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truepennyOne 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 12:12 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 04:16 pm (UTC)Life is full of tradeoffs.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 06:37 pm (UTC)