Most writers have probably heard the admonitory voices of teachers or mentors in our heads, reminding us of the mantras we picked up from them well after we left their tutelage. Hearing commandments like Write every day or Write what you know or Show don’t tell during our formative years makes it more likely that we’ll hear them beyond that phase, though the voices change in function over time. I’d like to talk here about what these voices actually do (and don’t do) for us and how to keep them from becoming poisonous.
I want to start with the second topic because it sheds light on why the first is so important. Internalized mentor voices can become disruptive to our writing practice, or even cudgels we beat ourselves with when we don’t live up to our own expectations. If we heard Write every day over and over again during our apprenticeship, we might find that inner voice rising up against us whenever we don’t follow that advice. But sometimes we need to step back and say nothing for a while, such as after we finish a big project—a totally reasonable time for a writing pause. Life gets in the way too, as we’re not likely to write on the day we bring our partner or child to the emergency room. Should we still Write every day simply because someone passed that advice on to us once upon a time with the force of commandment?
Of course not. I’m going through a silent stretch this very minute, since I’m so disgusted with AI’s encroachments on the literary life that sitting down to write only makes me think of somebody else setting up an AI agent to write the exact same words. Should I write every day just to keep the commandment? Not a chance. I know when I work best and when I work worst, and under current conditions it’s better to stay silent until I’ve built up such a head of steam for a project that I don’t give a rat’s bottom about AI.
The problem is that I’ve heard Write every day so many times—and spoken it even more to my own students—that its weight as a commandment keeps getting heavier. Even when I know I need a break, I still keep hearing that voice telling me to Write every day when I break the rule. All that changes is which teacher or mentor the admonishing voice comes from, but whoever is speaking, I feel like I’ve let them, myself, and the muses down.
Write every day helped me become a writer because it gave me discipline and focus. But now that my practice is well established, this mantra no longer helps me develop as a writer because I’ve lived through too many instances where blindly following it was counterproductive. Lately, I’ve done my best writing after a good stretch of not writing. This is why we have to examine the voices of mentors and teachers to make sure we’re updating their advice to our current writerly operating systems.
So what role do those inherited mantras play years or even decades after we first internalized them? For starters, they can be a great way to remind ourselves of the fundamentals of our craft. If we hear one, it could simply be us reminding ourselves of a fundamental idea that applies in the moment. Mantras can also be a tremendous self-assessment tool if we’re willing to separate them from the emotionality of mentor-protégé relationships and look at them with a colder eye. We don’t need our emotions to have good relationships with our mantras. When they arise we can use them to calmly assess where we are at, whether on a specific project we’re working on or in the development of our writing practice. Each time we hear one, we are actually inviting ourselves into a deeper conversation about what’s happening today—not who we were when we first internalized the mantra.
This is the hard part that requires some self-training, especially if we have ever used our mantras as cudgels. Hearing one gives us an opportunity to begin an internal conversation about why we’re doing (or not doing) something on the page or in our practice, and each time we do this we have a chance to reinterpret them in the context of our own writerly development. We benefit from being aware of how their meaning has changed for us over time, because we certainly change over time. Re-encountering a mantra can become a tool we apply in specific moments to make specific changes, which is vastly more beneficial to us than leaving them as bland commandments.
As an example, let’s look at another mantra that many of us have internalized: the dreaded Show don’t tell. This is obviously useful advice when it applies, and it can bring a tremendous sense of presence to our work because showing pulls the reader into a moment instead of describing that moment. But taken to its extreme, as it often is in workshops, it prevents us from moving through time. Sometimes you just want to say, Four years later, the neighbors moved out and abandoned their cat until Jocelyn heard it yowling in the window. The Show don’t tell mantra, as useful as it can be, handcuffs us when we apply it unquestioningly.
Hearing that mantra in a teacher or mentor’s voice is probably not our imagination telling us to walk through every single scene the same way. It’s more likely our imagination inviting us into a conversation about the balance between what we’re showing and what we’re telling on the page, which can help us write better. Figuring out how to make use of an internalized mantra in this way is an outstanding writerly self-management skill to develop. If we don’t learn to turn our mantras into useful working questions, it will be difficult for them to be anything but commandments.
There is not, and never will be, one way to write, and we must remember that some of the mantras we internalized were passed on to us by teachers and mentors as guidelines for them that may have gotten calcified over time. (I am virtually certain that at least one of the mentors who told me to Write every day stopped doing it years ago.) Teachers in academic settings, like I was, often boil down their teaching into pithy statements that leave little room for nuance. It may help us, as we try to loosen our grip on our mantras and use them more wisely, to know that the people we picked them up from may also have gone through the same loosening process.
Our ideal relationship with our mantras is not monolithic, and they are more useful to us if we let them change over time. Jobs and parenthood alter our writing practices, as do the fluctuations in our energy levels as we age. But if a mantra is good enough for us to remember years after we first heard it, then it’s probably good enough for us to reconsider at various phases of our writing lives. In the long run, we need to make choices about all our mantras: use them well and consciously, or let them grumble as calcified commandments in our heads that lock us in the past.
