Part Wild: A Writer's Guide to Harnessing the Creative Power of Resistance

By Deb Norton

“A must-read for any aspiring or seasoned writer.” —Huffington Post

We all have the call to create. The question is…why don’t we answer it?

We all come pre-loaded with a creative spark that drives us to innovate, explore, express, and make our unique contribution to the world. Often, though, that drive doesn’t get us very far down the road before it runs right smack into resistance—the mysterious force that thwarts creativity.

But resistance needn’t be the enemy of writing—or any other creative endeavor. Deb Norton’s Part Wild provides fun and practical ways to turn resistance into a creative asset.

Whether it presents as doubt, perfectionism, or Deb’s favorite: a chorus of withering inner critics, the power of resistance can be leveraged to launch the creative process with real momentum. Once we harness resistance, we can let our creative impulses off the leash.

Norton has turned a decade of sold-out writing retreats and private coaching into a process for powering up your creative ideas. In Part Wild, she shares dozens of illuminating and effective practices and quick-start prompts that are guaranteed to get us out of our heads and onto the page.

Just as The Artist’s Way gave millions of readers permission to explore their creative side, Part Wild shows writers of all levels of experience and skill how to harness the electrifying power of resistance and get writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501129162

Deb Norton

Deb Norton is a writing coach for screenwriters, novelists, and nonfiction writers globally. She leads writing workshops internationally, is a master teacher at Hedgebrook, and teaches immersive retreats in story structure and archetype for writers and novelists. After graduating from the master’s acting program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, she spent an eventful ten years dutifully pursuing her acting career before her desire for a deeper connection to Story led her to pen her own plays and screenplays. Her full-length play, The Whole Banana, has been optioned for a movie. She lives in the Northern Sierra Mountains in California.

Book preview

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Resistance Training

Building Strength and Flexibility

Why do writing exercises, you might ask? Why write anything that isn’t going to be something? You should exercise your writing for the same reason you exercise your body. Walking, cycling, weight lifting, and yoga all employ the same natural force to make you strong and flexible: resistance. You can’t build muscle without something to push against. The same goes for writing.

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Inspiration—Fickle Muse

Don’t Hold Your Breath / Provision Your Process

Until I was six years old, I loved being in water. In the desert town where I grew up, 110 degrees was the temperature on a typical summer day. Liza, the dentist’s kid, had a pool, and so her house was mobbed, sunup to sundown, from when school got out in June well into October. We played Marco Polo, pretended to be mermaids, did midair contortions off the diving board, and stayed in the water until our fingers were white and wrinkled. When we got out, we’d eat sliced oranges. This was my idea of the good life.

Then my mother enrolled me in the Pollywog swimming class at the local rec center, where I was surprised to learn that I didn’t know how to swim.

Every week, I suited up in my orange terry-cloth one-piece and my mom’s too-big rubber swim cap with the flowers and the chin strap and marched across the nubby concrete looking like something out of Cirque du Soleil.

Tread for five! The college-aged instructor blew her whistle. She and all the other kids bobbed like corks while I sputtered and thrashed for the side of the pool. I just couldn’t keep my head above the water. It was like trying to keep a piece of rebar afloat.

Relaaaax. The instructor pried my fingers off the pool gutter. Relax and feel the water pushing you to the surface. I stopped thrashing, sank, and took in water; so much for relaxing. I clawed for her shoulders and clung to them. Finally she just wore me around like a cape as she taught the other kids.

To graduate from Pollywogs, we had to swim across the short and shallow side of the pool. I splashed along like a waterwheel off its axle. When I reached the other side, purple and panting, a man with a clipboard stared at me over his glasses, puzzled. Did you hold your breath the whole way?

I knew I was supposed to breathe and blow bubbles, but if I lifted my head enough to get air, my bottom half sank and took the rest of me down with it. I nodded my head in shame. He marked his clipboard.

After that, I hated the water.

Why couldn’t I float? Why couldn’t I do this normal human thing? Friends tried to teach me but then watched, fascinated, as I went under. I was told I couldn’t float because I was too tense, that I didn’t have enough body fat, that my breathing was too shallow, my bones too dense, my muscles too stringy. I was told, and I sort of believed, that the water could sense my fear.

When I was pushing thirty, my ex-fiancé and I decided we’d like to be absolutely certain we weren’t right for each other, so he took me on a vacation to the Caribbean. I was very, very nervous about snorkeling, but Greg was a champion swimmer and promised not to let me drown. In a worst-case scenario, I reasoned, I could do the cape thing and he could wear me from reef to reef.

All geared up in our snorkels, masks, and fins, we clump-slapped into the warm—wow, waaaaarm—water and I put my face under and I could see for miles and I pushed off and waited for the struggle and the sinking, but instead I was gliding like a water bug, flying over a bustling, colorful landscape. It was the breathing! It had always been the breathing. With the snorkel piping air down to me, I didn’t have to lift my head and could lie flat as a leaf on the surface. I felt at home in the water, like it had always been my element. So this was