The Importance of Discernment

No writer attends their writing class as a blank slate. I certainly wasn’t.

By practicing so much on my own, I knew I could write well enough to finish projects. I wasn’t relying on my professors to suggest I could maybe write someday. I knew that I could. I was simply coming to class hoping to learn something that helped me write better, and I still believe that this is an appropriate level of attention to give an authority figure who has some experience and expertise to offer you.

I wish that every single one of my classmates could have learned with the same confidence I had. I hope everyone can walk into any learning experience with the attitude of: What can I learn to help me write a little better?

So, as we walk through People-Are-Stories-in-Progress, as well as any other creation I offer, I ask you to engage with the material with discernment.

Discernment: (noun) the practice of engaging with someone else’s expertise, recognizing that their knowledge is biased with their own perspective, and then filtering what you learn through your own perspective in order to discover what is most useful for you.

The Challenges of Discernment

An individual’s perspective is made up of their value system and all their foundational lenses. That’s a fair amount of bias to take into account. And while you need to be aware of the other individual’s bias, you also need to have some self-awareness to recognize what’s useful for you.

This is why I’ve made such an effort to name my foundational lenses here. I’m trying to equip you with the info you need to discern as quickly and easily as possible.

But beyond that, the skill of discernment is a tool in your toolbox. It helps you filter out what doesn’t work for you, so you can focus on what does work.

I arrived at college with my discernment much more highly developed than my classmates.

For example, like I mentioned above, I didn’t arrive in my writer’s workshops hoping my professor could tell me that I could write. I knew I could write—whole novels, if I chose—because I’d been doing it. I wrote the short stories assigned in my class with the intention of learning new tools, tricks of the trade which would help me write what I wanted to write with more skill.

In comparison, I recall one classmate saying, “I don’t know if I could write a novel.” This happened in front of the professor, as if the classmate was inviting the professor to say something. Maybe he wanted to be told, “Of course you can.” Some professors would indeed step into the role of mentor and cheerleader with great gusto, but I watched other professors create creativity wounds in their students on the first day of class.

Giving over your inner authority as a creator is dangerous. The antidote is discernment.

You trust your own creative vision first and foremost, and though you may consider all advice, you only keep and take action on what will actually make the creation better.

This includes your understanding of yourself as a creator, which evolves over time. You are the only one who can know exactly what you need on your creative journey, and that’s equally true no matter where you are and what you’ve already created.

All of my college professors were sincerely trying to help us become the writers we students dreamed of being.

But there was a power dynamic, where one group was asking, “How do you become a writer?”

And the other group was answering, “This is how.”

Many individuals from the first group, the students, scooped up the professors’ teachings as if they were fact. I did not, because my perspective on the professors’ authority was slightly different. I didn’t believe that those teaching us were any better or more talented than me. I looked at them, thinking, “The only difference between us is that you have more experience than I do. A little time and dedication will change that.”

So, instead I was asking them, “How do you specifically write?”

And in their response, I heard: “These are the ways we know how to write.”

In other words, I was learning their creative tools—and deciding which of them to make my own.

The need for discernment isn’t limited to teachers and other obvious authority figures. In college, I was also discerning around the writers’ mystique I saw in my peers, and here, I invite you to be discerning around the writers you meet on the internet, including me.

To keep in mind while learning

Right now, if you are here, I’m assuming you are curious about how I personally write, and I’m happy to share. At the same time, I ask you to approach this material in a similar way that I approached my own teachers.

So, please keep in mind:

• The only difference between me and you is experience, and a little time and dedication can change that.

• Know that you are the only person who can fully answer the question, “How do I write?”

• What I share is how I personally write. I’m sharing in the hope that it’ll help you discover and/or adapt tools for your own creative toolbox. (More on that process in the next section.)

My Method of Discerning

With that said, I would like to share the first tool in my toolbox—my own method of discernment. If you already have your own, that’s fabulous. You can just keep using that one instead.

If you are looking for a method to practice discernment, you can try what I do, which is to examine each offering with these questions in mind:

1. Does this help me make my creation more easily or navigate my life more skillfully?

2. If yes, why? What need does it satisfy?

3. If not, why not? What can I learn about my own needs so that I can instead find a better solution?

If you try this method out and it doesn’t work, you can always adapt this tool to better suit you.

We’ll talk about this in the next section.