A couple of the sessions involved using the Enneagram to figure out one’s strengths as a writer and figuring out one’s brand. One common lesson was to be true to yourself in pursuing your authorial career, to figure out what you want your writing to do.
What do I want my writing to do?
This sounds simple, but it has been a hard question for me for a long time. Moreover, it’s a subset of my whole career problem: what do I want to do? Not just one thing. In writing, I care about psychological realism, utopia, ecology/ecocentrism, strong character relationships, cultural exploration/getting outside our daily norms, and lots and lots of guilt.
In my life work, I care about teaching, degrowth/just and sustainable economy, saving my hometown from climate disaster as much as possible, reasoned inquiry, my sci-fi writing, nature, Buddhism. The core reason I’ve gotten next-to-nowhere in both my writing career and my teaching career is that I’ve always been split in ten different directions. (This isn’t even touching on time and energy for family and friends.)
But sitting in that session, I think I cracked it–how all these things are connected. I care about bringing different perspectives together to seek goodness. In fiction, this is dialogism (my dear love as both writer and reader) with a utopian/hopeful bent. In life, it is teaching and reasoned inquiry and Buddhist compassion and care for nature and just/sustainable economy. And I think this clarifies some things about my path forward. ( Read more… )
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