In this episode, Gina, Melody, and KimBoo explore a pivotal stage in Gina’s “Creativity Quest” approach to writing, focusing on the theme of “Trusting the Process.” This stage challenges writers to decide whether to persevere or give up when faced with obstacles.

Gina shares the apocryphal story of R.U. Darby and his quest for gold, illustrating the importance of resilience and persistence in creative endeavors. KimBoo reflects on her own experiences of trusting the process, emphasizing the value of realizing that storytelling itself is her ultimate goal. Melody adds insights about taking breaks and reevaluating goals during challenging times.

Together, they delve into the deeper meaning of success in writing beyond tangible outcomes, highlighting the journey of self-discovery and growth that accompanies the creative process. Tune in to the next episode for a discussion on the seasons of writing and their connection to this critical stage in the creative journey.

RESOURCES

Ep. 38: Creativity Quest: Trusting the Process

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
0:43
Welcome back listeners to Around the Writer’s Table. This is KimBoo York. We are starting Episode 38. Getting back into The Creativity Quest with Gina Hogan Edwards. And also, of course, I’m here with Melody, A Scout. 

I am, just in case you don’t know, I am a romance novelist and former project manager who helps writers and solopreneurs find time and motivation to create. I also run the 1 Million Words membership community for writers, for accountability and productivity. Just kind of new and I’m really excited about how that’s shaping up. So you’ll probably hear me talking about that again. 

But, good morning, Miss Melody. Tell me what, who are you again? And why are you there? You’ve been busy a lot lately. You’ve had a lot going on with Spring, right?

Melody, A Scout
1:29
Yeah. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. My name is Melody, A Scout. And yes, I am a landscape designer and all around plant person. And this is a very busy time of year for me. So that’s been going on with me, 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. We have those links on our website where you can either order the book or check out my blogs. And I’m also, as I mentioned earlier, I’m a landscape designer. And I love anything to do with plants. So, welcome.

KimBoo
2:17
And you really do, like, she’s the plant person. I’m the plant murderer. But everybody has to have their role in the great circle of life. Speaking of, Gina. Good morning, how are you doing?

Gina Hogan Edwards
2:29
Good morning, ladies. Good morning, listeners. It’s wonderful to be here. And there’s also something that Melody and I share in common, which is that we are both working on historical fiction novels. So yeah, yeah. So I’m a writer, I support women in finding their voices, getting their stories out. I facilitate writing retreats on the beautiful island of St. George in the Gulf of Mexico. Got one of those coming up in May. I have a Facebook group called Women Writing for Change.

KimBoo
3:04
And that’s four years old now. We just went through that anniversary, didn’t we?

Gina
3:09
Just had a birthday and hit 500 members, which blows my mind.

KimBoo
3:14
That blows my mind, too. Man, I can’t get over that. You’re doing such a great job with it.

Melody
3:20
So I want to encourage our listeners to click on that, click on that Facebook link. And we’ll have it on the Around the Writer’s Table, link as well, because it’s a great tool. We have creative writing sessions scheduled every week. And it’s a great accountability tool to get you into the writing groove. 

KimBoo
3:42
Yeah, that’s a great community, Gina. 

Gina
Thank you, ladies.

KimBoo
You’ve done a good job building that up. It has been a real inspiration for me as I work on the 1 Million Words Club. So, thank you there, too. But it looks like we are back around to The Creativity Quest. And I know that we were talking about this as ‘Three Feet from Gold,’ which, when, the first time you said that to me, a long time ago now, but the first time you said that, you had to explain it to me because I was just like, what? What does that even mean? 

So, I know you’re gonna back up a little bit and go over The Creativity Quest for listeners who are not familiar with it yet. But I, for one, I’m really looking forward to hearing more you have to say about three feet from gold. So take us there, Miss Gina. Take us away.

Gina
4:21
The Creativity Quest is a model that I created based on my own experience as a writer, and based on the writers that I have worked with over the years as an editor and a creativity coach, and kind of how we experience the process of creativity and the creative journey. So I just wanted to recap, especially for new listeners, the stages of that quest that we have already talked about on our podcast and reference the podcast episodes so you can go back and listen to those if you haven’t already. 

We started out with an introduction to the quest, kind of an overview back in episode 18. And then we dove into what I’m going to call the ‘first’ stage, but as I emphasize in every episode when we talk about this, this journey is not linear. It is not sequential. It is not cyclical. It is a reiterative process. We may skip stages. You, as a creative, may not experience them in exactly the order that I talk about them in. But it is a model for looking at the way that we experience the process and the different alternatives for where we may jump from one stage to the other. 

So, the first stage—and you’ll see that each of these stages, the first letter, spells out the word CREATIVITY—so, ‘C’ is Carrying Inner Disquiet. We talked about that in episode 19. 

And then we went into ‘R’: Releasing, which we started in that episode not only about talking about the stage and what that stage means but we did a second episode which we relate to Melody’s book, Soul of the Seasons, and how we experience the seasons of our lives, the seasons of the process of writing, in relationship to this model. And so there were two episodes on Releasing, 20 and 21. And that is all about releasing the resistance and the barriers that hold us back.

‘E’ is Emulating and Mirroring. That’s a muscle-building stage where we are looking to our mentors. We talked about that in episodes 22 and 23. 

And then we did an episode—I think it was summertime and we did a bonus episode on something in 24—but in 25 and 26, we talked about Assessing and Acknowledging, which is looking at where we are, what we’ve learned, what we still have to learn, what’s still ahead for us. 

And then we went to ‘T’, which is the first T, obviously, called Taking Ownership, which is all about inviting in the divergence from our mentors and greater mastery. We talked about that in episodes 27 and 28. 

Then we were at ‘I’, which is Inviting Authentic Existence, which is opening up to all of the new world that we’ve created with this living the life as a creative person, and an acceptance of all of the consequences of really living into our authentic existence. We talked about that first in episode 29. And then again, we had a little bump with some bonus episodes in there. And we skipped to 32 and 33. So Inviting Authentic Existence was episodes 29, 32, and 33. 

And then ‘V’ is Verifying and Testing. That’s where we’re testing our skills, testing our supporters, our allegiances, our allies. We talked about that in episodes 34 and 35. 

And then the most recent stage that we talked about is Integrating and Dedicating. We talked about that in episodes 36 and 37. And that’s all about wearing the creative identity, all about really living into it fully, taking off the masks, integrating the creative part of our lives into our day-to-day existence. 

That brings us, ladies, to today’s topic, which is Three Feet from Gold. I am also calling this Trusting the Process for our ‘T’, And you’ll understand why as I talk a little bit about what the Three Feet From Gold story is about and how we live into that. 

This stage is inspired by the story that Napoleon Hill is credited with, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other people who have talked about this story. But I’m going to kind of paraphrase to you the way that he told the story. 

So, there’s always this idea wherever we are in the journey that we can keep plugging away, that we can keep moving on, or we can give up. And so this story of three feet from gold kind of exemplifies that.

There was this dude named R.U. Darby. And his uncle was really caught up in the gold fever and the Gold Rush days, and so he decided that he was going to go west, and he was going to dig himself a vein of gold, and he was going to get rich. Right? So he went out west. He spent weeks and weeks of finding the land, staking a claim, and going to work with a pick and a shovel. You know, really doing the hard work, but his lust for the gold, if you will, was greater than his resistance to doing the hard work. So weeks and weeks of labor, he finally found this vein of gold. 

But he discovered that he was not going to be able to use the pick and shovel, that he was going to need some machinery to be able to get that ore to the surface. And so he covered up his mind, so nobody else would find it. And he went back to Maryland, told his relatives about the challenge that he was facing. Ask them and his neighbors for some help, because he had struck gold, but he needed their help to get to the next step. And so they all got together the money that he needed for the machinery. They got the machinery out there. And so Darby and his uncle went to work on this mine again.

They mined the first car. They shipped it to the smelter. They realized that they had found one of the richest mines in Colorado. They did a few more cars of the ore, and were able to get completely out of debt, pay off their family and their friends, this machinery that they had helped them purchase in order to mine this ore, and they just knew that they were going to make a killing. Right? 

And so the drills went down, and they kept mining the ore, they kept filling the cars, and then all of a sudden, the vein disappeared. They couldn’t find any more gold. They felt like they come to the end of the pot of gold, you know. It was no longer there. 

They kept drilling, just trying to pick up that vein again, they did weeks and weeks and weeks of that and had no success. And so they finally decided to quit. 

So they sold this piece of machinery to a junk man. Okay, sold it for a few hundred dollars. They had already paid off the debt. So it was just a matter of no more riches, took the train back home to Maryland. 

Okay, now that junk man was not a dumb junk man. He called in a mining engineer. He knew where that mining cave was that they had been digging. So he called in a mining engineer to look at that mine and to do some calculating. And that engineer told him that even though Darby and his uncle thought the project had failed, they had been unfamiliar with what are called fault lines. And so his calculations showed that the vein of gold could be found only three feet from where they had stopped drilling. 

So the junk man jumped into action, and that is exactly where he found the vein of gold. And he ended up with millions of dollars in ore. And so, Darby and his uncle, of course, realized that they gave up the ghost too quickly. And so when I call this stage Three Feet From Gold, this exemplifies the toughest stage when we face the most challenges ever, and we have to make that decision: are we going to keep at this creative journey? Are we going to keep plugging away at being a creative person? Or are we going to walk away? 

Now I use the words’ plugging away.’ There’s a masculine and a feminine approach to this stage. And the masculine one is the one we hear terms like “Keep plugging away,” “Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” and that sets up this winner-loser opposition, right?

KimBoo
13:59
Zero sum game, yeah.

Gina
14:00
Exactly. And so I prefer and I’m renaming the stage. This is the official renaming of this stage to Trusting the Process. Also gives us the ‘T’ in creativity that second T, but it is a, I think, a less . . . like you said, there’s no zero sum game here. It is leaning into this choice that we have of continuing on this creative journey.

KimBoo
14:30
That’s a tough one, I hear a lot of authors talking, especially these days—this is, as we record this, this is March 2024. And 2023 was a rough year for a lot of professional authors. And so, actually, I’ve talked to a lot of them who are facing that right now, because they didn’t make a lot of money. Some of them are having to face getting back to day jobs, are relying on their spouses to pay the bills. And so there’s a lot of talk: is it worth it? why are you really in the game? Like, are you in the game to make a lot of gold? Are you in the game to tell the stories? Are you in the game to, why are you here? And so this is very timely, at least for a lot of the chatter that I’m hearing out there in the professional author-writer community.

Gina
15:12
I think a lot of writers—one of the positive things that came out of COVID was that it gave a lot of creative people time to create. And when we started getting back to—eh, you know, you can’t really say getting back to our normal, you can’t say getting back to our old world. But when COVID ended. That, even though it’s not over either.

KimBoo
15:39
The lockdown ended.

Gina
15:42
And we had to go back to some sense of normality, or whatever you want to call it, that authors did face that decision. Okay, they may have invested two full years into writing full-time because they could, and they couldn’t go back to their regular jobs, and then in 2023, we’re faced with, do I go back to that? Or do I keep up this momentum that I’ve created? So it has been. 2023 was definitely a hard year for a lot of writers. 

KimBoo
Yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m hearing. 

Gina
I’d love to know, if you all have examples in your own life, or maybe the clients that you’ve worked with, in your capacity of supporting writers and creative people, if there are some examples that you can give us of a time when you either witnessed or experienced yourself being Three Feet From Gold, and how . . . so, three qualities that I feel like writers really need in this stage are trust, of course, and then resilience and persistence. And so you kind of think of it in terms of when you had to call on those characteristics and how that went for you. Melody, what about you?

Melody
17:00
As you were talking, I was thinking of not only two different examples, but two different ways that I could look at my experiences of being Three Feet From Gold, what the actual gold was. The first one, of course, is my book, Soul of the Seasons. It was a very long, challenging process. The subject material was deep. It worked me as I worked it. I remember coming down to the final revision suggestions that Gina sent back to me as my editor. And then I had some, in my head, some unkind thoughts and said some bad words in my head about all of Gina’s suggestions. Crap!

KimBoo
17:59
The true experience of being edited.

Melody
18:04
And, as you know, she’s got great wisdom. “Take a break, come back to it. Go in, get it done, get out. Don’t overthink it, just do it.” That was really helpful. It wasn’t nearly as challenging as I had imagined it to be. And helped me push through that last. 

Many times I thought during the process really? really? do more now? Seriously? But I am so glad I did that because it was a better product. I felt happier about the work. It helped. Her encouragement and my sense of duty and her engaging me in accountability helped push me through and complete that. 

Now, when I first started my writing in earnest back in probably 2000, I was starting another novel loosely based on my own personal history. It was semi-autobiographical, I got 350 pages into it. My writing group was kind and helpful. But I sent the first chapter off to another friend of mine who was a writer, and she came back with the critique that it’s too depressing. 

KimBoo
19:40
Oh, what? Okay. 

Melody
19:43
Which was hard to hear, but as I took a moment, I realized she was right about it, and that I never had a clear ending point for this story. But the goal that I saw—I never finished it—but the goal that I harvested out of it was my writing improved. I got some real clarity about it. Yeah, this is not really a subject I want to take any further, at least not right now. But I really gained a lot of valuable experience and wisdom in the writing process by doing it. So I kept a hard copy of it, just to remind me of that.

Gina
20:28
Good, awesome.

KimBoo
20:29
Yeah, good.

Gina
20:31
Terrific. So you raise a wonderful point in using the book-writing process. When I talk about three feet from gold and trusting the process, it’s easy to jump first to the conclusion of, Do I continue this? Or do I stop? Do I keep being a writer? Or do I go back to a day job and do something else? So that’s the most dramatic example of the stage. But I feel like, a lot like the early stage of Releasing, this is one of those stages that keeps coming up again and again and again, as we go through various phases of our creative existence. And it sort of overlays everything else, because you can, it is necessary for us to trust the process, even if we’re just moving from one project to another, and trusting that that next project is what we should be focusing on.

KimBoo
21:33
I also think that Melody brings up a really good point is that gold isn’t just gold. Gold is the experience, trusting the process of writing something, even if it never does get published, trusting the process of what you’re going through, as part of the process, not necessarily is how much money is in the bank. So I thought, Melody, that was a really good example of it, because you were trusting the process and learned from it. And you took gold out of it, even though you never went further with that particular project. So that was a good insight for me to have.

Gina
22:08
Thank you for pointing that out, because, again, the name change from Three Feet from Gold to Trusting the Process represents that emphasis on the feminine, that it isn’t about . . .  I do not believe that the writing process, that the existence of being a writer, is about creating some end product. Yes, of course, we want to finish a book or finish whatever it is that we’re working on as our writing project, and have that tangible result, but embracing the process is mandatory in order for us to ever even get to that stage of having a finished product. But with the emphasis on the product robs the richness of the experience.

KimBoo
23:05
Yes. Yes.

Melody
23:08
Absolutely.

KimBoo
23:09
I agree with that so much.

Gina
23:11
KimBoo., what about you? What kind of experience have you had of being three feet from gold? 

KimBoo
Or trusting the process? 

Gina
Or mining some nugget?

KimBoo
23:25
Ah, I think mine is more an example of how this is something that happens repeatedly throughout your career. A while back on my blog, The Scriptorium, I actually posted about, I think, the three times I quit writing. 

Gina
Yes. Yes. Perfect example.

KimBoo
And, yes, a lot of it was because I, in those instances, it’s just getting back to it, it was because I wasn’t doing what Melody was doing. And I was looking at the end product as the goal rather than as the experiences of writing the stories and telling the stories that I want to write. So for me, three feet from gold has been, trusting the process, however we want to define that, has been coming around to finding the real reason I’m in it. 

My goal is storytelling, and whether—and yes, I would like to make money doing that, I would like to do that full-time and do that—the goal is and always has been, whether I admit it or not, or acknowledge it or not, or trust it or not, to tell the stories that I want to tell. And so I’ve gotten wrapped up in genre-hunting and niching-down and rapid-release and subscriptions and all these things about making money, and I have to remember that the whole point of that, the whole point of any of it for me, for my gold, is to tell the stories that are like verbling up in my heart and my heart and my mind. 

That’s kind of my experience with Trusting the Process is a constant, constant reiteration of it is me remembering why the hell I’m doing this in the first place. Okay? My gold is storytelling. I’ve stopped plenty of times, not telling the stories because of other things, or lacking fake confidence in myself or lacking, you know, thinking that no one will ever buy the book. Like that’s not—that’s important, but it’s not why I’m in it. So I feel like I’m rambling.

Gina
25:32
You’re not rambling at all.

Melody
25:34
Well, and the other part I wanted to bring in about this was stopping or what seems like stopping the process really isn’t stopping necessarily three feet from gold. Sometimes, you just need to take a break.

KimBoo
25:52
Three feet from gold, so you can get back to mining for more than an extra three feet because you . . .  

Melody
25:59
Well, yes. And KimBoo, you described on a previous podcast how you did that, because you had to rethink a whole storyline and changed the main character and who she was. Then you could move forward with that story.

Gina
26:16
Your discussion of storytelling and your why I’m going to put a big footnote on that, because in our next episode, we’re going to be talking a little bit more with Melody, about the seasons of writing and how that relates to this particular stage. And so one of the things that I’m going to add to that conversation has to do with what you’re talking about the why. 

One example that I wanted to share with you about three feet from gold before we wrap up here. This is a heartbreaker for me, because this happened to a person that I love very much. And she unfortunately is no longer with us. She passed away a couple years ago, but she was a brilliant writer, extremely creative, could write sort of like fantasy. I don’t want to say monsters, but unusual characters, things that I could never possibly imagine. And she went to a number of conferences and retreats and worked on several different books over the years. And she had drafted a book and went to a conference and had the opportunity to pitch it to some agents. Some conferences, you can pay extra to do that, or sometimes it’s even included, but she pitched it to an agent. The agent loved it and was willing to take her on if she would rewrite this one section. She spent years, theoretically, rewriting that one section and never resubmitted it to the agent.

KimBoo
28:06
Oh, no. What the heck?

Gina
28:10
And oh, I mean, those of us who were her friends and supporters were just heartbroken to see how she could not get out of that. She couldn’t trust the process enough to follow through. And she was fearful, obviously, and she effectively gave up by just spinning her wheels. And so that is the most dramatic example of three feet from gold to me. And, you know, I don’t want to end our podcast on that sad note. But that’s the most top of mind example for me. 

As I mentioned earlier, in our next episode, we’re going to be talking more about this stage in relation to the seasons of the writing with Melody. And so just want to remind you all that we will have a worksheet on our website AroundTheWritersTable.com, that we have a place there where you can comment on the episode. You can also listen to these episodes on Apple, Google Play. Where else, KimBoo?

KimBoo
29:20
We’re on all the major podcast distributors including, as you said, Apple podcasts, Spotify. Google podcasts isn’t anymore. YouTube, we do put the episodes up on YouTube. 

Gina
Yes, you’re right. I knew I was forgetting one.

KimBoo
That’s a new one, but wherever you listen to podcasts, you should be able to to catch ours and yes, we will have links. We have the worksheets. We do get to posting to transcripts. So please visit our site. We do have that contact form there where people can submit their own questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you. 

But I’m looking forward to the next episode, Gina. Just a quick wrap up on you. That’s a little depressing story about your friend, but I think that’s a warning sign. That’s what we risk by not trusting the process and stopping completely rather than just taking a rest. So, I think it’s important for our listeners to hear the good and the bad sometimes. And that’s definitely a situation that didn’t go right for that particular author and I’m sorry to hear, too. 

But we’ll be talking about that with the next episode, which would be episode 39. And, Melody, you will be telling us more about  Soul of the Seasons and the five seasons, plant spirit medicine as it relates to The Creativity Quest. So personally, I’m really looking forward to it. 

Yeah, so that’s it for this time, y’all. Thank you so much. We survived technical difficulties in the strange noises outside and barking dogs and I don’t know what else, but we did it.

Gina
And downed trees.

KimBoo
For listeners, you don’t know what’s going on at her house.

Melody
I heard.

KimBoo
Yep, yep. Thank you so much. We’ll catch you next time.

Melody
31:12
Bye, bye.

Gina
31:13
Bye.

Dave
31:15
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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