The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (24 page)

So don’t
focus
on speeding up; just work to deploy the techniques discussed in this section at a comfortable pace. If you do that faithfully, you’ll be writing
vivacissimo
before you know it.

Chapter
6

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.”

—Gustave Flaubert

P
rocrastination makes you invisible and isolated. If you never finish your novel, you won’t be seen by agents, editors, or your audience. If you never finish your thesis, you won’t be seen by your committee, colleagues, and prospective hirers.

Invisibility and isolation are, in fact, key
strategies
and
goals
of procrastination:

They are
strategies
because community is essential to productivity and success (Sections 3.8–3.12), so if you’re not seen, you probably won’t finish your work or attain your other writing-related goals.

And they are
goals
because if you’re not seen, you can’t be judged—and, in particular, can’t be judged a failure. Underproductivity may feel terrible, but recall that, for perfectionists, failure is a kind of ego death that feels far worse (Section 2.6).

Often, the craving for invisibility and isolation predates the procrastination habit. Many procrastinators grew up in critical or abusive families where they learned to survive by, as one writer put it, “flying under the radar.” Once such children grow up, they still feel a strong desire to hide when threatened—only now, not in the coat closet or remote corners of the backyard but via procrastination and underachievement.

To make matters worse, writing is about as self-revealing an activity as you’ll find. Your thoughts, feelings, values, and visions are spread out nakedly on the page. This, of course, represents an extreme challenge for someone craving invisibility, and is a big reason why so many people procrastinate with their writing but not elsewhere.

Incidentally, it is also common—and antiproductive—to use writing, or a grandiose self-sacrificial vision of writing (see “Stalling Out,” Section 1.10), as a way of making yourself invisible in other frightening realms, including:

• Financial.
  The writer may not want to be seen by decent employers—who he’s afraid won’t hire him—so consigns himself to a life of poverty and bad treatment in bad jobs. Or, he doesn’t want to be seen by personal finance coaches and mentors, who might judge him a failure financially. Or the IRS, which literally has the power to penalize him.
  
• Social.
  The writer may not want to risk rejection by getting out and trying to socialize or date.
  
• Health.
  The writer may want to hide from frightening news not just about his health, but his health and fitness obligations (e.g., diet, exercise) by isolating himself from doctors, nutritionists, personal trainers, etc.
  

Of course, the deprivation in these key areas only further undermines your writing productivity. And so, once more we see that procrastination packs a multiple punch (Section 1.4), and perpetuates itself via a vicious cycle of procrastination leading to shame leading to isolation leading to yet more procrastination, etc.

Remember that your fears are always legitimate, even if procrastination is a suboptimal response to them (see Section 1.1). This is particularly true in the realm of finances, since money is a highly charged issue for many people, and the goal of earning a living often conflicts with that of living an authentic, creative life. However, the cost of not earning an adequate living is severe: in
Money Drunk, Money Sober,
Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan talk about “poverty addicts” who disempower themselves economically while justifying that disempowerment with the idea that poverty is somehow virtuous. (They published their book in 1993, when the economy was much stronger—these days, of course, one is far more likely to be poor without having any dysfunctional attitudes.)

I also believe that a desire to hide is a major factor in another common area of procrastination: weight loss. Weight is obviously another highly charged issue, and one around which people also make a lot of judgments and experience a lot of shame. You can apply the solutions in this book to money, weight, or any other area where you procrastinate.

Back to writing. Fearful writers don’t just crave invisibility within their professional community; they often crave it within the communities of their family, friends, neighbors, and day-job colleagues. Each area of invisibility is a barrier to success, not just because you need those communities’ support but because invisibility in any realm adds to your shame and fear.

So a primary task for any writer is to “come out.” Yes, I mean that in the exact same way the queer community does—to reveal your true identity to yourself and others. I’m going to talk about ways to do that, but first let’s discuss societal and other forces that encourage invisibility and isolation.

I
n the writing classes I teach, we do an exercise where students list stereotypes about writers and writing. Here’s a typical list:

Malign Stereotypes about Writers and Writing

Nice, ain’t it? One student, while we were doing the exercise, remarked, “It sounds like Thanksgiving dinner at my family’s house.” And he is a successful freelance writer with many published books!

Three things to note about this list: it’s
harsh
,
long,
and
salient
.

The harshness is readily apparent; I mean, I can hardly imagine a worse list.

The length indicates the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes of writers in our culture.

Salience means that when I ask students for the negative stereotypes they shout them out so fast I barely have time to write. In contrast, when I do Part II of the exercise (Section 6.4) and ask students to list the positive and truthful attributes of writers and writing, it’s often like pulling teeth.

When others maliciously stereotype you we call that bias. When you do it to yourself—when you’ve absorbed the negative labels into your psyche—we call that internalized oppression. And make no mistake: negative labels undermine our productivity.
No one can move in two directions at once; and if, when you’re trying to write, a part of you is thinking that writing is selfish, futile, etc., that part will work in opposition to your productivity (Section 6.5).

Make a list of the negative ideas you hold about writers and writing, and use journaling and discussions with enlightened friends, colleagues, and others to defuse them. (Just naming some of the canards causes them to lose power, since many are ridiculous on the face of it.) Throughout this process, I would work under the assumption that the labels affect you more strongly than you realize. The tendency is to brush them off, but denial is a strong force, especially when it is aiding and abetting procrastination. Often, the labels are like icebergs: small on the surface, but bigger and more destructive underneath.

At the same time, it’s crucial to limit your interactions with people who hold negative ideas about writers, writing, and you personally, because those people can really undermine you. (As always, family members included.)

M
any successful writers hold stereotypes about less successful ones. I ask my students to name them, and again get a list that’s harsh, lengthy, and salient.

There is probably an element of psychological projection here, with some less-successful writers projecting their own feelings of shame and inadequacy onto more successful ones. At the same time, however, there is no doubt that some successful writers (and editors and agents and academics) treat novices or unpublished writers like crap, and that many literary and academic communities are caste systems. While these behaviors are bad enough on their own, their larger implications are worse, because they’re not just offenses against our common humanity but our common mission. Less-successful writers depend on more-successful ones to mentor them—and all successful writers were themselves mentored, so reciprocity, at least, would argue for assuming that role. If a more-successful writer chooses not to embrace the mentor role, that is of course her right, but she at least has the moral obligation to “do no harm.” (And, of course, writers who choose to take on teaching gigs have even more of a responsibility to behave professionally. See Sections 2.8 and 3.10 for discussions of the consequences of bad teaching and mentoring.)

Some writers operate under the idea (which they’re sometimes clueless enough to state aloud) that an artistic mission somehow justifies bad behavior. This is not just a peculiarly old-school notion—and one ineradicably linked to sexism and exploitation—but a particularly specious and self-serving kind of grandiosity. Writers have as much of an obligation as anyone else, and probably more than most, to treat others well—and that includes their less successful colleagues, no matter how inconvenient or importuning. (Section 4.11 offers kind and respectful ways to avoid getting sucked into unwanted discussions or obligations.)

All that said, many successful writers do treat less-successful ones well, and some are magnificent teachers and mentors. John Gardner was, by most accounts, devoted to his students. And one of my students reported that when she met the poet Seamus Heaney he conversed with her like an equal, confiding his worries about how his next book would be received—and this was
after
winning the Nobel Prize! Years later, when she recounted the conversation, her face glowed, and our entire class felt inspired and encouraged by Heaney’s kindness and humility.

The same instructions apply to this section as to the prior one: make a list of those canards you have internalized, and work to eliminate them from your thinking. And always avoid interacting with competitive, mean, or otherwise undermining people, no matter how talented, celebrated, or well connected they happen to be (Section 7.3).

O
kay, here’s the list of true traits of writers and writing:

The Truth about Writers and Writing

It’s typically much harder to elicit this list than the prior ones—a sign that students are alienated from their strengths and virtues. This is yet another manifestation of the disempowerment that causes procrastination, especially when the virtues are replaced, in students’ minds, with insults and canards.

In fact, I think many people have a love/hate relationship with writers. They admire us for our individualism, creativity, and courage, but resent us for those very same qualities, especially if they themselves have been unable to pursue their dreams, or otherwise regret their life choices.