The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (10 page)

What is likely to happen is that the writer will feel good—great, maybe—and more confident and inspired around her writing.

Dialoging compassionately with the oppressor should help alleviate its fears and rigid antipathy to CO, Rewards, and the other solutions discussed.

Finally, it’s a good idea to have an
activity reward
, both to amplify the celebration and help your body recover from all the sitting and writing. This could be a stretch or a happy dance.

Always Reward Lavishly
—meaning, don’t stint on time or money. Lavish Rewards not only feel great and are healing, they strongly reinforce the activity you’re Rewarding. Take the same time and energy you’ve put into bullying yourself, and reroute it into equally intense pride and satisfaction. Eventually, you probably can skip the tangible and activity rewards, but never give up on the celebration.
The goal is to evolve a mindset where you see your work as a continuous series of successes—some big, but most little or even tiny—and automatically celebrate, if only briefly, each one, so that you’re in an almost continual state of pride. (This is probably similar to the state many of us remember from when we were children and used to effortlessly create.) Then writing will become a joy, and nothing will hold you back.

It’s great to involve others in your Rewards. All writers should have critique partners and alpha readers (Section 3.11) with whom they can share their writing victories, including those that might seem weird or trivial to “civilians.” And if you’ve got kids around who you can do your happy dance with, that’s great! They’ll reinforce your celebration, and you’ll be modeling CO for them. My favorite Rewards story, however, involves a writer who also runs a dog daycare out of her home, and so is constantly surrounded by adoring canines. (Lucky woman!) I urged her to get the dogs involved in her Rewards, and now whenever she does her happy dance, the dogs join in and sometimes sing!

At the same time: NO PUNISHMENTS. If, for some reason, you don’t meet your goals, just ignore that except to learn from the experience so you can try to do better next time. When you start the next writing session, do so with a clean emotional slate that’s primed for Rewards.

Y
ears ago, I was fortunate to hear one of my heroes, former world chess champion and current Russian democracy activist Garry Kasparov, discuss important lessons he had learned from chess. Here’s how he began his talk: “I have won hundreds of chess games, and lost thousands. You have to have the courage to fail.”

The courage to fail
. What an amazing phrase—and coming from a hypercompetitive chess champion it takes on a special meaning. Kasparov probably hates failure more than just about anyone—in fact, as his use of the word “courage” implies, he probably fears it—but he had to develop a tolerance for it to reach his goals. That he chose to begin his talk with this point only underscores its importance.

Perfectionists are terrified of failure for all the reasons mentioned earlier, including that they define it too broadly, punish themselves harshly for it, identify too strongly with it so that it becomes a kind of ego-death, and are shortsightedly focused on the immediate.

To a CO person, however, failure is not just inevitable, but an essential element of any ambitious path, and probably our most potent route to learning and growth. In other words, if you’re not failing at least some of the time, you’re probably not pushing yourself enough or taking enough risks. Herman Melville called the willingness to fail “the true test of greatness.” Samuel Beckett famously said, “Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.” And Winston Churchill, who apart from his statesmanship also wrote and painted prolifically, famously defined success as arising from “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Needless to say, CO people also don’t overreact to success for the same reasons (non-identification with the work, taking the long view) that they don’t overreact to failure. They also understand that pleasurable as success is, it isn’t nirvana, and that it introduces its own stresses and complications. (If you sell your book, you have to worry about building your audience—or writing the next one.) Success can also bring a sense of loss, as Joan Bolker eloquently writes in
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day
:

How do we deal with the fact that there is sadness as well as joy about each major step we take forward—including finishing a doctoral degree? You may expect that you will feel only relief and pleasure when you earn your degree, so you may be startled by feelings of loss and sadness. Maybe you will grieve that a major stage of your life is over, or perhaps you will mourn the important people who are not alive to witness your triumph, or maybe you’ll confront the gap between the dissertation you’ve actually written and the one you imagined you would write ... Every major life change destroys the equilibrium of our lives and our self-image and leaves behind a portion of an old self.

I’m guessing that, for many people, a sense of impending loss is a major, unrecognized barrier keeping them from taking their next step.
CO people therefore work not just to succeed, but to prepare themselves emotionally and logistically for success—say, by consulting others who are already there and creating processes and infrastructures before they are needed. Someone who will need to market her novel, for instance, could (and should) create a marketing plan, and gather the resources needed to complete it, well before the actual publication date (Chapter 8.6).

CO people also realize that there is no such thing as a pure failure or success: that most failures contain some element of success (at least, as a learning experience), and most successes an element of failure or compromise. They also realize that
failure and success are not huge, show-stopping, life-defining events but merely transient states that one moves into and out of throughout one’s career.

T
he three productivity behaviors are: (1) showing up exactly on time, (2) doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, and (3) doing it uninterruptedly (except for small breaks) for long periods of time. The “showing up exactly on time” presupposes that you have done your time management (Chapter 4) and have a time budget and schedule. The “doing it for long periods of time,” a.k.a. endurance, can be achieved via timed exercises (see next section).

These behaviors support a mindset of accountability. You’re scheduled to write at ten o’clock, so at ten your butt is in the chair and your fingers dancing away at the keyboard.
What you really want to do is glide over to your chair, sit down, and start writing, all in a sort of calm Zen state without anxiety, drama, or anticipation.
Eventually, you’ll probably be able to anticipate your work pleasurably, but right now there’s too great a risk that the anticipation will lead to unreasonable expectations for success.

It is also helpful to practice the behaviors on activities other than writing. Practice doing the dishes at precisely 7 p.m., or getting the mail at exactly 2 p.m., or calling your folks right at 3:30 p.m. Or, practice boosting your endurance (in small increments; see next chapter!) while exercising or meditating. All this is not just beneficial in its own right; it will build your capacity to use the behaviors when writing.

Practice these behaviors on only two or three activities at a time, resisting the perfectionist temptation to try to change everything at once. Only when you can reliably do a behavior on time and with focus should you start practicing on another. And don’t forget to use abundant Rewards every time you even attempt to use the behaviors (the result doesn’t matter). And remember:
Never
any shame, blame, guilt, or other punishments.

The work of becoming prolific consists largely of managing your moment-by-moment writing experience to maintain a CO rather than a perfectionist attitude, and to easily solve problems as they come up (Section 1.2).
You’re in the midst of writing something, and feel some perfectionist terror—or physical discomfort or another obstacle or trigger—and instead of trying to coerce yourself to write through it (a response that, in the past, has elicited panic), you take prompt steps to keep yourself calm and address the problem so that you can resume writing as quickly as possible. (In Section 5.4, I discuss how you can learn to “write past the wall” of minor distractions, but for someone in the early stages of tackling perfectionism, it’s probably best to stop writing and focus on coping.)

Recalling the illustration, in Section 1.2, that showed the difference between procrastinators and the prolific, this is the technique that will help you shift from an easily-derailed (c) to a “minorly delayed” (b) or even a “steady as she goes” (a).

Hopefully by now you’ve “journaled out” your spaghetti snarl (Section 1.5), so that you’re aware of the many strands of your disempowerment and underproductivity. Hopefully, you’ve also been working to overcome or eradicate your obstacles, and to get less triggered (Section 1.1.)

Also, hopefully, you will soon read the rest of the chapters of this book and identify yet more strands and more techniques for resolving them.

These steps should have already eased some of your fears around your writing.

To cope with the remainder, and to strengthen yourself for coping with future fears, practice building your capacity to write fearlessly.

Get a timer—such as the large stopwatch available at online-stopwatch.com or any kitchen timer—and set it for five minutes.

Then start it, and begin writing on your desired project, in a low-stress, low-expectation, “free-writing” kind of way (Section 5.2).
Your goal is to put in your time (finish your interval) while maintaining a non-judgmental focus on the writing itself, as opposed to any outcome you hope for it.
You are especially not aiming to “write something good”—and shouldn’t judge your writing at all. (Remember: “process trumps product,” and recall Steven Pressfield’s remark: “How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it.”)

Don’t feel you have to write on the “next” part of your project, but choose whichever part seems easiest and/or the most fun. A key mistake of underproductive writers is to treat their projects linearly, e.g.: “I must finish section 1 before moving onto section 2, section 3, etc.” Prolific writers, in contrast, see their works as landscapes and hop on over to whichever part of the terrain they feel like working on (Section 5.4). If you can’t think of anything to write
in
your project, then write
about
it: note-taking, organizing, outlining, and editing are all okay. No research, though: you need to be writing, not reading, during this time.

Also,
no pondering
, particularly at the beginning of writing sessions. Pondering isn’t writing. If you’re stuck, either write about the problem, or leave a blank and start writing on another part of the project. This is especially true for the beginnings of writing sessions; some people—and, especially, many graduate students—like to have a “big think” before getting started, but they should just start writing, and let the writing catalyze their thinking. As Natalie Goldberg famously instructed in
Writing Down the Bones
, “Keep your hand moving.”

If, while writing, you feel the litany starting up, or any fear or anxiety at all, have your CO persona gently remind your inner bully (who, remember, is scared and trying to protect you), that it’s okay; this is just a little test; no one’s being hurt, etc. Then try to keep writing. If necessary, switch to journaling, outlining, editing, or an easier passage.

When the timer dings, then stop and ... extra points if you’ve guessed it ... Rewards!

Okay—that’s it for today. You set aside your project and go about enjoying your day, hopefully remembering at intervals to feel proud about your accomplishment.

Then, tomorrow, you do your five minutes again.

If you don’t make it through the entire five minutes, that’s okay and NO PUNISHMENTS. In fact: Rewards for trying! Try again tomorrow, setting the timer for two or three minutes, or even thirty seconds. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up.

Only after you can
easily and consistently
handle five minutes of non-fearful, non-judgmental writing should you increase the timer to eight minutes, and then ten minutes, fifteen, twenty, etc. A general rule of thumb is to spend at least a week at an interval before increasing it, and to never increase it more than 25% at a time.

This simple exercise was described by a student as “incredibly powerful,” and it is. Do you want to write eight to ten hours a day? You can get there using timed exercises—and faster than you might imagine, provided you maintain your compassionate objectivity.

Two additional points:

1. My suggested starting interval of five minutes is good for many seriously blocked writers. If you can accomplish it easily, however, feel free to start with a larger one.
   
2. It’s okay to do more than one timed exercise in a day, but beware of perfectionist grandiosity and overidentification with your work. If after doing two or three intervals you start to get that giddy “I’m queen of the world!” feeling, stop and ground yourself emotionally.
   

It’s particularly important, when doing multiple intervals, not to push it. It’s okay to round a writing day off with a final smaller interval—the icing on the cupcake, as it were—but any intervals you start, do your best to complete.

Y
our choice of writing project is always important, but even more so when overcoming perfectionism. Underproductive writers tend to either: (a) obdurately commit to an over-ambitious project (I call that “the Ahab syndrome,” and they often do, in fact, go down with the ship), or (b) can’t commit to any project.