Be Led By the Fire: Writing into Formless Creativity

This is the story of a writer on fire--releasing the need to follow all the rules and check all the boxes. Finding freedom by stepping into the hot coals of the unknown, led only by inspiration to create something, and a feeling in my gut.

2 Forms of Creativity:

What does it mean to be led by the fire with your writing? Let's begin by discussing creativity in general. In a simple view of creativity, there are 2 forms of it.

The first one you probably are familiar with. Let's call it creativity with a recipe: You have a certain goal in mind, a predetermined vision. You have certain steps, and you need certain ingredients. Just like going to the store and checking your list: When you have ideas in a create-by-recipe scenario, you check your ideas against your predetermined recipe.

You are always referring back to your list and your vision to compare it with what you have in front of you. Will potatoes go in this dish? Yes. Will honey go in it? No. You use the recipe to tell you what stays and goes. There are many things you will reject as useless to you. Every idea should fit into a box. They should be a preplanned ingredient for your desired recipe, or they have to go.

But there is another way to create that doesn't have a recipe. A formless kind of creativity, nebulous, like looking at clouds that drift into different shapes. There isn't just one way the creativity can move.

When you engage in formless creativity you let go of recipes you know. You do not go in with a crisp, clear vision of what you want the output to be. You don't reject ideas simply because you aren't sure what they will become or 100% certain if they belong.

You don't decide to throw everything out just because it would be difficult to turn it into a blog or an email. Too messy, silly, strange, unpredictable... Even if it stays on the fringes, or in the corners, or only sits in front of you with your morning coffee, ideas in the formless creativity path do not get abandoned or rejected outright. They live freely, it lives on. And you let them keep wandering, you let yourself keep wondering, to see what it all will become.

Instead of ruthlessly rejecting everything that doesn't fit, you let all the ideas exist. The value of an idea isn't determined so early in the process; you give yourself some time to get to know each other.

In this second mode you build patience, you tease out the ideas. You take the fibers like a bunch of cotton and wind them into string, you play with them between your fingers. It could be as you do other things...Perhaps as you spend another hour with them, they begin to look different. Perhaps you get new ideas of how you can use them.

They may begin to whisper to you louder about the things they could become. "I could be a book. I could be an email. I could be a video. I could be an article." You let them whisper until the sound is so loud, and the shape it wants is so obvious, it suddenly all comes together easily. Or perhaps you try things, and if they don't work out, you try something new, unltil you are happy with what you have created.

My Personal Experience:

There's nothing inherently wrong about either path, but I do find things can get out of balance sometimes.

In July 2023, I was burned out after six months of dedicated writing by recipe. I had written and published over 25 articles in that 6 months across Medium, Linkedin and other places. I probably could have kept going at that pace but I didn't want to do it if it wasn't fun and didn't have a clear ROI. It had started out being fun and still was a little bit... but I realized that my heart wasn't in it anymore.

The truth is when I'm stressed, lost, overwhelmed, I want to have certainty and control. That's why I gravitate to using a recipe for everything, like I can guarantee everything that is going to happen in life. But things can easily get out of balance if I get stuck in that mindset for too long. It ends up limiting my creative process and I don't enjoy it anymore.

I decided that I had gotten out of balance and I needed to let myself explore this second kind of creativity for a little while. Formless. And that change felt so good I decided to keep going.

It isn't about all or nothing--I still have article deadlines, and a weekly email newsletter. But beyond that in my writing, I just go with the flow.

What's your balance?

What kind of creativity do you engage in the most?

Have you gone too far in one direction?

Perhaps adding structure or a recipe to your process could help: some deadlines, or some accountability, a form to follow, a clear vision to guide you as you try to craft your outputs more consistently. For example, you could set a goal of publishing weekly or sending an email monthly. If you feel like you are noodling extra hard and need to get something out there, these goals and structures can help.

But today I want to speak most of all to someone who may be aching for something different: the formless creativity. Even if you didn't know it until you read this article. Perhaps I can encourage your curiosity to stir...

Some Hints

Here are some hints you might need more formless creative movement:

Do you ever write or think thoughts in your head and then immediately ask yourself how useful they are?

Do you dismiss thoughts or ideas you can't immediately put into a box?

Do you suppress your desires when you start wanting something that feels difficult, unattainable or impossible?

What would happen if you let yourself write these down to be played with later? And what would happen if someday you actually go back to some of them to play and explore?

Perhaps my journey will serve as an example of what this could look like.

An Unhealthy Amount of Recipes:

Let's start with my before picture--the time when I was leaning too hard in one direction.

In early 2023 I was motivated to write and publish weekly across many different sites and platforms. I think I was drawn to the certainty of having a clear goal because there were a lot of things out of my control in my personal life. Getting a quick win each week when I published an article also felt good, like I was on track. It was often really fun...

But after 6 months, the fun was waning. And I was beginning to think the constant weekly deadlines for writing and publishing articles weren't great for my mental health.

I was finding that, even thinking about my life in my own head, I was compressing and flattening my experience into a story to potentially retell in my writing. I was rewriting my own thoughts to be a story geared for someone else to be the audience, so that someone else could understand me more easily. I was doing all of this instead of thinking in my own internal language. That is the language that is solely geared at myself, the one who knows my story above all, who doesn't need the backstory or for it to be oversimplified or explained. I don't need poetic narration or a reason to listen. What if I could just be understood without all that effort, if only by myself?

Thinking only for the purpose of constructing a piece of writing for other people was starting to feel unhealthy, like I was just existing for the purpose of brandification, marketing or sharing externally. Was everything about my life going to be summed up for external validation rather than having my own authentic human life?

I wrote a note that day: "it feels like this comes up in a way where I abbreviate my original thought and get away from my original thought and inspiration. Through this I am losing something important.

It feels like a kind of self abandonment or like a way to get away from something that wants to unfurl on its own,

something that wants to take up more space and exist, without ramifications, without caveats without another reason to be there."

What Formless Thing is Guiding Me?

I have been following this formless path for the past two years, ever since I realized I needed to make a change...

It meant following this thing that wants to unfurl inside of me. I can say now that this urge is a human one, it is an urge to grow, to heal, to express. (Express not just for someone to hear me, but to release, to exude something from within like how a toad sweats out of its skin.)

This human urge is my fire leading me.

I'm deep now into this experiment feeling it and following it. I have been finding another way to write and be creative in a formless way not driven solely by a recipe. It lets me free from a rigid paradigm. I have sometimes called it "ungoaling," and this process involves my writing as well as the creation of a life where I am living more freely, too. I am finding balance, and filling the gaps that pursuing create-by-recipe creativity created. To do so I follow this urge of life.

This thing that is formless guides my navigation as I switch between creative ideas. What is it? It is life. It is fire. The wild, heart-beating, pulsing and surging life-force. It is the same thing that guides weeds to cram themselves through the cracks of pavement and explode onto the other side. Wild. It knows what direction to go, and it doesn't worry so much about being wrong.

An Awkward Shift:

The transition from the dominance of recipe based creativity to the more formless path was awkward at first. In the beginning, I wrote:

"I've just been embracing my own rhythm and this desire to write things more for myself...

it's been hard for me to switch gears because I've been so used to doing this pattern of fitting everything into particular format, that I haven't really known where some of my writing some ideas are going, or what they're trying to do.

It's been kind of hard because then my mind jumps in and tries to fit it into a box. And as a result of this interference, I can't get the original idea out. I can't express it.

I have to relearn this way of not switching out of myself, to just really try to hear myself: to truly try to hear what's trying to come through and be okay with it not being produced into something tabgible right away."

Making the Shift:

Coming out of a predominance of creating by recipe, I had to work on several key things. This allowed the formless creativity to take the wheel in a deeper way:

Self Trust and Compassion

First of all, the entire process involved a lot of self trust and compassion. I felt like I was breaking some sort of rule or being irresponsible as I shifted away from the structures that had me write 25 articles in 6 months.

Luckily, I had already put my relationship to myself first as my priority goal of 2023, since I knew it was the foundation of everything else. If it was affecting my mental health, I knew I needed to address it. Plus my intuition was leading me and I've learned so many times that trusting my intuition is essential in my life. I was certain I needed to release my expectation that I needed to publish writing weekly all over the internet. I decided to trust it even when I had mixed feelings about it at first, and even though I was uncertain how I would do it or what that would look like.

To be more compassionate with myself, I looked at all of my emotions around this change, fears around shifting my writing goals and what made it difficult. That meant looking at my fears, which no one really wants to do.

There were plenty of fears around change, mostly about how it would affect my business. I had been writing on a lot of platforms in 2023, for fun and enjoyment, but also to spread helpful content that might grow my business.

I did a rational assessment of the ROI (return of investment) from different writing outlets, however. I could see which platforms of my writing in the six months had actually led to paying clients, consistently reached more people, or were appreciated more.

That was really useful and as a result I felt less afraid of pairing down my goals down to focus my strategy. I focused on those places with higher ROI, so fewer places to publish, with more practical results. And I decided that even with those goals, fir mental health reasons, I wouldn't hold myself to them as tightly as a noose.

I didn't need goals for anything other than that, I decided: the rest of it would be led by what feels good to me. I trusted in myself, that this would be alright and nothing catastrophic would happen, especially now that I'd given thought to my fears or concerns.

Unhooking Instant Gratification Addictions

Secondly, now that I wasn't aiming to meet such high expectations, I had to accept the shift out of instant gratification was going to be another change. I had to release my addiction to it.

I was no longer racking up a writing "high score" like 25 articles in six months. During that time, I had gotten a dopamine rush from treating it like a game. My desire to press publish every week made my writing feel urgent. Also, I could see how many people liked my writing or how many read it, and I often checked back hoping for comments and higher read counts minutes after I had published. If I hadn't reached many people it would bug me, so I'd go all over the internet trying to share my article to other platforms. Or I used the lack of going instantly viral as reason to write another article to try again.

Many platforms have aspects that gamify your online content and writing. That creates brain chemicals like dopamine that can get addicted to. They often also reward you for publishing more often, daily, and even multiple times a day. Weekly articles felt like the bare minimum when I was writing regularly on Medium. I have even heard coaches for self published authors on Amazon recommend publishing at least four books a year to please the algorithm and keep your books selling.

In order to step off of this hamster wheel, I had to break out of that loop. I had to be less oriented on MORE MORE MORE: publishing more, getting read by more people, getting more likes, and so on.

I had to learn to be more present. I had to just be ok with the process. I had to just feel it was all enough as it was. I had to just BE. Sit on my hands and BE. Easier said than done but I did get there.

What surprised me most about this was how that affected my motivation. By taking away a motivation source, there was now a gap.

But I started this change during the summer 2023, and told myself I would be taking a temporary break at first. It was a good time to reset and take care of a few things I hadn't gotten around to like enjoying my life for a little while--a few months after that, I went on a secret honeymoon that I told very few people about. It was great :)

I still got all my essential writing done including emailing my newsletter updates weekly, contributing to the online magazine On Purpose Woman, but, otherwise, I just let myself work on things that felt fun. I was listening to my intuition and following where it went.

Organizing my Ideas

At this point it was all about following my intuition. My intuition was really telling me to focus on organizing my ideas. I have put a lot of effort into learning new digital technology to organize my messy ideas over the past few years. It had been helping me to keep up the pace of 25 articles in 6 months, and now that I had set the bar lower it helped me produce all the writing for my goals without much mental heavy lifting.

In a way, it was its own sort of game: how little energy could I use to come up with something awesome? How much could I develop old ideas? I was churning over my ideas more in a long term cycle, rather than constantly pushing myself to produce and complete new ones. These old ideas were already mine, just ones I had figured out how to keep safe, in an easy place to find, a long time ago.

As a result of this, although my expectations for my writing schedule changed a lot...I don't anyone really noticed. I was not putting the same pressure on myself to churn new things out every week, and yet I actually ended up publishing a fair amount anyway, but in a more organic fashion, and in fewer locations. I was still feeling plenty, productive as a writer. I also tended to like everything I published more because it was all stronger than before.

Since I had gotten so much out of the time I spent organizing ideas, wandering through them, and gardening them, I started to share my process with others. My articles and videos started to be about my process. I thought other people might think it was cool. And I knew it would be a gamechanger for them just as much as it was for me.

Organizing ideas digitally and turning them into things was so fun for me that I began a 3 month Digital Organization Club to teach other people in a more structured way..

I always think it's great when you spend more time on things that help you personally as a business owner, because often it leads to something you can offer someone else. Other people probably have the same problems that you do. And then sharing about the solutions is a win win.

New Sources of Motivation

A third focus in this transition was to find new sources of motivation. I had to fill the gap of the old urgency and gamification I had released.

There were other things in life (not writing, perse) that I needed to push forward. Honestly I had been struggling with finding positive sources of motivation ever since my father died in 2021.

I really wanted to figure out how to fire up those areas. I wanted to explore new, positive ways of finding motivation, that weren't about pushing or forcing myself to meet a deadline, but about kindling my inner fire to achieve things from the inside out.

This became so interesting to me that I began a rich series of writing, blogposts and emails, around the topic of seeking motivation. These were some of my most well received pieces of writing because so many people found them relatable.

Since some of my writing makes me feel fired up when I reread it, I began keeping a new collection of my writing in physical form. This is a Commonplace Book for everything motivational that I call my Get Fired book, for getting fired up. I would flip through it every day.

This led to another profound development for my life as well as my business. As I was learning from experts on motivation, I realized the key was to work on believing it was possible to achieve the things I wanted. How optimistic I am feeds into my motivation.

This became such a pivotal insight that I underwent a 30 day challenge to increase my optimism. I wrote about this process, refined it, repeated it, and eventually turned everything that I worked on into a program called Optimism that other people can purchase and repeat.

Once again, although I began this formless creativity journey scared about a negative impact on my business, it actually led to new, positive directions--ones I could not have forseen.

Overall Thoughts

Life is ideally a mix of both creative types, but I like to think that my life is at least 51 percent slanted in one direction. I want it to be led by formless creativity rather than the need to follow a recipe.

Since switching from a predominantly recipe-driven writing life, to a more formless one, I have noticed some changes.

Firstly, instead of needing to write about one-off topics so I have something to publish weekly, I've been more drawn to writing a series of interrelated pieces around core topics. My writing has been more guided by these big topics that have interest to me over weeks, months, and even years. And the things I write are more enduring; I want to refer to them and build on them for longer and longer.

Whether I write about organizing ideas, motivation, optimism, and so on, I have creative space to write and reflect on these topics over time. I have it because I have allowed myself it. I stepped away from the recipe of articles due for weekly publishing on platforms that display them in ways where those articles won't be connected to each other.

Second, I let myself follow the vibe. Something can be short or it can be long. I don't feel a need to wrap everything up neatly in a short amount of words if it would cut all of the insight. Even if that might go viral. I don't have to fit it into a box. If I'm not going to please a platform or a person, I just have to accept I can't please everyone. I won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Lastly, I also no longer aim to produce new, new, new and more, more, more. It's incredible how many writers I talk to discount things they spent hours refining because it is no longer new. It's still good! And you should still share it.

I like developing the ideas I have and building upon them. But sometimes I just feel like sharing something old I've made. It was great and still is. Sometimes I take an older idea and edit it, add to it, or take a new spin on it for fun. Sometimes I make an article into a Youtube video. Sometimes I take a youtube video and turn it into an article. And if I have nothing to say...then I don't have to publish anything today!

In conclusion: There's a freedom that comes from putting yourself first. Put that life force whispering for creative freedom at the front of your life. I can't tell you exactly what will happen but I wouldn't want to. Because discovering things that you didn't see coming is part of the fun. :D

Go ahead and find out, let the fire lead you on.

Thanks for reading!

More from Sofia

- Get More Focused: Come write with me during FREE Cowork Sessions on Youtube

- Get More Optimism: Start the self study Optimism Program

- Get Faster Progress: Get Sofia's coaching or editing in the 2 Month Faster Progress Package for your nonfiction book or business writing (1 spot available)

- Get More Organized: The 3 Month Digital Organization Club opens next in April

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