I am obsessed with all the ways surrender fuels productivity. I mean, every which way you turn there is an opportunity for and a gift in surrendering. We build up so much resistance to taking risks, being wrong, being a learner, finding our way, not having the answer, that we develop attitudes and actions that protect us from discomfort—and, at the same time, block us from progress.
There’s really no area of the process of writing, publishing, promoting your work that doesn’t involve surrender. An incomplete list of things I’ve had to surrender to is:
• Developing outlines without being sure that I hit all the right plot points
• Selling a book without complete alignment on all the plot points
• Selling two books without knowing what the overlap would be between the two writing schedules and how I would manage developing both projects.
• Drafting a book without knowing all the character arcs
• Publishing a book with less drafts than I’d like (wait, I can’t have my Polish Draft?!)
• Launching a project without having enough time to market it
On a micro-level, writing a project requires you to:
• Surrender to an idea (you have no idea where it will take you when you start working with it)
• Surrender to the flow of the scenes (you have no idea whether they are coming in the right order or right shape or right pace)
• Surrender to the flow of development (you may not know how many drafts you will have to write to get to the final draft)
• Surrender to where the characters and story want to go (they may have a different direction than the one you originally planned)
The older I get, the more I understand: Surrender is the key to the process. Letting it be messy, letting it be imperfect, allowing myself to set off on the wrong path—those strategies are all based in surrender. They are all based on me telling myself to surrender to the process and let go of every judgment, preconception or projection that tells me that there is a right way to do things. Because none of those things will get me where I am trying to go.