This week on Around the Writers Table, we dove deep into the concept of yielding to mastery in writing. Gina kicked us off with a reminder of where we left off in the Creativity Quest stages, then explains that mastery is personal and subjective, emphasizing the importance of defining what success means to each individual. Melody connects this stage to the seasons of writing, highlighting how each season contributes to the creative cycle. We explore how major projects reflect our essence and recurring themes in our work. We also discussed our personal writing themes — I talked about trauma recovery stories, while Gina explored family dynamics.

The conversation got really insightful as we connected writing mastery to understanding our essence. Melody made some great points about feeling “at home” in our work and we also discussed the importance of putting pen to paper and encouraging writers to immerse themselves in their craft, letting their characters and stories reveal deeper truths about their essence and mastery.

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Ep. 43: Navigating the Stages of Creative 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
0:43
Welcome back, listeners. You are with us at Around the Writer’s Table. Today we’re going to be doing some reviewing and expanding on the topic of Yielding to Mastery. But first, we’re gonna just kind of dive on in a little bit and get to know each other. If you’re new here, I’m KimBoo York. I am an author and professional productivity coach for creators, specifically authors, but I do work with other creators. I write fantasy, romance, nonfiction, I write craft books for authors, and I also run the 1 Million Words Club, which is a membership club on Discord. I’m still working on my coffee. As longtime listeners know, I’m always working on my coffee. So it’s a membership group on Discord. 1 Million Words Club is focused on productivity and accountability and support. So if you’re interested in that, we’ll have a link in the show notes. 

That’s me. Before we dig deep into what we’re going to be talking about today, let’s also let our co-hosts Gina and Melody introduce themselves. Gina, if you’d like to go first.

Gina Hogan Edwards
1:51
Hi, listeners, welcome back. Glad to be here today. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards and I support women in claiming and reclaiming their voices. I create community spaces such as the Story Camp women’s writing retreat, which we just returned from, as well as the online community Women Writing for Change. I’m also a creativity coach and editor, and I am working on historical fiction. So we’ll see where that goes.

KimBoo
2:23
And Melody, let’s get people to know you too. What’s up with you? Road traveler, you’re still up in some northbound place, aren’t you?

Melody, A Scout
2:33
Yes, I’m still up here in northern Wisconsin, enjoying the spring weather where it’s 40 one day and 80 the next. But love it. This is where I was born and raised. So welcome back, listeners. My name is 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. And, go ahead.

Gina
3:13
I was just gonna say I think your Wisconsin accent has been …

Melody
3:18
Ramped up again…

Gina
3:20
By the people you’re hanging out with right now.

Melody
3:22
Yes, I do that. I do that. My Midwestern twang.

KimBoo
3:30
Gina comes back from spending time with her father and she’s got that Appalachian twang back. We’re all going back to our roots here today.

Melody
3:39
I just have to say y’all every once in a while to remind me that I also live in the south. Okay.

KimBoo
3:48
There you go. Multicultural up in here. But today, we are going to be talking about Yielding to Mastery. Now we talked about that in episode 42. Listeners, you might want to go back and listen to that episode for a full recap along The Creativity Quest. But we’re gonna have Gina step in here and give us a little reminder of where we were at before we turn the reins over to Melody, A Scout so she can talk about how it fits in with the seasons of writing. So, get us up to speed, Gina.

Gina
4:17
We have covered a lot of ground in many episodes on The Creativity Quest, and Yielding to Mastery is, in our discussion, the tenth stage, but as I have emphasized over and over, if you’ve listened to past episodes, is that this is not a linear process. The creative process is not linear nor cyclical, but we had to have some order to have conversation about, and there are some of these that do just naturally follow one another sequentially in the process. As you learn about them, you’ll understand how that works. 

So the Yielding to Mastery is basically about getting to a point where you are producing, maybe massively producing, you are really leaning into whatever your art, whatever your creative endeavor is. One thing that I emphasize about this stage is that mastery is something that you get to define. You get to define what success and mastery mean to you. And that it is important to maintain a connection with that internal gauge of what success and mastery mean to you at this juncture. 

I use the word ‘yielding’ because to me, that has a feminine aspect to it. This is about allowing and leaning into whatever it is that you define as mastery. So that’s kind of in a nutshell, where this stage takes us to. The essence of who you are, the essence of your art, the essence of the themes that may run through your art are very actively being expressed in this stage.

KimBoo
6:13
It’s hard for me to believe that we’ve actually made it through all of the 10 stages already. It seems like we just started at the beginning.

Gina
6:22
Yeah, yeah, we’ve covered a lot of ground, ladies. And I love the way that we have interwoven this with the perspective that Melody brings through her book Soul of the Seasons, which is not a book about writing; it’s not a writing book. But we have been able to apply the … well, I’m gonna let her tell ya, cuz this is her deal. Right? Yeah. But the way that we’ve been able to interweave her perspective that she’s brought from that book in with the writing process and look at the seasons of writing has been really fun.

Melody
6:58
It has, Gina. And I want to reiterate that the seasons, both of the natural world and our lives, and of the writing process, like The Creativity Cycle, are not necessarily linear, and that we’ve talked about in the past if you’ve listen to any our episodes, we talk about balanced and imbalanced ways that we understand each season. So when we talked about—last time, I gave a little preview about the season of Summer having to do with Yielding to Mastery—honestly, each of the seasons has something to bring to the table with this stage of The Creativity Cycle. 

In Spring, which is about finding your vision—and you cannot have a space of mastery without having a clear vision, whether that’s for yourself personally, or your writing work. In Summer, it’s where our passion is ignited, and we put our creativity to work by bringing our vision to life. It’s all the hard work that we do when we move into the season of Harvest. This is the season of full appreciation of all that we created, and owning our mastery is about owning that creation that we have brought to life. And in the season of Fall, this is where we recognize and appreciate all our value, not only in our creations but in who we are as a person. And then in Winter, that creativity cycle starts again, where we master new ideas and new projects and new experiences for ourselves. 

So I’m going to circle it back around and talk a little bit more about Summer. And this is where we have the passion for our vision, which is the unique expression of our life’s purpose. I would say with our writing project, it’s our unique expression of the story we want to tell. I hear this—I don’t know if Gina and you, Kimboo, I’m sure you’ve heard it too—”I don’t have anything new to say about this subject; it’s been talked about over and over again.” Maybe you don’t have anything new to say but you have a unique voice and a way to present an old story.

KimBoo
I like that.

Melody
It’s important to bring our voices. Each of our individual voices make this beautiful tapestry to tell the story that is ages old, perhaps. How does this translate into our essence? Which, I consider the essence and mastery is about, for me, knowing who and what we are, knowing what our talents are, and the expression of them and the manifestation of them. Everything we do or write or experience is a part of this expression and this essence. 

If we bring these into mind, I want to ask a couple questions of both KimBoo and Gina this morning. How does a major project, or perhaps your collection of work, represent your essence expressed or that translates into mastery? And is there a thread or theme that runs through your work? KimBoo?

KimBoo
11:17
I wasn’t told we’d have to be self-reflective here today. I don’t know about this. So, as you’re saying this, and you asked the question, I panicked. I’m like, What? Recurring theme in my work? No! But there is, of course there is, and I’ve even talked about it before, I think, on this podcast, certainly with a lot of friends. 

One of the things that came up a lot in my early work—and it took me a long time to really understand what I was doing, and actually took me analyzing my interests in other media, analyzing my interest in other books, or analyzing my interest in dramas or shows—was that I’m less interested in the trauma than in the trauma recovery. I really don’t care what happened. If the world ended or a zombie outbreak happened. I’m interested in what people do once the trauma has been put in place. 

So one of my first really popular romance novels was actually about a widower. And it was a soul-bond romance, which is a trope that a lot of romance readers are familiar with. As far as he was concerned, his life was over, because his soul-bonded partner had died, and it pretty much meant there was nobody else. He’d be alone for the rest of his life. And it was just awful. But the partner died years before the story started, and that kind of got me into the idea of, well, this seems interesting to me… why? And I’m tying this into Yielding to Mastery, because anybody who knows me knows that my life was radically shifted when my parents died in my mid 20s, and in my life since then has been a story of recovery from trauma. 

So my mastery has been both internal in trying to have that kind of recovery for myself, but also how to express that recovery in my stories and how to make that relatable to other people who have either gone through it or are currently going through it. I’m not sure that entirely answered your question, but that’s what I was thinking of when you asked it. It was like, Oh, that’s my theme. That’s the mastery that I dreaded. 

But it’s scary. Y’all, it’s scary, because it does require me to dig down into some bad experiences for myself and for my characters. That book, the one I was talking about earlier, is considered one of my most angsty stories. And I didn’t realize it when I wrote it. I was rereading it recently, while I was doing some edits, and I was like, Dang, this is depressing. But that’s what I was trying to process and share with my readers, and people love it. People love the recovery story. So I guess I got it somewhere in the end.

Melody
14:17
I love that, and actually those are the kind of stories that fascinate me. Everybody likes to hear about the drama and trauma in the stories, but then we want to know what goes on next. How do our characters cope with this? How do they recover, if they recover? I had someone once say to me, when we worry about bad things that could happen, we’re not worried that they could happen, we’re worried that we might not be able to cope with what happens.

KimBoo
14:54
Yep.

Melody
14:56
That was a big aha for me and it also helps me understand about the direction my storylines need to go. Okay, I put my characters, or they put themselves, into the situations; how do they then recover, cope, come about change, become new people, whatever. That to me, that’s the juicy part of the story. I like that. So, Gina, what do you have to offer about this?

Gina
15:32
This is an interesting timing, because I’ve been thinking about this idea of the themes that are showing up in my writing and why. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently. So this is very timely. I recognize… Well, first of all, let me say that I’ve always joked that I don’t have a family tree. That for various reasons, even though I was an only child until I was nine, I now have six brothers and sisters, have some steps, and so I have this orchard, not a family tree. And it can get a little complicated sometimes. And so one of the things that I’m seeing show up in my stories a lot, are the sort of—there’s two aspects to this—so it’s family dynamics, but it’s the family dynamics that are sort of timeless and universal, what a lot of families experience. But also, because I write historical fiction, how the culture and the times and what’s going on in the era of the story can influence those family dynamics and the relationships that are going on in the story. 

I almost went into psychology. I’m glad I didn’t, but I think that that supports me as a writer, being very curious about the human mind and why we do things the way that we do. I think that that sort of feeding into this interest in these complicated family relationships and the things that happen to them that upset the applecart or totally change the perspective that they have about the relationships with the people in their lives.

Melody
17:23
I love that. And in that way, those stories are also timeless, because they’re very relevant. What’s happening today and the challenges we’re dealing with. We think of the riots and protests back in the ’60s; what’s going on today. So very similar things. I think even if you’re talking about fantasy, there is that theme. It’s a usually relevant and timely theme, if you’re writing about it. Somehow it comes out in our work; it always does. So I appreciate that. 

I’m writing an historical novel as well, based in the early 1900s, and it was influenced by the stories I learned about my mother’s family and her mother. My grandmother emigrated in the early 1900s from Prussia, because of the oppression and the discord, and the beginning of the Russian Revolution was starting to happen over there then. 

KimBoo
18:36
That’s not timely at all. There’s no relationship. [laughing]

Melody
18:40
Oh, no. Prussia is what is now Ukraine. So, yeah. It becomes fascinating to me to see how people dealt with and coped, and some of it has not changed in how we hope to manage, how what the human spirit endures, and how the human spirit copes with and overcomes a lot of these difficulties. 

KimBoo
19:16
I want to ask Gina, this newer understanding that you’re having of the themes in your writing, how has that affected your yielding to mastery perception, of ownership of that? Does that make sense?

Gina
19:31
It does. I see a lot of authors that I’ve worked with a little bit obsessed about not knowing what their themes are, what it is that they’re writing about. And I think that you can only learn that when you keep writing. I think that once you do start to see that there are these threads that keep re-occurring that that creates a confidence and that the confidence feeds into the mastery. 

I had a dream last night about confidence, actually, and I was talking about how we get to a certain level of confidence, but then we realize that there’s something else new that we need to learn or experience, and so our confidence may wane a little bit. But then we learn that thing, or we do that thing, and our confidence increases again, and hopefully each time we do that, the confidence is reaching a new level and a new level and a new level. 

I really hesitated in thinking about this stage to use the word ‘mastery’ because it gives the impression that that’s like, the pinnacle, and there’s nowhere else to go. But that’s also why I keep reiterating that you get to define what mastery and success means for you. And that that’s probably going to change for you over time. But as I recognize these family-dynamics threads showing up in my stories, I felt the confidence of. Okay, now I’ve got kind of a guiding light, a North Star. That’s obviously what I am passionate about, because it keeps on showing up. And it hasn’t been an intentional ‘putting into the story’ of that thing. It’s just been showing up. But knowing that on an intellectual level, as well as a feeling level, just helps me feel like I have more autonomy over my story.

KimBoo
21:28
It does, it does.

Melody
21:31
I love that. I also know that a trusted friend—and I would probably say writer friend—can also help you pull out the threads of the theme of your work. It would not surprise me the least little bit if the theme of your writing work is also the theme of your life, your personal life.

KimBoo
21:58
Good point.

Melody
22:04
Yeah.

Gina
22:04
I highly believe that those people who say, “I’m not in my writing,” especially fiction writers. “I’m not in my story.” I don’t believe that at all. It’s exactly what you just said, Melody. I so agree with what you just said.

Melody
22:19
Yeah, and that’s why we talk a lot in this podcast, not only in the writing process and the different stages of it, but knowing that in our personal lives, I truly believe that you cannot write deeply moving meaningful stories, where you do not access that in yourself in some way. We do that by knowing ourselves more deeply. 

My pen name and soon to be my legal name is Melody, A Scout, and that was specifically chosen because of what I do in my personal life. I like to look out into the future. I love to explore, that’s a frontier. I love to do that in nature. But I also love to do that in the psyche and in relationships. What’s out there? What do I see coming? How’s that gonna manifest? How’s it going to affect me? Then I come back, and I share that with my peeps. Here’s what I saw when I went out there and did my little scout-around in this area. 

For me, that’s exciting. For me, that’s the essence of who I am and what I enjoy doing. If you’ve listened to the podcast, you know I’m a plant spirit medicine healer, and we’re asked to choose a mission statement for ourselves in our practice. Mine was, as I mention often in the intro, mine is helping people find their sense of home. To me that home is a place of belonging within ourselves. It can be a physical place; it often is a physical place. But it is also the sense we feel when we are in this space that feels like we belong there. This is tied to mastery for me because you cannot master something really well, I do not believe, unless you feel at home in that space of the thing you are trying to create. 

KimBoo
24:43
Oh, that’s a great observation. That is a great observation. Because yeah, yeah, I agree that there has to be that emotional, spiritual connection to whatever you’re doing.

Melody
24:55
Absolutely. Because what are our readers, what do I look for, when I read something, or I consume media? I want to be moved emotionally. That’s what we all look for. Often, we can’t find access to that space in ourselves until we see it outside or read about it, and then we go, Oh, that’s what I was doing. That’s what I was feeling. That’s how that went. Our stories help our community see themselves and put themselves in their own stories. 

KimBoo
25:36
I’m just going to jump in as a librarian, because one of the things that I think is very important is the diversity of stories. There’s people I know who really love reading very violent fiction, and for them, it’s a catharsis from experiences they’ve had in their life, to read about it and then know that things get better. And, you know, diversity and cultural experiences, whether it’s racial or  cultural and religious and whatever. Having that kind of diversity is so important. It’s being fought against so hard right now, not to get too political on the podcast, but man, like you just said it: it’s so important that we have in the writing these elements of ourselves so that they can resonate with other people who may need to hear that or read that, whatever their reason might be.

Melody
26:27
Yeah, absolutely. Because that includes the dark areas of our life, not just the fun stuff that we want to put out for general public, but the dark thoughts. We can allow our characters to express those dark thoughts and expressions while we may never do that in real life. Everybody has that, put into difficult and trying situations. Those thoughts surface. So I really appreciated this whole part of The Creativity Quest about that. I’m also curious, how do you help your clients connect with their essence and expression, i.e., their mastery of their work? Gina, maybe you would go first with this.

Gina
27:25
Sure, I sort of made mention to it in what I said earlier about just, I see authors being a little bit obsessed sometimes with figuring out what their themes in their writing are or what they stand for. While I think that’s definitely a good mental exercise, what I encourage authors to do is to just keep writing, because it’s going to show up, and it might be something you don’t expect, that you can’t see on that intellectual level. Like you said, Melody, sometimes it takes an outside perspective, a writer friend, or someone who’s read a lot of your writing to start recognizing what those themes are. 

But I think too, it kind of depends on where the author is in their own journey. I think that’s especially good advice for beginning writers or writers who are maybe just starting out or haven’t haven’t published yet, but have written a lot. And then I think that when you get into the territory of a more experienced author… I went through an exercise one time—you mentioned, Melody, mission statement for your plant spirit medicine—we went through an exercise of creating her author mission statement. Tthat was really helpful for her to start thinking about some questions that she had never really pondered before about why she writes what she writes. So I think that developing an author mission statement can be really useful too. If I can dig up my notes on that, then maybe we’ll post them in the show notes. 

KimBoo
Definitely. Yeah. 

Gina
It’s been a while since we did that.

Melody
29:12
I like that. KimBoo, what about you? your work as a productivity coach?

KimBoo
29:20
Yeah, I’m gonna just point to Gina here in an audio way. I’m pointing at Gina and going, Ditto. Because that’s one of the reasons I started the 1 Million Words Club is I realized so much about my writing and myself, and whatever confidence I had after I had written over 1 million words of fiction. That was kind of a turning point for me to realize that it took that long, and I’m not saying it will take 1 million words for everybody, but I think the idea of writing more is way, honestly—and people are gonna challenge me on this—honestly, way more important than figuring out the themes and what you’re trying to do, and all that sort of stuff. That’s all good. I’m not saying you don’t need to do those things, especially if you’re a pre-planner and you want to do outlines, or if you’re a discovery writer like me and you don’t want to use outlines. But the act of writing and immersing yourself in the craft of doing the thing is what’s going to teach you all of that stuff. 

So that’s why I started the 1 Million Words Club. That’s why when my clients come to me and they’re having trouble finding a story—and they hate it, because my advice is, Well, put that one aside and start a new one. And they’re like, No! I want to solve this one. I’m like, You’re not gonna. Like, you could work on this for another two years. Just put that aside and start another one, and then come back to the other one. Trust me this works. 

And it does work every time. So that is, I think the most critical component, is just getting people to immerse themselves in doing the craft. I’m thinking… Gina, you might know this, or maybe we I know, we’ve talked about it… It’s the old pottery experiment where they had one group of students given a task to create a pot, and they were told, “Create the perfect pot and you only get so much clay.” Then they told another group, “Create as many pots as possible. You’re going to be judged by how much you use, how much clay you use rather than how aesthetically pleasing the pot is.” And in the end, based on whatever values they were using for aesthetics, the people who had created more pots and had just torn through all the clay to create many different pots, created better pots because they got to know the material and they got to understand it and be able to craft it in a way that met their vision. And I think that’s just as true in writing as well.

Gina
31:54
I’m glad you brought up that story. I remember hearing that story. And it’s a perfect parallel with our writing process. The more we do it, the better we get.

KimBoo
32:03
A lot of people want to sit down and study books and understand themes and like I said, all good, all very important. But you got to burn through the words. You got to do it.

Melody
32:14
And mastery is about doing it over and over again. It’s about making mistakes, it’s about failure. It’s about going down the rabbit hole. That’s all about mastery in our learning, because then we can hone. This is how in the season of Fall in Five Element Medicine is about letting go of that which does not serve us and keeping the essence. So I remember when I finished the final revisions or near the final revisions of my book Soul of the Seasons and I gave it to a couple of beta readers, and one of them was really insightful and pulled up some stuff for me that was so important. She goes, You know, the theme that comes out in your work— Actually, she did not say that. What she said was, You really know your stuff when it comes to the emotions. I really see that. That’s where you shine. I get fully into it. The other stuff is interesting, but that’s where you really shine. And so it wasn’t until after I had finished my book that I realized what was motivating, what was the theme, and that is— not only my personal desire through my life, but what I would love to offer to others—the authentic expression of emotion in a way that is balanced, and to do it in a way that is balanced. 

There’re so many negative things said about the emotions. We should discount them. Don’t pay any attention to that.  Don’t ever make decisions based on emotions. That is all bullshit, and I knew that from when I was little. Like no, we were created with all their emotions for a reason. But the mastery of those emotions is what I move towards. Because you just don’t want to emote out all over the place. You don’t want to emote all over the page. It’s messy. People don’t know…like, Oooo. So, to master those emotions and to use them artfully and skillfully. Sometimes that can come from outside of us. And I want to mention by the way, I was able to cut out 100 pages of stuff and it wasn’t good material, but it wasn’t what was required in that book. So it really helped me in the editing process towards the end. So that can come from outside ourselves, but it also comes from within sometimes, because our characters can tell. 

What I tell my clients, a lot of times when they’re puzzling over their life or their life’s purpose or a relationship is I tell them to stand back and let that relationship, let that experience tell them what is going on. What is true there? What is the theme? If you stand back as an observer, your character, your main character can tell you so much about what’s going on, and what is the true essence of what you’re writing.

To me, mastery is about releasing control enough to allow in the truth. So, this is so exciting. As per usual, we could talk about this for another hour, but…

Gina
Easy.

KimBoo
36:18
And we do, even when we’re not recording, y’all. We have ladies lunch together, and it’s three hours later and we’re like, What happened? Yes, we will be talking more about it. We’ve gone through the five seasons; we’ve gone through The Creativity Quest. So our next episode is basically going to be a recap. We’re going to talk about the themes that we covered, highlights from things that we discovered for ourselves or things that we want our listeners to maybe go back and listen to, again. We’re well into the 40s of episodes, so we’ve got a lot to cover. But after that, we’ll be going into some new directions, which we’ll talk about with our listeners on that episode. We’re very excited about it. If you’ve listened to Gina’s interview with author Rhett DeVane already. Go back and listen to that. It’s an awesome episode. And it’s a sneak peek of what’s going to be coming for us in the future. 

So we appreciate you all hanging out with us today around the writer’s table. We’re going to have links in the show notes to previous episodes we’ve talked about. In those show notes, older shows, we have worksheets for you. Gina’s done some great work on designing some worksheets on The Creativity Quest. And we appreciate you listening. So give us a thumbs up or like, whatever, you have on your podcast app that you listen to us on. YouTube or Spotify. And we appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us, y’all.

Gina
37:49
Bye, everybody.

Gina’s Pop
37:54
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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