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(Full episode transcript below show notes)
A new Write Now podcast episode?! 😱 Heck yeah!
What do you really need to do if you want to become a writer, or to improve in your craft? There are a lot of different answers to this question, from reading and writing as much as you can to taking classes and attending workshops. But I believe the most powerful thing you can do is not only free but readily available to everyone: cultivate your curiosity.
Today, I’m talking about how curiosity interacts with (and fuels) our creativity, and what you can do to cultivate your own curiosity to better your craft.
I’d love to hear your thoughts — if you agree, if you think I’m off-base, if you have your own favorite writing asset(s), and more!
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Full Episode Transcript:
Sarah Rhea Werner (00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 169: The Ultimate Asset For Writers.
(00:28):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host. Sarah Werner, and I am often asked,” Sarah, what do I need to do if I want to become a writer?”
(00:50):
And there are a lot of different answers to that question. Frequently, I’ll tell people, “Just start writing. See where your mind goes. See where your pen takes you, see where your laptop keyboard takes you.” Or I’ll suggest that people start with reading. What we read informs and influences what we write in thousands of ways, from understanding how words and storytelling work to developing our voice, building a unique voice, and getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t in our writing.
(01:25):
But I feel like this can be overwhelming. I’ve talked about this on the show before, but when you say, “Oh, just start writing,” well… it can be a lot more difficult than “just”. That’s like telling someone with anxiety to “Just stop worrying.” It’s like, well, okay, where do I start? What do I do? What practices do I need to integrate? Is this even possible for me? Should I do deep breathing? Should I do yoga? Should I take medication? Do I need to move to Italy? … I don’t know why I immediately went to Italy on that, because I’ve heard that the traffic there is very anxiety inducing, but! My point is I feel like often we need a little more direction.
(02:10):
Now, there is no shortage of suggestions online, in books, in journals and magazines, of what you “should” be reading and things that you can write about. But I feel like often those lists and suggestions aren’t very personal. And what I mean by that is, the very specific diets of books that you consume and the output of things that you create really deeply inform who you are as you’re developing into a writer. And oftentimes, especially with lists of books you “should” read, those are often not aligned with maybe who you want to be as a writer, with what you want to write. Often I feel like those lists are compiled by people who have a certain agenda they want to push, or they’re representing books from a specific publishing house, or they were compiled 50 years ago when we have different perspectives and needs as writers today.
(03:17):
I’ve seen a lot of these lists, and they’re often called “100 Books You Need To Read Before You Die,” or something very dramatic like that. And granted, they often feature a lot of very good books that are worth reading (and usually at least one work by Shakespeare). But the question that lies beneath our motivation to work through book lists like this, things that we are “supposed to” read, things that we “should” read, is: are we actually interested in reading these books?
(03:50):
Now, I’m not telling you not to read the books on these lists. I’m not telling you to necessarily avoid them. Some of them you may pick up, and you start reading it, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is changing my worldview. This is feeding my brain. This is amazing. And I would’ve never picked up this book if it weren’t for this list.” But — at least from my experience — what I’ve found is a lot of these lists are very one-note. They are the classics. They are books that you would find on a curriculum of a course about classic English literature. And obviously, there is absolutely nothing wrong with classic literature. A well-rounded reader should certainly read a few of the classics. But, as a young writer in my teens, in my twenties, when I was working at a desk job and I was desperate to do something more creative with my life and my career, I would look at a list like this and just feel this sinking feeling in my stomach. I would feel this feeling of despair. I would feel, looking over a list of the hundred books you must read before you die, that, “Oh my gosh, none of these are interesting to me.” I felt like I was looking at a list of years’ worth of homework.
(05:13):
Now, as a caveat, I can only speak from my own experience, but as a student, going back to my teens and even my childhood, I would read the books that we were assigned in class — that would be the homework. And then I would reward myself by reading a book that I actually wanted to read. I would slog through a chapter of Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I would not understand or retain very much. And then finally, when I was done trudging through that chapter… and no offense to Thomas Hardy or his fans, if that is your jam, that is your jam. But I could not get in to books like this. So when I was done reading my chapter of Tess, I would pick up the latest Animorphs book that I had just checked out from the library. Once I got through a particular act of a Shakespeare play, or once I got through the next chapter of Moby Dick, I was free to read Judy Blume or Christopher Pike. I could read books about dragons and monsters and knights and ghosts and werewolves and other planets. I could read a mystery by Nancy Pickard. I could read some sci-fi by Octavia Butler. I could read genre fiction.
(06:34):
Now, obviously, things have changed a lot since I went to high school and maybe recommended literature or literature that is read in the classroom is no longer strictly Shakespeare plus anything written in the UK or North America between 1700 and 2000. And maybe I was a little bit of a brat. Maybe I was a little bit of a snob. Maybe I didn’t give Tess of the D’Urbervilles enough of a chance. But all I really remember is that swell of excitement when I could close Tess of the D’Urbervilles and open up a piece of horror or fantasy or science fiction or humor, where the characters felt real to me, and made me laugh and cry, and went on adventures of the type I’d always dreamed about, and where I didn’t have to analyze the symbolism of Stonehenge or the fireplace in the corner, or why anyone would name their child Sorrow.
(07:36):
Again, I might be… perhaps I’m being incredibly unfair to Thomas Hardy and to the ranks of 18th and 19th century British literature. All I know is what I was interested in, what inspired me, what made me want to write, what made me want to read more — and what didn’t. Again, this is deeply personal and deeply relative, so maybe you couldn’t get enough Shakespeare growing up. I have friends for which that was true. They fell in love with the Bard and it sparked their imagination. They wanted to be in plays, they wanted to write their own plays. They were intrigued and inspired by these works. Or maybe you wanted to read nothing but nonfiction about pandas, or dinosaurs.
(08:25):
And again, it is good and healthy to be a well-rounded reader and writer. It is good and healthy to sample from other food groups. As much as I want to, I could not live purely on a diet of Doritos. You’ve got to get some broccoli in there. But while some people may discount Doritos as “real food”, and while broccoli does have a lot of nutrition in it, they’re both food. One is just a little bit more looked down upon than the other.
(08:57):
So where I’m going with this is, I may not have been a writer, I may not have ended up leaving my day job and becoming a writer full-time if I hadn’t fallen in love with weird genre fiction. My curiosity about this genre is what drove me to read compulsively, and that’s really the key to what we’re talking about today. That word: curiosity.
(09:27):
If you really want to get into something, if you want to make it your career or your world or your life, it has to be something that sparks your curiosity. It has to be something that you want to follow, that you want to consume, that you are passionate about consuming and creating. I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but often I will pick up a book because the cover, the illustration on it, the title, the blurb, the inside jacket description, whatever, it would spark my curiosity. I wanted to read it because I wanted to read it. Not because it had been assigned to me, but because my brain was searching for something. My brain was itching for something and it knew what I wanted before I consciously did.
(10:18):
I feel like our curiosity and our creativity are deeply linked, and our curiosity is what helps us to grow our creativity. And just as people will say we all start out as creative as children — we all color, we all use finger paints, we all build towers out of sticks — we also start off innately curious. If you’ve spent any time with children — small children — you know that they love to put things in their mouths: toys, sticks, leaves, car keys, books. Small children’s brains are growing and developing, and their curiosity leads them to explore and discover the world around them.
(11:06):
Now, obviously, we grow and learn, and at some point we stop putting the car keys into our mouths, but we stay curious. We lift up rocks to look at the bugs underneath. We mix together different fountain sodas to see what happens. We test boundaries with our parents. We solve puzzles and play video games and read books that spark our interest. We ask ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, “Well, what if?” And it’s that “What if?” question that is really key.
(11:40):
In the publication Psychology Today, Anthony Fredericks suggests that “our curiosity is not only the search for answers, but the generation of possibilities.” So curiosity not only keeps us learning, challenging ourselves, moving forward, growing, seeking truths — curiosity also leads us to create. It leads us to answer the question “What if?” in our own words. Curiosity is what allows us to solve problems, to innovate, to be creative in a number of different ways. I’m not even just talking about writing stories. I’m talking about coming up with possibilities and solutions for really complex problems at work, at home, in the world.
(12:31):
If we stay curious, if we allow ourselves to be guided by challenges and mysteries, by “What if?”s, then we can continue to grow and cultivate our curiosity, our creativity, throughout adulthood.
(12:48):
Something happens when we transition from children into adults, and this is the phase where a lot of people seem to lose their sense of curiosity. They seem to lose their talent for creativity. And I don’t think this is necessarily something that they intend to do. I don’t think anyone sits down and says, “Welp, I’m done learning and growing. Time to shut off my brain and just exist!” Or maybe some people do, and that’s just not my experience.
(13:21):
But I think to some degree, in order to keep society moving forward, some of us, maybe most of us, are told to stop asking questions. To stop asking “What if?” To stop asking, “Why?” We get a job at a bank or a retail store or a factory or a restaurant or a credit card company, and we are encouraged, if not explicitly told, to stop asking questions to sit down and do the work they’re paying us for. To not question the wisdom of your boss, to not talk back, to not upset the way things work, to not upset the status quo or the way things are.
(14:08):
I remember I really struggled at my first few jobs out of college because I would ask, “Why?” And the answers I received were not so much to inform me as to sort of implicitly discourage me from asking those questions. And often, I had learned not to ask these questions. I would write my ad copy and think, “Why can’t this be more interesting?” But I had learned, at that point, that the answer would be, “Because this is the way you need to do it. This is how we represent a professional bank in the world. It needs to be formal because reasons. It needs to have the FDIC logo at the bottom because compliance.” And again, I’m fine with those instances, having those parameters. I’m fine if the company that I am writing advertising copy for wants to present a formal image and not be like, “Yo, what’s up?” I totally understand that. But what frustrated me was that the answers I received were not sufficient to the questions that I asked. The answers I received were, “Well, because that’s how it’s done,” or, “Because that’s what our brand voice is.” And it wouldn’t explain to me why.
(15:29):
So as I moved on to a different company that did marketing for a lot of different businesses, I was encouraged to be more creative… but not more curious. So I would get an assignment of, “This company wants a blog post featuring this product and this product, and you can kind of have some fun with it in a fun voice, maybe with some fun images.” And it would feel like creativity… at least until I started the assignment. Because then I would start to get curious. And by now, I had learned not to ask my manager these questions, but inside I was asking, “Why do people actually want this product? Why do people actually need this product?” And if I had asked, the answer that I would have been given would have been, “Because we need to make sales; because we need to sell the product; because we need to make money by selling this product; because this is what you’ve been assigned to do, Sarah; now please do the assignment.”
(16:30):
But that separation of curiosity and creativity was what ultimately frustrated me most about being a paid writer, about being a marketer. I remember once I asked a company representative that I was working with, “Okay, why is your product actually better than anyone else’s? What makes you different?” And I would get back an answer that indicated to me that I was being annoying, or that they didn’t actually have an answer to that question. Like, okay — why should people go to your university when they could go to any other number of universities in the state, or out of state? Sometimes with discovery meetings with the client, I did get to ask these questions, but the answers I received were, again, not actual answers. They were dismissive. “Well, people go to our university because of our commitment to higher education.” Okay, can you show me a college that won’t say that people should go there because of their commitment to higher education? That’s maybe something that’s important to you. That’s maybe a value that you have. But that’s not what makes you different from other universities. That’s not what would make somebody go there, especially if they’re taking out what will be years worth of student loans to attend your university. And I was pressed to be creative and create things without a deeper sense of curiosity.
(18:09):
And I know this is the way things are. If you get a job, you’re just supposed to do the job. In order for the system to work, obviously, it needs to work; it needs to run smoothly. It doesn’t need hundreds of low-level employees asking, “But why? But why?” I mean, I get that. But ultimately, it made my career extremely frustrating, because I was producing the work, but I wasn’t fulfilling the curiosity. I was writing, but it wasn’t creative. It didn’t explore possibilities. It didn’t scratch that itch. I just put words on paper that people wanted to see, that they expected to see, and I collected a paycheck.
(18:55):
This is eventually why I branched out and started the Write Now podcast — because the stuff I was creating, even though I was being paid to write, which is many writers’ dream, it wasn’t out of curiosity. It was out of duty. It was out of responsibility. It was because my manager told me this was my next project, and I had to complete it by this date, and it had to be X number of words, and it had to be written below a fifth-grade reading level. And sure, there is certainly a way to convert restraints into creativity. There’s a way to use creativity to create despite these restraints. But ultimately, realizing this helped explain why the “dream job” — to be working as a paid writer — was ultimately so discouraging and unfulfilling.
(19:48):
The reason that I write is to fulfill my curiosity. It’s to explore things. It’s to understand, it’s to learn, it’s to grow, it’s to create. It’s to invent and then solve mysteries. It’s to challenge myself, to surprise myself. That was one of my very first episodes of the Write Now Podcast — episode four, recorded back in 2015. It’s called “Go On, Surprise Yourself,” and I talk about, this is the thing that I need. This is the thing that I’m chasing when I sit down to do some writing. I want to surprise myself. That’s the most joyful thing that I get out of writing.
(20:27):
So the next question becomes, “Sarah, why are you telling me that curiosity is an asset for a writer when it’s really clashed with a lot of the work you’ve been doing in your paid writing?” And this is really where I think there’s a difference between writing for yourself and writing for someone else. And I realized that I love writing for myself, and it is very, very frustrating to write for someone else.
(20:53):
Now, writing for someone else is often how we make money, and we need to support ourselves. And so for a long time, even after I left my day job, I was doing freelance projects that I didn’t really want to do. But I did them because I made money, and you need money to live. But I think that if I could go back, I would do it differently. I would get a job doing something completely different and save all of my creative energy, all of my curiosity, for my own creative projects at home. I couldn’t go back today and work in marketing — I think I would just annoy everyone. I would maybe be an administrative assistant, or I would work with the parks and recreation system, or I would paint houses, something where I could be paid for the work I was doing, but also accept it as, “This is my day job. This is what brings me money, and when I go home tonight, I’m going to use my creative energy to write. For me. For projects. I care about, projects which engage your curiosity and lead to new levels of creativity, which allow you to explore possibilities and solve challenging issues.
(22:12):
I always feel like this will be your best creative work. This is how you’ll make a name for yourself as a writer. This is how you will write important things that matter to you. This is what will enrich your work and make what may seem, at the beginning, to be a boilerplate mystery or a romance. Adding your own creativity to that, your own curiosity to that, will elevate the material and really help you to build your voice and stand out.
(22:41):
Maybe I’m being idealistic. In fact, I know I’m being idealistic. And I realize that I sound naive. But this has also been the only way that has worked for me to make a living out of my creative writing, letting my curiosity guide me. Letting it open doorways for creativity and possibility. Surprising myself, and staying open-minded enough to surprise myself. Letting go of judgments and assumptions, and truly asking, “What if?” Not just searching for answers, but generating possibility.
(23:19):
I’ll wrap up here with a quote from Albert Einstein who said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” So — all of this makes me curious. Why do you write? What do you get out of writing? What brings you joy in your writing? What challenges you in a good and exciting way? What opens up possibilities? What are you curious about? What role has curiosity played in your creative life? Or do you feel like that creativity, that curiosity, has been stomped out of you?
(23:58):
We are inherently curious and creative creatures, and even if you feel as though these things have been stomped out of you, they’re still in there. I promise. Open up your mind a little bit. Remember what it was that excited you as a child, whether it was going out into nature and finding all of the different flowers you could, looking at cool insects, studying birds, or maybe it was staying inside and drawing or putting together puzzles or reading. What did you love to read? What do you wish you could read more of now? What sparks your curiosity?
(24:36):
I encourage you to begin going down that path. And you can go gently, you can go slowly, but maybe pick up a book that you’ve always wanted to read, something with a cool cover and a great blurb. Or maybe even return to that list of “100 Books You Must Read Before You Die,” and give one of them a try. Get curious about, “Why is this book on this list? Why must I read this before I die? What about it will change my life? What’s going on here?” Get curious about why things are the way they are, and why people want things to be a certain way, or a different way, or the same way.
(25:16):
This is the key to jump-starting your creativity — that is, to get curious about the world around you, about what you’ve been taught, about what’s going on in your brain, about what’s out there to be discovered, about what you can explore, beauty that you can see, mysteries that you can solve. What sparks your curiosity, and how can that lead you to greater creativity?
(25:41):
I’m able to create this podcast because of the generous and kind support from listeners like you. Whether you would like to donate on Patreon, or on Ko-fi, or on PayPal, there are options that you can choose that will help me pay for hosting costs, help me keep the show going, and it is deeply appreciated. If you are, like so many of us, not in a great financial place right now and you can’t help out monetarily, then I encourage you to simply share this episode — or share your favorite episode of the show — with a friend, with someone who needs to hear it, with someone who is looking to explore their capacity as a writer, as a creative person, someone who wants to get back in touch with their creativity.
(26:34):
Special thanks go out to listeners Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Kim, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. Thank you all so much for your kind and generous donations to keep this show going. I truly appreciate it. Thank you.
(26:56):
And with that, this has been episode 169 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m so excited for you to explore the depths of your creativity.