Letting Go of Our Story: What I Learned from Walking Away

I recently made a crucial (but tiny) decision.

It was after a particularly hard week: a nearly 40-hour workweek on top of homeschooling my kids and attending a pitch meeting.

My breath had become shallow, like sucking wind through a straw. My mind was fuzzy from switching gears between clients, my own writing, the business of writing, and family.

Three things brought me to the awareness that I needed to, at least temporarily, walk away from my story.

1) I played a 25-minute game of Scrabble in the middle of the week.

This sounds like a completely wasted, unrelated fact, right?

Well, for me, upon reflection, I realized my shallow breath had become even slighter because my life that week lacked fun and spontaneity.

2) My pitch meeting led me to a greater depth of humility.

Living with the stories we tell – whether novels or spoken word or memoirs or articles – can be very all-consuming. After all, how else do you paint the characters’ emotions accurately, write authentic dialogue, and unfold plot without losing yourself in it just a little?

You live in the story. You carry it when you’re washing dishes, stopped at a traffic light, and making an online grocery list. It never really leaves you.

But in a pitch meeting, two comments helped me see my story from someone else’s viewpoint: It has merit, yes, but it isn’t everything. It lays a groundwork, yes, but there is a mighty work ahead of me if I pursue a traditional publishing route. Of course, these weren’t the actual comments; they were my takeaways.

And due to my feeling heavy-laden beneath my story and staring down what lay ahead, my decision became clearer: Giving up (laying aside) my story for a while would be necessary to see it from an outsider’s point of view.

3) I experienced a middle-of-the-night muscle tension that made me wonder if I was having a heart attack. (I wasn’t, and I’m fine now.)

Even though it was just a muscle spasm that lasted a little too long for my liking, it woke me up to just how much I’d been sitting at my laptop, thinking about work, carrying not only the story but also all the what-ifs behind it, in addition to the everyday life I have.

So these three events conspired against me and called a truce. I knew the story I’d been immersing myself in, the one where I finish my novel by a certain date, I get it edited and revise it, I give it to beta readers, and then make final changes before pitching it to agents… it needed to be let go.

I didn’t let go of it forever. In fact, I’ve already decided to self-impose a deadline to my state of release. I’ll pick it back up again on Monday. It may look different and the timeline might be altered, and that is okay.

In giving myself full permission to not be a writer for a few days, I realized that it is healthy to back away from something we love so that we can see it and appreciate it through an accurate lens.

It’s likened to a beautiful-weather day and a lifelong runner. Whenever there is gorgeous weather, as a lifelong runner, you feel you have to run, even if you weren’t planning on it or don’t feel up to it. Why? Because it’s what you do, it’s what you’ve always done, it’s how you celebrate the beauty of a new day and appreciate your ability to breathe it in.

But occasionally, you see that blue sky and you just drive beneath it. You don’t participate in it by running. For some reason, this choice keeps you tethered to your love of running while not actually doing it. It helps you walk in a beautiful day without being confined to certain parameters.

When I turned away from writing for a whole day, and I didn’t run on that sun-soaked afternoon, I made the same choice in two different arenas of my “usual” everyday experience.

I chose to let go so that I could stand back and see more objectively why – if – I love it.

I looked less at the story as a lifeline and more as a tool I have been allowed to carry and use, and a tool I can put down when needed. Sure, I still love it, but I’m not bound by it.

The importance of stepping away from our stories is this: It gives us the 50,000-foot view that we easily lose from being so close to our stories day in, day out.

I’m not suggesting giving up on your project. But I am posing the question:

When was the last time you actively chose not to think about, wonder through, or write down ideas about your story?

Take a break every once in a while — let your story live without you for a few days. When you return to it, you’ll be different and it will remind you why you started it to begin with.