing and not social media. But it does kind of overlap in the sense of being aware of the fact that you’re not going to make everybody happy. I think that’s one thing that a lot of newbie authors, and certainly something I went through, is if I just write something good enough that everybody will love it. And that will never happen. It’s just not the way humanity works. It’s not how we’re wired. And it’s just letting go of that and being able to say, Okay, I want to make the readers who want to read this happy. And I’m not going to worry about the people who don’t like it, or wanted me to write something else, or something like that. 

And that’s something that I’ve really had to learn on social media. Sometimes I’m going to say things and talk about things that other people don’t want me to talk about. Sometimes I’m going to write things and I’m going to write, especially with my genre, which is polyamorous romance. There’s some people who really hate that, like, hate it. Oh, well, I can’t, I can’t write for those people. That’s not what my voice is. That’s not the stories I want to tell.

Gina
14:07
And that’s where sovereignty steps in. 

KimBoo
Mm hmm. 

Gina
And the autonomy around your work as well. So I want to talk about what happens when things don’t go so well in this stage, and things that can cause us to have to step back and maybe repeat some of the guideposts and some of the learnings that we’ve already gone through once before, but we’re going to have to revisit them because we’re not quite ready to move completely through this guidepost yet. 

We talked about other people’s expectations. We talked about judgment from other people. So those are only two of the things that could go terribly wrong in this phase. So this is a guidepost at which we hope to start developing some resilience so that we can let go of those things. And if we’re unable to do that, there is the possibility that we may, creatively, hopefully temporarily, shut down. We may go back to the Carrying Inner Disquiet phase where we know we want to create. We have ideas. We have this impulse to put out into the world what it is that we want to create. But we shut down. We don’t do it. So that’s one place that we could loop back to.

Another place that we might go back to, and you actually alluded to this, KimBoo, in your elaboration of what this brought up for you, is that you might realize that you still have things to learn. Or the newness of this phase might just be a little bit too much. And you go back to the Emulating and Mirroring. So if you’ve got things to learn, you’re going to reach back to those mentors and say, Okay, what else do I need? What else is there in the toolbox that I can bring out that can help me continue on this journey? And then the newness of this particular Inviting Authentic Existence guidepost where that comes in, in terms of not navigating it well, is that the newness is overwhelming. The newness causes the judgment. People are like, Why are you being different than you’ve always been before? What is this new aspect of you? And so it can sometimes feel easier, then, to slip back into just emulating your mentors rather than being who you truly are, which is where the authentic existence part really comes in. 

And then finally, another guidepost that you might slip back into if things are not going well in inviting your authentic existence is the Assessing and Acknowledging stage. Perhaps your evaluation of where you are, and what it is that you want to do, are not completely in alignment with either your values or your skill set. And you need to go back and really take a close look at where are you in this journey? And where is it that you want to go next? What is it that you need to do next? 

So those are some of the things that can happen when this guidepost is not necessarily going so well.

KimBoo
17:41
Yeah, yeah. The last one really resonated with me, because sometimes when—and it’s happened multiple times where I’ve gotten that feeling of misalignment of what I’m trying to do versus what I think other people, what other people tell me I should do. And that sends me back to that assessing the level of, Well, what am I really here for? And so that can sometimes affect my growth as an author because that misalignment makes me unhappy. And then I’m back to Carrying Inner Disquiet. And, uh, yeah.

Gina
18:18
I think it’s also important for us to note that at any given time, we’re not the same person that we used to be. And so even when we have expectations for ourselves, if we don’t take a step back, and assess where we are, and reevaluate: am I still going in the direction that I intended? Or does that direction need to change because now I have a whole new skill set? or because I just have different priorities than I used to in my life for all kinds of different reasons? 

And that’s related to something that we talked about a little bit in a previous episode was, we can exist in more than one guidepost at a time. And early on in our discussions about The Creativity Quest, it was hard to get that concept across until we had a little bit of history of what each of the guideposts are about so that you can get this picture of: okay, Assessing and Acknowledging, that’s actually something that I need to dip into periodically. And so I may be in a truly robust productivity stage later on in my journey, and yet, I’m still going to assess and acknowledge, where is it that I am, and am I going in the place that I want to go? Am I focusing on the things that I want to focus on? 

And so being able to have our, not just our feet in two places, but every part of us in different places. An arm here and a leg there, an ear there. We can do that. It’s possible. And that’s why this is not linear. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about sometimes and to help creatives get an image of what this journey looks like.

KimBoo
20:14
When you’re talking, I’m really missing Melody right now. 

Gina
Yes. 

KimBoo
Because that’s what she says a lot about the seasons of writing with her  Soul of the Seasons, and her plant spirit medicine, of the five seasons that we move through. It’s like, not only do you move through the five seasons, physically in reality, but you also exist in all five seasons, in different ways and in different parts of your life. And that’s one of the things I really liked about The Creativity Quest when we first started talking about it, because so many of the creativity guides out there—and I’m gonna try to slam anybody—but I know that a lot of them try to make it very linear. And I think that’s a comfort zone for a lot of us because we feel like well, if we just, if we graduate from grade two then we get to go to grade three, and then we get to go to grade, and then eventually we graduate. 

Yeah, but something like this is just cyclical and multimodal in the sense of being in different guideposts, experiencing and going through different guideposts at the same time, and so I was just really reflecting on that, because it does resonate so well with the seasons and how we experience those and why I think The Creativity Quest is such a great paradigm. Ever since you started talking about it, I was just like, yeah, we need this in the community, because I think people get really wrapped up in that hierarchical moving through the stages, and then eventually, we get to be great, and it’s all over and we graduate. We get the certificate. We’re real writers.

Gina
21:43
I think there’s just a natural inclination for us to want a how-to.

KimBoo
Yeah.

Gina
Yeah, here it is. You do one. Then you do two. Then you do three. Then you do four. And this is where it will lead you. And it would be fabulous if it were that simple and that clearcut. But that is not what the creative process is. And quite frankly, that’s one of the things that I love about it. Because there’s always the opportunity for continual growth. You know, we are always in—I guess I shouldn’t say we are always. I am always in the learning mode when it comes to my creativity.

KimBoo
22:27
So I’m going to throw the question back at you on, when you were talking about this, in your own personal growth as a writer, what are your experiences with this particular guidepost, good or bad?

Gina
22:41
Honestly, it’s interesting, the timing of us recording this particular podcast and where I am in my creative journey. I’ve been at this guidepost before. What happens though when we are going through… you know, you mentioned cyclical. So I’ve been through this before, but when I come back to it, yes, I’m a different person. And, yes, hopefully—and this is what is happening for me—I have got increased skills. I have got a greater awareness of the things that are important to me, not only in my creative work, but in my life and how I bring those other aspects of my life to my creative work. And so I feel like I’m, you know, I’m riding the slinky, but I’m riding it upward.

KimBoo
23:39
Oof, that just sounds hard.

Gina
23:45
What we hope doesn’t happen is, you know, when you’re standing on the stairs, and you take the slinky and you collapse it and drop it down the steps, and it goes over and over and over and over and down. That’s not exactly the way we want to experience the creative journey. We hope that’s not that hectic.

KimBoo
24:05
Thumping down the stairwell. Do we crash at the bottom? I admit, I’ve felt that way sometimes.

Gina
24:13
Admittedly, so have I. And it’s a hard land at the bottom of those steps. But hopefully we gather ourselves back up. And so what I meant by riding upward on the spiral of the slinky—and maybe the slinky wasn’t the best analogy—but I do feel like I’ve arrived at the stage at a better version of myself. Let’s say that.

KimBoo
24:35
Uhm hm. Because you’ve got Dancing at The Orange Peel, which you’ve started serializing on Ream, and you’ve got an annotated version on Ream as well, which is super awesome, if people want to check that out. I highly recommend it. But it does seem to me that you’re having to revisit. This has been a long project for you.

Gina
Very long.

KimBoo
Yeah. And you’ve had to revisit a lot of the early work that you’ve done. And now you’re talking about how, at this point of Inviting Authentic Existence into that particular story, how has that changed?

Gina
25:14
Well, I was reading chapter four yesterday. And I was like, that’s not bad. Okay, that’s not bad. Now, the original version of this was written probably, I don’t know, 18 years ago. 

KimBoo
Holy moly

Gina
Oh, yeah. And of course, it’s been through multiple revisions. Because, you know, as writers, we tend to revise and revise and revise the beginning of something a whole lot more than we do the rest of the book. So it’s been through quite a few revisions. But there are things that I can see in it now that I would have just never been able to see in a previous stage. And that’s craft and skill accumulation, of course, but also just feeling more… the right word? Grounded and confident. You mentioned confident earlier. Yeah, there’s a new level of confidence. For me, even though this is a revisitation of where I’ve been before, I’m still not ready to fully, completely embrace all aspects of what I’m doing. But I’m certainly, there’s this opening. There’s this entryway into going: Yeah, I did that. And I’m proud of it.

KimBoo
26:33
As you should be, because I think it’s an amazing story. I’m loving it a lot. 

Gina
Thank you. I’m having a lot of fun with it. That’s one thing I can say, which is also a new level of understanding about myself is knowing what lights me up creatively.

KimBoo
26:50
You were talking a little bit earlier about stepping out of your zone, and people being critical of that. It’s actually a fear of mine. Because as I move in, now, I’ve got a couple of stories ongoing with my subscription on Ream. But my back catalog is a very specific type of romance story, right? And I’ve kind of drifted away from that. I still love that particular genre. But that’s not my brand anymore. So I admit, I’m a little worried about how people who’ve known me and my writing in the past will think of this new direction that I’m taking with my writing. It’s a little worrying to me. So I admit I’m still affected by the idea of how people are going to judge that. And not just new readers, readers who’ve been with me for a while and are seeing how I’m doing things differently now.

Gina
27:50
So you definitely got a foot in this guidepost?

KimBoo
27:53
Yeah, very much so. That’s why we were talking about I was like, oh, yeah, this hits about four or five things I’m dealing with right now. I feel confident. It’s kind of like what you were talking about with Dancing at The Orange Peel, the chapter you were reading about. You can see why you made the decisions you did, and you still feel confident about that writing, but you’re looking at it through new eyes. And so for me, looking at the arc of the stories that I want to write, and here’s a certain level of confidence there. I’m not going to back off just because I know some people aren’t going to like what I’m writing now. But it does open up the door a little bit to that insecurity.

Gina
28:30
Yeah.

KimBoo
28:32
Yeah.

Gina
28:34
We got this girl.

KimBoo
28:36
I hope so. I hope so.

Gina
28:38
We do. We do. Yeah, one of the things that can help us with that are some of the things that we’ll talk about in our next episode that Melody is going to inform us about.

KimBoo
28:48
Why don’t you just talk about that a little bit? What is she going to be talking about? I’m sure she’s gonna be really excited to listen to this episode and find out what she’s going to be talking about.

Gina
29:00
Yes. So when we first decided that we were going to talk about The Creativity Quest, we sat down with Melody and kind of compared, okay, this guideposts sort of relates to this season in a way. And so what we’ve been doing is an episode on the guidepost and then follow that up with an episode where Melody fills us in on how that guideposts relates to the five seasons of the writing process. And according to my notes from her, she says that it is Spring, but that there are also aspects of all seasons within this guidepost. 

KimBoo
Oh, interesting.

Gina
And we’re just gonna have to let her elaborate on that next time.

KimBoo
29:40
What did you mean? Yeah, we miss you, Melody. We’re looking forward to having you come back and explain all that to us for sure. So I think, also, you said you’re going to be having a worksheet, because you’ve been doing a worksheet for every stage of The Creativity Quest, so there’s gonna be one for this one as well. Right? 

Gina
Yes. Sure will. 

KimBoo
So that’ll be available at our website for listeners to download at our website. As Gina always reminds me, we should actually say what the website is. So that’s WWW dot Around the Writers Table.com. that’s all one word. We have pages, links for every episode where you can download the worksheets. We also get around to doing transcripts for every episode there, so you can access that. And of course, this episode will be available on all major podcasting apps. I think that’s pretty much it. You got anything to add?

Gina
30:32
Just, if you’re listening in, which obviously you are, if you’ll leave us a review, or click the heart button, or whatever it is that your platform that you listen on allows you to do, then that’s a tremendous help. Share our link with folks. We love having these conversations so that we can support you on whatever your version of the creative journey is.

KimBoo
31:00
And it is a journey, and we appreciate you listeners going on the journey with us. We will be back again with our third musketeer in tow. And we look forward to moving further along the journey with you. So thank you very much for joining us, y’all. And we will talk to you soon.

Gina
31:17
Bye, everyone.

Dave
31:21
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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