Mindset is Everything: How To Find Joy and Ease In The Creative Life
Less toxic positivity and “Good Vibes Only,” and more learning to harness your mindset to ENJOY the challenges intrinsic to the creative life and pursuing your artistic dreams.
Hi WGC, Amy here. I am an inherently positive person, but querying over five years really tested my intrinsic optimism. After years of rejection, I realized I was sending queries and outwardly hoping for “yes,” but deep down I began to expect “no.” It wasn’t until I began to study mindset and worked intentionally on it alongside my manuscript that I understood the power and importance of harnessing my own mind to not only shift outcomes in my favor, but also to genuinely enjoy each stage of my publishing journey.
Mindset is such a tough one, and it’s a process no matter where you are in the creative life. It often means unlearning things you’ve spent a lifetime practicing, knowingly or unknowingly.
But the first step is recognizing that mindset is not fixed. Mindset CAN be trained, it can be changed, and then beginning to take the steps to make the shifts, little by little, towards joy.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Especially if you’ve spent a lifetime with a more negative mindset. (This is not meant to oversimplify real struggles with mental health, depression, or anxiety, which are separate). But in the creative life, there will always be times that are hard and terrible and yet you will have the tools to begin to notice when you are focusing on that, instead of the gratitude for doing something you love.
And if you are like me, pretty positive by nature, there is always room to expand the joy, until pursuing the pleasure of the pursuit becomes the point.
Joy and Ease are my most used mantras. Embodying joy. Embodying ease. Finding joy. Finding ease. These are the feelings I try to cultivate while writing, while revising, while being interviewed or sharing about my book on stage.
That is where I choose to put my focus, that is how I choose to show up to my creative life every single day. (And a reminder, this is coming from someone who stared down five years of agent rejections and a 10-year journey to publishing my debut novel—easy it has not been by any definition of the word!)
Focusing on ease is not to suggest turning away when things get difficult, when the words are not coming.
It is not about chasing things being easy or running away from a challenge.
It is about NOT allowing your mind to work itself up before you even begin.
It is about finding the joy along the way, because a creative life should and can be joyful if you allow it to be.
If you want to start working on mindset, consider starting small. Maybe joy and ease are too far away from where you are today. Maybe it’s a focus on gratitude that feels more approachable. Maybe it’s I am lucky to get to do this. Or my creative time is a gift to myself. Whatever it is that grounds you in why you do this and reminds yourself how much you love to write. Tap into the joy that originally propelled you to put the words down.
There are so many great resources for mindset, especially mindset specific to the creative life. One book I love is Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. Another good one is The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer's Journey by Joanna Penn. I can’t recommend highly enough the Atomic Habits newsletter by James Clear (as well as his book by the same name, though the book is less specific to the creative life and more habit/lifestyle focused)— the newsletter is full of short and sweet mindset takeaways and delivered once a week to your inbox. You can also search social media for great bite-sized mindset content to get you started.
Okay, let’s take it to the chat! How do you find the joy and ease in your own creative process? Is this something you are working on, or something that comes naturally to you?
Erin: This is such an interesting topic to me! Like Amy, I’ve been a largely positive person my whole life, but I do feel things shifting as I get older. I think some of that is having kids and worrying about them all time. Plus, the cascade of unknowns during the Covid pandemic really set off my anxiety about my family getting sick and having potentially long-lasting issues. I also started writing fiction in 2019—and then querying and dealing with lots of rejection—so that time was formative for me.
The first thing that has helped me with my mindset during the publishing journey is focusing on what I can control, and that does include the joy of writing. I’m currently working on a new book, and it is so wonderful to escape to a made-up world at the end of the long day. There are definitely days that I’m just zonked by the time I’m supposed to write (usually 9 p.m.), so sometimes I give myself the “day off.” But I’ve found that even just a 15-minute sprint is enough to remind myself how fun it is to write a story (even if you don't know if it will ever be published!)
Another mindset help is having friends to text when my brain is going to a bad place! Sometimes I just need reassurance that a specific thing I did or said wasn’t really a big deal. The four of us have a text chain that includes plenty of reassurance that what we are thinking/feeling is normal and/or probably not as big a deal as we are making it.
Finally, I have a tendency to gloss over the cool/wonderful/amazing stuff in life, so I’ve started writing in a gratitude journal at the end of the day. Even just taking 5 minutes to remember something sweet my husband did or something hilarious one of my kid’s said helps put everything in a positive light.
Hadley: Positive mindset definitely does not come naturally to me. I grew up in the Midwest, so excessive humility and people-pleasing were practically baked into my upbringing. For me, it’s much more comfortable to focus on the ways I’m falling short than on the things I’m doing right, so joy and ease are mindstates I have to actively cultivate.
A few things that help: 1) Refusing to judge myself for having a negative mindset. It’s more helpful to think “this is just how some human brains are” than to berate myself for not being more naturally positive. 2) Trying therapy! It took me years to be willing to take this step, but I now believe therapy should come free with every book deal. And it’s critical for anyone who thinks anxiety or depression might be getting in the way of their writing. 3) Listening to all 107 episodes of the Career Novelist Podcast by author and life coach Camille Pagán. Everything about this podcast is soothing to my nervous system, and with episodes like, “How to tell a better story (about yourself),” “How to be uncomfortable,” and “How to enjoy success (when you secretly feel lousy),” it’s a must-listen for authors at every stage who are trying to improve their mindset.
Lauren: It may run a bit counter to Amy’s experience above, but I’ve actually been able to lean into the joy of writing more easily by taking “ease” out of the equation, so to speak. Embracing the difficulty—and sometimes, extreme mental and emotional discomfort—of writing a book has allowed me to find more pleasure in the writing experience. Usually when I encounter things that are really hard, I start telling myself that I suck. I convince myself that whatever it is should be easier, but it’s not because there’s something wrong with me (file under: motherhood). But when I remind myself that some things in life, like, for instance, writing a 100K-word book, are inherently challenging, I give myself permission to do something hard and not expect it to be easy. That in turn allows me to take the pressure off myself to “be better.” It’s hard because sometimes it’s just hard, not because I’m defective or a bad writer! The more I embrace the challenge, the more fun I have along the way, and the more fun I have, the more I want to dive straight into the challenge. And as I write this, I’m aware that maybe that is a kind of ease.
Tell us in the comments below: Is mindset new to you, or something that you’ve actively worked on? Does your mindset impact your creativity or enjoyment of the creative process (positively or negatively)? Any resources that you have found helpful that you can share to help others get started? How do you find joy in your own creative life?
These are such insightful comments! Keep them coming...learning so much!
Wise words! Mindset, to me, is about trust. Knowing that I've done hard things before and trusting myself that I can do it again.