The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (9 page)

1. Cultivate a Mindset of Compassionate Objectivity
   
2. Develop the Habit of Abundant Rewards and No Punishments
   
3. Arrive at a More Mature Understanding of Failure and Success
   
4. Use the Three Productivity Behaviors
   
5. Build Your Capacity for Fearless Writing via Timed Writing Exercises
   
6. Choose the Right Project
   
7. Learn to Balance the Creative and Non-Creative Aspects of Your Career
   

There are also some minor techniques.

Compassionate objectivity
(CO) is the foundational technique. It’s a mindset where you combine:

Compassion
, meaning you view yourself and your work with abundant empathy and understanding, with

Objectivity
, meaning you see things accurately, with all their nuance and complexity. In place of perfectionism’s reductive, rigid, and punishing worldview, CO offers nuance, flexibility, empathy, and true love and respect. The compassionately objective (CO) person sees through perfectionism’s illusions and understands the realities about herself and her work. She knows to:

Set achievable goals and be compassionate about any failures or mistakes

Be realistic and grounded, as opposed to grandiose

Emphasize process almost entirely over product

Rely on internal rewards

Work within the realities of creativity and career-building, and

The CO person also eschews invidious comparisons, dichotomization, rigidity, unhelpful labels, hyperbole, negativity, shortsightedness, fetishes, unconsciousness, pathologizing, and blind spots.

Don’t confuse CO with “permissiveness,” “self-indulgence,” “being a Pollyanna,” “letting yourself off the hook,” or “giving yourself a pass.” It isn’t any of those things. CO calls it like it is—and with much more accuracy than perfectionism. CO people forgo unproductive blame and shame, but that doesn’t mean they don’t take responsibility.

Perfectionists tend to see CO as permissiveness because they see everything through a harsh, judgmental lens—and they dread permissiveness because they feel that constant harshness is the only thing keeping them from devolving into useless, unproductive monsters.
It’s such a sad, difficult mindset, and so unnecessary: I promise you that if you use the techniques in this book you won’t devolve, but evolve.

In the end, CO is simply wisdom. The CO person knows how to be truly productive, and she also knows the costs of delusion. She knows, for example, that:

• Everyone operates under constraints of time, money, and skills. She judges a result against her own capacities and resources instead of an unrealistic ideal.

• She doesn’t have to fix all the problems with a piece of writing right now—she’ll have plenty of opportunity to fix them later. She also knows she shouldn’t expect to fix them “all” anyway, since that’s a perfectionist goal.

• Even if this writing project ultimately falls short, she’ll have plenty of other chances to succeed.

• She can’t perform superhuman feats, such as suddenly writing twenty pages in a day when her previous record is ten. She also knows she’s not a robot who can work 24/7, or when ill or seriously troubled.

• She’s not precognitive. Therefore, she won’t second-guess or punish herself for having made reasonable choices that didn’t work out as well as planned.

Finally, she knows she’s not just a writer but a human being, and that she needs to take care of the broad range of her human needs (health, safety, material comfort, relationships, etc.), not just because that’s the sane and humane thing to do, but because ignoring those needs is antiproductive. She also knows that progress in other areas of her life will support her writing success—and that, conversely, her writing success will feed her success in other important areas.

The CO person also knows important stuff about “failure” and “success” that I’ll discuss in Section 2.12.

The fundamental work of overcoming perfectionism is that of “switching” your mindset from perfectionism to CO.
There’s no magic to doing this: you just catch yourself thinking perfectionistically (i.e., the self-abusive litany) and GENTLY interrupt and correct yourself:

Instead of: “I can’t believe I’m behind on submitting my chapter to my thesis advisor. Whatever made me think I was a scholar? I’m just a fraud. I haven’t written anything in two months—and what I wrote before that is crap. And look at Mary—she’s a
real
scholar. She’s already submitted five chapters, and hers are all great. I’m just lazy, that’s all.”

The CO person thinks (and maybe journals, for extra impact and clarity): “Okay, let’s calm down. I actually have done some writing in the last two months. It wasn’t very much, and honestly it wasn’t very good, but there’s a big difference between that and not writing anything. The big problem is that I’ve been stuck on my analysis ... I guess I’ll submit what I have to my advisor so he at least knows I’m working. And I’ll talk to him and my other mentors about the analysis. As for Mary, well, her partner supports them both, so she gets to stay home and write all day. I still have my teaching job and we also have the kids—and if I can get three hours in of writing a day, I’m lucky. I guess I’ll talk to my partner to see if I can cut down on my work hours for a while, and also to see if he’ll do more of the housework and childcare. But mostly, I’ll stop comparing myself to her because when I do it drives me crazy.”

Note how in the CO response the writer isn’t letting herself off the hook: she admits that her writing hasn’t been very good. It is possible to acknowledge mistakes without taking on a mantle of shame—and you must absolutely learn to do so. Notice also how a shame-free examination of the causes of her underproductivity enables her to easily problem-solve.

Here’s another example of substituting CO for perfectionism:

Instead of: “Even though I’m sick, I should still be able carry out my normal schedule and commitments, including writing. I’m not that sick, anyway: I’m just using a few sniffles as an excuse for being lazy.” (A formulation that is not only self-contradictory—are you sick or not sick, which is it?—but will lead to a poor workday, resentment, a lingering illness, and perhaps infecting others.)

The CO person thinks: “I’m sick, and I’m going to spend the day focused on getting better. I’m going back to bed and will take some Vitamin C. Oh, and there’s no food in the house, so I will call Frank and ask him to bring me some.”

And a third example:

Instead of (after dropping a dish): “Oh, what a klutz I am.”

The CO person thinks: “Oh well, I dropped a dish. It’s no big deal—I’ll just be more careful in the future.” (Practicing CO in other areas of your life will help you be more CO in your writing.)

At first, these self-corrections may feel awkward and even contrived, but keep practicing and eventually CO will replace perfectionism as your reflex response to underperformance. Just don’t try to immediately correct every tiny instance of perfectionism, or berate yourself harshly when you slip—that’s perfectionism! Just focus on building the new habit gradually.

Students have described the CO voice as that of the “good grandparent” or “wise teacher.” These adult metaphors are no accident: CO, unlike terrified and regressed perfectionism, is a mature viewpoint. The more you replace perfectionist thoughts and feelings with CO ones, the less fear and the more confidence you will feel around your writing—and writing will become, first, easier, and then a joy.

E
very time you substitute CO for perfectionism, and any time you experience
any
success at all in your writing or in other areas, you need to acknowledge that success and reward yourself.

Every time.

Without fail.

And reward yourself lavishly.

The habit of recognizing and lavishly rewarding success is one of your strongest techniques for overcoming perfectionism. It is actually the opposite of what perfectionists do, which is to relentlessly devalue their successes and punish themselves.

“Acknowledge and reward” helps you do four very important things:

1.  Recognize your success—something that, as discussed in the “dichotomizing” section of Section 2.7, perfectionists have trouble doing.

2.  Celebrate your success, which is a more emphatic form of recognition that also reinforces the successful behavior. It also helps “fix” the success in your memory, so that you can call on it when needed: “Oh, I’m struggling now because I got distracted by that phone call. But I got a distracting phone call last week and was able to recover and keep writing. So I guess I’ll just start writing now and see what happens.”

3.  Heal the burden of shame and guilt you are probably carrying around from years of underproductivity, and harsh perfectionist attempts to correct it.

4.  Build your confidence and hope, two powerful precursors to productivity.

It’s particularly important that you learn to recognize and reward partial, small or even trivial-seeming successes
, for three reasons:

1.  As a perfectionist, you are probably routinely undervaluing your successes, and so they are probably all more significant than you realize.

2.  
All
successes are partial. There’s no such thing as a perfect writing session or perfect piece of writing.

3.  There’s also really no such thing as a “big success,” since all big successes are really compilations of small ones. In a sense, Tolstoy didn’t write
War and Peace
: he wrote a huge number of paragraphs, pages, and chapters that added up to
War and Peace
—and before he began that project he succeeded at other writing projects, and at intellectual and life challenges that readied him to take on the big one.

The practice of “Rewards,” as I call it, has three parts: a tangible reward, a celebration, and an activity reward.

The
tangible reward
could be a cookie, bubble bath, or DVD: whatever you like. (For heaven’s sake, don’t judge your choice!) Gold stars—yes, the kind that elementary schoolteachers use—or some other physical tracking of your achievement (see Section 5.9) is another terrific physical reward.

The
celebration
involves taking some time to feel honest pride and satisfaction at your achievement. It’s actually the most important part of Rewards because it’s the part where you most directly challenge perfectionism.

Taking a few seconds to feel proud sounds easy enough, but for perfectionists the temptation to gloss over one’s accomplishments can be huge, and the idea of rewarding oneself for partial productivity can seem a dangerous form of self-indulgence. If you feel an urge to skip this part of Rewards, it is especially important that you not do so.

Please note that by “proper pride” I’m
not
talking about the giddy “I’m king of the world!” feeling perfectionists tend to feel on those rare occasions when they think they’ve written well. That’s a clear sign of overidentification with the work, and is almost inevitably followed by an equivalent “crash” the next time things don’t go so well. Honest pride and satisfaction are what prolific writers look forward to after a good day’s work. (There may be a time for giddiness—say, when the manuscript is finished or the book sells—but this isn’t it.)

And, of course, don’t expect perfectionism to give up without a fight: it will almost certainly pop up with a litany crafted just for the occasion: “You wrote a paragraph and now you’re celebrating? How pathetic! How do you ever expect to finish your novel writing a paragraph at a time?”

Never listen to the perfectionist voice, a.k.a. the voice of the oppressor.
The best way to respond to it is to dialogue with it via journaling, while assuming the role of a CO adult:

Perfectionism
(in disgust, but also terror): You wrote a paragraph and now you’re celebrating? How pathetic!

CO
(with honest curiosity): Oh, so you think it’s ridiculous to celebrate? Why is that? Perfectionism: Well, it’s just a paragraph!

CO:
So you don’t think it’s a long enough passage to be worth celebrating?

Perfectionism: Of course not—and how do you expect to finish your novel?

CO:
I’ll get to that in a minute. But, first, isn’t a paragraph a meaningful achievement after weeks of not writing at all?

Perfectionism:
Errr ... maybe.

CO:
And am I hurting anyone when I celebrate?

Perfectionism:
Well, no, I guess not. (Then, with sudden franticness)But, but, but—if you celebrate, then you might get the idea that a paragraph is enough! And it really isn’t! We’ll never get the novel done a paragraph at a time! And then everyone will know we’re losers!

CO
(with extra compassion): I understand your fear—and you’re absolutely right: a paragraph really isn’t that much writing compared with an entire novel. This was only a first step, though. I promise you that I’ll be working as hard as I can to boost our productivity to a rate we both think reasonable.

Perfectionism
(relieved): Really?

CO:
Yes, but we can’t rush it, or we’ll go back to writing nothing. Perfectionism: I guess you’re right. But, you know, I really do want to rush it. We’ve lost so much time already.

CO:
I know—I kind of want to rush it, too. But we tried that approach for years, didn’t we? And it never worked. So, let’s just try this other way for a while.

Perfectionism
(not entirely convinced, but now willing to go along with it): I guess you’re right.

CO:
OK, so let’s try celebrating and see what happens.