The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (22 page)

But we’re not talking about ten percent; we’re talking about doubling, trebling, or even quadrupling your output. Or maybe increasing it tenfold. These improvements are quite possible if you use these techniques:

1. Use a freewriting-based process for all your work, and do many drafts.

2. Develop a “smooth” writing process; minimize interruptions.

3. Write nonlinearly; leverage your project’s easy parts.

4. Write backwards in the piece.

5. Show your work frequently; read it aloud.

6. Learn to write on the fly.

7. Achieve mastery.

There are also several minor techniques.

I describe all the techniques in this chapter.

F
reewriting is the unfiltered, uncensored, unedited, “stream-of-conscious” writing down of one’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas. You may be familiar with it from journal-writing or creativity exercises. It tends to be:

• Private (not only do you not have to show your freewriting to anyone, you’re often explicitly instructed not to);

• Raw (spelling, punctuation, and grammar aren’t an issue, and you are often explicitly instructed to ignore them); and

• “Disposable” (because it’s not supposed to lead to anything except, maybe, fun and insight).

Freewriting is the free-est, fastest, funnest writing most people ever do, which is why even self-described “blocked” students can do it in class exercises.
The major technique for increasing your tempo, therefore, is to free write all your writing, including your “serious stuff.”
Here’s how you do it:

Start with a “shitty first draft” a la Anne Lamott (Section 2.5). It can be of the entire piece you’re working on, or a section of it.

Follow that with many shitty drafts, in each of which you correct a few
obvious
flaws of the former one. The drafts will still be filled with holes, mistakes, and grotesque aberrations of style or meaning. However, each will be somewhat less shitty than its predecessor.

When doing these drafts, aim for
speed
: correct the obvious errors and flaws, but don’t get hung up on trying to solve the difficult ones.

As soon as you are comfortable doing so, show the work (or pieces of it) to your critique partners and alpha readers (Section 3.11) and get feedback. You’ll probably also have a few intractable problems to discuss with them.

Keep revising and showing. Eventually, the drafts will cross the line into “non-shittiness,” at which point you are within sight of your final draft.

Keep working the same way until you complete the final.

You’re done! Now submit it.

If you follow this advice, you will probably wind up doing many more drafts than you’re doing now. That’s fine: a free writer can write ten drafts, or even twenty or thirty, in less time than it takes a “normal” (a.k.a., perfectionist) writer to write one or two. And, believe me, the free writer is having more fun.

Setting out to write many drafts is the opposite of what many people seek to do, which is to try to write as few as possible. (As discussed in Section 2.5, many perfectionists think the proper number of drafts is one.) The “limiters” think they’ve got the quickest process, but they’re wrong because setting an arbitrarily low number of drafts causes you to struggle to perfect each one, which is not only an inefficient process but an invitation to perfectionism.

The limiters are also denying the incremental, nonlinear nature of creativity, in which change and improvement usually happen a little at a time, and unpredictably. A lot of creativity, in fact, happens via trial and error—and yet another reason freewriting works so well is that it lets you zip through “trials” (i.e., drafts) at maximum speed.

Can a freewriting-based process work even for complex or intellectually sophisticated work? Absolutely—because you’re not suspending your intellect when you free write, you’re unleashing it. Joan Bolker, author of
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day,
strongly endorses freewriting, saying “it causes you less pain while you’re doing it, and produces better writing.”

Freewriting, in fact, solves a common problem graduate students (and some others) have when they write, which is that they sit and wait for a “good idea” or “good sentence” to come before starting to write
(see the “pondering” section of Section 2.14). Leaving aside the fact that their notion of a “good idea” is probably perfectionist, and hence unlikely to be achieved, this process is actually the opposite of what prolific writers do, which is to just start writing, and use the writing process to facilitate thinking.

Committing to a freewriting-based process for even your most serious projects represents the final frontier of your antiperfectionism work. It’s actually antiperfectionism carried down to the micro level. Something’s a little hard to write? Don’t struggle with it! Just move on to another, easier section. Or, go back to the conceptualization, planning, or research stages of the project (Section 5.4).

When you back off, temporarily, from a tough piece of writing, you are actually giving it time to “marinate” in your mind—and just like with real marinades, it should soften and become easier to work with. Of course, if you buy into the perfectionist myth that creation is supposed to be an epic struggle, then not only will backing off seem like a defeat, but you will also view the freewriting process itself with suspicion simply because it’s easy and fun. The voice of perfectionism, a.k.a., the oppressor, is a reliable compass for how
not
to think and behave.

Still doubting? Have others review your free-written passages, perhaps comparing them with others you’ve labored over. There’s a good chance the free-written passages will be as good or even better than the “labored” ones, in part because grueling effort often produces a stilted result. (Joan Bolker: “From what I’ve seen, fast writing produces no worse results than slow writing does.”) Even if it turns out that the labored piece has some superiority over the free-written one, you can probably easily adjust your freewriting process to achieve the same result—and still be far ahead in terms of productivity.

In class I often ask how many drafts people think it should take to get to the final.

Most people answer with a specific number between three and ten.

The right answer is, “as many as it takes.”

I
ncreasing your tempo also often entails replacing a “Swiss cheese” writing process filled with holes (pauses, hesitations, and interruptions) with a smoother one. Basically, you just sit down and write—and write. You don’t stop to format the work, check your email, answer the phone (it should be shut off, anyhow), or get a snack. You just write.

You don’t even stop to try to recall a word or fact; you just leave a space and move on. (This tactic obviously goes hand in hand with the “many drafts” one, above.) Memory is tricky, and you’ve probably had the experience of struggling to remember something, only to have it effortlessly pop into your mind later. So don’t waste time trying to force it.

As for research, it’s not part of the composition process, and it’s also a common vehicle for procrastination, so save it for later. Leave a space in the manuscript to remind you of what you need to look up, or jot a quick note on a pad.

P
erfectionists tend to see their projects as long strings of words—and there’s a natural tendency, when you have that viewpoint, to want to start at the beginning of a piece and write straight through till “The End.”

Viewing your work from the meager and terrifying prospect of a point at the end of an endless string of words isn’t helpful. It’s far more productive to view it as a landscape that you’re viewing from above, and whose topographic features include hard parts, easy parts, exposition parts, dialogue parts, parts involving Character A, parts involving Theme B, etc. Viewed like this, your project resembles an illustrated map, or maybe one of those miniature landscapes you see in museums, and it’s now accessible to you in its totality.

And now you can use a visualization tool I call the “writercopter,” a mental helicopter that can transport you to any place in your piece. The moment you feel you’ve taken a particular patch of writing as far as you can, hop onto your copter and take it to another section that looks enticing. Work there until you run dry, and then re-board and hop to another part.

Prolific writers view their work as a landscape and have great fun using the “writercopter” to hop to whichever section they feel like working on next.

What if no part looks appealing? Try writing
about
the piece, since your alienation from it is probably rooted in the fact that you either need to think it through more or are trying to force it in the wrong direction (see Section 5.9). In the unlikely event that that doesn’t help, set the piece aside and let it marinate while you work on something else.

Writing might sometimes be difficult, but it should never be unpleasant; if it is unpleasant—if you’re feeling frustrated, bored or stuck—that’s not an indication of any deficiency on your part, but simply the signal to move to another part of the project, or another project.
While it’s okay to practice “writing past the wall,” i.e., sticking with a difficult section a bit longer than comfortable, don’t perfectionistically dig in your heels and become an antagonist to yourself and your process.

The writercopter technique is similar to that used by the late, great, and famously prolific author Isaac Asimov, who wrote or edited more than 500 books:

“What if you get a writer’s block?” (That’s a favorite question.) I say, “I don’t ever get one precisely because I switch from one task to another at will. If I’m tired of one project, I just switch to something else which, at the moment, interests me more.” [From his memoir,
In Joy Still Felt
.]

Note Asimov’s absolute sense of freedom and dominion (author-ity!) over his work—expressed not in grandiose terms, but the simple ability to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And, of course, the total lack of blame, shame, compulsion, and perfectionism.

Nonlinear writing obviously goes hand in hand with freewriting; using the techniques together should powerfully speed your writing. What’s more, the process is accelerative, since the more easy parts of your project you finish, the easier the hard parts will get. (By writing “around” the hard parts, you’re illuminating them and solving problems related to them.)

You can combine nonlinear writing with Anne Lamott’s famous “one-inch picture frame” technique from
Bird by Bird
to get through even the toughest piece of writing. To combat overwhelm, Lamott reminds herself that:

All I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame ... All I’m going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.

I myself have gotten through very tough patches of writing (meaning, sections where I felt a lot of resistance to the writing—because the patches themselves are neither easy nor hard, but just writing) by switching back and forth between the difficult patch and an easier one, doing “one-inch picture frame”-sized pieces of the tough section and longer stretches of the easy one. The easy patches actually become a reward, in this context, which is in itself a lovely development: writing not as chore, but reward.

Take these techniques to their limit, as I assume Asimov did, and you develop a very light touch around your work. You’re hopping everywhere in the writercopter, not in a distracted way but in a focused, effective way—and the writing is almost never a struggle, and the words just pile up.

The alternative is you struggle with grim determination to write the piece linearly. And so you write a page or two and ... wham! You’re at a hard part and you stop dead. And because you don’t know what else to do, you just keep throwing yourself against that wall—until procrastination steps in to “save” you from your predicament.

Besides seeing projects as complex in space, the prolific also see them as complex in time. While novice writers see writing as “just writing,” the prolific see it as a process consisting of these or similar stages: