I’m curious about the language clients use, words can seem so simple but can cover a huge range of complexity. Often images, symbols and metaphors are clearer ways into meaning.
So today my client’s goal, as a writer, was to ‘Get it down’. Seems simple. But each word needs clarifying and interrogating. The ‘IT’ is the story, so we work on defining the essence of the novel. Writer’s often think and talk at a high complexity level, because a novel contains many worlds. So our goal was to focus on key themes, at a high level so we can sum up the book in a few sentences. This is not easy to do. A writer will always be diving down into detail, and for the session, we’re working on simplicity and clarity. This is a powerful piece of work to do with a client, to help a writer speak about a novel at thematic level. It becomes like working on a pitch.
So we know what the IT is. Now ‘Down’. This turns out to be a lot simpler, it’s the writing, the written form. When it is ‘down’ it will be written.
Now to ‘Get.’ I know this is where the complexity lies. My client did not say ‘my goal is to write it down.’ They said my goal is to ‘GET it down.’ Get – fetch, acquire, procure, secure, or even grasp or learn. There is something active being done, requiring energy. As we interrogate the word ‘get,’ we find opposing forces are present, there is a border, a barrier, that must be breached, in order to do the getting. These are the myriad blocks to creativity, the million things that stop writers writing. They are often voiced as ‘family,’ ‘time,’ ‘day job,’ ‘everyday demands’ etc. They can also be the sheer complexity of trying to hold an entire novel in one’s head, that stops writing a first sentence.
There are so many potential blocks that it can be counter productive to name them all and work on them all individually. As coaches, we are not therapists. So we are not trying to ‘cure’ our clients, we want to help them find ways round the barriers, no matter what they are. So with this client, I work on a metaphor for all the blocks. How do they ‘feel?’ ‘Like a concrete block round my feet, inertia, unable to move.’ Great, so now we have the clients own metaphor to work with, the concrete block that represents the barriers and blocks to creativity. The concrete is a universal metaphor for ALL blocks, so we do not need to dismantle them all one by one, we just need a way of dismantling the concrete block. We do this by examining the feelings of being in flow, or writing when it works, a sense of flying, with the words and sentences flowing across the page like the air currents, the gusts of wind under wings. The in flow state is hugely powerful. It’s the sense of the story wanting to be written, so powerfully that its writing becomes inevitable. Still in the metaphorical world, we can use this power to turn the concrete into dust, we feel what that is like, I help my client to feel what it is like to use the power of the story wanting to be written to break down the concrete into dust, so my client can step away from the pile of dust and into the flow state of writing.
At the end of the session, we have reached out goal. GET. IT. DOWN. A tool that turns the barriers to writing into concrete that can be dissolved with the power of the story, so the story can burst out - the GET. The IT is the story itself and the DOWN is the page full of words that sing.
By vigorously clarifying and interrogating the goal, by listening to the clients metaphors and focussing on their world, we have been able to bring about a state of mind that allows the goal to be fully understood and eventually, hopefully, achieved.
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