Awakening Subconscious Stories with Mindful Writing

I had always wanted to be a novel writer so when I started writing my first one, I was overjoyed to finally be doing it. But then I got involved with the commercial publishing scene and became focused solely on the goals for my writing:

get an agent, get a book deal, get recognised.

There’s a whole industry dedicated to writers’ publication dreams and I got completely swept up in it. It now seemed as if there was no point in writing anything unless it was going to help me achieve those goals.

This approach took me through the writing of that novel and the next. I was writing a lot of flash fictions and submitting them to competitions and journals all the time. I had a lot of success with them and felt validated by that. But then I realised that there was no joy in the writing for me anymore. No real connection to the characters and their stories.

I knew I had to really think about what it was I was writing for before starting my next project. I had to look inside for the deep truths about why I wanted to write.

When I started writing my first novel, I just wanted to tell the stories that came to me in the hope that what I had to share could connect with readers in the way the novels I’d loved had connected with me. The protagonists for both of the novels I’d written had appeared in my mind as descriptions of the situation they were in. I then built their stories around these single pieces of information I had for each character. For my flash fictions, they mostly came from prompts and I never really dug too deep into who these people were that appeared in them. I just prettied them up and sent them out.

I sat with this for a while and that’s when I realised that these characters come to me as I need to learn something in writing their story for them. I’d missed the point in my first two novels and all of those flash fictions. I’d hurried the process to get the stories out there, get published and get the recognition I craved to make me feel I was good enough, as a writer and as a human.

There were times when writing the first two novels when all thoughts of anything beyond what I was doing in that moment were gone and it would feel like the story was coming through me rather than me consciously creating it. The characters would do things I hadn’t planned or even thought about. I finally understood that I needed to let that happen all the time.

I had to stop thinking about the story I wanted to tell and channel the characters to let them tell their story through me.

The next story I wrote, Pressure Drop, is the first one where I completely let go of any ideas I had and let the protagonist, Stephanie, come through me. I learned a lot in the writing of that novella — about myself, the past hurts I was still clinging onto, and some of the dreams I have had to let go. It was very different from the writing of the two novels. It helped me to heal and to forgive myself and others.

I knew I could never go back to writing, or teaching, in the way I once had. This new knowledge now guides everything I do for my own work and in the way I work with other writers.

That is what inspired me to build a community of mindful writers who want to know the deep truths at the heart of their work, rather than focusing on external goals for it.

Writing in Community

As part of this community work I run monthly Mindful Writing Marathons where we write for 10 minutes at a time to single word prompts and just let the truths inside us emerge from that word. I truly believe that if we’re fiction writers, these truths go out there into the universe and the characters that are out there connect with them, if it’s their truth too.

If we’re writing non-fiction, we can tap into our own stories and the things that really matter to us to let them guide our work. In both cases, I believe that the work we do will bring healing to us when we write it, and to the readers it reaches, when we are coming from an authentic place.

If you’d like to give it a try, then use these prompt words to get started on your own mindful writing practice. Sit quietly and focus on your breath for a few inhales and exhales to bring yourself fully into the writing moment.

Set a timer for 10 minutes each time and just write the first thing that comes into your head for each word. Don’t try to guide it. Just let what comes flow through you onto the page.

Prompt words: Sea, Gold, Mountain.

Writing like this without any ideas for what might come out, and with no goals, is transformative. It reveals the places where we still need to heal, the injustices in our world we need to highlight, what really matters to us as writers, and as members of the human family. It reminds us that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves and connects us to our collective consciousness to grow our compassion, empathy and understanding for everyone.

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My mission is to transform the stories we tell about ourselves and each other to bring more peace, love and unity to the world. Bringing mindfulness to our creative endeavours offers the chance for us to transform ourselves and our work. This has inspired me to launch the Mindful Writing Festival, which is running for the first time this year.

It will be fun and interactive with sessions focused on writing fiction with me, writing for Substack with Claire Venus ✨, writing memoir with Ros Barber, and choosing the right words with Teri Leigh 💜. As well as a panel discussion about the mindful writing way featuring Don Boivin, Maia Duerr, Ryan Delaney and Diamond-Michael Scott. It’s going to be great!