How Writers Can Weather Creative Setbacks With Resilience

Photo by Daniil Lobachev on Unsplash

Every writing journey has its bumps in the road — and the occasional detours and pile-ups, too.

Sometimes the creative setbacks we experience are of our own making. We procrastinate writing, then wallow in self-pity or miss an important deadline. Or we fail to do our research and end up waiting around for a response from a literary agent who isn’t accepting submissions.

Other times, we aren’t the least bit at fault for the creative setbacks we experience. A bad night’s sleep leads to a migraine that makes it too difficult to write, or a beta reader lets you know that they won’t be able to provide feedback because of a family emergency.

Either way, there’s no doubt that setbacks can be costly — both literally and figuratively.

The theft of a laptop can be an expensive setback, as can commissioning a book cover design from a disreputable company. Sometimes setbacks can also come at a physical cost. Too much time spent writing can lead to exhausting creative burnout, back pain, or another frustrating physical issue.

But perhaps the most damaging cost of creative setbacks involves your emotional energy.

Even the smallest of writing roadblocks can prompt an unhealthy emotional reaction that disrupts (or even drains) your creative energy, making it difficult to overcome obstacles, focus on your work, and get back to enjoying your creative journey.

Thankfully, there are steps that every writer can take to not only minimize the number of setbacks they experience but to weather creative turbulence with resilience and strength. What must you do to begin cultivating a little of this creative fortitude?

What the Stoics can teach us about creative setbacks…

In modern times, we define "stoicism" as the ability to endure pain and hardship without complaint. Thus, the term tends to call to mind someone who is relatively humorless and unfeeling. But ancient Stoic philosophers were anything but emotionally callous.

While it’s true that Stoics strived to weather adversity without loudly proclaiming their grievances, they didn’t do so by suppressing their emotions. Instead, they worked to achieve and maintain a deep sense of inner peace that allowed them to circumvent grievances in the first place.

The ancient Stoics understood that responding poorly to adversity only results in additional pain and hardship. Thus, they practiced cultivating control over their emotions by accepting the reality of adversity and honing an attitude of optimism and resilience in the face of challenging setbacks.

Though the Stoics were ancient philosophers, their wisdom remains as apt today as it was over 2,000 years ago. Anyone can harness Stoic philosophy to develop the resilience to weather unwelcome obstacles, creatives included.

In a moment, I'm going to share with you eight key tips that can help you learn how to weather setbacks with a sense of peace and assurance, many of which derive directly from Stoic philosophy. But first, it’s important to note that anyone can cultivate an attitude of resilience.

While some of us may seem naturally more resilient than others, resilience itself is not an inherited trait. It’s a skill and a measure of emotional maturity that anyone cultivate.

Resilience also isn’t akin to suppressing negative emotions. Remember, the Stoics didn’t strive to ignore their unhealthy reactions to adversity. They worked to respond to pain and hardship in healthy ways by maintaining control over their emotions and moving forward with optimism.

With this in mind, let's explore my top eight tips for weathering creative setbacks with resilience:

Tip #1: Manage Your Expectations

Creative setbacks become easier to manage when you accept them as inevitable realities rather than possibilities to be feared. Acceptance allows you to adjust your expectations, mentally and emotionally preparing yourself for creative challenges so you won’t be taken aback when they come to call.

By managing your expectations, you can also take precautions that can prevent setbacks from happening in the first place. For example, you might lower your target word count goal when you aren’t feeling well to avoid “underproductive” writing sessions and the frustration that typically accompanies them.

Tip #2: Develop Skill and Expertise

Another way to reduce the number of setbacks you experience is to continually improve your storytelling skills and knowledge of the craft. You’re unlikely to get stuck in your story’s sagging middle, for example, if you understand the mechanics behind strong story structure.

Developing your skills and stories can also help you avoid exorbitant editing fees, painfully disheartening beta feedback, and seemingly endless negative reviews and rejections — among other such creative challenges.

Similarly, cultivating your knowledge of book publishing and marketing can help you avoid the pain and overwhelm of struggling to get your writing career off the ground without any real plan in place.

As a bonus, you’ll also gain greater confidence as you develop your storytelling skills and expertise, ultimately helping you build resilience as you recognize that you’re capable of tackling any curveball the writing life throws your way.

Tip #3: Practice Awareness

Confidence may be cousin to resilience, but no amount of self-trust will help you develop and maintain a sense of inner peace if you don’t know what’s going on inside your head. That’s where practicing awareness comes into play.

The next time you grow frustrated or dejected when writing, take a moment to listen to your thoughts. What stories are you telling yourself?

Do you have a lazy inner voice that says, “Eh, 300 words is enough. You don’t need to write anymore even though you have the time.”

Or do you have a fearful inner voice that whispers, “Your work will never be good enough anyhow, so why bother trying?”.

Maybe you have a bitter inner voice that insists, “Your beta readers clearly hate your work. They probably think you and your story are so stupid."

No matter what’s going on inside your head, try not to feel guilty, ashamed, or embarrassed. The point of this exercise isn’t self-flagellation or self-pity. You’re simply working to develop an awareness of your thoughts so you can begin to reframe your mindset in favor of greater resilience.

Tip #4: Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs

With a stronger understanding of what’s going on inside your head, you should be able to identify some of your core limiting beliefs. That is, the stories you tell yourself that hold you back from living your best (writing) life.

Maybe you believe that you’re not good enough or that success isn’t available to you. Maybe you believe that creatives can’t really earn a living doing what they love or that no one will take you and your stories seriously.

Whatever the case may be, challenging your limiting beliefs through awareness and affirmations is key to developing resilience. Because the fact of the matter is that our negative internal narratives are often what make setbacks so painful to endure in the first place.

Not only can setbacks trigger our limiting beliefs, leading us to respond with anger and self-pity and fear; our limiting beliefs can also be the catalyst that sparks many of the creative setbacks we experience. For example, a fear of failure can lead you to procrastinate your creative work, resulting in poor progress and long periods of creative drought.

Though this type of introspective work can be difficult, taking the time to rewrite your inner narratives can make a world of difference in how you approach the blank page — and ultimately, in how you handle the creative setbacks that come your way.

Click here to learn more about how to challenge your limiting beliefs.

Tip #5: Reframe Setbacks In a Better Light

When faced with a setback, one of the many ways you can practice resilience is by mentally reframing the event. In the book The Stoic Challenge, William B. Irvine outlines six frameworks you can use to change how you view setbacks.

1. The Stoic Test Frame

Example: When a family emergency causes you to fall behind on a writing deadline, try viewing the setback as a challenge rather than a source of pain by imagining that fictional Stoic gods are testing your resilience.

2. The Competing Obligations Frame

Example: Rather than wallowing in self-pity when all of your first-choice literary agents reject your manuscript, remind yourself that such rejection isn’t personal. The agents may be committed to other projects or believe that your manuscript simply isn’t right for their personal portfolio.

3. The Incompetence Frame

Example: Instead of growing frustrated when a beta reader offers you feedback that's too vague to be helpful, remind yourself that they likely haven’t yet had effective feedback modeled for them (or maybe they’re simply worried about hurting your feelings). In either case, the beta reader meant well, even if their feedback ultimately wasn’t helpful.

4. The Storytelling Frame

Example: Rather than drowning in despair after discovering a major plot hole in your manuscript, try telling yourself a story about how you'll view this setback in the future. In retrospect, what will this setback teach you? How will it help you grow and evolve in your creative work?

5. The Comedic Frame

Example: If your computer crashes and there's nothing to be done to recover the documents you've lost, considering replacing self-pity with humor. "Well, that's one way to learn a lesson!" you might say. Laughing to keep from crying is a valid way to keep moving forward.

6. The Game Frame

Example: When you find yourself re-writing all of those chapters you lost when your computer crashed, trying viewing the work as a game. Can you write 1,000 words in an hour? A whole chapter in a day? View each step as a victory (or the final boss challenge in your favorite video game!).

As illustrated by those last two examples, these frameworks don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Feel free to use any combination of reframing techniques to help you weather creative setbacks with resilience.

Tip #6: Try Negative Visualization

When you’re ready to level up your relationship with resilience, you may wish to try an anchoring technique called negative visualization.

In psychology, “anchoring” refers to the human tendency to rely upon initial information (i.e. an “anchor”) when making decisions.

Say a clothing store needs to sell a dress at $20 to make a profit. To encourage customers to buy the dress, the store marks the item up to $25 (the anchor), then runs frequent 20% off sales to convince buyers that they’re getting a deal.

See how that works?

Applying modern terms to ancient philosophy, the Stoics used anchoring to reframe their mindsets through a practice called negative visualization. By visualizing theoretical setbacks, Stoic philosophers primed themselves to accept unavoidable hardships and appreciate the good alongside the bad.

As writers, we can use this same technique to develop our resilience. To practice negative visualization, you might consider what it would be like to receive your first one-star review or fail to make a sale during a book launch.

By visualizing these setbacks, you can accustom yourself to the reality that such obstacles are inevitable and determine what actions you might take before or after experiencing the setback to mitigate their effects. And should the setback not occur after all, then you’ll have something wonderful to celebrate!

Tip #7: Create Tests of Resilience

Another way to level up your relationship with resilience is to complete what some modern-day Stoic adherents like to call "toughness training." In other words, you can purposefully put your resilience to the test.

As a writer, you might gauge your new mental toughness by sharing a chapter with your critique partner that isn’t perfectly polished. You might also consider purposefully underperforming your word count goal to see what thoughts and feelings might arise or try writing in a distracting environment to see if you can’t hone your focus.

Any test that helps expand your comfort zone and prove your ability to keep moving forward is a great way to become a more resilient writer.

Tip #8: Memento Mori

Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning “remember that you must die.” Stoic philosophers didn’t use this phrase to dwell upon their deaths with morbid fascination but rather to remind themselves of the beauty and fragility of life.

In much the same way that negative visualization can prompt us to remember all that we have to appreciate in our lives, memento mori can remind us that we have so much to live for — including the joy we find in writing.

Moreover, considering the truth of our mortality can prompt us to take a closer look at our priorities, taking stock of what really matters and stripping away what doesn’t, including unhealthy and unhelpful responses to setbacks.

As a writer, you might wish to bear memento mori in mind in an effort to strip away unnecessary creative pressure and embrace the simple joy of writing, as well as to remind yourself that there’s no use in allowing creative setbacks to steal the joy and fulfillment you find in your writing life.

As with any introspective work, training yourself in resilience takes time and effort.

In many ways, learning to weather setbacks with resilience is a practice that will prompt its own challenges in turn. When you inevitably fail to handle a moment of adversity with grace, try not to fall into the same feelings of anger, self-pity, or despair that you’re striving to avoid.

Instead, remind yourself that you’re only human. Take a moment to reframe the setback, and perhaps to address a few limiting beliefs while you’re at it. Then get back to your feet and keep pressing on, taking one resilient step forward at a time.

No matter the challenges and hardships that come your way, you are more than capable of standing firm in your sense of optimism and self-assurance. Of traversing the inevitable highs and lows in the full knowledge that they’re all a part of the beautiful journey that is your writing life.