Entrainment: What You Hold Close, Creates Who You Are

Imagine a roomful of pendulum clocks. Left alone, each will begin to entrain with another clock, until they are all ticking in concert. Way back in 1665, a Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens found that two pendulum clocks on the same wall eventually swung in opposite directions and in perfect time with each other. This synchrony is something we can apply to our writing lives, or so I’ve discovered.

I learned about the concept of entrainment from a dear friend who passed away a few years ago. We’d have long discussions via letter about how to learn skills later in life.

With youth, he’d say, teachers abound. Influences are everywhere. Everything looks interesting and exciting, fresh experiences. Plenty of time to experiment, to choose poorly, to make mistakes.

As a young person, I often studied with teachers who took me off my most natural track as a writer. Now I’m much more careful: Mistakes in choosing who influences you might not matter as much when you’re twenty as it does when you’re seventy. Fewer years left, pick more wisely.

Age gives me a bit more experience and mistakes have taught me to choose wisely. No more so than right now. What do I let into my life, into my vision? Whatever is around me, creates my view of the world to some extent.

When we consider the natural phenomenon of entrainment, where oscillating bodies tend to vibrate in harmony, even lock into phase with each other, it brings caution to the table.

Mentors and mistakes

Who are you allowing to influence you right now, in your creative life? Do you have a sense of what you might need, differently from what you’re allowing yourself to absorb?

It takes time and mistakes to learn how to choose the best influences, creatively. I’ve spoken before about my catastrophe years attending the Iowa Summer Writers Workshop. I went for three years when I was in my forties. I selected instructors and their workshops based on their renown. Sometimes I read their writing, but mostly I looked at awards and distinguishments.

I never considered what I needed, at that time. I was stuck in my creative life, not moving forward, so I naively thought that sitting at the god’s or goddess’s feet as a literary aspirant would teach me everything I wanted to know.

A costly mistake, as it turned out.

The first two years, I suffered through each course I chose. I came away with even more stall-out in my writing life. Often, I didn’t recover for months.

The third summer, a friend wanted to come along. We talked about our goals, and she said she didn’t care about the teacher’s credentials. She mostly wanted inspiration and momentum, qualities I hadn’t considered before.

We landed with a superb teacher who was relatively unknown by the literati. She was inspiration personified: I couldn’t wait to get to class each morning, to try the exercises. I wanted to entrain with this person, to absorb her unique and fun approach to the writing life, and by the end of the week, my skills had grown enormously too. Was it because she helped me tap into my ability to leap forward? I don’t know. I just know I gained new perspectives on a story I was working on and eventually went on to publish it.

What do you really want?

It’s taken me a lot of years to say no to the news, to social media scrolling, when I’m in a fragile place, creatively. Or when the world is ungentle, as it is now. I don’t want to absorb and align with that ungentleness, not right now. What I really want is to be inspired to create.

Whatever we are close to, we begin to mimic. Consciously or unconsciously. Many writers and artists are very sensitive to this.

What I read, listen to, talk about, obsess over cements the entrainment of my creative self. Do you find that when you read amazing books, you become a better writer, somehow? When you watch a really skillfully created film, you take away the unconscious rhythm of great dialogue? When you walk through an art exhibit or a beautiful garden, there’s something that changes in your visual perception, and that translates later into your own work?

It’s a great time, right now, to decide what you really want from your writing life this next year. And to look for others who have qualities or skills or points of view that you aspire to, with this realized goal. To begin to entrain with them in some way.

A first step, for this week, is to examine the sources of inspiration you have around you.

Sources of inspiration

I renovated both my writing space and my painting studio this summer, because I realized I needed to bring visuals of my dreams and goals into closer proximity. Whatever I align to, I become. I put quotes by writers I admire, books I love, paintings that make me soar inside.

I also wanted to align with more open space in my creative life. It felt like a metaphor for becoming a student again, for learning more than knowing. One of my big goals for the new year is to learn.

I examined the accumulated stuff from my years of teaching and editing—beloved professions I no longer do. I asked myself about each item: Who am I now, as a creative artist, and does this reflect it fully?

I started a pile of what didn’t. I found good homes for the books and study materials and furniture and art that was the past me, not the present me. What I see around me now, in these renewed spaces, is slowly teaching me who I am becoming. And I like it.

This week’s exercise is all about dreaming your creative space and your next step in learning from those whose skills you admire. You may not have time or energy this month to do anything about changing it, but you can begin now.

The concept of entrainment assumes that we have freedom of choice, but it also gives us the warning: if we want to become something new, we need to change what we have around us as reminders. Very helpful to anyone who feels stuck or who is reinventing themselves after a publication, a job change, a move, a loss.

Entrainment is all about proximity. To me, it’s an immutable law. It affects us whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

As the new year begins, here’s an interior-and-exterior renovation exercise in two parts. You’ll be considering (1) your writing space and (2) your writing mentors. Each part of the exercise asks you to dream a little on any changes which might align with what you want to become in 2025, as a writer and creative person.

Part 1: Your Ideal Writing Space in 2025

If you were to design your writing space to better reflect what you want to entrain with at this point in your creative life, what would you keep, move, replace, discard?

Make a drawing or list. Doodle ideas on paper. Write a description of your ideal writing space, even if it feels far in the future.

What qualities do you most need, in order to become your full self?

Part 2: Your Ideal Writing Mentors in 2025

Who teaches you, right now? Who are your mentors in your creative life?

You may find them in books, online here and elsewhere, in classes. What qualities do you feel you’d like to entrain with this coming year?

I learn the most from skilled writers who are also aware of how they create and can distill it into a system for others. Who is that, in your life?

Again, jot down some skills you’d like to add to your toolbox. They might be in tech areas, in specific craft skills, in accountability. Who comes to mind, who might help you with one of these?