the current manifestation of writer's block

[truepenny]

One of the most useful things I learned from Victoria Nelson's excellent book, On Writer's Block, is that you can't let writer's block present itself to you as a reified monolith. Which is to say, without the fancy words, writer's block is not an ineffable thing imposed on you from the outside. (Well, okay, with different fancy words.) It is not the monolith from 2001. It's a problem, or a set of problems, you are having with the interface between your creativity and what I call the front office--the conscious "I" that frequently suffers from the delusion that it's running the show.

Treating writer's block as (1) monolithic and (2) reified--I have WRITER'S BLOCK! Woe! Woe is me for I cannot write!--only makes it harder to figure out what the problem is. It also feeds into a number of toxic myths about writing, which we may call either Shelley's Revenge or the Hemingway Trap, depending on whether we want to see it as yet another hangover of Romanticism or as the thing that killed Hemingway. But the idea that creativity controls the writer--which is EXACTLY the idea behind the pernicious anthropomorphism of The Muse--cannot help but lead to mystification and reification of writer's block, turning it from a problem into an insurmountable, career-ending disaster.

So the first thing you have to do with writer's block is analyze the living fuck out of it.



My current difficulty seems to come in several distinct pieces.

1. the "this is stupid" voice (which I mentioned a while back).

2. the "I'll make this stupid" voice, a clever variation on (1), saved especially for stories which I have half-written and KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY.

3. the "I don't know enough" voice, which is another clever variation on (1). It rebrands the quote-unquote "stupid," offering, moreover, the tantalizing suggestion that if I just do enough research I'll be able to write the story.

4. good old garden variety writer's block, in which I simply don't know how to proceed from where I am--with, of course, the bass line provided by (2).

Now, the first line of defense against "this is stupid" is to write the damn thing anyway. Unfortunately, when I did that (with "The Werewolf Laura Stiles"), it turned out that, yeah, it was stupid. Or at least, it seems deeply stupid to me, and stupid in a particular direction which has made me profoundly unwilling to let anybody else look at it. (The layers of self-sabotage here are, yeah, pretty breath-taking. Professional writer on a closed course. Kids, don't try this at home.) I've been trying to work on things where I have to let other people see (Shadow Unit and A Reckoning of Men), but with Shadow Unit, I can feel the pre-emptive defensiveness of (2) rising up--not helped by the fact that (3) is banging on pots in the background. And ARoM is currently treating me to a good old-fashioned round of (4), with a side of deadline panic to complete the freeze.

And the thing that made me decide I needed to write this all out: last night, as I was wrestling with it, I thought, Maybe I should go ahead and work on the silly talking horses story. It dovetails with my current non-writing obsession, and it's ALREADY silly, so there's no reason to get all worked up about whether it's "stupid" or not. And then I watched the cascade happen, which I transcribe for you here in slow-motion, so that, as with the star-nosed mole, you can see all the tentacles move:

1. The talking horse story takes place in 19th century America. (I think we can take the AU as given, what with the TALKING HORSES.)

2. The two protagonists are Draco and Hennessey, who meet because they're put in a wagon-team together.

3. Hennessey is a former cavalry horse.

4. Which means he's almost certainly a Morgan.

5. But wait! Did they use Morgans as draught horses? Even carriage horses?

6. I DON'T KNOW ENOUGH!!!11!1!! (Quick, Robin, to the Batnet!)

And we're right back in the middle of my writer's block, as frozen as a rabbit gone tharn.

I seem, in other words, to have reached a point where all roads lead to Rome. All stories in my head (and the last time I made a project list, there were forty of them, and there are at least two ideas that have come on board since then--the idea part is SO not the problem here) are currently reducing in this Devil's calculus to one of the four heads of my writer's block hydra. (My metaphors, I mix them at you.) And I have to admit, I don't know what to do about this state of affairs. Knowledge may be, as G. I. Joe tells us, half the battle, but the other half of the battle is still right there waiting, with the wargs slavering and the mumakil shifting their feet impatiently. I can see exactly what's going on, and I can see that it's a bunch of self-sabotaging lies and nonsense, but I can't make it stop happening.

I'm hoping that writing it out will help. At least it gets it all out there where I can look at it, and maybe start to see ways to break the stasis.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

FWIW, they used Morgans for EVERYTHING. That is the point of Morgans.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Amen. (http://www.swantower.com/essays/philosophy/writers-blocks.html)

And good luck.

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

Yes, there were Morgans as carriage horses, also (to my surprise) there were an astonishing number of horses from Quebec in New England, and the Chevaux Canadiens look Exactly Like Morgans except they are descended from extremely French horses.

Otherwise, I canna help. Sorry to hear about writer's block, it sounds vile.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The process you describe for your story is pretty much why I don't do contemporary or historical fiction, and why I am so tentative about approaching anything like it.

Sf and fantasy worlds work for me because I am confident that the physical and biological sciences (or systematised magic) to make that sort of settings hold together are things I understand well enough not to go tharn over.

[marycatelli]

I think you might find The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

And if she finds it, she might find it useful. :)

But as I remember it, it's much more anecdote and scientific background than practical guide to overcoming writer's block. So it may be more of a long-term project.

[marycatelli]

Oops.

Nah, not so much a practical guide as insight into the condition.

[inizitu.livejournal.com]

Tangentially, can I just say I really love reading a post that includes both the phrases "reified monolith" and "analyze the living fuck out of"?

Also, have you tried working with the voices in your head? Like some version of "it's a draft, it can suck" or "It's okay if it's stupid now, i can spit shine it into awesome later"? I don't know of the advicey stuff is obnoxious or not. I'm coming from a place of wanting to be supportive, so the obnoxious is not on purpose. =)

Anyway, we're all in your corner. You'll wrestle through it. =) And, you know, if you want a cheerleading beta-reader. =p

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

That's not your writer's block; that's Hennessey having an identity crisis. Remind him that at the time Laura Ingalls met him, Alonzo Wilder's carriage and sleigh horses were a team of Morgans, then tell him to get his shoulders up under the damned collar and set to pulling. *g*

Seriously, I totally get this. Assure your inner editor that, for the time being, you know everything in the whole wide world. Inner editor can come back later, look shit up, and say, "Nyah nyah, see, no you don't," and fix it. But for now? EVERYTHING. In the WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Bug out and get a sandwich, inner editor.

Sometimes the way to get the suckvoice to shut up and let you work is to promise it your complete attention later, and keep that promise. You'll listen respectfully...but not until the first draft is done.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

And not only that, let Hennessey know that It Doesn't Matter. Despite vigorous denials on some parts, early Quarter Horse forebears looked suspiciously draft-like, and there's been a few of that breed working as draft horses.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

With me, it's reviser's block. The one voice that speaks says,"This is just making it worse! It was better before!"

[marycatelli]

There was a time where I oscillated between writer's block and reviser's block. I would write and write and write until I started to wonder whether I would get anything polished and out, and then I would revise and revise and revise until I started to wonder whether I would run out of stuff to revise because I wasn't writing anything new.

(I've gotten better.)

To help Hennessey's identity crisis...

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Also remind him that his *foundation stallion* spent a certain amount of time pulling stumps, which is a quintessential draught horse job.

http://www.vtmorganhorse.org/history.htm

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Eep! Frustrating! *Sympathy* and *Good wishes* winging to you. FWIW, I enjoy your writing very much!

[vg-ford.livejournal.com]

Yes. This. Thank you. And sympathies that someone else is going through the same damn thing I'm going through now.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey, I hear you!

The only cure I know for #'s 1-4 is the Reality Check, aka, My Trusted Group of Writers. No, I don't want to show them how stupid I am, either (why would I? They think I'm smart, just like you do--Ha! Fooled you, too), but over the years I've learned that they love me anyway. My trick is to send them really early drafts. They're supposed to be shitty. They're first drafts! We are therefore all agreed that that the plot is inchoate, the characters emerging, the style bumpy, and the themes murky--that the draft is, in fact, stupid, unpublishable, and all the other things my back-brain is telling me, loudly and repeatedly.

What my Trusted Readers do is to point out the places where I've got it right. They encourage me without flattery, enthuse over bits that encapsulate a character or a feeling, or even a theme. And then, as I read over what I've written, I can start to see the possibilities in the stupid thing I've written, plot points here, ways to make that character more real there--engage, in fact, with the thing itself rather than my neuroses surrounding it.

Having said this, I fully appreciate how hard it is to show Stupid Drafts to anyone at all. I've been doing it for years now, and still feel the impulse to delete the email, to apologize for my stupidity, to crawl under the bed and pretend I didn't write that derivative, clumsy pile of drivel. I've learned to push past it, but I don't remember (or have blocked) how I learned.

I also appreciate that mileage varies wildly on these matters. The only reason I'm telling you all this is that I know you've already got wonderfully precipiant, loving, and talented writers in your writing circle, who I would trust with my work in a heartbeat had I the relationship with them that you do. You trust them enough to collaborate with them, to excellent effect. Maybe you can try to persuade the back office that advice and support will not compromise your integrity as an artist, that the work that is done in a loose community of writers is no less your own unique voice than that carved out in solitude. Have you read Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep, about the Inklings? Even the famous bandersnatch Tolkein took encouragement, and even advice, from Lewis and Williams and the rest.

And if I've missed the point entirely, please forgive me. I'm in a bit of a slough myself at the moment, and inclined to see my own disease in everyone else's symptoms.

[marycatelli]

On the other hand -- I try not to show my stories to the writer's group until I've gotten them as good as I can get them. Because once they've seen it, they've been burned. Never again will they look on it with fresh, new eyes of a naive reader. They won't be able to warn you that the revelation that John really is not the long-lost son of the king isn't sufficiently foreshadowed because they know it's coming. . . .

Life is full of tradeoffs.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Ah. That's why I have layers of writing group (if that makes sense). Those who read my drafty drafts (a couple of trusted friends indeed) don't always see (for comment, anyway) my later drafts. And sometimes, just sometimes, a reader who already knows all about John's parentage isn't a bad thing to have.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Good luck.

If it helps, my talent is Having Excellent Taste (I can't *produce* stuff, but I can easily find & publicize obscure cool stuff). & I THINK YOU DON'T SUCK. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm really amused because I'm in the middle re-reading the Tanya Huff Blood books-- female protagonist, Victoria Nelson. Wonder if she got writer's block in the middle of the first book? ;)

[(Anonymous)]

I couldn't help thinking that some kind of screwtapelettersesque thing might be a good approach. You're a writer (I love your writing, btw, I didn't think the doctrine etc was stupid at all), here are these voices (some people pay money for this kind of inspiration), perhaps you might go with it and set down their conversation with you? Or something along those lines?

Warm regards

Zafar

[(Anonymous)]

I have no solutions for you but you have my sympathy.

I recommend to you this posting at one of my favorite blogs:
http://thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/what-it-feels-like-in-my-brain-when-im-depressed/

She talks about the similar bad voice in the head: only it doesn't just criticize writing, it criticizes everything.

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

I read your post and could empathise entirely - I have spent most of my life wanting to write and yet blocking myself in some capacity - and this is despite having spent 5 (lo-o-ong) years doing a PhD. However (and please disregard any or all of the below if it is not helpful for you) the thing that has (recently) helped for the first time has in fact been my horse-riding.

All my life I have wanted to write, and yet I have always felt powerfully anxious about the process of writing - I would dance around my desk (not literally!) using every excuse to avoid _actually_ sitting down and writing, and then I would goad myself mentally and emotionally with harsher and harsher words/tactics until the pain of those were worse than the anxiety of writing and then I would fall on the page and hurl out words in a kind of blur, until I riccocheted away from the page afterwards, emotionally reeling. This was particularly the case during my thesis write-up, which took a year and was deeply scarring. The side-effect of this approach was that I found it almost impossible to stick with any project long enough to finish it - which then became a family joke and another stick that I could use to beat myself up with.

And then, about three years ago I started learning to ride.

I started off in a typical BHS (Britsh Horse Society) riding school, and had the same experiences that most adult learners have with horses that expertly detected our weakness and instructors who told us not to let the horses get away with ignoring us, telling us to use the crop if necessary to back up our (inept) instructions, and making it clear that the only criterion for success was if the horse did what you had told it to do. (And all these things are riding koans (like writing koans) and they are teachings that have their place and have a relevance in certain situations, but they are not the whole story.)

So, about a year in, I came across Mary Wanless's Ride With Your Mind approach, and ever since then I have been learning with her and one of her instructors, and the focus of their teaching is very different. The salient point about the RWYM approach is that this is all about riding in a state of non-judgmental noticing - you notice yourself (where are my legs, what is my core doing, where does my breath go, where does my awareness NOT reach, etc) and you notice your horse (what do his long back muscles feel like, do I have more horse on one side than the other, where does the reach in his neck start, etc, etc) and you try to separate out any judgment or emotion from that noticing state - you are not a bad rider (or a bad person) for having your legs too far forward, but if you aren't able to notice where your legs are, you cannot correct them, and your horse is not nasty or stubborn or lazy for not transitioning into canter when you ask, but he is telling you that something about the way that you're asking for canter is making it difficult for him to do it (for eg). The instructors guide you to the point where you can take responsibility for your own noticing and to begin to experiment with finding things that will work as a solution (what does my horse do if I release this feeling of tension from my shoulder, what does he do if I exhale when I ask for a transition, etc). This was a revelation for me and it transformed my enjoyment of my riding - and my horse's enjoyment of my riding, which is also key!

And then, when I was in the middle of my most recent round of excruciating writers block, I happened to watch a programme on selective mutism in children and I had a moment of blinding inspiration - THAT was what my writing self was doing - it was sitting there refusing to communicate with me and when I looked at it like that, I could see that WHY it was refusing to communicate with me was because it didn't like the WAY that I was trying to communicate with it. (cont in next comment!)

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

And here is where we come back to my horse-riding experiences, because the metaphor that came into my head was that my writing self was like the horse that has had such bad experiences in the schooling ring that it now does not even want to go into the school - so for me, my writing self was so hurt by the tactics I had been using to try and make myself write (effectively whipping and spurring myself to try and force it into action), that it was now refusing even to let me go to the computer and sit down to begin to write. And once I looked at it like that, then I suddenly had a framework for how I could do things differently.

What would I do if I was riding a horse that was completely freaked out of going into the schooling ring? Well, the first and most important thing would be to get it to trust that it could go there and nothing bad would happen, in fact that it might even be enjoyable to be there. So, I did the same with my writing, trying to stay in the same noticing mode that I used for my riding - how could I get myself to the computer in a kind way, in a way that could be positive. And I think the answer to that would be different for different people, but for me it was about making the time to sit at my desk at least once every day but in a calm, kind way, and when I was sitting at my desk, I opened up a document that I called Emotion Notes, and I noted down how I felt - panicky, excited, scared, ill, cross about stuff that had happened, and then having got that out, I would write something like 'Right, I've made the decision to sit at my desk and open the computer, and now I'm making the decision to go to the page' and I would open up my notes document for the story I was working on and all I had to do was to allow my writing self to speak without judging what came out - to follow the enjoyment factor above all else, with success being simply that I had allowed myself to write freely.

And to start with that was really hard, and the anxiety that my writing self felt was really high, but I worked on trying to prove myself trust-worthy to it - that no matter what it came out with, I still wasn't going to say nasty things to it or beat it again - and that it could just relax and feel confident that this was a space for it to feel free and happy. And to my real amazement, I would go repeatedly to the page, convinced that I had nothing to say about the story that I was working on, and then two or three lines in I would suddenly have the spark of an idea and then suddenly these chunks of information about my plot or character or theme would come and I'd write them down going 'cool!' and 'wow!' and for the first time actually enjoying what I was doing. And that was the first step.

And what I have now is about 50k words on my plot and characters and theme, and a timeline of what happens where and now I'm taking the same approach to how I now move on to writing prose, whilst keeping that critical self from harming my writing self. What has worked well so far is trying to externalise it as much as possible, as a dialogue between two different parts of myself that each have valuable advice to give and valuable perspectives, but neither is allowed to hurt the other - so the critical self is allowed to point out the things that are wrong, and I'll write them all down, and then looking at them I'll think these are all true comments, but these are things for me to fix later, and it's not helpful for us to focus on that at this stage, but thanks for your input, and my critical self goes 'OK, no worries, just wanted you to be aware' and then steps aside! And the other thing that has worked well is turning it back on the critical self - so one time it was having a little tantrum about how much it disliked my prose, and I noted that down, and then asked it what I could do to make it better, and it stuttered a bit, and I let it have a bit of time to think, and then it came out with a couple of really constructive useful ideas about working off other people's prose to start with and free-writing fictionalising events of the day or tv happenings, and then again having had its say and feeling heard, it went quiet and let my writing self get going again. (cont in next comment!)

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

So, for me, taking this approach has led me to a whole new place in my writing, where I am actually enjoying being at the computer, which is the first time I have EVER felt that. It's still a work in progress, still a process of noticing what works and what doesn't and negotiating the inner voices, but I have faith in myself now, and I'm having fun! I hope that maybe some of the above might be useful! Apologies for the length!

Tam

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, don't apologize! That was very interesting, and I thank you for sharing it with me.

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm glad it was interesting/useful! :-)

[anef.livejournal.com]

That is just fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you! I'm glad you found it interesting! :-)

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

Argh! That was me! Lol!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, when I am like that, writing poetry helps, because poetry is a different thing, at a different angle, and it can cut through. Other times it doesn't help. But it's one of those things that generally feels worth trying.

Sometimes, deciding that it's an AU and in my world of course they used Morgans as draft horses, good grief, they can talk, helps with the not knowing enough. I'm contemplating a huge one of these at the moment, because it honestly seems easier to make up a new Canadian province and all the history and geology and everything than feel confident I've done enough research to actually write about Montreal in 1983.

Gah.

Being stuck sucks. Sympathy.

[charleneteglia.livejournal.com]

I love Lawrence Block's quote: "If you're blocked, lower your sights." And the corollary, "It's only a book." I remind myself of these two points pretty much daily. It's just a book, not a cure for cancer. It doesn't have to be the greatest book ever written, it just has to get written. And when I start panicking over how wooden and mechanical and unreadable the writing is, I remind myself that I can fix it in revisions.

Lately I'm reminding myself that I was only hoping my last book would be a. finished and b. an accepted manuscript and it ended up for two awards. The suckitude of the process has no relationship to the quality of the product.

FWIW, I think this kind of mental torture happens in direct proportion to the amount the author cares. If we didn't care, we wouldn't despair of ever, ever, ever getting it semi-competent, let alone right.

[charleneteglia.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add: I saw a recent interview with Seth Godin where he expounds on the voice of resistance from The War of Art by S. Pressfield; the voice of resistance, he says, is the voice of the lizard brain.

When I heard that I pretty much screamed Oh. My. God. It all makes sense now. The terrified survival-oriented lizard brain shuts down all creative thought, literally, because the lizard brain can't *do* that. The key is to remove the fear and get out of lizard thinking. So whatever it takes to do that, get to a feeling of safety where creativity can happen.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Greg Frost once told me you have to give yourself permission to write shit.

Sometimes I think it's giving yourself permission that's the hardest part. I've been accumulating more and more strategies to allow myself that permission, because none of them seem to work all the time.

[lianemerciel.livejournal.com]

I like the advice about giving yourself permission to "write shit" but it never works for me. Because everything that follows from it is resting on a foundation of shit, and then _it_ is shit, and then aieeeeee what am I doing oh god I have spent months of my life on total unsalvageable crap.

Which is to say: the self-sabotage and the crazy, I know them well. I have no solutions to offer, only empathy. You're a far better writer than I, so it is both reassuring and saddening to know you go through it too.