The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (6 page)

I actually find quotes about how awful writing and the writing life are to be not just perfectionist, but self-indulgent. No one’s forcing these writers to write, after all, and there are obviously far worse ways to spend one’s time, not to mention earn one’s living. All worthwhile endeavors require hard, and occasionally tedious, work; if anything, we writers have it relatively easy, given writing’s few material requirements. (Contrast with, say, a potter’s need for a wheel and kiln—not to mention, a place to house them—or a Shakespearean actor’s need for an ensemble and stage.) Besides, writing, like all creative endeavors but unlike most noncreative ones, offers the possibility of transcendence—a fantastic reward for one’s efforts and struggle.

Nonperfectionist and nongrandiose writers recognize all this. Flaubert famously said, “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living,” and Toni Morrison (I think it was) once said in an interview that, while she doesn’t particularly enjoy writing, “without it, you only have life.” Special kudos go to Jane Yolen, however, for her book
Take Joy,
which begins with a celebration of the inherent joyfulness of writing. She also responds to Smith’s and Fowler’s sanguinary comments with the good-natured ridicule they deserve: “By God, that’s a messy way of working.”

Even absent a self-sacrificial imperative, the idea that writing is a holy mission is fundamentally antiproductive, since it raises impossible expectations and puts huge pressure on the writer (see the Labels section of Section 2.7). Partly for that reason, partly because they are focused on their quotidian work as opposed to fantasies of success, and partly because they are focused on internal rewards (Section 2.4), the prolific tend to see their writing not as some kind of holy mission but their “work,” “craft,” or even “job”:

Stephen King
: “Don’t wait for the muse ... This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three.”

Anthony Trollope
: “Let [other writers’] work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

(I love the skepticism at the end of Trollope’s statement, which I think is entirely justified when reading grandiose statements about writing.) Ironically, it’s the nongrandiose attitude that frees writers to consistently experience the glory and transcendence that grandiosity promises but only rarely, if ever, delivers.

The final problem with grandiosity is that it causes perfectionists to distrust and devalue work and success when they come too easily. “If it came easily, then it couldn’t have been any good” is their motto. I can’t imagine a more self-defeating attitude.

The idea that grandiosity fuels perfectionism always shocks perfectionists, who tend to think their problem is low self-esteem. But it’s grandiosity that causes the shame and low self-esteem by constantly setting goals and conditions the writer can’t possibly live up to.

I
n
The War of Art
, Steven Pressfield describes the end of his writing sessions thusly:

I wrap for the day. Copy whatever I’ve done to disk and stash the disk in the glove compartment of my truck in case there’s a fire and I have to run for it. I power down ... How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got.

Prolific writers tend to trust themselves and the writing process, knowing that the latter will take them where they need to go. Even that poster boy for quality and
le mot juste
, Flaubert, said, “Success must be a consequence and never a goal,” meaning that it should arise organically from the creative process.

Perfectionists, in contrast, focus obsessively on (1) the quality and quantity of their output and (2) the external reward or result they hope to reap (Section 2.4)—all measured grandiosely, of course. Focusing on product is a way of trying to control the outcome, a common and understandable response to fear. If you’re terrified that you’ll fail, and that the consequences of failure will be disastrous, you’ll naturally want to do everything you can to avoid that fate. (It’s also a trauma symptom; see Section 2.9.)

Of course, some writers do use word counts and other metrics to gauge productivity, but you should only do this after having overcome your perfectionism. Otherwise, you’ll just set unrealistic word-count goals and bash yourself for failing to meet them. And even those writers who do set goals devote most of their attention, while writing, to the creative demands of the work itself (Section 2.16).

P
erfectionists tend to dwell on questions like these:
Will my book sell quickly? Will it sell a million copies? Will it earn me a million dollars? Will it receive a wonderful review from the
Times
?
The reality is that very few books achieve those levels of success, and success at that level is often a crapshoot, anyway. (You could write a fabulous book and it might not sell. Or it could sell, but get dreadful reviews from clueless reviewers.) So these preoccupations are not just grandiose distractions, but dangerous in that they set you up for likely huge disappointment.

Please note that I have nothing against ambitious goals—in fact, I’m all for them. The problem is when you set them without planning for them, or without being willing to make the necessary investments and sacrifices, or you are unrealistic in your expectations (for instance, by pretending that there’s not a large luck component to success). Someone determined to write a bestseller, for instance, can greatly increase his odds of doing so by writing to a popular formula, doing shrewd networking, and investing a lot in marketing and promotion. Whether you’re willing to do those things or not—and I’m not saying they’re bad, although most people who abstractly want to write bestsellers turn out not to want to do them—you need to get clear on not only your motives and goals, but your strategy (Section 8.6).

Another problem with ambitious goals is that even when you do everything right, there’s a good chance you’ll fall short. (That’s why they’re “ambitious.”) And if you’re prey to another perfectionist trait, overidentification with your work (Section 2.6), that can be devastating. But it you approach ambitious goals nonperfectionistically then you’ll probably achieve plenty—and have lots of fun doing it—even if you don’t achieve stratospheric heights of success.

Most of us, perfectionist or not, love stories of improbable or outrageous success, like J.K. Rowling rising from welfare to billionairedom. But to make your happiness and self-esteem dependent on such an outcome—or even a far lesser one, or any external reward or outcome at all, really—is risky in the extreme. Far better to do what most prolific writers do and enjoy the external rewards when they come, but derive most of your satisfaction from the act of writing and the creativity-centered lifestyle you build around it.

P
erfectionists are all about the easy win. They think they should be able to write easily and build successful careers easily. When a perfectionist hears Anne Lamott’s famous dictum that almost all writing projects begin with a “shitty first draft,” he nods and says, “Of course—that only makes sense.” But when you ask him to describe such a draft, he inevitably describes something already organized and polished, and that just needs a few tweaks here and there.

Perfectionists’ idea of shitty first drafts is the same as other writers’ almost-final drafts!

A blocked graduate student once told me, “I never thought the idea of drafts applied to me.” As is often the case with perfectionist delusions, hers was built on a grain of truth: she had, as an undergraduate, been able to write papers in a single sitting. (She wasn’t actually eschewing drafts so much as blowing through them quickly.) When she got to grad school, however, the assignments got more complex and her process was inadequate. This is a common problem, actually, yet few graduate programs seem to help students with it, or even recognize that it exists.

Epically blocked humorist Fran Lebowitz also deprecates drafts, deriding them as “waste paper.”
1
She says she does nearly all her revisions in her head and then writes out a final. Most writers would find that process profoundly antiproductive—which it obviously has been for her. In Section 5.2, I discuss how prolificness is achieved, counterintuitively, by writing not fewer drafts, but more.

Whether they realize it or not, many perfectionists grandiosely believe excellent writing should flow from their fingertips.
And even if they admit they need to write drafts, they tend to grossly underestimate the number it takes to get to the final. (The correct answer is “as many as it takes.”) And, as if all this weren’t bad enough, here’s an example of the kind of standard they tend to hold their finished products to: “If I couldn’t write about debtors’ prisons with Dickens’s authority, I failed. If I couldn’t outwit Jane Austen, I failed. If I couldn’t philosophize like Bellow, I failed.”

Perfectionists also deprecate the resources and preparation needed to write, and to succeed as a writer (Chapters 3–8), and they love stories of spectacular success that confirm their perfectionist, grandiose biases. (And, as discussed in Section 2.8, the media are only too happy to oblige.) Here’s Brenda Ueland, from
If You Want to Write
:

We writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people. A gifted young woman writes a poem. It is rejected. She does not write another perhaps for two years, perhaps all her life. Think of the patience and love that a tap-dancer or vaudeville acrobat puts into his work. Think of how many times Kreisler has practiced trills. If you will write as many words as Kreisler has practiced trills I prophesy that you will win the Nobel Prize in ten years.

In his book
Outliers
, Malcolm Gladwell provides examples ranging from chess players to Olympic athletes to The Beatles to substantiate his claim that it takes around 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to achieve world-class mastery of a complex skill. And that’s just to succeed technically. To build a career around your talent requires entire other skillsets, including the abilities to strategize and plan; manage time, money and other resources; and market and sell. Perfectionists tend to elide all that with their obsessive fetish about talent as the key determinant of success (Section 2.7).

1
Thomas Beller, “Interview with Fran Lebowitz,” Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (blog), October 11, 2002 (mrbellersneighborhood.com/2002/10/interview-with-fran-lebowitz).

O
ne of the worst torments of procrastination is that many people do it only around a goal they care deeply about. In other areas of their lives—day jobs, community work, family responsibilities, etc.—they are dynamos. Many blocked writers are even writing dynamos—on pieces other than the one they most want to be writing. They’ll write emails, work reports, or letters to the editor galore, while their novel or thesis goes a-wasting.

We already know part of what’s going on: the procrastinators are using the other tasks to mimic productive work so that they can feel less aware of, and guilty about, not working on their main project. But why should they so strongly need to procrastinate in the first place?

In Section 1.1, I discussed how procrastination is grounded in a craving to escape from perfectionism-induced fear. Most of that fear arises because perfectionists overidentify with their work, meaning that they see it as an extension of, and reflection on, their deepest soul. When a work fails—and, remember: for a perfectionist, failure is not just inevitable, but constant—a perfectionist feels that he himself is a miserable failure.

Perfectionism reduces your entire existence and value to your writing—and, often, just one aspect of your writing (Section 2.7). “If I can’t write, then who am I?” the perfectionist asks—and his answer, unlike that of a psychologically healthy person, will be “nothing,” because perfectionism values all your non-writing attributes and accomplishments at approximately zero.

Because perfectionists reduce their entire value to their writing, any “failure” becomes a kind of ego death or annihilation—and that, in turn, engenders not merely a fear of failure, but a terror of it.

Can you remember the last time you felt truly afraid or terrified? We tend to confuse fear with less intense emotions like aversion, but it’s actually far more horrible and disabling than that. When we’re afraid, our priority is to return to safety, and the three most characteristic responses to fear—flight, fight, freeze—are intended to help us do that. Not coincidentally, they match the most common manifestations of procrastination:

Flight
: doing something else other than your writing—or writing something other than what you had planned to.

Fight
: adopting a combative relationship with your writing, as in “Why should I be stuck inside writing on such a nice day when everyone else is outside having fun?” (Because fear impairs our ability to problem solve, it never occurs to the combative writer that she could take her laptop outside and write.)