Are you a victim of writer’s block? I was…and sometimes still am.
When I began work on my first novel, more than 30 years ago, I kept a daily journal recording my work habits. It’s painful to look at it today–but oh, so revealing.
One thing it shows is that I had confidence issues: after a bad day, 3 or 4 blank calendar squares would follow, proof that I’d stayed away from the desk like a burn victim shuns fire.
Another thing that jumps out at me is my perfectionism: I fussed endlessly over first draft chapters because they “lacked something.” A whole day might be spent getting one or two difficult paragraphs “just right.” I wanted to use a timer, but I couldn’t find the right one, and so on.
Then there are the “I suck” sign-offs on days when my ideas had run thin, or the quality of prose – and this was rough draft – didn’t resonate like finished Faulkner or Hemingway. On these days, I was ready to quit go to law school, take the cloth, anything but continue as the fraud I suspect I was.
Does this sound familiar? Have you struggled with means to fend it off or avoid it, and if so, what strategies have you developed for staying productive?
Here are a few tips based on the ways I’ve learned to deal with my own negative tendencies:
Confidence issues are rarely about the writing. They are about your view of you, and on bad days they take the form of judgmental inner voices saying (usually after you’ve just read Faulkner or Hemingway), “Who the hell do you think you are to dare enter the Pantheon of the Published?” Just tell them: “Hey, I’m trying to write my own best story, that’s all. I’m just a guy (or girl) trying to get a job done. Now, will you please shut up?” Don’t forget, on the very basic get-it-done level, the skills of writing, like the skills of tennis, are learned, practiced, and developed. Would you stop playing tennis if you weren’t a Federer? So why stop writing because you aren’t a Tolstoy? Just play your own best game.
Perfectionism is a sneaky enemy because it’s so close to “perfection, the quest for.” Like those weeds that mimic a legitimate plant so they can grow next to it and choke it to death, perfectionism masquerades as noble high standards in an age of trash, and so on. No. It’s a weed, but it can be dealt with a lot easier than most weeds. How? By deliberately lowering the standards you’ve taken for granted for your rough first-draft. Norman Mailer use to work facing a sign on the wall above his desk: “Lower Standards.” (His psychoanalyst suggested this tactic.) What if your perfectionism takes the form of quantity rather than quality: that is it demands X number of pages or words a day? Deliberately lower the number.
As for “I suck,” it usually means you’ve read your day’s work over at the end of a writing session, and it isn’t great. Your spirit implodes. Your heart keels over. You might even feel fingers of panic tickling the back of your neck. But wait – hear this: Nothing you write can be read fairly by you until some time has gone by, so don’t even give it a glance until the next morning. Personally, I don’t even do that unless I can’t recall where I left off: I push ahead without readiing, because I know that for me, to reread will be to look for winning prose, and that’s a loser’s game, not much different from expecting a coat of primer to gleam with the glossy perfection of finished enamel.
For simply getting words on screen or paper, I recommend freewriting. Lower your standards (yes, there will be garbage) set a time, and GO. Freewriting is a marvelous tool for busting any case of writer’s block because there is only one way to play the game of “5 Minute Freewrite,” And that’s to write.
So get to work. I’ll be expanding on these techniques and introducing others in an article I’m working on now. Stay tuned.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I am very comfortable with the feeling that I suck, but I often feel that if I didn’t need the money, I wouldn’t have finished a ton of my stuff.
I suck is my friend, though. It reassures me that I can still see my faults, which means I can fix them. The alternative is much worse!
Wow, that’s a fresh take on “I suck” if I ever heard one! You’ve taken the dead hand of self-loathing and turned it into a pom-pom of reassurance.
First, thanks for the earlier post on goals — I loved both the quotes at the end of that one. I just finished reading your writer’s block post. Actually, your writing itself is pretty inspiring: crisp, clean and clicking right along to clarify your points (sorry, couldn’t resist the aliteration, AND it’s all true!).
“I suck” is never helpful to me though. It is too black and white of a statement, and too harsh to be helpful. Also I don’t think I will EVER be too worried about seeing my own faults as spysribbler relates. Instead, the more I learn to see my own faults IN PERSPECTIVE the better everything gets. Reminds me of one of my favorite sayings re where I’ve come from: “Sure I know about moderation — I see it every time I swing by it going from one extreme to another!”
have a good night or morning as the case may be jL
P.S. Man, I HATE it when I misspell alliteration! But did I just misspell “misspell”? That is the question. Someone can get back to me on that… nyuk, nyuk jL
Sometimes I use a term that is a little too untamed to be reliable. It attracts attention to itself like a bucking horse. People grab it and ride it wherever it leads them. The important thing to note is that I used [that term] to indicate those awful moments when I remember rereading something and feeling the bottom drop out of my life. In the movie “Adaptation,” Nicholas Cage nails it visually when he listens to some notes he recorded earlier in high excitement: as his recorded voice yammers on, high on hope, we see his face sicken with despair. Writing this, I just realized I went for the same effect, sort of, at a spot in my novel, I KILLED HEMINGWAY, where the main character finally pulls himself together and finishes the book he has been dreading to write:
So the winter passed….as [the book] struggled to be born, survived infancy, and grew into a whopping handsome stack of sizzling pages. Then one day it was done. I printed out two copies, boxed one, and set off through a snow storm to hand-deliver it to Warren & Dudge.
Then I came home, sat down with the other copy, and read it, start to finish.
It was trash.
[END OF CHAPTER]
I beat writer’s block (and constantly fighting my inner editor) by not reading what I’d written AT ALL until I’d finished. I completed my first novel at the end of NaNoWriMo this past year by doing this and now that I’m going through the second draft, I actually like a majority of what I wrote but if I’d read it that day or even the day after, I probably never would have finished. So, I highly recommend writing that way. I never thought I would beat my inner editor! She’s a maniac!
P.S. New to this blog via Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs and loving it!