Who Are Your Influences?

If you’ve ever seen the Irish movie The Commitments, you may remember that it was about a band, and when they were interviewing new band members they asked, “Who are your influences?” (They asked it with a lot of attitude and a thick brogue, both of which made the movie a cult classic.) Based on their answers they would let them audition; Muddy Waters got you in, Elvis was no deal.

I really love this, because your influences, what you are reading or listening to or watching all trickle down into your big pot of ideas. There they cook, and the flavors mingle. And if you are brave enough, you serve up some of that soup in your own writing and creating.

My ideas are all mingling together from these writing influences in 2014: Jesus and that book He helped to write, also Bene Brown, Ann Lamott, Ann Patchett, Flannery O’Conner, C.S. Lewis, Shauna Neiquist, David Sedaris and Augustin Burroughs. Books on writing are in there too, as are a few poets like Mary Oliver and Marie Howe (thanks to my much smarter and cooler best friend). Great fiction from Alice McDermott, Gillian Flynn, Marilynn Robinson, and John Steinbeck round out the list for this past year.

Of course, the people we love are our biggest influences. My husband and my kids teach me, in no particular order, about honesty, bravery, the weather, money – or more specifically, what to value – chess, horses, and mermaids. My best friend teaches me what she is really feeling, and helps me to learn what I am really feeling, which I consider a priceless exchange, and my sister teaches me about patience, imperfection (mine, not hers) and unconditional love.

One influence that I am not inviting into 2015 is fear, especially fear of failure. Failing is part of the process of growing, and one of the only ways I know of getting better at anything. Especially writing. So when I notice that I am letting fear be one of my influences, I am going to stop, and breathe, maybe go for a run or make a sandwich, and start again.

I am enthusiastic by nature and hopeful to a fault, but because of the crazy way human nature is wired, I still at times let fear of judgment, failing, ridicule, messing up, being unlike everyone else, being too much like everyone else, not fitting in, and blending into obscurity, be the thoughts that take up my head space. And don’t even get me started on fear’s nuclear weapon: rejection. Life is too short. Find your tribe, your people, and let the rest go.

To begin writing, the very first thing I had to do was silence my inner critic. You don’t get very far in your work if that voice is chatting in the bleachers while you try to tell a story. I did this by inviting my critic to hang out if it wanted to, but ONLY during the editing process, the second half of writing. The first half, writing what Ann Lamott calls ‘shitty first drafts’, only my creative voice was invited to the page. And when I do this, my inner critic transforms into something that sounds less like fear, and more like a wise old professor who is challenging me to write better, to say what I mean, a little more simply, using as few words as possible.

This helps so much to quiet fear. And since I have used this in writing, it has taken over in other areas of my life. The fear I once had is slowly being replaced by a desire to live and love as hard and honestly as I can, as simply as I can. Saying what I really mean.

So for this coming year, I am going to work hard cultivating influences that inspire, not ones that invite fear. That and maybe train my youngest to stop dumping out the dog’s bowls. I’m aiming high for sure.