Episode Description:
In this episode of What If for Authors, Claire explores the challenges and benefits of being an action-oriented writer. Drawing on her Enneagram expertise, Claire delves into what it means to lead with action in your writing process—balancing the need to move forward with moments of pause for reflection and emotional connection. She shares personal insights on managing overwhelming schedules, the importance of intentional pauses, and how to leverage your innate action-oriented strengths without burning out.
Key Takeaways:
Understanding Action Orientation:
Discover what it means to be an action-oriented writer and how it may manifest differently based on your Enneagram type and subtype.
Recognize that being action oriented doesn’t preclude using planning or intuition—it's about finding your unique balance.
The Power of Pausing:
Learn why even action oriented writers benefit from occasional pauses to check in with their emotions and thoughts.
Explore strategies to avoid unproductive action that arises from trying to outrun negative feelings.
Balancing Productivity with Self-Care:
Understand the pitfalls of overloading your schedule with responsibilities as a misguided attempt to maintain control.
Embrace the idea that taking time to pause, reflect, and even connect with loved ones can ultimately enhance your writing.
Practical Strategies:
Consider setting up realistic, sustainable work habits and allowing room for flexibility in your creative process.
Use techniques like mindfulness to refocus and reclaim your energy when your schedule feels overwhelming.
Why You Should Listen:
If you’re an author who thrives on action but finds yourself occasionally overwhelmed by your own pace or the pressure to always be moving forward, this episode is for you. Claire offers a refreshing perspective on how to harness your action-oriented strengths while incorporating essential pauses for growth and self-reflection. Whether you're struggling to maintain balance or looking for ways to optimize your creative process, you'll gain valuable insights to empower your author journey.
Support the Show:
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform and sharing the show with fellow authors. Every review helps more writers discover these insights and join our community.
Join the Conversation:
We’d love to hear your thoughts! How do you balance action and reflection in your writing process? What strategies have helped you avoid burnout while staying productive? Share your insights with Claire by emailing contact@ffs.media or connect on social media.
Transition Announcement:
As a quick update, Claire announces that the podcast will be transitioning from a weekly to a monthly schedule. This change will help ensure the quality and sustainability of the show and protect Claire’s sanity, so be sure to stay tuned for the next episode!
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors as well as a Humor and Mystery Writer. My latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, is all about how to root out the unsustainable practices in our writing life and how to spot the right opportunities for us when they come along.
Check it out by going to ffs. media forward slash sustain.
Before I get to the good stuff today, I have an announcement that I know you're going to want to skip past, but I encourage you not to because then you'll be confused in future weeks. I'm now 40 episodes into this podcast, and while there are plenty more topics to cover, and new ones popping up weekly, I'm shifting some of the focus of my business right now in the new year, and that requires that I clear the decks a little bit time wise.
So this show will transition from a weekly podcast to [00:01:00] a monthly podcast. So make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss it, because I know that when the frequency goes down, then people forget about things, I'm not front of mind, blah, blah, blah. So just make sure you're Subscribed if you want to continue getting these episodes.
And so, you know, if it's at a monthly schedule, I will be able to sustain this more long term. And of course, sustainability is the name of the game right now. So I don't make this decision lightly, this transition to monthly, because I know how much pain it causes me when one of my favorite podcasts releases monthly or irregularly or they skip a week. That small predictable thing, sometimes the small predictable things are all that keeps us going. Right? But each of these episodes takes about three hours for me to brainstorm, write, and record.
And once I'm done, I'm pretty much tapped for the day. I just don't have a day each week to commit to this [00:02:00] anymore with all the coaching and writing that I need to do this year. So we're going to monthly releases. All right. That is the announcement. End announcement. Bye. And on to the episode. Today's episode is one that some of y'all have probably been anticipating since the episode on being a thinking oriented writer.
This week we're going to ask the question, what if I'm an action oriented writer? Now just because you're in the action center of intelligence in the Enneagram, that's eights, nines, and ones, doesn't mean you're an action oriented writer. Nines, for instance, don't tend to lead with action. Threes, meanwhile, are very action oriented.
Sevens are frequently action oriented as well.
So when I talk about action oriented writers, I'm talking about those who feel much less resistance to taking a first step. Pausing to stop and think or to stop and feel might be a little less natural for these folks. In my [00:03:00] work, action oriented people tend to be 1s, 3s, and 8s, but that doesn't mean all the 8s are action oriented, and it doesn't mean the other types cannot be action oriented.
It's really up to you to pause and think about how you tend to approach things, both in your life and in your writing career.
Subtype may also play a part here. For instance, a 1 to 1 7, the fascination subtype, tends to be much more in their heads than a social 7. the sacrifice subtype that tends to be very service oriented and more action oriented as a result. I use the word tend a lot here because even your subtype isn't the whole picture of you, right?
There are a lot of personal factors that come into play, which is why I'm not drawing strict Enneagram lines here.
But there are clues in the Enneagram to get us started with asking the questions. Now, that being said, I will say if you're an 8 and you don't identify as an [00:04:00] action oriented writer, you're probably either mistyped or you've slid over into your stress type of 5 a little bit. So 8s are action, action, action, pretty much uniformly across the subtypes.
Let's start by asking, what common advice do we need to ignore if we're an action oriented writer? I would start by saying that you might find detailed outlines a little confining.
Anything that slows the process of actually getting to the writing part is likely going to make you cranky and impatient. Do you need to know your characters well before you start? Maybe, maybe not. You really have to find that sweet spot and allow yourself to find the sweet spot for you. Revisions can feel like cruel and unusual punishment to a lot of action oriented writers because you like the feel of moving forward, and revisions can feel like being dragged backward.
So if you'd If you don't like doing a lot of revisions, it might help the overall [00:05:00] quality of your books to delay gratification just a bit at the start to get to know some integral qualities of your characters before you begin writing them. That leads to less revisions needed after to make the book make sense.
It's a balance though, right? If you hate going back for revisions, and you hate doing a bunch of planning before you start to develop things like characters or theme, Then you're facing a trade off between a little bit of discomfort as you delay the action, or a book that may feel a little half baked to readers.
Now obviously I'm biased here, but a great solution to this tension is to decide on the Enneagram types of your protagonist, antagonist, and a couple of secondary characters before you get started.
That'll help you craft consistent characters on the fly as you write, and it can give you an idea of the central internal conflict and theme before you dive right in. For instance, you pick a protagonist who's a 2, the [00:06:00] helper. and an antagonist who's a five, the investigator.
If you know a little bit about those types and their core motivations, you can start to see that they'll clash the hardest around themes of help, self reliance, service, and competency. Now you don't have to settle on one theme, but you can sort of keep your eyes open in the direction of those conflicts.
It may also help to remind yourself that just because the process of outlining and then returning to the beginning to draft might feel like being constrained or dragged back in time. That doesn't mean that it's the only way to think about that. So rather than orienting yourself to the order of action in your story, orient yourself to the process of writing a book.
So it's all forward motion when you orient yourself to the process of writing a book. Even finishing the outline and going back to the beginning of the events of the story to start drafting. It may feel [00:07:00] like it's going backward because you're orienting yourself to the timeline of events in the story.
Now, it's a minor shift of perspective, but it can be incredibly helpful when you feel like, Ugh, I have to start drafting when I already know what happens in the end.
Also, again, you don't have to do an outline if you don't want to. But if you hate revisions and you don't want a half baked story, you probably got to find a balance that's tolerable for you.
And people tend to be more comfortable with delaying gratification than getting immediate gratification and then having to go back to something that is really, uh, intolerable or slow.
Now, just because you're an action oriented writer doesn't mean that you're necessarily an intuitive writer. You might not feel completely comfortable with improvising the whole book, and you might want to have the guardrails of a road map or an outliner, basic story beats. If that's you, recognizing that you may be feeling impatient as you plot these out can be [00:08:00] just incredibly helpful.
The impatience may register to you subconsciously as I'm doing this wrong. But you can reframe it to excitement like nerves before the starting gun of a race. The impatience is energy building up and that can be a really good thing. You're ready to take off. Accepting that impatience at the start is a crucial step to the process of being an action oriented writer can be incredibly helpful.
That tension of Delayed gratification can be a great pleasure if you remind yourself that it is delayed gratification and not punishment.
Now, action oriented writers tend to have a blind spot for either the logic of their story or the emotions of their characters. Whichever of the three centers is the lowest for them. If your thinking center is the least developed for you, there might be a lot of loose ends in the plot, moments when you're writing and feel like, Eh, that doesn't really [00:09:00] make sense, but I'll fix it later.
It may even look like characters taking action to move the plot forward the way you want it to go, without the action that they're taking necessarily making sense for their motivation and history. This
is something you might
And if you have an editor who is incredibly detail oriented for plot and consistency, that will be a huge way to support yourself so that you don't need to be the best at everything and you can lean instead on the gifts of your action orientation. Now,
if your least developed center is the feeling center, the heart center, then it's likely that your pacing and external actions are crowding out some of the space needed for your characters to feel their emotions and convey the emotional stakes to the readers. What happens when this occurs is that it can make the book feel a lot more like, and then, and then, and then, just one thing after another [00:10:00] without the increasing emotional stakes that will actually propel readers through your pages faster than if you just cut out all the moments of checking in and showing their internal worlds.
It may seem counterintuitive to slow down to create room for the emotions, but I promise that it actually keeps people moving and holds their interest longer. If you know that your heart center is your least developed center, finding the right editor is also a great solution here. And you could maybe even create a quick scene checklist to go back over things.
, that, you know, compels you to ask what the main characters are feeling in a moment, check and see if the scene follows emotionally from the previous scene, what your characters are afraid of losing in this moment, AKA the stakes and how, what they feel. is conflicting with what needs to be done. Anyway, your checklist doesn't even need to be that much info, but you can create something that helps you check in with them, because it's [00:11:00] not like you don't have emotions, right?
Even if you're an action oriented person, you have emotions,
but you may be in the habit In fact, you probably are in the habit of moving faster than the speed of emotions. Emotions require their own time and space, and that often has to be built into the schedule because it won't naturally appear if you like action and just getting shit done. You may also notice that you use action as a way of avoiding the emotions you don't want to feel.
Which works for a while, but not forever. Eventually something forces you to slow down, and if you haven't been practicing checking in with those emotions along the way, then they can feel like a landslide.
Not to mention that making space for emotions in your life, if you don't do it, it deprives your stories of a depth that would help keep your name front of mind for readers in a [00:12:00] publishing landscape of, you know, what it is, sometimes ghost written crap where the author feels no particular connection to the story, and machine written stories where, well, you know.
There is such a thing as unproductive action, and this is something that action oriented writers May want to watch out for unproductive action is doing to avoid feeling or thinking. It looks like taking on an insane amount of projects at once so that you have no choice, but to keep moving or else it all comes tumbling down.
I'm implicating myself a little here I understand, but as my announcement at the top of the show hopefully demonstrates, I'm trying to be more mindful about that default.
So, for example, one of my friends is totally action oriented, and she's also a marathon runner. So, a buddy of mine and I, we were giving her a hard time once while she was like training for a marathon, and he said, are you running towards something? And then I [00:13:00] finished with, or are you running away from something?
So we were both being snarky and flippant, but it, it turned out that we were closer to the truth than we thought when we found out the following week that her boyfriend was actually quite the asshole and she actually was subconsciously using training to avoid dealing with that situation head on. But the action of running marathons doesn't address the action of leaving.
a shitty abusive relationship, does it? Therefore, it's an unproductive action you're taking for the situation. It's using action to avoid looking at the truth. Okay, I will say this story has a happy ending. When my friend told my buddy and I about her relationship situation, the shit show she was in,\ we were able to offer her perspective that what she was experiencing Wasn't necessarily normal and healthy and then she was soon able to break up with him safely, but it took that pause It took that emotional vulnerability.
She kept training for [00:14:00] marathons And she did get into a relationship with another piece of shit right after. But, baby steps. It's been moving in a positive direction with each new guy, so, yay. Anyway, my point is that those of us who are action oriented do need pauses. Even if those pauses feel super uncomfortable.
And they probably will if they're Unfamiliar. Because in those pauses, where we feel the emotions we've been avoiding and have to confront the fears and thoughts that have been waiting for the space they need to come forward.
From those thoughts and emotions, we get incredibly useful information. Maybe even that golden nugget we need to figure out a new and more fruitful direction for our author career.
In those pauses, we can see and hear our heart and our minds screaming at the top of their lungs that now is the time to write that series we really want to write because the industry is ripe for it. [00:15:00] Or maybe our heart is saying, I'm lonely. And instead of trying to move faster and faster and do more and more to avoid feeling that, we can see that the action we need to take is to spend a little time catching up with old friends.
Our writing will be there when we're done, and we might find our fear drive around productivity has lessened as a result of addressing our emotion and strengthening connections with others. Then we may find that half of the projects we've been filling our day with are just noise. And not moving the needle forward at all on book sales.
If we spend some of that busyness time with our friends instead, we might find the fulfillment we were chasing the whole time without risking burnout.
Yeah, it's hard to pause and let the thoughts and feelings in when you're action oriented. A lot can come flooding in at once when we start this process, but you can handle it with the right support. So, take [00:16:00] action, which you love to do, and build the support you need so that slowing down and feeling emotions and having deep and interesting thoughts.
can be a part of your daily life.
When we try to outrun the negative emotions, we also leave the positive ones behind, and life becomes very dry and uninspiring when we do that.
In those cases, there's nothing to run toward, only things to run away from.
Your action oriented gifts shine when they're not also occupied trying to do the work of feeling and thinking for you. So, practice slowing down just a tad, listen to what's waiting to be heard. And don't be afraid to orient your ship to those stars before you embark on your next adventure.
Readers need your action orientation. They crave it. Your gift is one of vitality, power, passion, and it helps [00:17:00] your readers feel empowered just by experiencing the pace of your stories and the inevitable action orientation of your characters.
A lot of people need reminders that action is well within their options. And you can remind them even without directly meaning to, just by writing your books the way you are built to write them. So if you're wondering, what if I'm an action oriented writer, I say, fantastic. Keep at it.
Slow down from time to time, even though it's uncomfortable, because the richness you're chasing is often found in those still moments. Those pauses are where you study the map and scan for any information that may indicate dangerous terrain ahead. From there, you can take action with more confidence that it's Bringing you and your author career toward where you want it to go.
That's it for this week's episode. Thanks for listening. Please make sure to [00:18:00] subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so that you'll open up the app in a month and go, Ooh, new episode. I love that feeling. I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode of What If for Authors. Happy writing!