Category: Practice

Dealing with writer’s block, tip 6: Work hard, but not too hard

It is commonly accepted that writers do best when they write every day.  The “write regularly” trope appears in almost every book on writing that I have read (I can think of only one exception, and that book, in my opinion, is a piece of junk). 

While the advice to write regularly is good advice, too often it seems that “write regularly” gets conflated with “if you’re not writing regularly, you’re not trying hard enough.”  Although there may be people who want to be writers who aren’t trying hard enough, there are also a lot of people whose issue is not a lack of effort or self-discipline. It is necessary to try, but if you’re struggling with emotional writing blocks, putting pressure on yourself to try harder can be counter-productive. In a healthy practice, writing flows from the motivation to express ideas, and self-criticism for not trying hard enough can interfere with the imagination and conceptual freedom a writer needs.

“Try harder” is not always good advice

People who suffer from writer’s block often have plenty of self-discipline. The issue is not a lack of self-discipline, but the extent of the emotional barrier to writing. The same people who experience writing blocks often demonstrate exemplary self-discipline in many aspects of their lives.  

As analogy, consider a runner who wants to improve. Obviously, this takes effort and training and self-discipline to succeed, and “try harder; dig deeper,” is often useful coaching advice or encouragement. But what if that runner has a broken bone in their foot or leg? In that situation, “try harder; dig deeper” is pretty bad advice because it can aggravate the injury and delay the desired improvement. Instead, the runner needs to work on rehabilitation to rebuild lost strength.

Writer’s block is not a physical injury, but like the runner’s broken leg, it is an injury that can be exacerbated by a simplistic “try harder” approach.  If writing has become painful for you, and you force yourself to do it despite the pain, you give yourself an unpleasant experience that may reinforce your emotional resistance to writing. Each attempt saying “try harder; dig deeper” may contribute to future resistance to writing, until the resistance becomes so great that it stops progress. Some people who have success saying “try harder, no mater how much it hurts; no pain, no gain,” eventually hit a wall of writer’s block where their resistance has grown greater than their self-discipline.

People with writer’s block have enough self-discipline

The way I see it, you can only get writer’s block if you have written successfully in the past.  If you have never written anything, you struggle because you have to learn how to write, not because of writer’s block. And if you’re not writing because you don’t put in effort and don’t make a serious attempt, then you’re not experiencing writer’s block, you’re just being lazy.

For most advanced academics—graduate students and professors alike—it’s reasonable to consider the possibility of writer’s block, because you don’t become a graduate student or professor without having written successfully, and without having the self-discipline to take care of the responsibilities needed to get into a graduate program or professorial position. Ok, sure, there are exceptions, but the majority of graduate students and professors have successfully fulfilled all sorts of responsibilities that required self-discipline over the course of years.  If you have successfully written course papers and applications and fulfilled previous expectations, but then you start to struggle to write, especially due to anxiety, it’s reasonable to say that you’re experiencing a writing block: you are struggling with something that makes it difficult for you to manifest abilities that you have previously demonstrated.

In this context, it makes sense to ask why those abilities—the self-discipline and the ability to write—do not continue to work. For most scholars struggling to write, the self-discipline generally continues to operate: the struggling writer still teaches classes, grades student work, and fulfills administrative responsibilities, all of which require self-discipline and often some writing, too. But, faced with some specific writing project—a dissertation or work for publication to survive the publish-or-perish world of academia—anxiety kicks in, and writer’s block ensues.

Yes, you could say “I need more self-discipline than I used in the past; I need to be stronger.” But you could also say “I want to reduce the barriers that keep me from working effectively on this one project, because my self-discipline is enough for all my other responsibilities.”

Look for ways to use the discipline you do have to lower barriers

As I have been arguing in this series, you can develop a positive relationship with writing and, by identifying specific causes of anxiety, you can begin to reduce writing-related anxieties that inhibit writing.

One specific anxiety that affects many is the notion that they are not trying hard enough or that they do not have enough self-discipline. This anxiety can create a negative feedback loop: each time you tell yourself you don’t have enough discipline, it can increase the level of anxiety, which makes it harder to write and reinforces the narrative that you don’t have enough self-discipline.

I don’t know how much self-discipline you have and I admit that most people would benefit from increasing their self-discipline, but all the same, I think a pragmatic and realistic approach is to ask how much you can accomplish with the self-discipline that you already have.

Rather than berating yourself for lack of self-discipline (and then retreating from your writing project), ask yourself whether there are any small steps you can take that are within your scope. If sitting down to work on the current draft of your book or article or dissertation leaves you feeling overwhelmed with stress, can you sit down to write a to-do list of tasks related to your writing project? Can you do some free-writing about your concerns or your hopes for the project? Can you find any low-hanging fruit related to the project that you can accomplish—for example, maybe you wanted to find the page number for a quotation you’re using or correct a reference in the list of works cited. Maybe the challenge is just to open the file in which your work is saved—if that feels like a challenge, then do it, and chalk it down as an accomplishment on which you can build. Today, just open the file. Tomorrow, open the file, and find on typographic error to fix. The next day, do the same, or maybe find two errors.

If you’re battling significant emotional blocks—if anxiety overwhelms you when you sit to write—don’t turn it into a massive pitched battle where you beat yourself up to face the anxiety for hour after hour, instead (to continue the battle metaphor), strike quickly and retreat: pick one small task that can be quickly accomplished and then sit back to celebrate your small victory.  In the long run, each small victory reduces the larger task, each small victory also reminds you that you can make progress, and, with time and repetition (and maybe a little luck), these small victories can reduce some of the anxieties surrounding the project and even build a little confidence. 

Don’t overwork

Writing takes imagination and concentration. When those operate effectively for you, you can accomplish a tremendous amount in a few hours.  And, often, if you try to work more than a few hours, imagination and concentration become less effective.  You don’t need to write eight hours a day to have success as a writer. Indeed many successful writers in and out of academia, only spend three to four hours a day writing.  If things are going smoothly, it’s quite possible for a writer to write over 1000 words in an hour.  Those 1000 words might need revision, but if you can write 1000 words in an hour, you can complete a book draft in 100 (good) hours or less. If you write two good hours each day, that’s a book draft completed in 50 days.

Effective writing need not be a torturous grind; it can be a rapid outpouring of ideas.  And the more you recognize that self-discipline is not the most important concern, the easier it is to look for more important concerns, like developing ideas that you want to put on the page, and finding words that help you express those ideas.

Conclusion

Writing takes effort—consistent effort over time—which requires self-discipline. Overcoming writing blocks, however, is not predominantly a question of self-discipline. If you think the answer is more self-discipline, you create stress that is antithetical to the imaginative intellectual freedom that is the most important characteristic of the writer and scholar.  Writing blocks are built of anxiety and a self-critical idea that more self-discipline is the answer builds anxiety and distracts you from the focus on the ideas that could be driving you.  Yes, it’s important to have self-discipline enough to sit down and try to write, but it is far more important to have ideas that you want to write about. Self-discipline does not create such ideas, for all that it is crucial in putting the ideas on the page. Don’t work harder; work imaginatively and easily. If you have writer’s block, don’t just try harder, instead look for ways to develop a writing practice that takes effort but also feels relatively easy.

Dealing with writer’s block, tip 5: Principles for a healthy writing practice

When I started this series, my plan was to offer suggestions for dealing with specific anxieties, such as the fear of rejection, or the belief that writing is inherently unpleasant.  Such specific anxieties deserve attention: approaching them in the right way can reduce their negative emotional impact and thus reduce barriers to writing. However, I realized that such suggestions need to be part of a framework that offers a larger vision of a positive writing practice, not only some sense of how to deal with the negatives.  This realization led to my third tip, in which I argued that writing is a process that can be enjoyable, despite its frustrations, in the same way that other skilled activities are also enjoyable, despite their frustrations, difficulties, and demands. In this post, I consider the overarching concern for a writer struggling with a writing block, which is to generate a good relationship with the work.

The search for a positive writing practice

I can’t fit all the ideas I have about a positive writing practice into one post. There are many different issues to consider. Here, I look at some of the basic principles that guide positive writing practices, starting with the basic principle that it is possible to have a positive writing practice. 

Find something that you care about

Part of the answer to having a positive writing practice is to do something that you care about. For a scholar or academic, the desire to understand things better and to answer questions provides a strong motivation (at least for those who pursue research questions that interest them). If you care, that provides motivation to help deal with the inevitable difficulties.

Many scholars, especially early in their career, come to believe the common critiques of academia that research is disconnected from the real world, and that because the audience for the work is small, therefore the work is unimportant. A full refutation of these critiques might be an essay in itself. Here, I will argue, on the one hand, that the relevance and importance of a work are not always obvious to a large audience, and that the value of work is not measured only by the size of the audience.

If you don’t care about your work—if you don’t think it’s interesting or important—that’s a heavy burden that may well contribute to writing blocks. Many scholars who have come to doubt the value of their work have also lost sight of the motivations that initially inspired them, so if you suffer from such doubt, it can be valuable to look back to your initial motivations.  But dealing with this specific problem—loss of interest in your work—is one of the writing blocks that I hope to address individually.  Here, I only want to emphasize that having positive motivation is central to positive practice.

Care for your health, both physical and mental

Part of developing a practice that is healthy and sustainable is to remember that the practice should be positive, healthy, and sustainable. What is fun is not always healthy and sustainable, and what is healthy and sustainable is not always enjoyable, but the ideal sweet spot for a writing practice (or any practice) is to be both healthy and enjoyable.  A positive practice will reinforce itself over time by delivering positive rewards greater than the investment of effort and difficulty necessary to maintain the practice. 

Practice takes effort and persistence

It takes effort to be a good writer, just as it takes effort to excel in any skilled activity.  The work of a writer may not be too physically demanding, but the intellectual demands are large, both in developing ideas that are worth expressing, and in expressing those ideas. A scholarly analysis of some question or body of evidence takes time and effort, both to execute planned steps of analysis and to attempt to deal with any surprises that may come up.  And writing out a description of the research and its conclusions so that others can understand  is also difficult. (Effort invested in writing about research often helps develop thinking about he research, so the analysis and the writing are not entirely independent.)

Persistence is needed to keep going in the face of difficulties, which inevitably arise.  A good practice is not free from difficulties—indeed, one characteristic of positive practice experiences is the element of challenge and the possibility of failure (based on Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow). One aspect of a healthy practice, however, is that difficulties are not always unpleasant to deal with.

Practice involves activities that might seem boring to an outsider

Often practice demands activities that individually dull, but because of the interest in the overall outcome, these efforts do not seem overly onerous, even if sometimes tedious. In the best circumstances, dealing with tedious issues feels rewarding because of the progress towards a desired goal. An athlete in training may find individual drills or exercises tedious, but will enthusiastically engage for their role in developing skill and ability. A musician might find playing scales and arpeggios boring, but will enthusiastically engage because those tasks will facilitate the more enjoyable goals of playing much-loved music. A scholarly writer may dislike the work of matching specific style guidelines, but that work facilitates publication.

Imagine a hypothetical Scrabble player who wants to be competitive at a high level. In order to win games, they start practicing. One element of that practice, of course, is playing games of Scrabble against opponents (friends on social media, for example). Presumably, this hypothetical Scrabble competitor enjoys playing Scrabble, but despite any general enjoyment, playing many practice games takes time that might be spent doing other things, and the more games played, the better the chance that some are frustrating (bad luck drawing tiles), or boring (a slow opponent, or one who is no challenge). Beyond playing games, our hypothetical player might also choose to spend time studying a Scrabble dictionary or other lists of words. To me, studying a Scrabble dictionary seems tedious and dull, but to the enthusiastic player, the motivation to succeed might turn the study into an activity in which they engage enthusiastically.

In my own experience as a writer and editor, I definitely do things that many people would find boring (beyond writing itself, of course), such as studying style manuals and references on grammar, or, as part of the process of writing, rewriting and revising the same sentence or phrase several times with slight variations in word choice or structure. At times, I find these things tedious or boring, too, but I persist because I want to get better as a writer and editor and these skills are at the heart of my professional work. This occasional tedium, however, is not constant because I enjoy the challenges of writing well and helping others write well.

A healthy practice built on positive motivations will have its difficulties and frustrations, but many aspects of that practice that seem boring or unpleasant, will not seem nearly as boring if they are part of a healthy and positive practice. Often that which seems boring to the outsider is calming and comforting to the practitioner who is absorbed in the task.

Practice is regular

Part of the emotional reward of a regular practice is the sense of engaging in something that is comfortable through familiarity. For me, writing has that comfort: despite all the frustrations I often feel when writing, I know from experience that I can become absorbed in the work and have an hour or two pass with my attention entirely focused on the exploration of some idea and ways to express that idea for others. The hour doesn’t really pass enjoyably—when things are going well, it’s more an excitement or exhilaration or hope than fun—but it is a positive experience. When things are going well, as a writer, I also feel like I’m doing something worthwhile, in the sense that I’m working to forward my career, and that I’m doing something that might help other people have more success in their lives.  These remembered emotions flavor all my work as a writer, making it a task that offers some emotional comfort despite the necessary effort.  

This comfort grows with regularity. If I stop writing for a while—even a few days—the comfort is reduced as difficult questions of where to focus my efforts arise.

Practices are not only a matter of the intellect or behavior—they are also matters of physiology and neurophysiology: practice shapes our physical manifestation as we build physiological structures (including neurological structures) that support the behavior. If we write by hand or type on a keyboard, our body builds structures that make writing/typing easier. If we use our imagination around some topic, the neurological system that supports that activity is used and enhanced as a result of use. Regular use of a physiological system builds it; lack of use lets the system decay.

Good practice is disciplined and persistent but also gentle: It pushes just hard enough

A good practice pushes to the limits of the practitioner in one way or another. As mentioned above, it takes effort. A practice doesn’t build to success without seriously pushing. Writing isn’t ever going to be very easy, though there may be some writing tasks that come relatively easily.  On the large scale, if you’re trying to get better as a writer, that means trying things that are difficult and/or unfamiliar in order to build your skill set—even if “unfamiliar” only means trying to find a better way to phrase things than your last draft. 

But at the same time that it needs to firmly push forward, a practice needs to be sufficiently gentle that you can go back to it with a sense of comfort. There is a world of difference between thinking “last time I wrote, I got a bit frustrated,” and “last time I wrote, it was painful.”  If writing is consistently painful to you, that’s naturally going to build emotional resistance.  For a good practice, it’s important to keep healthy, and that means respecting limits, both emotional and physical.

Conclusion

To write well and to have a good experience as a writer, it’s valuable to develop a healthy practice—a practice that calls upon you for regular effort. The practice helps you develop written works and also helps you develop your skill and comfort working as a writer. A healthy practice pushes at your limits but not so far as to cause long-term harm. It pushes enough to promote growth without pushing so far as to cause damage.  A careful balance needs to be maintained at the edge of your ability, so that you can gain the benefit of a flow activity without suffering traumatizing injury (whether emotional or physical).  For writers dealing with emotional writing blocks, a healthy practice builds gently by accepting current limits and trying to expand areas of comfort. If you are dealing with emotional writing blocks, you can help ourself by focusing on the goal of creating a healthy and postive writing practice.

Dealing with writer’s block, tip 4: Facing fear of rejection

For many people, fear of rejection is a big barrier to writing. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t have any fear of rejection, but with the right approach, you might be able to reduce or manage that fear more effectively, thus reducing the block to writing. Fear of rejection is, in fact, quite reasonable in many circumstances.  I am going to argue, however, that you want to try to contextualize that fear in order to limit it.

Not all writing involves rejection

There are, speaking loosely, three distinct main purposes for writing: memory, development of ideas, and communication. Of these three, only one—communication—is subject to rejection. When you’re writing to aid memory or to develop ideas, the writing is not for anyone else, and therefore the question of rejection isn’t really relevant, and therefore, fear of rejection ought not be a significant issue.

Of course, saying that one “ought not” have a certain emotion is pretty poor advice. People don’t just turn emotions on or off at will, especially not significant fears or anxieties that are strong enough to interfere with writing. In this post, I’m going to suggest thinking about writing with respect to these three basic purposes, and trying, at times, to focus on the two kinds of writing that don’t involve the possibility of rejection.

Dividing up your writing process

In the end, you probably want to give your writing to other people—if you didn’t, fear of rejection could hardly be a problem. By dividing up your writing process to attend to the non-communicative dimensions of writing, you can give yourself space to work without fear of rejection immediately looming. 

Generally, this calls for a more expansive and practice-oriented view of writing: rather than writing focused on the final product that you share with others, write as an exercise—as a way to build skill and to experiment with different possibilities. If you always write while thinking of the possible response of other people, your attention is taken away from the ideas that most motivate you, and can weigh on you emotionally. But writing doesn’t just have to be about sharing, especially not in the early stages of any specific process.  When you’re just beginning a project—when a final draft is potentially months or even years away (if you’re writing a book-length work, especially)—concern for future readers can take a back seat to building skill and exploring ideas and modes of expression.

The exploration of ideas is a strong positive motivation for many. (If exploring ideas doesn’t motivate you, that’s a different barrier to writing than fear of rejection, one that requires a separate discussion.) Writing can be a tool for exploring an idea in a fashion similar to an artist or an architect making initial study sketches of their work.  The artist’s early sketches provide the artist feedback on issues of composition and appearance—they’re not for the rest of the world, they are for the artist’s own introspective processes. 

When approached this way, writing out a theory that seems flawed leads to curiosity about how to fx the theory. And writing a weak explanation leads to questions and attempts to provide a better explanation. In this mode of writing, attention isn’t on future readers of the work, but rather on finding answers are to unanswered questions, and to new questions that arise in the thought process. To be sure, this exploration of ideas can be frustrating because it’s almost always possible to find new questions, but if you’re driven by your interest in and curiosity about the subject you’re studying and writing about, then new questions aren’t terrible—they often open new ways of looking at old ideas. (Letting new questions constantly derail focus on a current project is a separate kind of writing block related to dealing with uncertainty, but that’s a separate issue from fear of rejection.)

Writing Exercise 1: Breaking up the process

[An exercise is an attempt to explore something and to develop skill. Like the musician’s scales or the athlete’s practices, it’s not meant to be the product in itself, but rather a tool to develop skill. This exercise can provide value both as a thought experiment, and as an exercise that builds the skill of putting ideas into words/sentences/paragraphs on the page.]

In your experience, are there any parts of the writing process during which you’re not thinking about the people who will read it? Which parts?

Have you ever written anything without a fear of rejection? A journal or diary? To-do lists? E-mail? Social media posts? What is the difference between writing that triggers fear of rejection and writing that does not?

Different layers of rejection fear

In some cases, writers fear multiple potential sources of rejection.  There’s the editor at the publishing house or journal.  There’s the larger audience. There are friends and family who might disdain or disrespect the work. For some, there are fears based on past experience—the teacher who criticized so harshly last year or the year before.

Additionally, fear of rejection may have multiple dimensions and aspects. There is, of course, the direct fear of rejection—you say “will you accept it;” they say “no”—but there are also fears of what follows rejection, such as: your efforts will have been wasted; you won’t get the job or the promotion; your career will be finished; your parents will be upset; your romantic flame will be unimpressed; your spouse will complain you’re a failure; etc. 

As with any anxiety-related writing block, fear of rejection may seem worse when left unaddressed than when analyzed. By analyzing your own fears of rejection, you may be able to separate out those that make perfect sense (the editor at the publishing house will turn you down) from others that are less reasonable (the effort was wasted; your career is finished). Analyzing potential bad outcomes can trigger some anxiety, but if you make the fears explicit, often there is comfort in being able to address concrete specific issues rather than just facing the big undefined fear that things will go wrong.

Writing exercise 2: What are your rejection fears?

Part a: Who might reject your work? Who do you fear will reject your work? When you’re writing, do you ever feel anxiety that your work will be rejected or criticized by someone who will not actually see that work (a former teacher or professor, for example), or who will not be in a position to impact you (a professor who might see the work, but won’t be in a position to create problems)?

Part b: Why is getting your work rejected bad? Because of the immediate emotional impact of rejection? Because of the impact on your career? What are the potential consequences of rejection that contribute to your fear? Which make you most nervous?

Writing blocks and rejection by default

People with anxiety-related writing blocks often don’t write at all, which can lead to rejection by default: if you write nothing and submit nothing, your work can’t be rejected, but you can suffer any or all the negative consequences of rejection, along with any emotional burden of having an unfinished project.  

Getting rejected carries an emotional sting, and it is often accompanied by harsh criticism or some show of disrespect. But submitting nothing at all is no protection. Indeed, it is reasonable to expect that many people in your life—especially those who love you—will be more frustrated with and critical of your failure to submit than of a rejection.  Sometimes, even rejected is accompanied by positive and useful feedback or support. The editor at the journal or publishing house may suggest a different journal or offer encouragement. Reviews may include useful feedback, even if not all the feedback is helpful. The professor who rejects a work has a better reason to support your continued work on that same project than to support you if you submit nothing.

The pain of rejection is sharp and immediate, while the pain of facing a writing block continues as long as you retain the hope of finishing, and sometimes even after. 

I don’t like to focus on negative motivations, but if the fear of rejection rises, try to focus on the fear of rejection by default—focus instead on the things that happen if you don’t write, submit work, and risk rejection. [Ideally, you can learn to write from more positive motivations, but sometimes fear of rejection can be countered by fear of inaction.]

Conclusion

Fear of rejection often interferes with writing processes, and because it’s a realistic and reasonable concern, one cannot simply ignore the risk that comes with trying to communicate and share your ideas with another person. However, blocks associated with fear of rejection can be limited in a few ways. First, remember that part of the writing process is an exploration—a way for you to develop your ideas and build skill as a writer. Second, analyze your fears of rejection: separate those that are realistic from those that are not. Finally, if the fear of rejection raises it’s head, think of the danger of rejection by default—the rejection that comes from not writing.

Dealing with writer’s block, Tip 3: Learn to like writing

Yesterday, I saw an internet post from a writer saying, “I’m an early career, tenure-track professor, and I hate writing.”  One commenter responded: “I like doing analysis, but I hate hate hate writing.”  If you hate writing, that’s a big block. It drains motivation; it interferes with focus. It leads to procrastination. My preliminary response was to stress the value in recognizing and identifying the specific reasons that the person hates writing (see my previous posts in this blog). The original post author responded by noting a few different specific concerns that triggered the hatred of writing—feelings of inadequacy, fear of rejection—and another commenter added other specific concerns—uncertainty about how to proceed, technical difficulties with structure, emotional and technical difficulties with conventions.  All of these specific concerns can contribute to make writing unpleasant, but none of them are the totality of writing. 

In this post, I argue that you can learn to like writing, and if you do, that appreciation and positive emotion will help carry you through difficulties and frustrations related to writing.  The diagnostic analysis of your writing process is useful in developing a practice that you can like, not only because you can identify and eliminate or reduce problems, but also because you can focus your attention on aspects of the process that are interesting and potentially enjoyable.

“I Hate Writing; Writing Sucks.”

Lots of people say this. The internet post I saw yesterday struck me because, to continue my series of recent posts about getting past writer’s block, I was already planning for my next post to look at the idea that writing sucks, because the general dislike of writing is an emotional writing block for many.  The idea that writing generally sucks is a barrier that can be dispelled by using the diagnostic analysis that I have discussed previously: when you look at it closely, it’s not the writing, as a whole, that is unpleasant, but rather specific aspects of it, and specific responses to it.  If you hate dealing with punctuation, for example, that is one specific aspect of writing you don’t like, but writing is not only punctuation. If you hate writing because you fear rejection, well, rejection isn’t part of writing itself, it’s something that happens after you’re done writing.

If you think that writing sucks or if you hate writing, and you also need to write for your career, it’s worth trying to translate that general “writing sucks” into a more specific diagnosis. But making a diagnosis and developing plans to addresses problems is only the negative half of the picture. To reduce or eliminate a general sense that writing sucks, it’s important to see a positive dimension, too. And, though you may doubt, there is a positive side to the task of writing.

Can Writing Be Pleasurable?

Writing may be hard, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily sucks.  There are lots of things that are very difficult that are also pleasurable—hobbyists and amateurs work hard to excel at their chosen skill, not for financial or career rewards but rather because of the emotional reward. An amateur athlete will experience difficulty to excel in their sport and also enjoy the performance. An amateur musician will endure the frustrations of practice to enjoy the pleasure of performing music. Arts and crafts all involve some difficulties and frustrations, require significant investment of effort to be any good, but, in return, offer hours of positive activity as well as satisfaction from producing something beautiful.  For all of these activities, it’s worth noting that the balance between frustration and pleasure shifts as skill increases: the beginner struggles to create something simple, while the skilled expert creates something of beauty with relative ease (emphasizing the word “relative”).  Writing is an activity of the same sort: it is difficult and frustrating, but it can also offer the emotional rewards of creating something satisfactory (a written work that is well received by an audience) and the immediate rewards of engaging in a focused practice (being in the zone, as might be said colloquially, or being in “flow,” to use the idea of Csikszentmihalyi).

What Is Writing For?

You’ll struggle to find any pleasure in writing if the only reason you write is because someone told you you have to write.  Many of us learn to write in school when writing is only an unpleasant task forced upon us, after which we are criticized harshly. If you don’t want to write, writing that “what I did on summer vacation” paper may be pretty miserable. And worse so in high school, if you’re called upon to write about books that you didn’t really want to read either. Personally, I hated writing in high school and in college. It was only in grad school that my feelings about writing shifted as my ability to write improved.

But writing in’t taught to torture school students; it’s taught because it’s a powerful tool. There are, as I see it, three main purposes for writing: to aid memory, to work out and develop ideas, and to communicate with others.  Thinking about writing as serving at least one of these three purposes can shift your relationship with writing.  Instead of just writing because of some outward obligation, you can use it as a tool to serve your own purposes.

Memory

Writing to aid memory—from writing a shopping list for the market, to taking notes in a lecture, to taking notes of research observations—doesn’t feel like writing for an assignment. Indeed, that kind of writing often isn’t what people think of as “writing,”—it’s “just” taking notes or something of the sort—but that kind of writing still exercises many of the same skills as more formal writing, especially the skill of putting ideas into words. And many people have enjoyed writing down memories—diaries, journals, blogs, and social media posts are all forms of writing used to preserve memories.

Development of Ideas

Writing as an aid to analysis and development of ideas—akin to a mathematician working through a problem on scratch paper, or an architect or artist drawing study sketches of a project—is sometimes overlooked, especially by those who think they hate writing. As I mentioned above, there was a comment that said “I like to analyze but I hate to write.” But if writing is a tool for analysis and you like analysis, isn’t there a place to like writing as part of the larger process of analysis (recognizing that writing to work out an idea—on “scratch paper,” so to speak—is not quite the same as writing something for to be submitted for review)?  

The idea that “writing is thinking” is often expressed (I have seen it in multiple places, but the one I can remember offhand in the book The Craft of Research from University of Chicago Press), and many people enjoy thinking and exploring ideas.  Of course, saying that writing is thinking gives a very different purpose to writing than writing to answer someone else’s questions. It also shifts the view of the process: some writing is just an exploration that is not meant to be the final work but rather a tool for learning more, like a painter making initial study sketches for a project.

Communication

Writing is a tool for communication and many people like communicating but hate writing. A lot of writers that I have worked with get stuck because instead of focusing on the task of communication—what ideas do you want to share?—they focus on the task of putting sentences and paragraphs together on a page, which fraught with all the possibility of error in spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc.  Thinking about the technical difficulties interferes with thinking about the interesting stuff you want to share with people. You may be passionate to educate people about some topic, but if you’re worried about spelling, punctuation, etc., as well as the response of someone who might be hostile (a reviewer, a difficult professor), then it’s easy to lose sight of the underlying interest that drives a project.

Below, I offer an exercise comparing speaking with writing. It is instructive to compare speaking with writing because most people like speaking, or at least feel comfortable speaking, even if they dislike writing. Why do people like speaking? Among other reasons, it’s because speaking allows them to build connections with other people, to share ideas with other people, and to get other people to learn things that they care about. The process of writing takes on a very different emotional character when you’re focusing on sharing an idea with someone who will be interested, even enthusiastic about your work.  

It’s reasonable to give some attention to possible criticism of your work, but that shouldn’t keep you from thinking about the positive response you want to create. Some writers get stuck thinking about all the people who would complain; others get motivated by thinking about people who would be interested in or even excited by their ideas. In the practice of writing, think about writing to someone who would be enthusiastic about your work, rather than thinking about writing to someone who will complain about your punctuation.

Exercise: Writing and Speaking

How do you feel about speaking? Do you hate to speak? Do you like to speak? In what situations do you like to speak, and what situations do you dislike it? Do you like writing less than you like speaking?

What are the differences between writing and speaking?

What are the similarities between writing and speaking?

Other Positive Dimensions of Writing

There’s more to like in writing than just these three purposes. I mentioned earlier how writing offers the challenge of becoming good at a skilled task, and of practicing that task at a high level, which can be satisfying or even pleasurable. According to the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, such challenges are at the heart of the “flow” experience, which, for many, offer the best moments of their lives. I will not discuss this potential here, however. In other posts, I have mentioned how writing can provide a certain refuge from other difficulties. I’m not arguing that writing is free from difficulties and frustrations, only that writing offers benefits, including emotional ones.

Conclusion

If you want to get past writer’s block, it’s important to keep in mind that writing, despite its difficulties and frustrations, is something that has enjoyable and engaging aspects. If you focus exclusively on the worst parts of writing, your aversion will be strengthened. Instead, focus on the best parts of writing—the ability to explore and share ideas, the challenges of developing skill—to get more positive motivation.

Dealing with writer’s block, Tip 2: Sort your concerns

People who face anxiety-related writing blocks experience a range of different emotional concerns, and  often it is the combination of different concerns that lead to a writing block (See note on writing blocks, at bottom of post).  When fears/doubts/anxieties come in groups, the emotional response is stronger, and it becomes harder to see any of the concerns individually, which makes it harder to eliminate or reduce any of them.  In this post, I’m going to do a rough typology of different fears, and suggest and exercise to sort out concerns so that you can begin to untangle the variety of fears that trigger the emotional response that becomes a writing block. A typology can help in sorting out different anxieties, and can help in making addressing specific anxieties so as to reduce their impact on the writing process.

Why a typology?

As I have previously argued, sorting out different types of writing-related concerns is a good preliminary step toward making plans that can reduce those anxieties and limit their impact on your writing practice.  The typology here is offered as a tool to help distinguish different anxieties that you might experience. It should not be viewed as intellectually rigorous, but rather as a loose guide to identifying and distinguishing your own issues. It is not meant to restrict or limit your concerns—it’s possible that you have concerns that I do not include in my typology—but rather to help you analyze those concerns, so that each concern can be addressed individually rather than en masse, making it possible to begin to make plans for responding to, and possibly eliminating or reducing the concern.

A Typology of Writers’ Fears

  • Fear of rejection (“They won’t accept my work.”)
  • Fear of failure (“I won’t be able to do what I should do”)
  • fear of ridicule (“They will mock and mistreat me”)
  • fear of personal inadequacy (“I’m not good enough”)
  • fear of suffering (“writing sucks”)
  • fear of specific people (“my professor/parents/etc. is so mean!”)

These different types are not mutually exclusive; many come together, as, for example, with a hypothetical cruel teacher/professor who not only grades a work down but also makes cutting comments about your lack of ability.  Recognizing the different dimensions of the anxiety allows a writer the chance to separate out the different dimensions of the criticism, seeing both those that are accurate (the actual errors and weaknesses in the work) from those that are not (a general critique on ability or character that is contrary to evidence of previous experience). 

Realistic and unrealistic anxieties

There is one criterion that deserves its own sorting, separate from the typology, and that is the division between those anxieties that are realistic and relevant and those that are not.  Some anxieties are entirely realistic and therefore very difficult to dispel, most notably the concern that a work will not be accepted. While you may be able to reduce your emotional response to that situation, it’s a real and realistic concern: your work may not be accepted. It’s not a concern that is casually dismissed (though you don’t want to focus on it!). By contrast, emotional difficulties relating to a person in your past—a former teacher, your parents—are not relevant or realistic (in the sense that they are not current, even if the emotional issues remain). It may not be easy to set aside that internal critic that you learned from your past, but it is certainly realistic to do so: someone from your past is not going to read your present work. Concern yourself with the people to whom you will submit your work in the future, not those to whom you submitted it in the past. If you focus on the realistic present concerns and thereby limit or eliminate unrealistic and irrelevant anxieties, the overall level of anxiety is reduced and the more realistic fears that remain may be more easily negotiated.

Exercise 1: How realistic are your worst worries?

[Exercises are for practice, not for performance. They are to learn about yourself and your strengths and weaknesses, and also to increase your skill and ease in putting ideas into words on the page (i.e., writing). Writing an exercise like this will help develop your writing skill generally, which will support your writing in more formal efforts. Don’t worry about making mistakes; just do it for the exercise. Try, but don’t try hard. This exercise is not about pushing your limits of tolerance; it’s about doing something relatively easy to get the sense that not all writing is a difficult battle for precision.]

List some of your writing-related anxieties. For each item in the list, how realistic is that concern?  Are there any concerns that stem from previous experiences that have no bearing on your future performance (e.g., a professor or teacher you no longer work with)?

Goals of this exercise:

  • 1. Put ideas into words on the page (write something!)
  • 2. Identify realistic anxieties for planning purposes
  • 3. Identify unrealistic anxieties for mental health purposes
  • 4. To write without fear of making a mistake
  • 5. To write with minimal effort

To be avoided:

  • 1. Getting stressed over doing the exercise
  • 2. Working hard

Sorting Obstacles

If you struggle with anxieties related to writing—struggle to the point that anxiety significantly interferes with your ability to write—then there’s a good chance that you’ll feel a lot of anxiety when trying to list your anxieties.  Thinking about worrisome things is often a trigger for anxiety, so the exercise I’ve described above could be unpleasant or even counter-productive. If you feel it so, please be kind to yourself and gentle: you’re not going to reduce anxiety by self-criticism.  While the exercise might trigger anxiety, it might also help to calm it. Often, sorting through a group of problems, and seeing the issues clearly can also provide some comfort: no longer are you facing a massive, indistinct monster, instead you have a swarm of lesser issues, some of which you can deal with effectively.  

In the long run, sorting out different obstacles is a preliminary to making plans of action to address those different obstacles. Often, a sorting process of this sort will also lead to some ideas for how to work more effectively. One a problem has been named, solutions are often implicit.  For example, if you recognize a specific cause of anxiety as being related to an unrealistic concern—your fear of your high school writing teacher who won’t be seeing what you’re writing now, for example—it is pretty obvious that the solution is to stop worrying about that person (of course, knowing that you should stop worrying about an unrealistic anxiety does not immediately eliminate or reduce that concern or stop you from worrying, but at least if that specific fear rears its head, you can remind yourself that its not relevant and perhaps even focus your attention elsewhere).

Exercise 2: Where do your fears fit in the typology?

What are the fears that impact your writing process?  Are they concerns about how other people will treat you, or are they concerns about your own shortcomings, or both? How do the issues that block you fit into the typology? Do you have any fears/doubts/anxieties that impact your writing but don’t fit into any of the types described above?

This exercise is, again, more about the process of putting words on the page and the insights you might gain during that process than it is about what you write.  It’s also about engaging in writing without any pressure for any outcome.

Conclusion

My plan for future posts is to discuss different specific concerns about writing and how to address some of them to reduce or, when possible, eliminate, related anxieties. This post gets a start on that process by identifying the specific concerns to which a writer must respond.

Note on Writing Blocks:

As discussed here, “writing blocks” are emotional/intellectual issues that interfere with the writing of people who are otherwise, organized and diligent. Laziness is not a writer’s block—if you don’t try, that’s not a writing block. Competing demands are not writing blocks (in the sense discussed in this post, at least): if you have to care for children that’s not a writing block (though a writing block might lead to you say that your kids need all your available time when you could cut out an hour or 30 minutes for writing if it weren’t for the writing-related anxieties).

Dealing with Writer’s Block, Tip 1: Identify the Causes

To deal with and reduce or eliminate writing blocks, an important first step is to identify the causes of the block.  Until that has been accomplished, it’s difficult to make any plans for change.

I’m going to focus on writing blocks related to fears, doubts, and anxieties. In my experience, writing blocks spring from two main sources: those that spring from fears and anxieties and those that spring from dislike (or even hatred) of the project (See note on writing blocks, below).  Of course fears and anxieties can lead to hatred, and hatred can lead to fears and anxieties, so these two sorts of writing blocks are not entirely independent of each other. But to the extent that a writing block springs from dislike or disinterest in the project (and that dislike or disinterest does not have root causes in any fear, doubt, or anxiety), I don’t have much to say about it, beyond “choose to do it, or choose to walk away.”  I can’t think of any exercises or practice that would make someone interested in work that they hate.

But for writing blocks that have roots in fears, doubts, and anxieties, the writing blocks can be lessened or entirely removed through the development of a good practice and the use of writing exercises.

Exercise and Healthy Practice

In the long run, success as a writer comes from a regular practice of writing. By and large, people who publish regularly are people who work at writing on a regular basis.  Therefore, if you want to write, you should be thinking about how to build a regular practice of writing.  There are regular practices that are built on negative emotions, and this kind of practice—a merciless “try harder or you’ll never be good enough” mindset—can lead to growing emotional barriers. If you push yourself to suffer through a task, it would hardly be surprising if you developed anxieties around that task. 

My basic approach to reducing or eliminating writing blocks sits in the context of building a healthy practice motivated by positive ideals. As you develop a healthy practice, many anxieties and fears can fall away, reducing emotional barriers, even if some anxieties may remain.

Central in developing a healthy writing practice that reduces anxiety is to engage in writing exercises. The crucial factor of a writing exercise is that it is viewed as a trial aimed at building skill, not a final product for presentation. In such exercises, early errors are expected as part of the process of improvement. The concern is for going through the process.  A writing exercise can be viewed as a parallel to a musician playing scales: the scales are not practiced for their own sake, but to help build skill that can be applied to later performances.

To some extent, the key here is shifting focus from product to practice: rather than creating a good written work, create a good writer. In the long run, a good writer will be able to create many good written works. In this context any time you write anything—lists, emails, texts, journal entries, as well as more formal pieces of writing—you’re practicing the general skill of writing, which is to find words to express some idea or information. 

Writing exercises, like the musician’s scales, are a private practice, and being private, it’s not necessary to be concerned with what other people would think of what you write.

Exercise 1: Identify Your Fears, Doubts, and Anxieties

If you are struggling with any sort of anxiety barrier to writing, one very useful writing exercise is to try to identify all the different fears, doubts, and anxieties.  Make a list of all the anxieties, doubts, and fears that you have related to your writing.  Be as detailed as possible. A good list of anxieties provides a starting place for a process of identifying specific concerns that can be addressed in some way. Some writing-related fears are real and can’t simply be dismissed—“It’ll get rejected,” is a very real possibility to acknowledge. Other fears are less accurate—“writing sucks; it’s torture,” isn’t accurate for all writers and is, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you tell yourself writing will be painful, you may never develop a non-painful practice.  For many writers, fears of criticism by people from their past trigger anxiety, but making these fears explicit reveals that they can be dismissed as past concerns, not present ones.

In the exercise of writing about your writing-related concerns, not only do you practice your ability to turn ideas into words on the page, but you also gain insight into your process of writing, and that insight can be used to refine and improve your practice.

A word of caution and care: An exercise of writing about anxieties can trigger anxiety, so be gentle with yourself. Spend a few minutes writing down different anxieties, doubts, or fears as a starting point.  Repeat the exercise often, but not so often that it triggers anxieties. Practice identifying your concerns.

In future work, you can focus on specific individual concerns to seek ways to eliminate or otherwise manage/reduce that concern. (I anticipate writing some future posts on dealing with specific concerns/anxieties that many writers experience.) 

Diagnosis is the first step to treatment

If you are struggling with writer’s block—if you’ve written in the past, but are getting stuck now due to anxiety that arises in the writing practice—a first step is to identify the causes of difficulty.  Many anxieties about writing can be eliminated in the process of developing a healthful, productive, and sometimes enjoyable writing practice, but only if those anxieties can be identified and addressed. Writing is always going to demand effort, and will always offer some chance of failure, so it’s never completely free of emotional challenges, but you can develop a healthy practice in part by identifying and then eliminating or reducing the unnecessary concerns.

Note on writing blocks: failure to write does not always count as a writing block. One can only have “writer’s block” if one (a) is generally responsible and self-disciplined, (b) dedicates time to trying to write, and (c) has had some success as a writer in the past.  The second condition speaks to the notion that you must already have learned to write—as demonstrated by having written successfully in the past (as a student in school, at least)–before it’s reasonable to worry about writer’s blocks. There are many things that impede writing that I would not count as writing blocks. Severe illness or injury that prevent writing are not writer’s block. Inability to schedule time to write, whether due to competing responsibilities or to laziness, is not a writer’s block.

Seeking Hope; Building Hope

I am not an optimist. I do not believe things will work out well.  Take these statements as a context for this essay about the importance of seeking (and building) hope.  In my previous post, I wrote about the elusive nature of truth and how, even in the absence of absolute, undeniable truths, it is still important and valuable to continue to seek the truth. There is a small parallel here: like truth, we benefit from seeking hope even though hope may be elusive. 

Hope is an emotion or intellectual state

Hope is an emotional/imaginative construct: it is the anticipation or even expectation of something good. When we have hope, that is a real emotional benefit. But too often, our hopes are slim and seem hugely improbable. When hopes seem too far out of reach, they are often replaced by despair and apathy.

Hopes too easily realized do little to improve emotional states: to “hope” that you can do something trivial gives little emotional boost: the “hope” that you can successfully prepare a cup of tea is not going to inspire you to carry out some other difficult task in the same way that your hopes for a good vacation may inspire you to quickly wrap up loose ends at work.

A writer ought to have big hopes (while also being realistic about them).  I was talking with a writer who said he had something important that should matter to everyone, and then immediately backtracked to ask “who am I to be so egotistical?” But a writer needs that ego.  It’s true and good for this writer to have concern that his work isn’t good enough—that concern can drive efforts to improve on weaknesses, and it’s realistic to accept that one may have weaknesses—but it’s also important that he have the hope that he can be great. Without the hope of greatness, and if you constantly tell yourself that you aren’t good enough to achieve greatness, you won’t make the effort.  Most of us won’t achieve greatness, but many or even most of us can achieve good work. But almost none of us will achieve either good work or greatness without striving for that highest level of achievement and significance that we imagine.

Speaking personally, for over a decade, I’ve been writing to help other writers. I believe that I can help other writers, and I even believe that the ideas I have to share can help the vast majority of struggling writers. But I also have to accept that my work has mostly gone unnoticed.  My blog has never had many readers; my books have never had many readers. Maybe they’re not even as good as I imagine.  All of that is true, and still I hope that I can help people who struggle to write.  Pragmatically, these two conflicting views—that I can greatly help lots of people, and that I help very few people—are both possible. It’s possible that I “could” help, even if I don’t.  Hope operates in a realm of uncertainty.  It’s possible that I could win the lottery, even though it’s very unlikely. If I focus on the possibility of winning, I will take the chance, and thus will write (or will enter the lottery). If I focus on the low probability of success, then I might not take the action.

Ignoring the probabilities

To build hope, it’s sometimes important to deny the probabilities, or even the perceived realities.  Buying a lottery ticket is a form of denying the probabilities: your lottery ticket is very unlikely to win you anything, much less a jackpot of millions. The logical choice is to pass on the lottery ticket because the expected return is less than the cast of paying.  At the same time, if the cost of entry is low, it may be worth taking a chance if for no other reason than to have some hope—as the saying goes, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Writing and other endeavors of skill share some of this dynamic: it’s good to envision greatness, even though the chance of achieving greatness is small.  Still, writing and other skilled activities have additional dimensions that shift the dynamic: although the necessary investment of effort in a writing practice is not trivial—you have to keep investing day after day—writing can offer positive returns even if you don’t hit the jackpot of becoming a rich bestseller.

Building hope

If you buy a lottery ticket, there’s nothing you can do to increase your chance of winning on that ticket, and beyond the chance of winning, there are few rewards available. Still, if we look at hope as providing an emotional boost, that in itself is something of a benefit (and, for a truly depressed person, perhaps the $2 cost of buying a lottery ticket is worth the hope temporary hope that is created).

With writing and other skilled activities, each successive attempt to write may spark some new hope. “If I try this time,” you can say to yourself, “I will get better results than last time.” With practices that depend on skill, this hope will, in the long run, be realized because practice does lead to improved skill.

While you need some hope to make the effort to write, if you invest that effort, there is a good chance that you will build more hope as you build your abilities as a writer, and as you develop new ideas that could be turned into good writing.

The more you practice, the more you build skill, and therefore the more you have reason to hope that your work will provide you some benefit (beyond any benefits you may get from the practice of writing—there are some, but that’s a subject for a separate discussion).

Continuing the Search

Hope is ephemeral; it looks to the future and when the future arrives, whether the hope is realized or not, the hope itself must pass away because it is no longer relevant. If you hope that something will happen by next Sunday, that specific hope will necessary be eliminated next Sunday, whether it is realized or denied. Therefore, it is necessary to keep revising our hopes and looking to a new potentially positive future. A skill-building practice like writing is good for building hopes because each practice session can be driven by the hope of doing something that you did not do in the previous session. Instead of feeling like work is simply a treadmill of drudgery, it is possible to view it as a ramp of hope; each new practice session may be the one in which you write your most brilliant work yet.

Without hope, life is miserable, and without hope it’s almost impossible to make life any better, because it takes some element of hope to act: if you don’t look forward to any benefit from an action, you’re unlikely to take that action. (I don’t mean this is a purely transactional sense: helping another person is a benefit for which one can hope, even without compensation for that help.)  If you despair, a practice in which you hope to build skill, and also aspire to greater goals, is one way to build a little hope to fight back against the despair.

I am not an optimist, and I believe that bad outcomes are generally likely. But when it comes to practice, I do believe that disciplined practice offers a reasonable a chance to build reasonable hopes and experience the benefit of hope rather than just suffering despair.  Practicing a skill like writing is no guarantee that things will turn out well, but a healthy practice helps build reasonable hopes for positive outcomes.

Finding comfort in writing practice 3: Finding time for ideas

[This claims to be the third in a series, but I posted the first and second on LinkedIn, to test whether posting as LinkedIn articles boosted my views.]

This is my third post in the series on finding comfort in a writing practice, and, in a way, I’m finally reaching the points that I initially wanted to make.  I started this series to help a parent I know whose writing practice has been thrown off due to child care demands. I’m not a parent, so I know the concerns of parenting only secondhand.   But I’m pretty sure that a lot of the general suggestions I made in the previous post about developing a practice are far more difficult, if not impossible, for parents. The parent of a young child may never have 15 minutes undisturbed to write, and may never be able to nail down a regular time to write. And, of course, when a parent does have time that they’re not directly caring for their children, there are pressing practical needs that will take precedence over writing—all sorts of self-care and housework. Even if there are a few minutes to write, the chances appear unexpectedly—the desired writing routine may seem out of reach.  It would be a bit facile to just say “make a commitment to your schedule.”

Although I’m not a parent, there are some points that I feel qualified to make.  These are largely ideas about a general relationship with writing and how writing fits into our lives.  In particular, what interests me is how to fit writing into the little empty spaces in out lives. Because the most important dimension of writing is the ideas that we want to express, we can actually work on our writing without actually writing, or with only a little writing.  In the long-run, completing a significant written work—a doctoral dissertation or work for publication—takes many uninterrupted hours of focused attention; I don’t want to suggest otherwise. But, in terms of building a writing practice that can provide some comfort in the moment, and that can be productive in the long run, the imaginative work that fits into the little spaces in life is extremely valuable.

Write because you’re interested, or even fascinated

Ideally, people will write about ideas that interest or fascinate them. In practice, lots of people end up working on projects that don’t interest them. That’s unfortunate, but a little outside the scope of this article, because it was inspired by someone who is interested in their work. Sometimes, however, people who have lost interest in a previously interesting project can re-ignite their interest by re-evaluating their relationship with the project, and my suggestions here might help with that.

The key here is that, if you’re interested in an idea, you’ll think about it, and thinking about your ideas makes a difference.

Visualization and imagination

Imagining how and what you’re going to do, helps you do it better.  Many of the same neural circuits that fire when you actually do something also fire when you imagine doing that thing.  Visualization doesn’t replace practice—especially not for a writer, for whom it is absolutely necessary to get words on to the page—but it can be a strong supplement to it.  For people with difficult schedules, visualization can lay a foundation for productivity by using brief moments of time to develop ideas and phrases that can later be put into writing.

It’s easy to find time for a single thought

Life is filled with moments where there is time for idle thought. Can you fill those moments with thoughts about the ideas you want to write about, or thoughts about how to express those ideas? If you’re sitting at a traffic light on your way to the grocery store, you have time to ask yourself “how would I express that idea?” Or “what is the most important conclusion I can draw from that?”  There’s time for such passing thoughts when cooking, or when doing laundry, or bathing, etc.

Thinking about what you would write, or how you could explain an idea to different people, is a way of engaging the ideas that you will ultimately write about.  Thinking about what to write helps develop ideas and can help you find phrases.  Maybe you don’t write down that thought you had while stopped at the traffic light, but maybe you get a chance to make a quick note on your cell phone while waiting on line at the grocery. And, perhaps most importantly, thinking about a subject helps keep it near the forefront of your mind.

Building patterns of thought

The more you think about an idea, the easier it becomes to call that idea to mind. The most obvious case of this is repetition: the more you repeat something—a name or a phone number or a poem, for example—the easier it is to remember it. Ideas don’t have the same fixity as the words of a poem printed in a book, but they do have some of the same continuity.  If you think about your subject today, you have a place to start thinking about that idea tomorrow.  If you don’t think about your subject for a week, then you have to search your memory for the ideas that you were thinking a week ago.

And the more you build patterns of thought, the more likely the thought will pop up in your mind spontaneously in idle moments.  An idea that you have been considering is more likely to appear in dreams than one you have not.

Geek out

Pretty much everyone knows someone who is extremely interested and absorbed in some idea, pursuit, or activity.  Such people are often mocked as geeks for their focused interest on subjects.  Whatever the interest—be it a game, or a sport, or a job, music, art, etc.—it becomes a dominating focus on a person’s attention. In academia, of course, scholars often “geek out” on their subject of study. Such focus is often derided, but the person who is focused in that way often enjoys the focus and finds meaning in it.  If you are a writer who is struggling to find time to write, and struggling to find time to attend to your work, a geek-out approach can be useful in building patterns of thought.  Focus on your interests; think about them whenever you can.  The more you do, the easier it will be to write when you do find the time.

If you’re writing fiction, think about your fictional characters and setting. If you’re writing non-fiction, think about your subject as much as possible.

Reflections in daily life

Non-fiction writers can often see traces of their subject matter in daily life.  Someone studying human behavior in a specific field of endeavor—in restaurants, for example—may not be able to go to restaurants to observe people in action, but they can still think about how people behave. Perhaps something they observe in their family will remind them of how people act in restaurants.  Or perhaps someone is studying some human characteristic—intelligence, for example—in some specific setting (restaurants, for example), and even though they may not be able to go to a restaurant, they can observe people around them—their families, people at grocery stores—and ask how intelligence (or humility, or honesty, wisdom, creativity, etc.) plays out in the situations they can observe and compare those observations with their ideas about how the characteristic of interest plays out in the specific setting that they are concerned with.

To be sure, not all non-fiction studies have reflections in daily life, but if yours does, then you can develop your thinking on the subject even if you aren’t writing.

Exercises

How would you explain your idea and your interest to your child or children? Or, more generally, how would you explain to a 5-year-old? Or a 10-year-old? Or a teenager?

What would you say you study? Why do you study it? What good is studying it?

What is your “elevator pitch” to a peer? To someone who might offer you a job? To someone who might publish your work?

Conclusion

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, schedules have been upset, and finding time to write is difficult, especially for parents who are now tasked with constant childcare. But, as I have argued in this series of articles, a positive writing practice can provide a form of comfort, offering a chance to focus on things other than the stressful state of the world.  Therefore, it would be good to be able to focus on writing, and especially on the ideas that interest people.  In this article, I have focused on the purely intellectual part of writing—the development of ideas for writing.  Thinking about what you would write if you had the time is a habit that you can develop. All it takes is a focus of attention in the spare moments when the mind wanders.  In the long run, thinking is not enough for a writer, but developing patterns of thought and developing the habit of thinking about your writing—not as an adversary, but as a fascination—can help make actual writing more effective when you find time to sit down to it.

Keeping to the heart of it: Another guitar lesson for my sister

My previous post was inspired by my sister asking me for tips to teach herself guitar and the parallels between what I wanted to say to her and what I would say to a writer/researcher who was struggling to develop an effective writing/research practice.  I’m going to keep down that same path here, while, perhaps, stretching the parallel a little too far.

Keeping the beat; Keeping to the heart of the matter

One of the suggestions I made was that she work on keeping the beat. “Rhythm is everything,” I wrote.  On reflection, I feel like this is true in two ways, though at the time, I was only thinking of one of those meanings.

The first meaning is about music alone (not writing, at least as I was thinking of it): Music depends on rhythm more than it depends on tonality. So, to my sister and any other aspiring guitarist, I would say that getting the rhythm right (especially the strumming/picking) is more important than getting the notes right. Ultimately, of course, you want to get both right. But the question is how to learn and how to learn effectively. Because rhythm is at the heart of music—because music isn’t really music until there is a rhythm—it is the thing that the musician most needs to get right.  With respect to my sister, in particular, I know that she has solid command of the tonal dimension as a singer, and as a singer she is also possessed of sufficient internal rhythm to sing with other people. Given this, it makes even more sense for her to learn rhythm first and foremost—that’s what will enable her to accompany herself, even if she’s only strumming once for each new chord.

The parallel to writing is a little tenuous here—what’s most important in writing is not rhythm, but idea. But at the same time, it’s a reasonable parallel to remind the writer that the crucial element in their creation is the idea that they want to communicate.  This is what the writer needs to practice to develop skill as a writer, but also to develop a personal voice.

Practice and motivation

Speaking generally, practice is better when you focus on what’s really important.  In music, superior rhythm will make better music, and better music generally contributes to more enjoyment of the practice. In writing, superior focus on ideas will be generally lead to a more positive experience—it’s more enjoyable to develop an idea than it is to get bogged down in concern for grammar, for example.

Focusing on priorities can help in dealing with the real difficulties that practices face. This can be particularly true in areas of complexity that are relatively low priority.  In playing the guitar, it is easy to see the strings and the frets as complicated, and spend a lot of energy thinking about mastering that complexity. These things are important, it’s true, but there’s a reason that right-handed guitars put the fretboard in the left hand: the real priority, and the real difficulty is in the action of the righthand, which controls the rhythm. In writing, a lot of people get stuck worrying about grammar—grammar is important, often complex, and one of the first things schools teach about writing. But grammar isn’t at the heart of writing. Ideas are. And people worrying about getting grammar right can lose touch with the ideas that motivated them in the first place, and that can lead to the practice becoming tedious and boring, rather than a way to do something that feels important. To judge whether the grammar or the ideas are more important, think of what is possible for an author: can an author have an editor to fix bad grammar? Yup. Can an author have someone else come up with ideas? Not ethically, at least.

The rhythm of practice

The second meaning of “rhythm is everything,” that occurred to me was that the larger life rhythms of practice are also crucial.

Practice is going to develop better if it’s done regularly and frequently (but without overdoing it).  Given the neurophysiological component of playing guitar (or any other practice, really, including writing), it’s not surprising to think about how practicing every day, or almost every day, will have greater efficacy than occasional practice.

For my sister to become a good guitarist—good enough that she can enjoy playing—she really needs to play a little bit every day. Fifteen minutes a day, seven days a week (totaling one hour, forty-five minutes) is going to do more to help her growth as a guitarist than three dedicated hours each Saturday.

Writing, too, benefits more from regular daily practice than it does from occasional intensive bursts.  There is a real obvious physiological component to writing that practice will help develop—whether you write by hand, by typing on a keyboard, or by dictation (using voice recognition, perhaps), there is a physical element that can become easier with practice.  I never studied typing, for example, but I’ve been using a QWERTY keyboard for decades and there is a certain physiological familiarity that helps me write with far greater ease than writing by hand or using a touch-screen interface. The ease of using the tool that develops with practice allows greater attention on what is important because less attention is needed for the physiological element.  

There is another level at which the rhythm of practice is crucial for the writer, and that is at the level of ideas.  If you think about your work and try to write something every day, then everyday, your brain focuses on your ideas for writing.  The regular practice keeps the ideas fresh in your attention.  If you write early everyday, it’s more likely that you’ll think abut the writing project later in the day. If you write late in the day, everyday, you’re more likely to think your writing early in the day.  If you’re writing only once a week, there’s a good chance that the demands of life will keep you from thinking about your writing project (you may even compartmentalize it, saying “I think about my project in the time I have scheduled for it”). If that’s working for you, great, but for people who are struggling to develop a project a regular practice is better,  The regular practice, however brief, makes it easier to start each work session by following up on the previous session’s work. The weekly practice often has to spend a lot of effort just getting back up to speed on where the work left off.

Keep it simple; keep the challenges relatively small (on the small scale)

To develop a practice that can be maintained, it’s useful to do things that you can accomplish successfully and build upon.  Don’t worry about doing the most difficult stuff immediately.  Worry about doing something that moves you forward.

I specifically suggested that my sister work on moving between the G and C chords, a common and fairly simple chord transition to make.  For a beginner, making that change while keeping a steady beat and also strumming/picking with the other hand is plenty of challenge. And adding in singing while keeping the beat is another level of difficulty. But this represents a small enough challenge that it can be accomplished relatively easily, at least in basic form. 

The ability to accomplish something is important in developing a practice, because it provides positive feedback. And simple doesn’t necessarily mean bad.  There are excellent, enjoyable two-chord songs that could be played using C and G (”Feelin’ Alright,” by Dave Mason/Traffic, and recorded by Joe Cocker, is I-IV, which, in the key of G, is G-C). Simple two-chord songs are obviously not works of complexity to be compared with great symphonic works, but that doesn’t stop them from being great music—not at least if we evaluate the music on its ability to reach a wide audience. A parallel to writing still holds: if you can express a simple idea in writing, or one part of a larger idea, that provides the satisfaction of accomplishment, and is also valuable in its own right.  So doing simple stuff helps build the practice.  And then, in the long, run, the practice develops skills to do more, better.

With each accomplishment, of course, a new challenge can be added, and as practice develops and strengthens itself, there is room to work on developing things other than the simplest fundamentals.  A guitarist who can keep the beat playing simple chords, can work on playing more complex chords. A writer who is getting simple ideas down on the page in simple sentences can work on writing out more complex ideas in more complex sentences.  But underlying the development is the continued rhythm/idea that holds the musical/writerly exploration together.

A Guitar Lesson for My Sister, Or A Paean to Practice.

My sister asked me for tips on teaching herself to strum basic chords on guitar while she sings. Since I taught myself to strum basic chords while I sing, I’m a reasonable person to ask.  The most simple answer—which I gave her, and which is hardly a surprise, I expect—is to practice.  We were texting and she put her “sigh” into words. 

But when I say “practice,” I want her to see that idea in the same light as I do—as something good.  That’s why I’m writing a “paean”—a song of praise—though it’s not really a song, but an essay.  And, I suppose, it’s not really to my sister, or not only to my sister, because these are the fundamental ideas that I think lie at the heart of good writing, or even, good living.

Practice, I must admit, is a central idea in how I approach life. It’s not a concern that rises to the level of obsession, but it is something that I think about and preach for.  (And, naturally, I try to practice what I preach on this subject.) Practice, I believe, leads to a better life—not just for me but for people in general. But I don’t want to digress too much into talking about practice because this is ostensibly a guitar lesson for my sister. 

Practice is difficult

If I were singing a song of praise for practice, it would be easier to ignore or leave aside the manifest difficulties of practice, but an essay making an argument for practice should deal with the complexities of the issue.

There are good reasons to sigh if someone tells you that you need to practice to accomplish your goal.  Practice is difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s frustrating. It can be painful. To ignore these aspects of practice would be to ignore reality.

To practice the guitar as a beginner means making unmusical noises. It means fingers that hurt from pressing on fine, taut wires (nylon strings can make fingers sore; steel strings are worse). And it means the frustrations of trying to get untrained fingers to make precise motions.  These frustrations may be exacerbated by the fact that for the beginner, it the less competent hand that requires the necessary fine motor control to properly fret the strings.  (In the long run, this makes sense for the guitar, because it is the picking that is the more difficult part, which is why right-handed guitars put the fretboard in the left hand, and left-handed guitarists—Hendrix, McCartney, e.g.,—put the fret board in their right hand.  This is, I think, counter=intuitive because the fretboard, with all the multiple frets and multiple strings, appears complicated, while the strumming/picking appears simpler—as just the sweeping of the pick across the strings.)

Failure is frustrating, and practice begins with a lot of failure.  My sister, for all her musicality, and for all her manual dexterity, will probably do more noise making than music making in her practice, at least to start.

And even once she’s practiced enough that she spends more time making music than noise, there will still be difficulties. Practice tends to bump up against limitations. 

Practice can be boring

To do something right—especially something musical—repetition helps.  You want your fingers to go to the right strings and the right frets at the right speed? Repeat the motion, over and over, and you’ll get better.  

Repetition gets boring, though. Boring and frustrating. When you switch between those two chords for the 100th time, you may well be bored. Bored and frustrated—it’s not out of the question that you get bored of the  simple task you’re practicing even before you can do it well.  That’s both boring and frustrating. Practices are like that.  The habits/skills/abilities that support a strong, competent practice don’t develop without repetition.  Trying to play a song? Keep working through it until you play it well. Trying to write a document? Keep writing and revising!

Practice is often frustrating

The anodyne to boredom is to try something new. But, in practice, trying something new means trying something that you haven’t practiced before, and that means that you’re likely to come up against your own limitations again.

Once you have mastered that first simple song—at which point you may well be sick of it from having played it so many times—you will be tempted to learn something new. But, since you won’t have practiced that new song, playing it will be difficult and frustrating, and may have a low reward/frustration ratio.

Practice tends to be like this, in whatever arena.  To avoid boredom, we try new things, but those new things are difficult and frustrating, and the way to master them is to practice, which can wind back to boredom (while including a healthy dose of frustration).

The key, I think, is to find the balance between these two areas—where there is sufficient challenge that it’s not boring, and sufficient competence that it’s not too frustrating.  If we can find that balance, we can possibly find some of the best moments of our lives.

Practice can be rewarding

Practice isn’t always unpleasant. It is not just a move from boredom to frustration and back.  Practice is also exhilarating and often enjoyable.  It carries rewards both in the long run and in the immediate present.

The long-run rewards of practice are, I think, the most obvious.  The expectation is that the frustration and difficulty of practice will payoff with a long-term accomplishment. If you work hard enough, then you have he satisfaction of a job well done.  To be sure, this is a very real and very worthy aspect of practice: there is a lot of long-term comfort in being able to look back at a job well done.

At the same time, there’s another kind of pleasure that can accompany practice, and this is the sense, in the moment, that you’re doing something well.  This is distinct from retrospective pride, though it is certainly related.  But the sense of pleasure in the moment of practice is not so much, I think, pride at an accomplishment, but rather a sense of personal power and ability. And it’s not just satisfaction with self, as it can be absorption into the act.

A very large part of why I learned to play guitar was because I love music, and although my musicianship isn’t nearly up to the standards of the recording stars whose work I love, it is enough to spark my own appreciation of music. I may not play that two-chord song as well as my heroes, but I can play it well enough that I enjoy the song.  Similarly, there are times when I’m writing when I’m entirely caught up in an idea that I think is interesting, and the interest in the idea I’m trying to convey is itself a form a pleasure.

In short, I think practice offers three kinds of reward: the long-term accomplishments; the short-term sense of power/ability; and the absorption into something of interest.

Conclusion

My main point here, I suppose, is not so much to dispel negativity about practicing as to balance than negativity with the positive side, especially the positive aspect that gets overlooked: the pleasure in practice.

Yes, practice is difficult and frustrating.  But that is not the only face of practice.  Practice is also pleasurable and uplifting.  There are times when practice is difficult, perhaps even painful.  But in a good, healthy practice, there should also be times when you feel your strength and ability, and times when you can celebrate accomplishments. 

Perhaps this is all a product of my personal experience: the best things in my life have grown out of practice and effort and working through problems. There are good things that I’ve enjoyed–movies, books, television–that didn’t require effort or investment. But those were small things compared to the satisfactions I’ve felt when my writing, or my music, were going well. And that is why, I write this paean to practice.