Get Out of the Silo

Photo by Masood Aslami

Today’s post is by writer and creativity coach Anne Carley (@amcarley.bsky.social) who believes #becomingunstuck is an ongoing process.

We’re not alone.

As creative people we want to be alone—and sometimes need to be.

But underneath it all, we’re not alone. We’re primates, which means we’re fundamentally social creatures. 

It’s easy for me to forget this truth, and to my detriment. Recently, I got a great reminder. I hope that sharing it may be helpful to other writers who tend hole up in a writing silo of their own making.

A cool acronym

There’s this nonfiction book I’ve been working on for too long. Starting out, it was going great. I had a clear vision, the words flowed easily, and I got some colleagues and readers excited about my ideas. I even had a cool acronym to organize the book around. Then my life blew up. Soon after, the pandemic began. I told myself I could power through anyway, but the book withdrew into a coma. I tried unsuccessfully for a long time to revive it regardless of the chaos surrounding me.

A few years passed, during which I focused my writing on other things. Eventually, I felt ready to return to the comatose nonfiction book project, unseen for years by any eyes but mine. My attitude was good. I could do this. Except I still couldn’t.

I looked at the sentences and paragraphs and chapters in my document. There was plenty of good stuff there. I reviewed constructive comments from early readers of sections of my manuscript. They should have encouraged me. But everything felt distant. I was trapped by the words that were already in place. Even the structure felt off to me.

Get fresh

First, I thought the problem was that the work was stale. I had moved on from the ideas that were frozen in this draft. Good news, right? Over the past few years I’ve learned some things that will be helpful, so why was that a problem? Usually having new insights feels good, because it will improve the overall project. Somehow, I felt stuck on the ground, unable to rise above the words already in place and seed them with fresh ideas.

I continued making false starts, convinced that once I got the creative perspective I needed, things would flow again, as they had when I began, years earlier.

Progress was not made during this period. Although I returned time and again to the manuscript, I left each session having changed next to nothing in the pages. The book was already about 75% complete, so what was the #$%^ problem????

Structural flaws

Then came another a-ha moment: The problem wasn’t that I had some new, good things to add to the book and didn’t know where to put them. The problem was the structure itself. I had that cool acronym, and wanted the material to organize itself around the letters into four sections, each a key pillar. But it wasn’t really working. The four sections weren’t equal in weight, or thickness, or nature. A house built on this foundation would topple.

Peopling

This is where other people came back into the picture. The project and I got out of the silo. Finally!

When it came to the stalled book project, I’d been keeping everyone, writers and non-writers alike, at arm’s length throughout this multi-year period. The most I would say out loud is that I was waiting to return to the project when the energy was there to do a good job.

One day, over coffee with a writer friend, I surprised myself and got into it. My friend was interested, and we had just been talking about their writing struggles, so I went for it, excusing myself in advance if I got too granular with the details. I explained the book project, why I (still) believed in it, and where the problems lay. A lively conversation ensued. Looking a little wary, my friend suggested I needed a different acronym. A veteran of writer groups, I reassured myself not to get defensive, and listened with an open mind. Hmm. My friend made a good point. I said thank you, and resolved to re-think the matter.

My journal entries for the next week or two were full of experiments. Combinations of letters on page after page of my black-and-white college-ruled composition book document the brainstorming process. Nothing quite worked, though, to replace my anchoring acronym.

Whut?

Then, on a call with coaching colleagues, it was my turn to bring a problem to the group. I mentioned the whole unfinished book/unsatisfactory acronym thing. And one of my colleagues spoke up. Very quietly, they delivered a truth I really needed to hear. “You know, you don’t have to have an acronym.”

Bookshop • Amazon

It was a d’oh moment. Once you see it, you smack your head for having been blind to it for so long. Not only was the acronym structurally unsound, it also forced a false emphasis, away from what I could now see was the heart of the book. The tail no longer wagged the dog. Whew.

Free from the perceived need to have one short word to rule them all, I am looking at the manuscript with fresh eyes. At last. Is the book magically complete? No. Not yet. Traction has resumed, however, and boy howdy does that feel good.

My takeaway from this saga? Get out of the silo. Remember you have friends and colleagues out there in the world. Talk with them. See what happens. Repeat as needed—actually, maybe a little more often than that.