Welcome to episode 42 of the Around the Writer’s Table podcast where we discuss the 10th and final stage of Gina’s Creativity Quest guideposts for writers: Yielding to Mastery.

What does mastery look like for writers? It’s not about perfection, or even publication, but about defining success for yourself. We discuss the importance of setting your own goals and defining what mastery means to you.

The episode explores the idea of writing as a lifelong journey, where mastery is not a destination, but an ongoing process of growth and self-discovery. We also touch on the relationship between mastery and confidence, and how both can be cultivated through consistent practice and self-awareness. Join us as we share our personal experiences and insights on this final stage of the creative quest, and encourage you to embrace your own unique path to mastery!

RESOURCES

Ep. 42: Creativity Quest: Yielding to Mastery

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
Welcome back, listeners. This is KimBoo York here with the Around the Writer’s Table podcast. We are on Episode 42, which always boggles my mind whenever I talk about what episode we’re on. We do this for a while y’all and today is the start of an amazing turning point for us. We are at the end of the creative quest guideposts series. And Gina is looking very mixed feelings about that as I look at her as we’re recording this, but we will be getting onto that. This particular guidepost is called Yielding to Mastery. It’s going to be very interesting, and we’re going to talk a lot about it. 

But first, for new listeners or maybe for people with bad memories like me, I am KimBoo York. I am a novelist and productivity coach for authors. I love writing, talking about writing, and helping other writers write. I also run the 1 Million Words Club, which is a membership community for authors focused on accountability, support, and encouragement. And that is me. 

And of course, I’m here with my co-hosts. Let’s go over to Melody, A Scout. Go ahead and tell the listeners who you are, my friend.

Melody, A Scout
1:53
Welcome back, listeners. 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: Creating Balance, Resilience, and Connection by Tapping the Wisdom of the Natural World, available at most major online bookstores.

KimBoo
2:21
And you’re also working on a historical fiction novel, right?

Melody
2:24
Yeah. Yes, ma’am. Thank you for the reminder. 

KimBoo
2:28
We all have to remind each other of these things. It’s wild. We’re speaking of, Gina, historical fiction author, star of the show. Tell everybody about yourself, a little bit. Then we’ll get into the topic.

Gina Hogan Edwards
2:40
Hi, ladies. It’s always great to be here. And welcome, listeners. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards, and yes, I’m working on a historical fiction novel, well into it. It’s one of those things that has been in my heart for a long time, and these characters will not leave me alone. So eventually, it’s gonna get done. 

I am also a creativity coach and editor. Using that background, I host women’s writing retreats called Story Camp, which I’m getting ready to depart for one of those in two weeks and have another one this fall. One of my most favorite things to do in the world. And so really, my overall mission is just to create safe space for women so that they can get words on the page.

KimBoo
3:24
And having been to Story Camp myself, let me just say, I’m extremely jealous that I am not joining you on this particular one, because they’re great, fantastic experiences. So, go have fun. Darnit, just go.

Melody
3:39
I can second that, having been to a couple of Story Camps, it does not disappoint. Any of our listeners or writer friends out there, I would say look for Gina’s retreats in the future, because you will come away a changed person and a changed writer.

KimBoo
4:00
That’s so true. That’s so true. And we’re focusing back on Gina’s wisdom with this episode, Yielding to Mastery, which is the very final or in the process. It’s not the final, you’ll get into that. But it is the final one that we will be covering on this podcast, Yielding to Mastery. So, Gina, I know you’re probably gonna go do a little bit of an overview of the creative quest and then get us into the topic. So I’m excited about hearing about this one. 

Gina
4:31
Yes. So we have already in past episodes talked about the 10 stages of developing, reclaiming your creative voice in the creative journey, and I call this The Creativity Quest. We talked about the [previous] nine stages, and then after each one of those episodes, we talked about that stage in terms of the writing process, framing it through the perspective of Melody’s book Soul of the Seasons and the natural seasons of the writing process. 

So we’ve talked about—I won’t go through every single one of these stages since they’re covered deeply in past episodes, but we’ll have a list in our show notes, so that you can easily link back to those past episodes. But each one of the stages, the first letter spells out the word CREATIVITY. So we’re now at Y, the tenth stage. Hard to believe.

As I’ve talked about, and taught, the stages, they’ve transformed somewhat. I’ve refined them based on both my experience and the experience of my clients. And in some cases, I’ve even renamed them, as some of the past listeners will know. So this stage, I called in the past, Your Essence Expressed, because I felt like it was a stage at which we really come into our voice. And that is true. But I am now calling this stage Yielding to Mastery, for several different reasons. I had someone ask me, don’t you mean wielding mastery? And I’m like, no. 

So ‘wielding,’ if you look that up in the dictionary, has a very masculine type of definition. It’s about exerting, commanding, handling, wrangling, that sort of thing. And I don’t think that we really can do that in an effective way with this process that we call writing, I think it needs a little more gentleness sometimes. And so, yielding is about having some flexibility to lean into, is kind of how I look at it. 

The word ‘mastery’ is an interesting one that people sometimes have a little bit of trouble with, because it’s often equated with expertise and knowledge. The point that I want to get across about this phase is that, sure, mastery can be you stepping into what you consider to be a mastery of the skill of writing, if you want to look at it that way, mastery of the process. But the thing about it is that you get to define what mastery means.

A conversation that I often have with writers is also about success, because mastery is often equated with success. And you as the writer, get to define what success means for you. I work with writers who their intention is to use journaling to get to know themselves better; they have no intention to publish. They have no intention to share their writing with anyone. It is a process of self development and self fulfillment. I’ve worked with other writers who intended to self-publish or who were submitting their books to agents and wanted to traditionally publish. And so the picture of what success or mastery looks like to you is in your command. It is what you decide that it’s going to be.

We meet different levels of mastery throughout the creative process. So in the short-term, mastery might look like finishing that novel. And finishing might look like writing The End. Or it might look like seeing the thumbnail because you’ve posted it on Amazon for sale. You get to decide what that focus point, what that level of mastery looks like. And so Yielding to Mastery is a very gentle process, I think.

Of course, we aspire to expertise. We aspire to success. But one of the things that I love most about the writing process is that there really is no endpoint. Unless of course you decide I’m gonna write one novel, and then I’m done. Of course, that would be considered an endpoint. But if you incorporate writing into your life on a regular basis, there’s always something else that we can do different. There’s always something else we can learn. Always something else we can do better. Always another genre we can write in. Always another different type of writing that we can do or a different kind of writing experience we can have at a conference or retreat. 

So the perpetuality, the long-lasting-ness, if there is such a word, of this process is one of the things that attracts me to it, because I feel like it’s something I’m going to live with for the rest of my life. And so defining different points of mastery along the way are important for me. And so I’m going to stop yammering because I could keep doing this forever and ever. You know how I get out when I talk about these stages.

KimBoo
10:28
No, we have no idea, Gina. Complete loss. I would like to bring up an idea that I thought of while you were talking because you were talking about people who just want to write for personal self expression reasons. And of course, we have examples of that. We have Emily Dickinson, whose poems weren’t revealed to the world until after she died. But it’s interesting, because this is not an analogy I usually personally make, but it reminds me of amateur athletes. Nobody really questions that, say, an amateur runner or an amateur jogger ever gets anywhere. They’re not training for the Olympics.They’re training, they’re running for personal best. They’re running for personal health reasons. They’re running because they enjoy the process. I’d love to see that applied more to writing and people who are writing, because I think in our field, our industry, as publishing industry and writing industry, we all tend to get focused on where are you going to get published? And are you going to publish a book? And are you going to do this? And are you do that? And success doesn’t always mean that for some people, and I think it’s unfair to put that kind of burden on people for whom that doesn’t resonate. You know what I mean?

Gina
11:40
I know exactly what you mean. I think that is an excellent analogy. Self-development, understanding ourselves, can be an aim for our writing, and being able to understand ourselves better, mastering that is kind of like, I feel like that’s why we’re here on earth to begin with.

KimBoo
12:06
Well, yeah, and then like anything else, that can bleed over into other things. If you are an amateur runner or are an amateur athlete, that health will affect how you enjoy other things in life, right? And if you are an amateur author, an amateur writer, however you want to define it, that will affect your ability to read literature and interpret other things and to write letters and to write emails or whatever. I think there’s a lot more to yielding to mastery than just simply hitting a success bar that someone else put down in front of you.

Gina
12:40
In addition to those things that it could bleed over into, I know from my own personal experience, that when I journal, it gives me a place to put all of the blaurgh that’s in my head.

KimBoo
12:54
You’re so eloquent, Gina.

Gina
12:59
Thank you. It gives me a place to put all that mush, all that mud, that I then don’t have to bring into conversations with my husband, or it doesn’t have to bleed over into other areas of my life. Because I’m— You guys have heard me say the quote from Joan Didion before, my very favorite quote in the whole world, which I put on my notebooks for the writing retreat: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means what I want, and what I fear.” I think that when we use writing for that purpose and get to know ourselves better, it makes us better people.

KimBoo
13:42
That’s beautiful.

Gina
13:45
So I have a question for you, ladies. 

KimBoo
Oh, no!

Gina
Yeah, of course, we always have these little question and answer sessions. I would love to know a time when you… let me back up. I would love to know, at this moment in time, what you would define for yourself as mastery in the writing process. And it can be big or small. It doesn’t have to be like this huge, like life goal sort of thing. Like I said, when we approach mastery, there are different levels of that throughout our development as writers. And so how do you think of mastery in terms of your own writing process at this point? I’ll kind of open that up for a little more flexibility. And if you have an example of maybe when you felt that you had attained some mastery. Who wants to go first? Volunteers, please.

Melody
14:48
Well, I can speak to that a little bit. I love the title that you’ve given to this step in The Creativity Quest. ‘Yielding’ to me, the word ‘allowing’ keeps coming up. And it’s like an embracing. Again, it’s not an efforting or dominating sort of activity. But you allow yourself to have this and own this experience. And the mastery is just so many layers to me. Because over the years of my writing experience there’s from very basic—oh, I learned to write with better grammar these days, and I don’t use a thousand commas in my writings, like I used to. But also, adding depth and strength, and each level I’m writing dialogue and showing not telling, and all those levels have developed over time. And to own that, to allow that, and sink that in, that it is an ongoing process, and not a landing place of perfection, of idealized perfection.

Gina
16:26
Yes. Oh, I love that: not a landing place of idealized perfection.

KimBoo
16:31
Yes, darn it.

Gina
16:33
Thank you. Thank you for getting that. And thank you for also recognizing the equivalency of ‘yielding’ with allowing and owning, embracing it and letting it, not just come to us, but letting ourselves be washed in that devotion that we’ve made to our writing that’s helped us get better at it.

Melody
17:05
Like the first time that I said out loud to somebody, “I am a writer.” I mean, it gives me chills to say that and that was about owning it for me. Other people called me that, but it took me a long time to just own that.

Gina
17:25
I think that’s the case for a lot of writers. It’s something that even when we’re living into it, sometimes we just can’t own it for one reason or another. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. So, KimBoo, mastery. What is that? What does that look like? How does it feel?

KimBoo
17:45
It’s certainly something, as I was thinking of while you were talking, it’s something that’s changed over the years. I think when I was younger, it was a very external variable. It was very like, Have I finished a novel? Have I published a novel? Have I published four novels? Have I done this? Have I done that? I think as I’ve gotten older and I have done those things, and I’ve realized I still don’t feel mastery, I realized that it’s much more an internal gauge that I have to measure by. 

So as I was thinking about while you were talking, and while Melody was talking, mastery for me is very simply confidence and confidence in my skill set. Confidence is not arrogance; arrogance is thinking that everything you do is great, and you don’t have anything to learn. Confidence, to me, is the ability to get down on the page what I want to say, the story I want to tell in a way that I want to tell it, while acknowledging that there’s hurdles, there’s growth, there’s more to learn. There’s always more to learn. There’s more things I want to do, but that I can at least do that much. And I think I’m edging up on that feeling. 

Again, going back to the amateur athlete: it’s the personal best that’s always changing. You hit one bar, then you want to go to the next one. But also you’re getting older and you might get injured and your goals might change. You might not care about marathons, whatever—flog that analogy down. But to me, it has changed. A lot of my goals have changed over the years and so just having that confidence is both the goal and the daily practice.

Gina
19:42
Thank you for seeing that the definition of mastery doesn’t always have to include external things. It’s easy for us to say, “Okay, I’ll feel like a writer when…” or “I’ll feel like I’m whatever when I’ve done X.” But that—you use the word ‘internal’ gauge—that it is just as, and maybe more, important to have that internal gauge and a way to tap into that feeling of mastery than simply to use external measurements.

KimBoo
20:24
Yeah, and I get the value of external measurements. I’m not trying to say that that’s not important. Good writing, good editing, understanding story structure, finishing your first novel, publishing your first story, if that’s what you want to do. Those are all very helpful. But I’ve learned that the internal gauge is the one that I need to really look at, because the external ones are always going to fall apart at some point.

Gina
20:53
Well, and I would argue that in the long run, if someone is going to make writing an integral part of their life for the rest of their life, that internal gauge is probably going to be a more reliable one, because if you can keep an eye on that barometer and have that feeling of confidence, or however you want to define that feeling of mastery, regardless of what’s going on in the exterior world, then you can still always tap into that. If the only measurement you have is what’s going on in the environment, what’s going on around you—a lot of what you can’t control—then there will always be places where you’re going to feel like the mastery is completely falling apart, that things are not working.

Melody
21:51
Or if you’re trying to live by someone else’s definition of mastery. 

KimBoo
21:59
Yes. Yes. Very true. Because that will ruin you if you try to do it. It can ruin you. It can be helpful, but it can be ruinous. Gina, it does bring up the point that I think I want to— I’m going to throw a question at you. This is Yielding to Mastery. It’s the Y in CREATIVITY. We are running around to the end of this creative quest cycle of guideposts. But as you often say, these guideposts aren’t linear, and so I would really like to see, or hear, I should say, your thoughts on Yielding to Mastery in conjunction with some of the other stages that you might find yourself circling back around, and how that can affect your self perceptions of mastery, I guess.

Gina
22:56
Very good question. So, as you noted, this is not a linear path. We’ve talked about these guideposts in a particular order just because we have to have some order, right? But you as the listener, and each of you two as writers, may not experience them in the same order that we’ve discussed them in. Additionally, any one of us may repeat any one of these particular guideposts. What I’ve recognized in certain different writers is that oftentimes, a single writer will have one that they really need to work on. And so they may repeat it over and over and over again before they get to the point where that particular guidepost is no longer a hurdle for them. 

In terms of mastery, I can see a relationship between this one and one we talked very early on in the process of Emulating and Mirroring. If you’ve listened to that episode, you might remember that that is very much a muscle-building and sort of training, beginner’s mind stage. To go back to your metaphor of the athlete, it’s that training stage, but it’s when we’re learning and we’re absorbing. So at that stage, we may not even be able to define what mastery looks like for us. We will probably be looking to those mentors and teachers and other people to see how they have defined mastery and how we view them in terms of mastery in order to define our own, and I think that that’s a good stage to start gathering that sort of input, if you will, for what mastery could look like for you. 

The stages of Assessing and Acknowledging and Verifying and Testing, both of those two stages are similar in certain aspects, in terms of evaluating where you are now as a writer. And again, I think that is a very relevant stage at which to go, “Okay, here’s how I’m going to define mastery, at least for now.” Because I do think the definition, your definition of mastery, if you are writing over time, it’s going to change. 

Those are some that I particularly see in terms of being related to mastery, and where you can start cultivating what the picture of mastery looks like for you.

Melody
25:50
Can I just add along with that, as I see it in The Creativity Cycle, as well as the five seasons of the writing process, and it’s not to attain perfect balance in each season, but more to the self awareness of where you’re at, at any given time, and the ability to move from one season to the next one, one stage to the next, as you need it. Because that’s what life is. It’s about flow, and movement and growth at all times. And so, never being over-focused or stuck in any one place. But the ability to move is what I feel mastery is about and it’s also what builds our resilience and our ability to reach new levels of mastery as we go along.

KimBoo
27:02
One thing that’s not discussed enough, just in general, is that mastery, true mastery, in my opinion, requires flexibility. It’s when you are super rigid about your values or your goals, things break. Rigidity leads to… what’s the word I’m looking for? Fragility leads to things breaking. 

Melody
Death.

KimBoo
Brittleness, brittleness, that was the word. Death is another word. Sure, okay. All right. 

But I think in our society, a lot of times, mastery is held up as this perfection of attainment, and what we’re talking really about is the idea of constant learning, flexibility and learning. That’s why I think, when I think about it now, that’s kind of where I think I get my confidence angle on it. It’s that I’ve learned a lot so I know I can learn more. 

Gina
28:06
Mmmm. Beautiful, there’s this sort of balance that needs to take place between—so we talk about being in a stage or a phase and that sometimes we think we’re stuck, when what we really need to do is just sit in that phase for a while. And then there are times when we need to and want to be propelled forward and have that movement that Melody was talking about, but sometimes we try to control the situation and move ourselves faster than we’re really ready to go. 

So to me, in this moment, what true mastery means to me is being able to discern between stuckness and needing to stay in a place, and movement that I’m ready for or movement that I’m trying to force. So if I can discern between those things, so that I know when I maybe need to learn something new or I’m ready to put myself out there in a way that I’ve never done before, if I can discern between stuckness and sitting because I’m supposed to sit and movement that is forced or necessary, then I will feel like I’ve reached some sort of mastery, not only in my writing but in my life.

KimBoo
29:45
That’s pretty profound. Gina. 

Melody
29:47
It is. And it’s a question I challenge myself with a lot of times because of this mindset we have in our culture about productivity: doing doing doing all the time, never taking a rest. So I am challenged to allow myself the periods of rest, to take a break. And somebody asked me once, how do you know if you just need a break or if you’re stuck? And my answer to that is you’ll know it on the inside, when you give yourself permission to take that break, without any judgment, you will feel calm and at peace with it. And the stuckness has got that inner disquiet, it feels like–mm, mm—there’s not movement and there should be. 

KimBoo
Yeah.

Gina
Discomfort.

KimBoo
30:50
Yeah, yeah. It’s reminded me of the phrase I saw floating around on the internet, meme, or whatever, somewhere, but it’s not laziness if you’re bored, because if you’re being restful on purpose, then you’re not bored, and then you’re doing something for a reason. But if you’re bored, then it’s not laziness, because you want to be doing something. It’s that disquiet, right, so you’re bored. You’re like, oh, I want to be doing something. That’s not laziness. That’s your brain telling you it’s ready to do something else. You may just not know yet. So I thought of that when you were talking about the inner disquiet and the difference between sitting versus being stuck. And it was like, Yeah, that’s the inner feeling inside. 

Melody
31:39
Absolutely, and I like that because we’re taught that, or we somehow internalize that there’s something wrong if we’re bored. I read recently, no, there’s nothing wrong if you’re bored. That’s part of the—they didn’t call it inner disquiet—but it’s that space that is right before something creative happens.

KimBoo
32:08
Right. Yep. 

Gina
32:10
Since this is all about writing, I do want to suggest that to discern that energy that Melody was talking about that you can feel to identify the difference between the sort of stuckness and the sitting when you need to be sitting, I have found no better tool to really discern what that energy is than journaling. I know a lot of people resist the idea of journaling, but truthfully, it goes back to Joan Didion’s quote, again: I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking and feeling. And if you journal about whatever that feeling is that you’re having, then it will help you discern between whether it is “I am stuck and I need to find some way to get out of this stuckness,” or, “I feel stuck, but I’m really sitting in a place where I need to sit for a while, and what is the reason that I need to be in this place?”

KimBoo
33:17
It’s funny you should say that because I am one of those people. I resist journaling. I resist it, I resist it. I don’t, I’m just like, I’m not writing for an audience. I’m not writing for a purpose. I’m not telling a story. Why would I want to journal? And yet, and yet, every time I’ve actually sat down and made a practice of journaling on a regular basis, it has given me those insights. It has given me that ability to have—not quite objective, right? Like we’re always in our own brain. But a little bit of a step back from the immediacy of what I’m feeling. And that’s, yeah, so thanks for calling me out. Gina. I really appreciate it.

Gina
34:01
You’re welcome. Those insights it leads you to can be the purpose. 

KimBoo
Yeah, yeah, they are. 

Melody
34:06
I just want to add to that note, I’m one of those people also. I don’t know if I resist journaling, but I’m not always inspired to journal. I enjoy it when I do it, but I do a lot of auditory journaling with my good writer friends who allow me, without judgment, to talk it through and talk it out. To me, that helps me get whatever is in out of me, and then I have clarity. Often, I don’t need somebody to give me advice. My good friends know that. They’ll ask well-timed questions, but a lot of times I come to what I need to know just by talking it through with someone.

KimBoo
34:52
In my productivity coaching, there’s the brain-dump exercise, and it’s not quite journaling, but it’s the same principle of getting something out of your brain that’s knocking around in there, making noise, and putting it down and getting it out of that space and putting it somewhere where you can get it or listen to it or get feedback on it, depending on how you’re doing it. So critical.

Gina
35:18
Interesting that back in episode 40, when we were talking about trusting the process and being three feet from gold that we touched also on the idea of having that support group to talk through things with, to help us really understand where we are and just think through things, as we talk it out.

Melody
35:42
Your community is so important, even if it’s a community of two. It’s really important.

Gina
35:52
Oftentimes, I think that even when we are not feeling like masters, even when we’re not sitting in that space of mastery, we don’t feel like we can approach that, that our support system can remind us that we probably are.

KimBoo
36:12
Absolutely, that’s true.

Melody
36:14
And they often do.

Gina
36:18
Yes. So we’re going to be talking about Yielding to Mastery one more time when we talk with Melody in depth about the seasons of the writing process in our next episode. So we’ll have a worksheet for Yielding to Mastery in the show notes underneath this on our website, which is AroundTheWritersTable.com. Anything else you ladies want to add about this stage before we wrap things up?

KimBoo
36:48
No, I think I’ve been called out on journaling. So, you know, accomplishment achieved there. But no, I think this has been a really insightful episode for me as well, to get me to thinking about what is my internal gauge? How am I judging that and how am I making those calls?

Gina
37:06
Yeah, right.

Melody
37:08
It’s a call to more self awareness is what I’m realizing.

KimBoo
Darn. 

Gina
37:14
Yes. Oh, I love that. Okay, I’m making notes here, you know, super simple. I’m still going to be refining and developing and writing about and talking about these stages in The Creativity Quest for quite a while. So like I said, we do have one more episode related to Yielding to Mastery, and then we’re going to do a wrap-up of the full cycle. Then this summer, we’re moving on to more interviews like the one we recently did with Rhett DeVane. And you’ll hear from each one of us interviewing some of our favorite writers. So I look forward to that. And thank you for being here, ladies.

KimBoo
37:55
Thank you so much, y’all. Thank you for listening.

Melody
37:57
Thank you. Bye.

Dave
38:01
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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