03 Premium: On Overwhelm & Mindset

Overwhelmed by Editing Your Novel? Shift Your Mindset (Fixed vs. Growth)

Beth Barany addresses how overwhelmed and confused writers can feel after a first read-through of a novel, especially when faced with lots of issues to fix and feedback from themselves or others, noting that these feelings occur even for experienced writers. 

Drawing on Carol Dweck’s concepts of fixed vs. growth mindset, she explain how a fixed mindset can make writers believe their abilities and situations can’t change, leading to constant comparison to an unattainable “perfect” writer image and unrealistic expectations that editing should be linear, when it is often messy and non-linear. In contrast, a growth mindset supports learning, resilience, and measuring progress against one’s own improvement. 

To shift from fixed to growth thinking, they suggest asking: 
  • What can I learn from this? 
  • How can I improve?
  • What could I do differently?

00:00 Editing Overwhelm
00:33 Where To Begin
01:19 Mindset Matters
02:30 Fixed Mindset Traps
04:20 Growth Mindset Shift
05:07 Three Reset Questions
05:38 Wrap Up Resources

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Today I'm going to talk about overwhelm when it comes to editing your novel, and that will lead me to talk about your mindset. So I've worked with hundreds of writers. I'm a working writer. I totally know what it feels like to have overwhelm. So many options, so many choices you've done your first read through. There's so many things you wanna fix and maybe you feel overwhelmed. I totally get it. There's also probably a lot of confusion. So now what? Now? I did mention this in the first audio. also about our philosophy with editing. When I hear writers say, where do I begin? How do I start, what do I do with all the feedback that I gave myself? Or if you've already shared your work with others, how do I handle their feedback? And it, it can feel like such a big mess. We totally get it. My husband and I, who we've been editing our own novels and each other's and many, many client novels for a really long time, so we found some ways to handle it and. One of the things that I know is these feelings arise even in experienced writers. Feelings of doubt, feelings of confusion, feelings of overwhelm. We just get better at handling them, and we remember that we have skills. So I'm gonna talk about. Some skills and the biggest skill is our mindset, and also I would say the biggest skill is to breathe and take a deep breath and remember that this is a step-by-step process. You wrote the book, you can edit the book. If you've never edited a book before, it's a learning process. Just like learning how to write a story. Learning how to edit a story is a new skillset. So here's what I wanna say about mindset. From the work of Carol Dweck who wrote a book on this topic called Mindset. we can have two different kinds of mindsets. We can either have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. So check in with yourself what is your mindset? And I will define each of these for you, and I think our mindset. Really can help us succeed as writers. There's other factors we can consider, like how do we define success? What has our life experience taught us? How healthy are we with our emotions? our personality traits, environmental, family, social factors? So let's focus on what does it mean to have a fixed mindset. Now, to be a novelist, we probably already have a very creative mind, but sometimes we can get fixed, meaning people with a fixed mindset might think their lot in life is fixed, or the situation they're in is fixed. No change is possible. And since you're born with certain skills or abilities, that's it. Things can't be any different. Even though you may have learned things, still things are fixed and we often can have a fixed mindset, and not be quite aware of it until something happens and we realize, oh, I am stuck in a certain way of thinking. another belief that accompanies this mindset is that people are always comparing themselves to how they think they should be acting as a writer, some kind of perfect image they acquired, you know, what is it that people say or what the experts say. So what I've noticed is that people with a fixed mindset. Are often comparing themselves to a perfect future that they can never attain. Therefore, they're always falling short. And with today's social media, it's so easy to try and compare ourselves to someone's airbrushed reality. Also, if you've never seen a book be edited or you've never experienced editing, you don't realize how messy and non-linear the process can be. Even if you have checklists, even if you have, things lined up in a row, words do follow on the page in a linear fashion. We expect editing to be super linear. It's not most likely, I've never seen it be linear with any writer I've worked with, and I would say that editing is also a messy process. Just like writing can be writing the first draft. So people with fixed mindsets often are comparing themselves consciously or unconsciously to some kind of perfect or ideal way of being a writer. Contrast that with a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset know that they can grow, they can change. That happens easily or that can happen with focus, diligence and hard work. So the growth mindset creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. That's a paraphrase from a quote. So what I notice is that people with a growth mindset compare themselves or measure themselves with how far they've come, not with anybody else, but with their own progress. And they celebrate each step that they take. So if you notice that you have more of a fixed mindset around editing, and you're judging your actions, and you're judging results, see if you can change the channel. Switch to a growth mindset. Or another metaphor, switch gears, and here's three questions that you can use to shift gears. When you notice you're being stuck in thinking, oh, this is too hard. I can never learn how to do this. I can't match this perfect ideal in my head. Here are three questions. What can I learn from this? How can I improve and what could I do differently? Those questions again are, what can I learn from this? How can I improve and what could I do differently? There are lots of resources online if you wanna study about mindset, and I encourage you to do that if that's a topic that interests you. Uh, That is it for this week and write long and prosper.