“Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.” – Steven Pressfield.

Greetings my overachieving undergraduates. Today we are going to talk about how we avoid doing what we need to do.

During this hectic week with some personal things happening it took me longer than usual to get the idea for this installment. On Wednesday night, I finally got an idea and decided to sleep on it. Thursday morning found me cradling my morning coffee like the precious life-giving, life-saving elixir from heaven that it is, and going over the day’s tasks. Number one priority was writing the first draft of this blog, and almost as pressing because it was also due Friday, was editing the final draft of a short story for my fiction class. Lower on the list were baking my stepdaughter’s favorite cookies for her upcoming birthday, checking in the notebook I use as my brain for any upcoming deadlines I might have spaced in other classes, and making sure I had dinner early so I could make my six o’clock class. 

So, of course, once I began tweaking on caffeine and gingko, I immediately grabbed my laptop and began researching mid-nineteenth century politics for a historical fiction screenplay I am writing on spec to try to sell.

On the surface not many people would call that writer’s block. I beg to differ.  I am going to go over three different ways our mind plays tricks on us, and that is most certainly one of them.

First let’s define our terms. I believe writer’s block, the specific malady of not being able to start, continue or finish a writing project, and procrastination, the generic avoidance or delay of anything in your life are sort of kissing cousins. Sometimes there is not much difference in how you avoid writing as how you avoid doing the dishes or vacuuming the house or calling your Aunt Sonia. (Call your Aunt Sonia, please, she loves you.)

Let’s get the easy one out of the way.  I will call it “the blank white abyss.” The platonic ideal of writer’s block is a tortured scribe staring at a blank white space, be it screen or page with nothing to write and a mind seemingly devoid of ideas. I will tell you that many people do not think this type of block actually exists—Bukowski said that writing about writer’s block is better than not writing—and while I am on the fence about that, I will tell you that the situation in which it may or may not arise is completely avoidable.

I know I am supposed to tell you to make yourself a set schedule and stick to it and write at the same time every day like it is a job and that will solve all your problems because your brain will anticipate having to write and be trained to give you output at the same time every day. There are very successful writers who do that. Stephen King comes to mind. However, having tried this method several times through the years, any time I sat down with absolutely no idea what I wanted to say or write about, it was a total waste of time.

I know you have deadlines on papers and stories, and I am not telling you to blow them off or wait for divine inspiration. I am telling you to acknowledge your resistance, recognize it, and resist the resistance. A great metaphor for this is sailing. When you are sailing, you are at the mercy of the wind. You need to use the wind to push yourself gradually toward the direction you want. Even if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, you can angle toward your goal. This is called tacking. The wind is blowing against you. Your monkey mind doesn’t want to sit still and write. You need to adjust your sails and go as far as you can before the wind is against you again, and then readjust. Be patient, you will get there.

The second form of block is what I was doing this morning, trying to figure out when Frederick Douglass and Lincoln met when I should have been writing. The particular form that had me doing research on a personal project instead of my required writing is what I tend to call “I am incubating my idea. It’s not ready yet,” syndrome.

As a disclaimer, there is a certain truth to that in my writing process. I am not a note taker in general. I get an idea, and I mull it over and stew with it in my brain and then one day it usually starts to itch, and I know it is ready for a first draft. If we use the analogy of a pregnancy, then the length of time from the germ of an idea until I sit and begin to type a draft can be thought of as a gestation period. It is in that nebulous interim that things can get sticky. Where process meets procrastination is when I sort of know the idea is ready but my insecurity kicks in, or I am distracted, and I wind up carrying the baby into the eighth trimester. (Fun fact, the gestation period for an elephant is 12 months. Don’t ask me why I know that.)

It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I wanted to write about in the blog. It also wasn’t like having to write a paper where you know the parameters, but don’t have a hook, like you have to write about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn through a ragtime-jazz piano lens and have not a damn clue where to start. I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. I didn’t have an opening line, but I wasn’t stressing it. I also wasn’t stressing editing the fiction assignment, even though editing is the work part of writing and who the hell needs that. I was actually surprisingly happy with the draft I had considering it was sort of a flash fiction and I like neither reading nor writing that genre. Still, there I was until noon, deep in the pre-civil war south.

The last form of block I want to talk about is what I call “I’ve got a better idea.” For me, this usually manifests as a way of avoiding the harder parts of composition and plot.  I will have an idea, incubate it, start the draft, and then get to a point where I either have painted myself into a corner or I can see that there is a large plot hole I am about to fall into and I have nothing to build the bridge across it.  At this point, my monkey mind will tap me on the shoulder and say, “look, this isn’t working. Maybe we need to give it a rest. I have this other idea though that is so much better and will practically write itself.” This is the one I have to warn you against the most. This is the one that will give you a huge pile of unfinished manuscripts and an even huger inferiority complex about not finishing anything. I tell you this because, especially with a full-length piece like a novel, or a screenplay or a thesis, the act of actually writing “the end,” is as indescribable as holding your son or daughter in your arms if you aren’t a parent.  The sense of elation is tremendous, and the sense of agency you give yourself by having a completed work behind you turbocharges every project that comes after it. You know you can do it because you have done it before. If you take nothing else from this week’s manic rant, please take this:

Finish. At all costs. Finish.

This comes back to the link between writer’s block and procrastination.  I am a musician. I don’t do it for a living anymore. It is just a hobby/obsession/integral part of my soul that I can’t live without. Because I no longer play in bands or try to make money with my music I have this irrational guilt about picking up a guitar, or bass or djembe and playing because it is “wasting time,” that I could be using on schoolwork, or writing I can sell, or the myriad other things that need to be done in my life.  So, I make a deal with myself.  I can’t play any instrument until I…whatever.  Until I finish this draft, until I edit the short story, until I make sure nothing is due in African Philosophy.

If you suffer from “I’ve got a better idea,” block, I want you to try to apply that system to your writing.  Stay the course.  Don’t start something else until you have typed “the end” on at least a rough draft of the initial idea.  If other ideas come, write down a skeletal version of them and promise yourself that as soon as you type “the end” you will dive into this (obviously better and easier) idea. 

I want to leave you with this last thought. When I lay all these things out, it makes it seem like it is easy. Just do B, instead of A and all will be well. I never want you to think I believe that anything about art is easy, or that your doubts are something to beat yourself up over. I have written for decades. I have finished novels. I have been published. I have taught writing. I am still afraid every time I come to the page. There are moments that I am certain I am a fraud and a charlatan and have no talent at all. That is okay. When I am afraid, I think of these words that Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles:

If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Write until the end. Peace.

Sources:

Steven Pressfield. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. ISBN: 1936891026