The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (5 page)

Stalling out
is the opposite of selling out: it’s when you sacrifice everything else to your writing. Basically, your interests narrow, and your life narrows, until you’re doing little else other than your work—except that, since this strategy creates deprivation and denial, you’re probably not doing much of that, either.

Selling out and stalling out are both perfectionist mistakes, reflecting grandiosity (Section 2.2), dichotomization (Section 2.7), and other perfectionist symptoms.

D
espite the many ways procrastination may have impeded your life and success, it is important that you not see it as your enemy. For one thing, it’s part of your own psyche, and it’s not helpful to see a part of yourself as the enemy. For another, its motives are noble: as discussed in Section 1.4, it is only trying to protect you from failure and consequent ego demolition. True, it is doing so incompetently and destructively, but that’s not its fault, either: procrastination is incompetent because it is a fear-based behavior, and fear tends to both regress us psychologically (more on that in a bit) and impair our judgment and effectiveness. Also, if no one taught you the elements of writing productively, and the solutions for underproductivity, how can you blame yourself for not knowing them?

You invoke procrastination when you perfectionistically try to coerce your vulnerable writing persona into writing. That persona is vulnerable not because it’s weak or flawed, but because writing is a hugely self-exposing activity, and is often risky in other ways, too (Chapter 6). Your perfectionist self will tell you the opposite—that writing is easy, trivial, etc.—but, as you will shortly learn, you should never listen to the voice of perfectionism.

So: you ask your vulnerable writer self to “perform,” but hold her to an unreasonable perfectionist standard of success (Chapter 2) AND deprive her of needed resources and support (Chapters 3–8). And then, when she doesn’t instantly leap up and do your bidding, you try to coerce her via the self-abusive litany (“Why are you so lazy?” etc.), which only increases her fear.

In other words, you’ve already tried to write (or merely contemplated writing), encountered an obstacle or trigger, felt a quintuple-engendered terror that you’re going to fail, attempted to get yourself back on track via coercion, and thus are even more terrified.

Or, expanding on the illustration from Section 1.2:

Prolific vs. Underproductive

That’s when procrastination steps in. She’s regressed, remember? So let’s picture her as a fierce and determined fifteen-year-old with a strong sense of justice. She reacts to your unfair demands and bullying with outrage, and responds the way teens do: first by rebellion, and eventually (if you persist) helplessness.

Rebellion:
“Why should I be stuck in here writing when everyone else is out having a good time? I’m out of here!”

Helplessness:
“It’s hopeless, so why should I even bother trying?”

Both reactions reinforce and justify your initial reflex to flee from the terrifying oppression.

Rebellion and helplessness are developmentally appropriate and even liberated reactions—for a fifteen-year-old. An adult, however, should be able to respond more productively by problem-solving (Section 1.2) or changing her writing context in ways detailed in the rest of this book. Then again, there’s no real adult in this scenario: only the vulnerable writer, perfectionist bully, and teenaged defender. The adult will show up when you start practicing compassionate objectivity (Section 2.10) and the other solutions to perfectionism.

As discussed in Section 1.2, the best bullying can achieve, in most cases, is short-term compliance. The more you try to bully, in fact, the more likely the teen is to dig in her heels. And it’s important to realize that, although the procrastinator is regressed and therefore disempowered in terms of problem-solving, she nonetheless retains all your adult capacities for dissociation, denial, and deception.

And her cause is just. As explained way back in Section 1.1, your reasons for procrastinating are always valid, even if procrastination itself is a suboptimal response.

So don’t reject your procrastinator, but embrace her as your courageous protector. Soon you won’t need her anymore—and, like most teens who’ve been asked to take on too much responsibility, she will be happy to step back and let the adult take charge.

The first step is to overcome your perfectionism—which we’ll do in Chapter 2.

Chapter
2

“You can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine.”

— Cervantes,
Don Quixote

M
any people think perfectionism is a destructive habit or way of thinking, but it’s actually much worse than that: it’s a kind of toxic filter through which you view yourself, your work, and the world. Perfectionists make six overarching mistakes:

1. They hold unrealistic definitions of success and punish themselves harshly for perceived failures.
   
2. They are grandiose.
   
3. They prioritize product over process.
   
4. They over-rely on external rewards and measures of success.
   
5. They deprecate the ordinary processes of creativity and career-building.
   
6. They overidentify with their work.
   

I discuss these in this section and also in Sections 2.2–2.6. In Section 2.7, I discuss a host of other serious perfectionist errors.

Then, in Sections 2.8 and 2.9, I discuss the causes of perfectionism.

And, finally, starting in Section 2.10, I start discussing the solutions.

Here are some examples of perfectionist writers:

• A novelist who believes he must sacrifice everything for his art, including family, friends, material comforts, and health. To not do so, he feels, makes him a “dilettante.”

• A grad student who expects to write her thesis while still maintaining her full load of household, parenting, and teaching responsibilities. Anything less means she’s being “lazy.” Moreover, if her thesis doesn’t rock her field, she’ll know she “hasn’t lived up to her potential.”

• A community worker who plans to write a thirty-page grant proposal over the weekend, even though he’s never written more than ten pages a day and is hosting out-of-town guests. If he fails, he’ll feel “uncommitted.”

• A short-story writer who has been blocked for years and decides to start writing again, setting a goal of three hours a day. If she fails, she knows she’s destined to be a “loser.”

All of these writers are making the fundamental perfectionist mistake of setting unrealistic goals and punishing themselves harshly, via self-shaming, when they fail to meet them. Please note that each has a rationalization for the crazy goal: the novelist tells himself that “sacrificing everything is what committed artists do”; the grad student thinks she’s a “multitasker” and “has done so much research that the writing will be easy”; the community worker tells himself his guests are “low-maintenance”; and the short story writer tells herself “writing is easy.” The rationalization occasionally contains a nugget of truth, but never enough to justify the perfectionist’s inflated expectations.

It’s important that you recognize just how far these writers are from the truth:

Nonperfectionist novelists know that chronic deprivation and isolation are not conducive to creativity—and, in fact, almost always work against it.

Nonperfectionist grad students know that the best way to write a thesis is to clear the deck of as many other commitments as possible before getting started. They also know that the goal should not be to set your field on fire—which almost no one does, anyway—but simply to finish as quickly as possible so that you can move on to the next stage of your career.

Nonperfectionist grant writers know it’s crazy to try to increase your writing productivity 50% overnight, especially when you’ve got other commitments.

Nonperfectionist short story writers know that when recovering from a block, you should initially set extremely low productivity goals—say, five or ten
minutes
of writing time a day.

All of these perfectionist writers are probably also telling themselves that they’re simply “setting a high standard.”
But perfectionism isn’t about setting high standards; it’s about setting unrealistic or unachievable ones.
There’s a
big
difference.

Most perfectionists struggle under a constant burden of failure and shame because they are constantly setting unrealistic goals and failing to meet them. “Time for a three-hour writing session. In which I have to write something fabulous. And each sentence needs to be superb. And all of this, pretty easily.” Fail, fail, fail, fail.

“And the same thing tomorrow, and every day I try to write.” Fail, fail, fail, fail.

And don’t forget the harsh punishment side of the equation! It encompasses labels such as “dilettante,” “lazy,” and “uncommitted,” which our writers will take very much to heart and feel deeply ashamed of, and more generally, our old friend the self-abusive litany (“What’s wrong with you?,” “Why are you so lazy?,” etc.; see Section 1.2). An interesting thing about the litany is that, when I ask writers to recite it, they can almost always effortlessly do so, and this tells me it’s a “living” presence within them. (Usually, their voice becomes harsh and strident, and sometimes, when I ask whose voice it is, it turns out to be that of a parent or teacher who harshly criticized them. Harsh words often live on for years or decades.)

The litany, as it turns out, is not merely the voice of procrastination, but more specifically that of perfectionism, most writers’ biggest barrier to productivity.
Many writers refer it as their “inner critic.” I call it the “inner bully.” Anne Lamott, in
Bird by Bird,
cannily calls it “the voice of the oppressor,” which fits in with the idea of procrastination as disempowerment, because oppressors by definition disempower you.
The voice of perfectionism is
always
wrong, and you should never listen to it
. In fact, the work of overcoming procrastination is largely the work of learning to ignore it.

G
randiosity, or the delusion that you’re special and/or don’t have to follow the normal rules governing productivity and success, underpins nearly every aspect of perfectionism. The writers in the previous chapter were all being grandiose, as are writers who believe they should be able to write polished first drafts (an oxymoron) or achieve commercial success without having to market or sell (Section 2.5).
Even reasonable goals can be grandiose if you’re not willing to pursue them strategically, or make the needed investments of time, money, and other resources.

Another group of grandiose writers believe that if they just publish the right book, all their problems will be solved. (“I’ll be rich and famous
and
popular!”) This is, basically, a gambler’s strategy: writing as slot machine. Here’s Steven Pressfield from
The War of Art
:

Grandiose fantasies are ... the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Grandiosity is a problem for writers because our media and culture are permeated with grandiose myths and misconceptions about writing, which writers who are undermentored fall prey to. Red Smith’s famous
bon mot
about how, to write, you need only “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein,” and Gene Fowler’s similarly sanguinary advice to “sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead,” are nothing but macho grandiose posturing, as is William Faulkner’s overwrought encomium to monomaniacal selfishness, from his
Paris Review
interview:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Many of the most famous quotes about writing are grandiose. I’m not saying that all of these writers were posturing—perhaps that’s how they truly perceived themselves and their creativity.
What I do know is that, for most writers, a strategy based on pain and deprivation is not a route to productivity.
In fact, it is more likely a route to a block.