The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (26 page)

T
his chapter lists deprecating ideas about writers and writing that are unfortunately pervasive in our culture. If you’re not careful, they can create ambivalence and wear you down. They are also at the root of many of the canards listed in Sections 6.2 and 6.3, and the uncomfortable questions discussed in Section 6.8.

(1) A fundamental hostility to individuality and creativity

John Gardner writes, in
On Becoming a Novelist
, “The first value of a writers’ workshop is that it makes the young writer feel not only not abnormal but virtuous”—and it’s true that the “real world” is often unsupportive of, or hostile to, creativity. As David Bayles and Ted Orland eloquently put it in
Art & Fear
:

It may have been easier to paint bison on the cave walls long ago than to write this (or any other) sentence today. Other people, in other times and places, had some robust institutions to shore them up: witness the Church, the clan, ritual, tradition. It’s easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God than when working in the service of self.

Not so today. Today almost no one feels shored up. Today artwork does not emerge from a secure common ground ... Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next.

All this takes its toll—and if you add in the fact that our culture actually thinks of itself as supporting and celebrating individualism and creativity, you’ve got the even worse situation where the artist is both unsupported and blamed for his consequent lack of success.

(2) The decline of writing as a profession

Because so many people equate money with value, and even virtue, the decline of writing markets—and, thus, opportunities for writers to make a living—is a real problem. Just a few decades ago, many writers could support not only themselves, but also a family, by writing nonfiction and even fiction for the “middlebrow” and pulp markets. (The middlebrow magazines were the slick, mass-market ones like
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Collier’s Weekly
, while the pulps—who got their name from the cheap, rough paper they were printed on—were mainly science fiction, mystery, “true confession,” “men’s,” and other genre publications.)

More recently, many magazine, newspaper, and other markets have dried up due largely to competition from blogs and other websites. Overall, I think the Internet is a fantastic thing for writers, as I will discuss in Chapter 8, but some of its benefits will take a while to arrive, while its costs, in terms of declining markets, are well under way.

When markets disappear, they take with them not only writers’ incomes, but our legitimacy. One of the first questions many people ask upon being introduced is, “What do you do?,” meaning really, “How do you earn money?” And there is no doubt that many people think non-money-earning endeavors are a waste of time, and are thus likely to look askance at anyone devoting a lot of her time to such an endeavor.

The decline of paying markets and rise of amateur ones also supports the widespread naïve notion that “anyone can write.”

(3) Temporal Challenges

In
Outliers
, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve world-class mastery of a challenging endeavor. That’s roughly equivalent to three hours a day, every day, for ten years—but for someone who can’t or won’t take that time away from other priorities, mastery will take even longer.

The fact that it takes a long time to get good can put anyone on the defensive. In many fields, however, you at least get paid while you learn. We writers usually have to pay for our own apprenticeship, further reducing our legitimacy in others’ eyes.

Another temporal challenge is that books, theses, and other long works take months or years to write. In his
Paris Review
interview, Philip Roth says that whenever he starts a new novel, “I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one.”

Roth is successful enough that no one will question his methods—but how would people react if you wrote for six months only to get one usable page? And how would they react if you spend years working on a book with no guarantee of “payoff”? (You probably already know the answers to these questions; see the next section.)

In a perfectionist society that deprecates the true process of creation, the writer will always be on the defensive.

(4) “Fatal Fallacies”

Writers are prone to believe what I call “fatal fallacies,” misconceptions about productivity and success that, if not corrected, can create havoc or even doom your career. I list some common ones below; note how many involve dichotomization, trauma, and other perfectionist symptoms (Section 2.7), and also how many support a status quo fundamentally hostile to the creative process.

To not sacrifice yourself 100% to your writing is to sell out.
First of all, what does “sacrifice yourself 100%” even mean? Do you give up your entire social life? All material comforts? Bathing?

Second, in the real, nonperfectionist/nongrandiose world, deprivation tends not to catalyze, but degrade, productivity. There’s a big difference between working to eliminate lower-priority activities from your schedule and giving up high-priority ones. For more on this fallacy, see Section 1.10.

Relatedly,
poverty is noble
. In “The Girl Next Door,” from his collection
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
, humorist David Sedaris writes, “Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much needed veneer of authenticity.” Many writers (including me!) fall for this fallacy when they’re young, but you tend to grow out of it when you realize that not only is poverty not noble, it’s a drag and antiproductive. I urge all “starving” writers to read
Money Drunk, Money Sober
, a book about addictive relationships to money that was co-written by Julia Cameron, author of
The Artist’s Way
.

Two clarifications:

1) I’m bashing deprivation, not frugality. Frugality is GREAT because it buys you time and freedom—see Section 4.6. But deprivation is taking things too far.

2) I’m not talking about people who are poor because of circumstances beyond their control—for instance, a chronic illness or disability, or trouble finding work in a bad economy
1
. I’m talking about those who make choices that leave them unable to meet their basic material needs, and/or who think that that situation is somehow virtuous.

If your work is coming easily, or you’re having fun, then you’re doing something wrong.
Pure perfectionism—and, moreover, over time your work
should
come more easily, and should be more fun, as you gain mastery (Section 5.8).

In Joyce Carol Oates’s 1978
Paris Review
interview, the very first interviewer comment was, “We may as well get this one over with first: you’re frequently charged with producing too much.” Charged?!?! Is prolificness a crime? I’ll let you speculate on the envy and other emotions and attitudes that could create such a bias. (Oates responded that the issue of productivity is “insignificant.”)

And, finally, one of the most damaging of the fatal fallacies,
publication = legitimacy
. This one really keeps writers in the hole because (paradoxically) it prevents them from taking the steps they need to take to get published in the first place, including coming out, joining writers groups, and going to conferences.

Jennifer Crusie takes on this one in her essay, “A Writer Without a Publisher Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle: Writer’s Liberation and You,”
2
in which she compares some writers’ desperation to be published to some women’s desperation, in a prior era, to be married: she notes that, whether you’re talking about writing or marriage, “Waiting for somebody else to come along and validate us means giving up all control over our lives.”

Marketing guru Seth Godin uses the same analogy in his blog post,
Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked: Pick Yourself,
3
in which he says:

It’s a cultural instinct to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission and authority that comes from a publisher or talk show host or even a blogger saying, “I pick you.” Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you—that Prince Charming has chosen another house—then you can actually get to work.

Ambitious writers, like ambitious people in any field, must propel themselves into communities they wish to be part of
, and not wait on the sidelines hoping to be invited in. It may initially take some courage to do that, but if you target the right communities you will find them wonderfully welcoming.

1
My free ebook,
It’s Not You, It’s Your Strategy
, might help. You’ll find it at hillaryrettig.com.

2
Jennifer Crusie, “A Writer Without A Publisher Is Like A Fish Without a Bicycle: Writer’s Liberation and You,” (essay), n.d. (www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/a-writer-without-a-publisher-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle-writers-liberation-and-you/). Originally appeared in Romance Writer’s Report, March 2002.

3
Seth Godin, “Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked: Pick Yourself,” Seth Godin’s Blog (blog), March 21, 2011 (sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/reject-the-tyranny-of-being-picked-pick-yourself.html).

Y
ou’d think that having people ask questions about what you do wouldn’t be such a big deal. But in a world where most people...

• are suspicious of, and/or outright afraid of, the nonconventional;

• believe in big wins, overnight successes and other perfectionist tropes;

• have no idea how hard writing is, or how long it takes to complete works, or the time and effort it takes to create and sustain a writing career;

• conflate your value as a human being with how much money you earn;

• believe the canards listed in Section 6.2, and deprecations listed in Section 6.7; and

• are happy to pronounce judgments on people or paths they know little about,

a writer is always going to be on the defensive.

Some of the questions that really irk writers are:

• “What do you do?”

• “What do you write?” (Sometimes followed by: “You write
that
?”)

• “Is there any money in that?”

• “Where have you been published?” (Often followed by, “
Where?
”)

• “How’s the book coming?” (Alt: “When will you be done with that thing?”)

• “Why don’t you just sit down over a weekend and just finish it?” Or, “Why don’t you just go on [popular TV show]?” (Or other “useful” advice.)

• “When are you going to get a real job?” And,

• “Did you hear about XYZ? She just sold her novel for a million dollars!”

In an essay entitled “The Little Author Who Could,”
1
Joanne Levy, who wrote fifteen (!) books before selling her first, eloquently describes the toll these types of questions take:

Angst, embarrassment, and feelings of failure were pills I swallowed daily along with my multivitamins and orange juice. Family and friends had learned that when they asked how my writing was going, they were going to get a short and crusty answer like, “Shitty” or “it’s not,” but periodically I would get the question from a well-meaning relative and would have to explain that publishing is a tough business and it was going to take some time (yeah, it felt pretty hollow to me, too, even as I was saying it). Indubitably well-meaning relative would get one of those glazed over looks which I knew meant, “But there are so many books on the shelves at chain bookstore, so what’s
YOUR
problem?”

I frequently hear writers bemoan the necessity of dealing with difficult, obnoxious, or clueless questions or comments, but don’t hear a lot about the specifics of coping. I have a feeling most writers think it’s like the weather and you just have to endure. But a little strategy and forethought can help a lot. Below are strategies for (a) increasing your tolerance for difficult questions, (b) maintaining conversational boundaries, and (c) dealing with hostility.

Increasing your Tolerance for Difficult Questions

By far the best thing you can do to increase your tolerance for difficult questions is to work on your own perfectionism and internalized oppression, since they can make you oversensitive, like a burn victim who yelps in pain at the slightest touch. If a part of you actually believes you’re “taking too long” to finish your book or thesis, or that writing is a waste of time when it doesn’t earn any money, then any hint to that effect from someone else is bound to hurt. In contrast, the more compassionately objective you are regarding your work, the more resilient you will be in the face of challenging questions.