Ask for Help
When You Can Use It
I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I hate asking for help. Somehow I have acquired the belief that I should do all things on my own and that asking for help with anything is an embarrassing failure of ability. I combine the aforementioned with the unfortunate additional belief that if I ask someone for help with something, they will lose faith in me forever and will never rely on me to do anything independently, ever again. Naturally, I do not ask for help until I’m well past when I needed it.
Today’s subtitle is not when you need it because that’s still a bit late to ask for help; when you can use it—or perhaps, when you realize you could use it—is a much better time. In my experience, the longer you wait to ask for help the more time you give your challenge to get worse and then you’re asking for more help than you would have had to ask for were your problem still a wee baby problem.
Related issue: People think of writing as a solitary activity. Which, to be fair, it largely is. Sitting down at your keyboard or in front of your notebook with a pen in hand and transcribing images from your head to paper is something for which you do not require any other people. That said, sometimes other people can still be helpful with your creative process and nothing is wrong with that.
Writing itself is solitary but creating a finished book or other publication is not. Few books, and even fewer (if any) good ones, are created in a vacuum. Books have always had beta readers, editors, proofreaders, and other editorial helpers—even since the dawn of books. Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote what we now recognize as the first novel, passed chapters around to the other ladies in waiting at the Imperial Court and incorporated their feedback into later chapters.
If you go into a bookstore or a library and pick up a book, that book is the product of many people’s work, not only the author’s. Professionally published books pass from their authors to early readers, agents, acquisitions editors, development editors, production editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, and prepress QA before they get to you. Books are not the solo work of only one person, even when they have just one name on the spine.
Considering the above, I want to suggest five “helpers” you can turn to in your creative work when you need a little shove in the right direction.
1. Someone to Bounce Ideas Off
Pretty much everybody can make use of a sounding board for their creative ideas. This doesn’t have to be only for writing ideas but can help with any type of creative work.
“I’m going to write a vampire story, what do you think?”
“I’m going to record a ukulele solo for this track, what do you think?”
“I’m going to paint this room forest green wall to wall, including the ceiling, what do you think?”
The thing about having someone you bounce ideas off of isn’t that they’ll give you the answer to your creative conundrums but that they lend an interested ear and ask relevant questions while you bounce away—so they can help you get to the answers you need.
Therefore, it’s important to choose somebody for this who doesn’t attach a lot of ego to the process and someone who is not too solutions-focused. You don’t need someone to solve the “problem,” just someone to listen to you work through it. The best person for this, in my experience, is another creative person who uses you for their creative sounding board. The reciprocity is nice and, also, listening to them solve their own creative problems can help with your own creative solutions, too. It’s a twofer.
Remember: This is a safe activity. No one is out to steal your idea because ideas aren’t valuable.
2. Someone to Read a Blurb Now and Then
I don’t mean “blurb” in the specific sense of your back cover copy, but rather any little piece of text. Many writers have alpha and/or beta readers who read chapters early and provide feedback, but having somebody in your life who can read a paragraph or two on short notice for any purpose is super helpful.
“Hey does this dialogue sound natural to you?”
“Can you look at the transition between these two paragraphs and tell me if you followed it?”
“Can you proofread this query for me real quick just to make sure there are no typos?”
Sometimes you don’t need to break out the whole beta reader for just a quick bit of feedback. This doesn’t have to be a fellow creative writer, it can be anybody who can take a quick five minutes to read something now and then for you.
3. Someone to Body Double
Body doubling is a productivity strategy that works well for many people with ADHD (hello) but the usefulness isn’t limited to just those of us with trouble focusing. Body doubling is also sometimes called coworking or tele-coworking by neurotypicals.
The idea is that when one is working quietly away at a solitary activity, one may become distracted and lose focus—you ever sit down to write and find yourself half an hour later watching YouTube videos? Very common. A body double is a second person who sits near you—physically or virtually—and works quietly away on their own tasks. You don’t have to talk to each other, you don’t have to be working on the same kind of thing, you just have to be nearby. The act of working near another person can help keep you on task.
This is kind of what my writing group does—we get together and quietly write together in a shared space—and it works really well. Some body doubling techniques encourage briefly checking in at the start of the session to share goals and again at the end to share whether you were successful.
You can body double by working in the same physical space as another person, or virtually over an app like Zoom with cameras on but mics off. If you don’t have anyone to body double with, there are a number of sites you can easily find through Google that will match you with others, virtually, who want to body double and put you in a session together.
4. Someone to Be Your Accountabilibuddy
An accountabilibuddy is someone you buddy up with to keep each other accountable. This could be someone you body double with, but it need not be. There are tons of ways accountabilibuddies can help each other.
You can share your self-imposed deadline to get something done with your buddy and ask them to check in with you on progress or request the finished item on the deadline so you have motivation to get it done. You can have regular meetings where you update one another on progress. Your accountabilibuddy can call or text you out of the blue to ask if you’ve worked on your manuscript lately, to remind you that it exists.
When you have goals and deadlines that are self-imposed and not foisted upon you by an authority like a supervisor at work, a family member, or some other social obligation, those goals and deadlines can fall to the bottom of the to-do list as they get preempted again and again by other deadlines that you know people are going to come asking you about. If you know your accountabilibuddy is going to come around asking you where Chapter 5 is, it’s way less likely to fall off your radar entirely.
Now say accountabilibuddy five times fast.
5. Someone to Trade Bugaboos With
A bugaboo is a center of fear or alarm for you—something that you dread or avoid. There are some things that are bugaboos to everybody like the imminent collapse of society so there’s no point trying to pawn that one off on anybody else, but there are plenty of bugaboos that are unique to just you.
For instance, let’s say you really, really hate to call a medical office and make an appointment. Something about this normal life task just makes you want to avoid it, possibly at the cost of your health. This could be any normal, little life task that you dread and put off forever.
Well let’s say your friend Catherine has no compunctions about calling the receptionist at the doctor’s office, but Catherine has an absolute mental block when it comes to opening letters that look important. This is true, by the way, the avoidance is in remission right now but I once went more than a year without opening any mail. It was a whole thing.
So we both have these dumb little bugaboos. What if I call your doctor’s office and make your appointments, and you open my important-looking letters so you can tell me “oh it’s nothing serious just a recall on your vacuum cleaner” or whatever. Bugaboo solved.
If you have creative-adjacent tasks that are tough for you—like submitting your finished story to a magazine, sending out a particularly scary agent query letter, or entering a poetry contest—see if you can find someone to trade bugaboos with (creative or otherwise).
I’ve called doctors’ offices and impersonated a friend to get a prescription refill for them. I’ve called and made appointments for people who can’t stand the phone. I’ve filled out online forms for a friend who crawls right out of their skin when they have to deal with an online form. And friends open my mail for me sometimes when I can’t.
When I feel like I shouldn’t ask for help, I remind myself that I offer to help people often, and they take me up on it often, and I never think less of them. People won’t think less of you or your creative work if you ask for their help.
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