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Writing Personality Types

Note: these descriptions relate to the public writing you do, which is probably at work. But we take these public personas home with us too, and our writing personality seeps through every time we write.

Perfectionist Petra

Your attitude is that your writing is either perfect or worthless. You spend ages on one piece and feel that nothing you do is ever quite good enough. Ironically, your work has plenty of errors because you always want your writing to be exact and precise. You’re highly conscientious and a hard worker.

Fretful Fiona

You hate seeing your boss’s, editor’s, or colleague’s red marks on your work. So you play it safe and don’t take many writing risks. This means you tend to follow set patterns in your work and don’t like to try out new techniques or ideas.

Could Do Better Betty

You simply never put 100 percent into anything. You know that you have huge potential but instead prefer to do just enough to get by. Occasionally you pull out all the stops and write something magnificent. But then you go back to your “easy” life—which of course doesn’t feel easy on the inside.

Fun-Seeking Femi

You prefer not to think too much and would much rather be active and outdoors that cooped up with a notepad and pen or hunched over a computer. Having fun is the most important thing, and writing just doesn’t compete with other activities. But secretly you yearn to write.

Slapdash Susannah

You whittle work off at an amazing speed, but your writing is littered with silly errors that would have been spotted with a little more care and attention. You also leap in and start writing without formulating any kind of plan.

Last-minute Lorraine

If you have a deadline, you often miss it, or make it just in the nick of time. This is simply because you don’t give yourself enough time to write. With every piece of writing you do, it’s as though you’re competing in a hundred-meter race because you avoid it until the last minute.

One-trick Olivia

You quite like writing certain things: your blog or Instagram posts, for instance. But when it comes to something you find challenging, you freeze up. Sometimes, you can get going but find it hard to finish. You wonder if you really have the skills to write properly.

Grab Your Notebook and Answer the Following Questions:

oWhat’s your writing personality (in your own words)?

oWhich of the writing personality types did you identify with?

oHow do they sabotage your writing?

oWhat strategies could you put in place to stop them taking over?

Now consider this:

oHow can you get your writing personality to work for you, not against you?

FEAR—that’s the word to remember. All these writing personality types are governed by fear. Shaking things up helps you to bypass this fear. Quite simply, you forget you’re scared, you lose the coping behaviors, and writing just happens. So don’t be afraid to shake things up. In fact, page by page, that is what I will urge you to do in this book. The following quote by the philosopher Nietzsche has become my mantra over the years: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” We just need to remember that there is safety in the storm. When you ride the wave, the raging tide cannot harm you. When you yield to its force, you are strong. It’s only when you try to resist it that the chaos can turn into destruction.

A great way to get past the fear is to move. So, the final exercise in this chapter is a moving one. Your challenge is to pull on a pair of comfy shoes, go for a solo walk, and shake off the fears.

The Magic of Movement (AKA Why You Need to Write on the Go)

Walking and thinking and writing go hand in hand. Getting into your stride and mapping out where you want to go on the street allows your mind to do the same with your thoughts and ideas.

Ferris Jahr explained this perfectly in an article called “Why Walking Helps Us Think” (published in The New Yorker). He wrote, “Since the time of the peripatetic Greek philosophers, writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!’ Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. ‘Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.’ ” I couldn’t agree more. And no, I didn’t just include that quote for the snigger factor of the word “methinks.” Although I dare you to go around using that for a day, just for fun!

But I guess that’s the point. Movement is fun, and walking shakes things up, helping to clear the cobwebs to creativity. It pumps blood and oxygen to all the muscles in your body.

In fact, for the past few years, I’ve been blogging on the go, pounding the pavements, and typing my posts into my phone. It struck me that when I get out into the world, armed with a little inspiration, the ideas (and my writing) just flow. I realized that if I consciously sit down and think about what I want to write, the writing often comes from my head, and not from my heart. In contrast, my writing is far more heart-centered when I put myself into an alpha state, where my subconscious can flow.

In my first book Just Write It! I wrote a little about this alpha state:

Ideas are like radio waves that float all around us waiting for us to tune into them. And when you alternate intense thinking with periods of rest, you often find that you open your antennae for flashes of inspiration. This usually happens when you’re doing routine activities such as walking, running, washing up, or taking a shower. These types of activities increase alpha brainwaves. These put you in a relaxed enough state for your intuition to kick in, or for you to have an “aha” moment.

The trouble is that in our society, we do too much pushing and not enough allowing. Many of us take quotes such as Thomas Edison’s “Success is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration” to heart. And that can mean that we end up chaining ourselves to our desks.

The following exercise is about giving yourself permission to move, to roam, and to explore—to shake out of your skin and move into the magic of your imagination.

Writing on the Go: The Instructions

Walk for thirty minutes while thinking, daydreaming, looking, and seeing. Make sure you have a notebook and pen with you, or a smartphone where you can write down whatever comes into your head.

Before: Set an intention for what you want to write, or think about an issue or topic that you’d like to ruminate on. Alternatively, you can think about what’s bothering you today—those (good or bad) thoughts you just can’t shake.

During: Well, there are no real rules. Just do anything that gets you walking and into a good rhythm. You could go to the park, or go window shopping, or explore a part of town you’ve never been to before. Once ideas pop into your head, stop and write them down as fast as you can, and then continue walking.

After: Once you’re back from your walk, reread what you’ve written, and, if you feel inspired, use your favorite bits in a finished piece of “work.” By work, I mean a Facebook or Instagram post, a little note that you put on your fridge door, or a verse you decide to save on your phone. If you like what you have written, honor it by saving it somewhere special.

I love this exercise, because it allows creativity to percolate and brew. When I run retreats, we do this together. We begin in a pack—talking and laughing—before wandering off our separate ways to walk our way to writing. I recommend doing this walking and writing exercise regularly (as often as you can). If nothing happens the first time, try again. Wait patiently for creativity to happen, and trust that it will. If nothing more, you’ll have gone for a head-clearing walk.

Yours Too, Can Be the Truest Voice

If your energy is flagging, I hope this story will perk you up. You may have heard it before—it’s the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, which was made into a film of the same name in 2016. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you get yourself to a movie download site, pronto! The film is a heartwarming display of passion. Florence is a woman who has had syphilis for fifty years. She’s always known she could die at any moment, so she always felt she had nothing to lose by following her passions. She had wanted to be a concert pianist but couldn’t due to problems with her hands. So, she ran a successful music club with her boyfriend for more than two decades.

Then, in her twilight years, she decided that she wanted to sing. The trouble was she didn’t have a “good” voice. It was either flat or completely out of tune. Plus, she had poor phrasing and terrible breathing. But she sang with such gusto and passion, and with so much of her heart and soul, that despite her concert audiences laughing at her, they also fell in love with her.

Toward the end of the film, she reads a terrible review of her performance in The New York Times. She looks to her boyfriend for reassurance: “I was never laughing at you. Yours is the truest voice I have ever heard,” he says. But the shock of the review sends her health into a downward spiral. And finally, on her deathbed, she says, “People may say I couldn’t sing, but they can never say I didn’t sing.”

Make sure they can never say that you didn’t write.

Don’t allow anguish, fear, and blocked creativity to stagnate. Get moving and get writing. There is true magic in movement. You just have to put one foot in front of the other.