Lately, I’ve been looking forward to getting to my desk.
That may sound like an ordinary thing for a writer to say. But after struggling with anhedonia, the absence of pleasure even in things I knew were worthwhile, that eagerness means something to me.
Writing fiction has been bringing it back. I want to find out what my characters will do next, even though I’m supposedly the person in charge. Apparently, nobody has explained that arrangement to them.
In this solo episode, I explore discovery writing, the feeling of being absorbed in creative work, and the possibility of returning to something you love with all your life experience behind you. I also talk about why I’m likely to write out these solo episodes before recording them. Some of the discovery happens while I’m figuring out what I want to say.
The big takeaway
My eagerness to return to storytelling is something I want to pay attention to. It tells me something about what belongs in my life. Your curiosity may offer something worth noticing, too.
In this episode
* I describe how writing fiction has renewed my enjoyment, while keeping that experience distinct from anyone else’s experience of depression.
* I consider how creative absorption may overlap with flow, drawing on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman.
* I explain why “discovery writer” fits the way I work, even when I have a destination in mind.
* I connect the pleasure of discovering characters with everyday discoveries, from a new restaurant to a solution for a stubborn problem.
* I reflect on Bruce Robert Coffin’s return to writing after nearly three decades in law enforcement.
* I share why scripting solo episodes feels like a return to my own writing roots.
Something to try
Ask yourself: What am I curious enough to come back to?
It might be a story, a skill, an unanswered question, or something you once loved. Give yourself a little room to explore it without requiring yourself to know where it will lead.
And when you notice that small lift of discovery, pay attention. I’m learning to take my own eagerness seriously.
A thought to carry with you
“Being excited to get to the desk is something I want to pay attention to. It tells me something about what belongs in my life.”
Mentioned in this episode
* Flow and engagement: The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center explains engagement within Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework and its connection to Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow.
* Bruce Robert Coffin on The Indy Author Podcast: Matty Dalrymple’s conversation, “Writing the Stories Only Life Can Teach You.”
* The Sparklight Chronicles, my fictional parables exploring nonfiction principles.
* The Chemistry Between Us and The Signal Between Us, the first two books in the series I’m writing as Devon Marin.
* Kevin on Kraft, my ongoing conversations with Kevin Tumlinson about writing, creativity, and making things.
With thanks to this episode’s sponsors
Butterfly Copywriting: Val Roskens Tews helps take the stress out of creating LinkedIn content and sharing your message.
The Chemistry Between Us, by Devon Marin: Meet Riley, a behavioral scientist, and Leo, a science communicator with ADHD, in the first book of a planned STEM romantic-comedy trilogy.
Through September 30, sample two chapters through Diversity is Mainstream, a promotion featuring nearly fifty writers whose stories include neurodiverse characters. After the promotion ends, the excerpt will remain available at DonnKing.com/Devon.
What have you been discovering lately—or what are you ready to come back to? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Article Version
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world, welcome once again to The Alignment Show, where we talk about where what matters meets real life. I’m your host, Donn King…
And today, I want to talk about the pleasure of finding out what happens next.
Which is a slightly odd thing to say when I’ve written this episode out before recording it. Presumably, I should know what happens next. It’s right there on the page.
But writing the page is where some of the discovery happens. Lately, that discovery has been doing something for me that I haven’t felt in quite this way for a long time.
I’ve been looking forward to getting to my desk.
If that sounds like a small thing, stay with me. There’s a little more behind it.
I don’t want every solo episode to become a progress report on the STEM romantic comedy I’m writing under the Devon Marin pen name. You have your own life. You don’t need a standing appointment with my imaginary people.
Although they are pretty good company.
But most of my recent writing experience has happened there, and something about that experience seems worth sharing even if you never read a romance novel, never write a book, and would prefer that imaginary people make their own coffee.
There are moments when the writing feels as though it’s coming through me instead of from me.
I’m still doing the work. I’m choosing words, figuring out what fits, and eventually going back to fix things that seemed brilliant at the time. But while I’m in it, I’m often following something that feels as though it’s already moving.
That may overlap with what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow. Martin Seligman includes that kind of deep engagement in his work on well-being, too. You become absorbed in something that stretches your abilities, and the doing becomes rewarding in itself.
I’m not sure every moment I’m describing qualifies as flow. Some of it may simply be curiosity. But I recognize that feeling of being caught up in the work, with less attention left over for watching myself do it.
The ancient Romans had an idea that gives me a useful image for this. A person could have a genius: an accompanying spirit. That’s a different use of the word from the way we call somebody a genius today. The Greeks had related ideas about spirits and inspiration, although the traditions weren’t identical. I even harnessed the idea of Muses for my parable series, The Sparklight Chronicles.
I don’t think a helpful little spirit has moved into my office and started dictating dialogue. If one has, I’d appreciate some help with proofreading.
Still, I understand the appeal of the image. It captures how surprising creativity can feel from the inside. I put the words down, and sometimes I’m also the first person surprised by them.
Longtime listeners and readers of several of my books have heard me talk about a realization I had years ago. I thought I wasn’t writing because I was depressed. In my case, I came to recognize that I was depressed because I wasn’t writing.
I was leaving out something important to the way I live and make sense of life. While that realization mattered, it also didn’t resolve everything.
Even afterward, I struggled with anhedonia, a loss of the ability to experience pleasure. It’s a frequent part of depression. For me, the defining feeling wasn’t sadness so much as the absence of enjoyment. Things could be worthwhile, and I could intellectually know they were worthwhile, without feeling much pleasure in them.
I’m describing my experience here. I wouldn’t assume someone else’s depression has the same cause, or that writing would do for them what it has done for me.
But I began to feel some of that pleasure again while writing The Sparklight Chronicles. Those books use fictional parables to explore nonfiction principles. I got to tell stories, get to know people I’d invented, and watch what happened when those people ran into the kinds of problems the books were exploring.
Since I started writing pure fiction this year, that eagerness has become much stronger. I find myself wanting to get back to the desk. I want to find out what these people are going to do.
A romantic comedy gives me a setting and a set of possibilities. But the storytelling itself seems to be what’s waking up my excitement: people with things they want, things they’re afraid of, and a remarkable capacity to complicate their own lives.
You know. People.
With The Chemistry Between Us, I had an endpoint in mind. I knew something about where I wanted the story to arrive. But knowing the destination still left a lot to discover along the way.
How would these two people respond in this situation? What would one of them say that the other would misunderstand? What might they finally admit after spending a considerable amount of energy avoiding it?
I could get excited about following them around even when I knew where we were headed.
Now I’ve started the second book, The Signal Between Us. Its main characters were supporting characters in the first book, so I already know them to some degree. I know the starting setup.
Beyond that, I have no idea where it’s going. That is either an exciting creative process or an alarming business plan. Possibly both.
I know who the main characters will be in the third book, too. I know how they meet. That’s about all I know so far.
Writers sometimes describe this as the difference between plotters and pantsers. Plotters work out the story ahead of time. Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. A more polite pair of terms is outliners and discovery writers.
Most writers probably fall somewhere along a spectrum (and, really, most humans approach life along a similar spectrum), and I lean strongly toward discovery writing.
That word, discovery, has been sticking with me. I know that pleasure in other parts of life, too. Discovering a new restaurant, or maybe a new dish at a familiar restaurant. Finding a way to do something that has been annoying me for years. Finally seeing the solution to a problem that kept refusing to cooperate. Finding a cool little neighborhood off the beaten path. Even watching one of those “I was today years old when I found out…” videos and realizing I’ve been making some ordinary task unnecessarily difficult for several decades.
There’s a little lift in finding something you didn’t know was there.
Writing fiction has been giving me that feeling over and over. I know I’m inventing these people. I also get to discover them as I go, like they have a life of their own. Every choice gives me something else to understand about them, and that understanding shapes the next choice.
The fun is getting to know them.
There’s a downside, though. I can’t actually sit down with them over a cup of coffee. I’d enjoy that. I have questions. A few of them probably have complaints.
The closest I can come is to spend time with them on the page, and then invite someone else into that experience. When you read a story, you bring your own experience and imagination to the people in it. You get to know them, too.
So yes, dear listener and reader, I’m inviting you to come along and play with me and my imaginary friends.
And I’m encouraging you to discover your own. If that takes the form of stories and characters, wonderful. But discovery has plenty of other places to live. You might follow a question, learn a skill, try something unfamiliar, or return to something you once loved and see what happens now.
I’ve been thinking about that returning thing, too.
I admire Kevin Tumlinson’s off-the-cuff conversational style for his podcasts. I’ve used that kind of spontaneous delivery myself for years in podcasting and professional speaking, and I enjoy it. There’s a particular energy in hearing an idea take shape as somebody says it.
But writing this out first produces a different kind of energy. It allows me to ensure structure and to do some background research. I know the delivery sounds different. I hope to make it effective, to let the words sound like something I’m saying to you, even though I’ve had a chance to work on them beforehand.
And right now, writing the solo episodes feels like a way of circling back around to my roots as a writer.
Something I heard today helped me think about that. Bruce Robert Coffin was talking with Matty Dalrymple on The Indy Author Podcast. He wanted to write from a young age, but his life included nearly three decades in law enforcement before he published his first novel at fifty-two.
He’s gone on to write and co-write multiple books, at least 13 I could find. His professional experience gave him material he could bring to those stories: lived detail, an understanding of people, and experiences that could give his characters emotional weight.
What stayed with me was the possibility of returning to an early love with all that life behind you. You return as somebody who has lived, worked, learned things, lost things, and discovered things. You have more to bring to it than you had when you first wanted to begin.
That resonates with me. I’ve spent years writing, speaking, teaching, and having conversations. Now I’m finding a particular pleasure in storytelling, and even in writing out what I want to say here before I say it.
We’ll still have those natural, spontaneous conversations with guests. I love what can happen when people listen to each other and follow a thought somewhere neither one expected.
For the solo shows, though, I’m likely to write them out first. I want to see what I discover in the writing, and then bring that discovery into the conversation with you.
Maybe there’s a question in all of this worth carrying into your own week: What are you curious enough to come back to? I’ve noticed how much that eagerness matters to me. Being excited to get to the desk is something I want to pay attention to. It tells me something about what belongs in my life.
At this point, I’m not completely sure what we’ll have on our next episode. We have another recording session scheduled with Kevin Tumlinson for Kevin on Kraft, our ongoing conversations about writing, creativity, and the experience of making things. Kevin brings that easy conversational style I enjoy, and we’ll see where the next conversation takes us.
I also have some episodes we recorded months ago, and several guests lined up whose recording times we still need to arrange.
So there’s more to come, even if I can’t give you the exact order yet.
We’ll keep the connection here on The Alignment Show, where what matters meets real life.
Thanks for spending some of your time with me. I’d love to hear what you’ve been discovering, or what you’re ready to come back to.
And now, I think I’ll go see what my imaginary friends are up to.
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