find your alter egos
weekly story work exercise
If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly Story Work topics cover universal life themes with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression.
Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et. Today’s exercise is open to all subscribers.
Hi everyone,
Writing this weekly reflection and exercise for the past two years has nourished and strengthened my creative practice in astounding ways. When I started this series, I didn’t know what would work best for me: creating a bunch of posts in advance or taking each week as it comes. I was scared I would run out of ideas. I thought I might get bored or just in general be boring. So, I experimented. Now I have a whole system in place that works uniquely for me, forged through trial, error, and devotion. The series has given me the endurance I need to write this book, and the courage I need to put progress before perfection.
I’ve built my creative journey on giving myself little challenges, noticing patterns, finding solutions, and gradually expanding my capacity for uncertainty along the way.
If you’re a dreamer creative type like me, you may struggle to create structure around your creative projects and finish them. But if you find the right invitation—a purpose or vision that you can’t ignore—that can be the motivation you need to study your creative challenges, work with them, and move past them.
Sometimes that invitation can be a deep, persistent desire to write about your life.
Do you want to heal, teach, confess, advocate, create a legacy, break cycles, or build community with your story?
Do you worry about how people will perceive you if you share your authentic creative voice and the stories that you are being called to write?
If you’re new here, I encourage writers to dig up their stories, big and small, to find new meaning in the journey of their lives. Story Work is the name of my book-in-progress and my distinctive process of creative self-discovery through storytelling. By following the weekly story work exercises, my clients and paid subscribers are offered different lenses to view their life experiences as creative material. (You can learn more about the memberships I offer here.)
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story work builds creative courage
Writing about your life can alleviate anxiety and inhibition, shame and regret. It can provide you with an expanded capacity to express your truths and values in your personal and professional lives. Story work integrates the parts of ourselves that have been hidden, so we can find healing narratives that fill us with hope and new visions.
Our current story work theme is masks we wear, and the paywall is down for this series because it ties in so well with my promotion efforts for The Creative Courage Writing Intensive summer cohort which is currently open for registration.
The personal and social masks we wear are defense mechanisms. We put them on and take them off to keep us safe from harm; to reveal and repress our secrets. They can be a source of limitation as well as freedom. In this series, we are doing writing exercises to explore the parts of ourselves that are sheltered within these masks.
So far we have explored reasons why we hide and the courage to unmask, this week we are looking at how masks can liberate our creative expression.
find your alter egos
Is there a version of yourself that lurks inside of you, calling to be released onto the page? Writing can provide an outlet for us to break through the restrictive packaging we’ve created for ourselves and delve deeper into nuanced parts of our personalities.
It’s not unusual for writers and artists to use alter egos to explore suppressed aspects of their personalities. Beyoncé as Sasha Fierce. Eminem as Slim Shady. Theodor Geisel as Dr. Suess. J K Rowling as Robert Galbraith. These alter egos serve as a canvas to experiment with different techniques, styles, voices, and themes.
Your alter ego is a version of you that often goes unexpressed for fear of criticism or negative consequences. When used for creative expression, it can help you access emotionally intense experiences, assert controversial opinions, and reveal truths by removing the conscious and subconscious inhibitions that suppress your creative instincts.
Let’s look at two ways we can leverage the creative power of alter egos to express ourselves with more freedom.
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alter ego + creative identity
An alter ego can be expressed through a pen name. For years, GG Renee Hill was my pen name, and Gina Hill was my corporate, professional name. The pen name allowed me to build courage when I started writing online. I was more comfortable being emotionally vulnerable with strangers than people in my personal life who might be turned off, uncomfortable with my vulnerability. Afraid of being seen and taking up space as Gina, I created GG Renee and she was not afraid. She was inspired and hopeful, and I trusted her. A liberating result of my creative courage journey has been the ability to integrate the two identities into one empowered whole.
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alter ego + fictional characters
When alter egos show up through characters in a story, they reflect the writer’s need to express traits, gifts, interests, opinions, obsessions, fantasies, secrets, etc. that are repressed in their daily lives. The characters may reveal themselves as you write, or they may already exist in your mind, asking for their stories to be told. As writers, the characters we bring to life contain our creative DNA and include the mysteries of our inner worlds. Connecting to our inner selves this way creates characters that readers invest in because the humanity rings true and they can see aspects of their own hidden selves on display.
Our exercise this week is to use the alter ego concept to do some self-discovery and storytelling.
Exercise:
What alter ego personas could help you access hidden aspects of your personality that you want to have better access to? What memories can you think of where this hidden part of you was ignored, teased, punished, invalidated or hurt in some way?
Choose an alter ego and rewrite the memory from the perspective of this persona, whether you choose an alternate writer identity or a fictional character to express it.
From a healing perspective, I suggest rewriting the story with a healing narrative that allows you to reclaim your power, but I also encourage you to get into character and go where your imagination takes you!
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To learn more about the Creative Courage Writing Intensive, you can get all the details here.
I want to think more about this exercise. Right now, my mind is exhausted from a long weekend.
I just wanted to say, when I first started writing as a blogger I wrote as Karen Wesley Weaver. Weaver is my married name. I feel like that person, wife and mother is a part I was playing an alter ego, perhaps. Now I write as Karen Wesley. She is the a