Jayne.press

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant; there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

Here’s a confession: I’m one of those women who easily gets swept up into hustle culture, but the truth is my spirit isn’t about that life.

I’m one who likes long-term connections, slow art, slow love, and my absolute favorite slow mornings.

The thing I had to learn was that hustle culture is not designed to see the soul stuff. 👉🏽 The exact stuff I adore in humans. 👈🏽

So I had to reframe my perception; I’m doing heavy lifting that others can’t see. And it became my job to affirm that instead of trying to measure up to a system that was never created for me.

How do you feel about hustle culture as a writer?

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.” -Hermann Hesse

Here we are today, looking upon past mistakes to help guide us toward a better future because that’s what works. And that’s why we need writers. We need you to show up with all your scars and present them in a world that expects us to behave like machinery or furniture. It brings our current moments to life in a time when life could be snuffed out at the moment of confession. We need evidence of what it means to be human. We need to claim the worth of our words. I feel this most when I return to old texts.

While reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written around 8 CE, I’m whisked away from all the problems of this world. It feels less like a time machine and more like stories that give humans meaning. And what Ovid offers is not just an escape but meaning. According to Viktor Frankl, meaning is enough to sustain life.

In a similar way, I was validated while listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. It lifted me right up from the darkness of this world. Not to ignore the tragedies taking place, this isn’t a toxic positivity post. It lifted me from hopeless despair into objective action. It validated my faith in humanity and reminded me that peace is an acceptable way to fight the good fight.

We write in our present moment to claim our humanity. That is the gift you receive from writing and reading allows us to receive it again.

“Art Is Organic.” – Sarah Michelle Lynch

“Art is feeling the emotions of a story and not only subscribing to them but living them and absorbing them” -Sarah Michelle Lynch taken from Writing An Organic Novel Which Becomes a Living Organism

I came across this quote and had to share it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way my novel came into being. Honestly, I’ve been writing it for a long time, so I don’t remember the initial start of it, but I do remember when it became vital for me to become a part of it. I didn’t want to write it from a distance. I didn’t want it to be about characters I didn’t care to know. I had to welcome characters that grew as the story unfolded.

And you know what happened?

They came alive and led me out of what could have been a pretty dark place.

It’s one thing for me to love the idea of an organic novel; it’s another to show up to the page with all my vulnerabilities and the willingness to let my novel change me.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. ~Yo-Yo Ma

This quote sounds romantic and fantastical. I love passion, but as a 40-year-old mom of two and wife for over a decade, I know that the work gets done not from passion but from dedication. And when the work is done and it’s time to present it to the world, the risk-taking at that point is less about passion and more about desperation. We’ve spent days, months, or years, and the passion was left back in the beginning, back when it was written with pure excitement. That is gone. It’s now finished with blood, sweat, and tears, and not an ounce of passion remains.

Then again, maybe there’s an ounce that remains.

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” ~Oscar Wilde

Finding yourself happens alone and with others. I like solitude, but I also enjoy discovering new aspects of myself while I’m out in the world trying to figure it all out. When we’re alone, we can indulge our curiosity with little interruption. When we’re with others, we get to entangle our curiosity and find new questions or frustrations to indulge our curiosities again. I know writing is fairly solitary, but I like a good collaboration too.

How about you? Do you prefer one over the other?