The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (4 page)

Try to distinguish between obstacles and triggers, and try to figure out what triggers your obstacles are creating, and vice versa. (The main use of the obstacle and trigger categories is to help you understand more fully the complex nature of your barriers.) Be sure to examine incidents going back to your childhood, as most cases of procrastination have early roots (Section 6.1). Cast as wide a net as possible, capturing both issues that seem monumental (the hawsers), and those that seem tiny or trivial (but may, in fact, not be).

Characterizing your snarl can be deep, intense work—one student described her list as a “grenade.” You’re looking at the types of hurtful incidents, losses, rejections, humiliations, mistakes, failures, and other stuff that many people strenuously avoid examining. And you might consequently experience rage, grief, remorse, shame, humiliation, or other difficult feelings. So please make sure you are doing this work with abundant support, including, if needed, professional support from a therapist.

And take heart, because what you are doing is very powerful and healing: you are moving beyond a moralistic and disempowering “blaming and shaming” mindset to one of calm objectivity, which is the precursor to effective problem-solving. The amazing thing is that often simply naming a fear will either alleviate it or immediately present a solution:

“Not enough privacy? I guess I’ll use the guest room for my writing room. It just sits there empty most of the time, anyway.”

“Not enough time? I’ll call up some friends and see if we can swap babysitting, or if they can drop the kids off at school.”

“Distracted because my friend called and we fought? From now on, I’ll tell her to only call after my writing time. She probably won’t like that, so I will need to be strong in the face of her pressure. And maybe I ought to rethink this friendship, anyway—it’s draining me.”

And, finally:

“I hate that I’ve been stuck on this stupid chapter for weeks. Well, let’s just take a moment and see if I can figure out what’s happening. OK, one thing is that my hero and heroine are supposed to be warming to each other in this chapter, and I just don’t see it happening. WOW, I think I just hit it. They really do hate each other. I think I’ve confused the hero and villain, or maybe I need an entire new character for the romantic lead. Wait! What about George, that funny astronomer in Chapter 7? I really liked him, and the heroine really liked him. I would love to write more about him, and I could really see them together. OK, so where else could they meet? Maybe she’s camping in the state park and he shows up one night making a racket with his big telescope, and then she freaks out in her tent, thinking he’s a bear and so she throws her canteen at him and it hits him in the…” (Continues writing the scene.)

About that last example: YES, getting unblocked is frequently that easy—once you move past the moralizing and shame. As discussed in Section 5.4,
work often stalls when you either haven’t thought it through enough, or are trying to force it in a direction it doesn’t want to go
. Journaling will often solve these problems, and when you use it, even a piece of writing that seemed hopeless can come together almost magically.

So journaling will eliminate or shrink some strands of your snarl. Others will require more work, and probably the involvement of family, friends, writing colleagues, mentors, and professionals (e.g., a therapist or doctor). Some strands will require years to solve, and still others—such as a disability or chronic health problem—may not in fact be entirely solvable. But they are still worth working on.

Whatever you do, don’t waste time feeling guilty or ashamed about your barriers. As mentioned in Section 1.1, they’re all reasonable, and in nearly every case you didn’t even cause them.

C
harles Dickens famously called procrastination “the thief of time.” (It was Micawber in
David Copperfield
.) In classes, I share this quote and then ask students what qualities they associate with thieves: common answers include sneakiness, stealth, exploitation, and a predatory nature.

Congruent with Dickens’s view is that of Steven Pressfield in his book
The War of Art
:

Resistance [his word for the force impelling procrastination—HR] will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate; falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form, if that’s what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

Allen Berger’s characterization of addiction, in
12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery
, also applies perfectly to procrastination:

Addiction [or procrastination—HR] is like a tiger lying in wait for its prey. Unfortunately,
we are
the prey! ... [The tiger] is well camouflaged with denial, minimization, rationalization, and other psychological defenses ... Addiction is cunning and baffling. Many times its victims do not know they are being stalked until it is too late. ...

What makes matters even worse is that our opponent—our addiction—knows everything about us. It is part of us; it has all the intelligence, capabilities, insights, and knowledge that we possess. It’s like we are in a life-and-death struggle against a clone. Our disease anticipates our every move. It understands our strategies. It knows our strengths and weaknesses.

Put simply,
we don’t have trouble overcoming procrastination because we’re weak, but because it is duplicitous
. While we’ve spent years and decades vacillating fruitlessly between trying to reason with it and trying to coerce it, it’s blithely ignored our efforts and gone about its business—all the while, brilliantly hiding its tracks via two main strategies: denial and deceit.

Denial
is when emotional needs cause you to either selectively consider the data around a particular situation, or to limit the conclusions you’re willing to draw. Someone who gives up on his writing because he tells himself it’s incompatible with normal adult responsibilities is in denial, as is someone who gives up on other important priorities because he thinks writers should live only for their writing. Both of these strategies are dead ends, as you’ll learn in Section 1.10: denial is never productive over the long term.

The purpose of this book and all my work is to help you live as consciously as possible: to make choices with as full as possible an awareness of their context and implications, and to help you live as much as possible in alignment with your values. Consciousness is not only admirable and desirable in its own right, it’s essential for any kind of ambitious achievement. And it yields true happiness, contentment, and even joy.

The strategies that lead to productive writing are outlined in this book. You may not need all of them, but pretending you don’t need one when you do is pure denial and self-sabotage. You might dislike having to do your time management, for instance, or having to end a drama-filled relationship that’s taking up too much time and energy, but if you need to do those things, you should do them, and sooner rather than later. Prolific people take on these kinds of challenging tasks routinely because they know that, while there might be short-term pain, the long-term pain of underproductivity and underachievement is far worse.

Deceit
is procrastination’s most powerful strategy. Procrastination deceives us by mimicking productive work; and, as you will see, there is no shortage of ways for it to do so. The graduate student who researches his thesis to death but never gets around to writing it is a victim of the “deceit” form of procrastination, as are:

• The novelist who keeps revising her novel but never actually submits it;
  
• The blogger who keeps reading other blogs instead of writing his own;
  
• The writer who overinvests time and energy in her day job, so that she is too exhausted to write when she gets home;
  
• The writer whose time and energy go to an endless list of good deeds and community work, so that she never has time to write;
  
• The writer who spends all her time being a supermom and housekeeper instead of writing.
  

In all of these cases, the writer will easily justify the procrastination—much more easily than, say, if she were playing video games all day. There will probably be people cheering her on, and society as a whole supports many of the above choices. All of this outside reinforcement makes the deceit form of procrastination extremely hard to identify and solve.

The solution, in many cases, is not to stop doing those other activities (assuming that that’s even an option): it’s to do the work in this book, including overcoming perfectionism (Chapter 2) and time management (Chapter 4).

(1) Physical Discomfort

Writers tend to live inside their own heads and deprecate their physical needs, but prolific writers know that procrastination often begins in the body, so they treat their body like a “writing partner.” In particular, they learn to (a) create comfortable and safe (ergonomic) workspaces for themselves, (b) diligently maintain their health, and (c) deal with small aches and other physical distractions before they become larger.

An ergonomic workspace (Section 3.7) is essential, not just as a guard against carpal tunnel syndrome and other maladies, but so you can write comfortably for long periods. Ergonomic furniture doesn’t have to be expensive: a new adjustable office chair costs less than $100, and of course you can also buy used. My former husband built a super-comfortable custom writing table for me that’s exactly the right height; it cost $10 and took about an hour to build, and a decade later I’m still using it.
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Diligent attention to bodily health makes sense from a productivity standpoint and many others. Proper rest, exercise, and nutrition are also essential.

Even a healthy body is susceptible to small aches and discomforts from sitting too long, however, and those aches can subvert your best efforts to stay focused. The prolific therefore work to become conscious of, and responsive to, their bodies’ signals. A tiny bit of fatigue or stiffness, and they’re up doing a few quick stretches—and then, back to work. If they’re too cold, they break out the heater and foot warmers—and keep writing. If they’re too hot, they break out the fan or air conditioner. Many moderate their eating before a writing session to avoid drowsiness, and the coffee drinkers fine-tune their intake so they are energized but not hyper.

(2) Indecision

People often procrastinate when they’re scared to make a decision, a problem that’s often most severe and obvious when the decision is a big one, such as finding a new job or leaving a bad relationship. Indecision on even small decisions can also be debilitating, however—and it’s a particular problem for writers because writing is basically a continuous series of large and small decisions. If you procrastinate every time you need to decide which word to use, or which car a character drives, or whether he was born in Tuscaloosa or Tacoma, you’re going to have a tortuous writing process. (In case you’re wondering, it’s perfectionism that makes these decisions scary, because the perfectionist believes she MUST GET IT RIGHT. A non-perfectionist, in contrast, would just stick in the first word/car/city that came to mind, content in the knowledge that, (a) the initial choice is often the right one, and (b) if it’s not, she can always change it later. See Section 5.2.)

So, practice making quick—even immediate—decisions while writing, and in other areas of your life. Many decisions get delayed because they require just a bit of thought, or are a bit confusing, or because the right choice is mildly inconvenient or unpleasant. Just push through the reluctance, decide, and act.
Indecision is also often the root problem for people with overflowing email inboxes
—with the added complication that they are also probably trying to craft detailed, artful responses when a terse reply (or none!) is all that’s required.

Some people are terrified of making the wrong decision, but the prolific (and other successful people) know that wrong decisions are inevitable. They therefore don’t dwell on or punish themselves for their mistakes, but simply try to rectify them as quickly as possible and move on. They also know it’s far better to make a lot of quick decisions, including some wrong ones, then to agonize over every decision to the point where your productivity grinds to a halt.

And they also know that important decisions are best made after input from as wide a range as possible of those involved or affected, as well as knowledgeable mentors and colleagues. “Random” input from those who aren’t involved or knowledgeable is common in this world, but not particularly useful.

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I used to tell people it was “a big wooden plank with four sticks for legs,” but have since been informed that it is a sheet of medium-density fiber board and four 2x2” balusters supported by 1x3” pine crossbars.

T
he worst cases of writer’s block manifest themselves as selling out and stalling out.

Selling out
is when you sacrifice your writing dream to other activities, such as making money, raising a family, or doing community work. You can also, of course, sacrifice it to less worthwhile endeavors, such as compulsive housekeeping, television watching, Web surfing, or video gaming. I actually avoid using the term “selling out” in general conversation and classes because it’s often used to moralistically label people who are simply doing their best to make difficult life choices. But we can apply it non-judgmentally to those who relinquish too much of their dream.