Writing Process Archives - Page 2 of 4

Dealing with writer’s block, tip 8: Experiment

This post is, in a way, the inverse of my previous post, which argued that it was necessary to act (to write) in the face of unavoidable uncertainty. In this post, I’m going to argue in favor of a specific kind of action in the face of uncertainty: experimentation. Developing a practice of experimentation can help reduce anxiety that triggers anxiety-related writing blocks.

Experimentation

Experimentation is, when speaking of research, a process of gathering data that will give insight into some unanswered question. In this sense, it is explicitly a step into the unknown: the experimenter doesn’t know with certainty what the outcome will be. In science and research, experiments are commonly used to gather empirical data from which to draw conclusions. But a researcher can also benefit from experimentation in writing.

There are two kinds of experimentation that can serve a scholar: thought experiments and writing experiments. Both kinds of experimentation produce material (whether ideas or words on the page) that may or may not be directly or obviously useful. Because experimentation does not guarantee a positive result, many writers avoid it as inefficient—“It takes me so long to write, that I can’t spend time experimenting with something I’ll never use. I need to get it right quickly.”

Trying to get it right

For a lot of writers who are struggling with anxiety-related writing blocks, there’s a feedback loop in which low productivity and high anxiety about results lead a writer slow down their writing process to ensure that the product of their writing efforts is immediately useful, and that sense of needing to get it right can trigger anxiety and slow the pace of working, while also drawing attention to lesser details and away from the main ideas. This slow pace of working (often coupled with anxiety) then loops back to the continued experience of low productivity, high anxiety writing. Ironically, this focus on getting things right does not ensure good writing, but rather inhibits the learning process of the writer.

Cycle of excessive caution and lowered productivity.

There are times when every writer should be concerned with getting it right—the last review of a draft before sending it off—but most of the time, it’s best for a writer to be thinking about the ideas they want to communicate (rather than on details of presentation). One of the main values of experimentation as a writer—writing quickly to see what you get rather than trying to “get it right”—is that it can reduce anxiety about “getting it right” (since you’re no longer trying to “get it right”), as well as anxiety about low productivity (since you’re putting a lot of words on the page).

Thought experiments

In philosophy, there is a long tradition of what are called “thought experiments.” As their name suggests, these “experiments” are purely intellectual: they are a process of imagination, of asking “what if…” They are a crucial tool for any researcher or scholar, on levels both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, the imagination of a thought experiment precedes the development of any hypothesis: “what if the world worked this way,” leads to “then we would see this response, and we could test it this way…”

A famous example of a thought experiment was Einstein’s imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. That imaginative exercise aided the development of theories that continue to be used to this day.

Thought experiments require the imagination to consider different possibilities—even possibilities that seem unlikely or impossible.

Exercise 1: Thought experiment

[The key dimension in this exercise it to build your imagination, so it doesn’t need to be written out, but if you write out your thought experiment, you will also build your skill as a writer.]

1. Setting aside all the stuff you have read on your subject, what is your particular subject of study, and how do you think it all works (with respect to the specifics? If you study human behavior, why do humans behave in the way that interests you? If you study, historical processes, why did the history turn out the way it did? If you analyze texts, what do you expect the analysis to show?

2. Come up with some alternatives for the explanation you produced in step one. What’s an alternative that you have seen in the literature? What is an absurd alternative (use your imagination: is rain caused by a god washing her car? Is depression caused by watching Gilligan’s Island? Does Dickens’s Hard Times celebrate the beauty of capitalism)? Come up with as many different absurd explanations as you can.

Writing experiments

The harder writing seems, the easier it is to get attached to the words that you do get onto the page. If you struggle for an hour to produce one sentence, it’s a lot harder to give up on that sentence than if you only spent one minute. Being committed to what you have already written—“I can’t get rid of this; I worked so hard on it!”—inhibits learning in the process, or at least inhibits the willingness to use what has been learned. “I’m not sure it’s right, but I have to keep it because I worked so hard on it.” But writing usually involves learning, so a tension builds between the old writing (and the old ideas) and what has been learned. This tension can trigger anxiety, in addition to anxiety about “getting it right.”

If you think of the practice of writing as involving a strong commitment to keep what you have already written, that can lead to putting emphasis on getting each new sentence right on the first try, which might lead to struggling over a single for an hour, which reinforces the commitment to keeping what has been written, and to a sense that writing is a very slow, high-stakes process. The higher the stakes of writing anything, the greater the anxiety involved, and the greater the chance of triggering a writing block.

Approaching some (most) writing as an experiment helps reduce the importance placed on “getting it right.” Instead of trying to get it right, an experiment tries something just to see what results. It’s a process of trying and comparing ideas. Instead of just writing one version of a sentence (or paragraph), you write multiples versions and compare them. This kind of experimentation is obviously easiest with a small amount of text—a title, an abstract, a cover letter—because it’s easy and fast to create multiple versions. If I’m experimenting with a title, I can try out many different versions in only a few minutes. If I spend an hour trying to come up with a title, I can generate dozens of alternatives. This is more difficult with longer pieces. If I need to write a section of an article or chapter, it may take several hours to write one version, which makes it harder to casually write another version, but if that perspective places a lot of importance on keeping what you’ve written, it raises the emotional stakes and corresponding anxiety.

If you’re experimenting—just writing to see what something looks like—you’re not committed to the outcome; you’re willing to throw it away and try again. That attitude can reduce anxiety and increase the quantity of words written. It may sacrifice quality, but that’s only a short-term drawback. If you can shift from writing one really strong sentence an hour to writing 500 words an hour, you are, in the long run, going to produce a lot more strong sentences, even if you also write a lot of lousy sentences along the way. (Remember, experimenting does not preclude a later stage of trying to refine and polish your work.) And, in the long run, if you write 500 words an hour, your skill as a writer will increase, and you will be able to craft good sentences and paragraphs more quickly.

Exercise 2

Write several different versions of a single sentence, title, section header, or definition of some concept. Experiment with different structures and word choices.

(For example, I could rephrase this exercise in the following ways:

Write many variations on one sentence or other short piece of writing by altering word choice and sentence structure.
Pick one idea and try to express that idea in a single sentence. Repeat, writing a new sentence with different structure and word choice.
Generate several distinct versions of a title for your current work or a single single sentence. Experiment with different vocabulary, structure, and style.)

Slight changes in wording and structure can alter meaning, but that alteration of meaning can often give insight into both the issue you want to express and the ways you express it to your audience.

Spend 10 minutes on this, or generate four (4) alternatives, which ever takes less time.

Conclusion

One aspect of writing that is stressful and unpleasant for many is the worry about “getting it right,” from spelling to punctuation to grammar, and beyond. But a lot of writing is better done without such concerns. Writing isn’t a matter of following rules of spelling or grammar—those rules (and all the exceptions to them) are tools to help the writer—it’s a matter of exploring and developing ideas; it’s a matter of experimenting different modes of expression. Practicing the experimental side of writing—the willingness to throw some words onto the page quickly and without hesitation—can help bring the positive dimensions of writing into focus and help reduce anxiety.

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 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.

An Irony of Finishing My Book

Back in January, I was talking with the author of a book that was about to come out. I had been thinking in terms of celebrating his job well done, and was wondering what his next project was gong to be. He surprised me, then, by talking about how he planned to spend the year promoting the book he had just finished. It seemed to me both a good decision on his part, and a somewhat depressing reality. He had been working on that book for more than a decade, so it seems like being able to finish the project would be welcome.

The reality is, however, that books want promotion, and generally the people who have to promote them are their authors. Authors give talks. Authors write to people about their book, asking them to read it, to review it. They work to get the word out.

When I was trying to put the final pieces in place—reading the page proofs, doing the index—I started thinking about working on my next project. But, not really. Immediately after finishing the page proofs, I started working on blog posts, videos, and letters to people.

I think that I have “finished” my book a number of times over the years. There was the time that I finished the first complete draft and gave it to someone else to read. There was the time that I finished a completely revised draft and gave it to someone else to read. There was the time that I finished a draft and began writing proposals for agents/publishers. And then there was the time I finished revising the draft to use what I learned writing the proposals. Then, once I finished that draft, I had the proposals to write. And once I had a proposal accepted, I needed to work on the contract. Then I revised the draft in response to the reviews, finishing the project yet again. Not long after than, I had to read the copy-edited files to check the work of the copy editor and get an almost last chance at changes. (At the copy-editing stage, the publishers were emphatic about not making significant changes—they even gave me locked files—not that I wanted to make big changes. I wanted to be finished.) And only a little while after that, I had to read the page proofs and do the index. And then, I was finished! The publisher took the files, and began production of the book.

Except that I’m not finished. I may be finished writing the book itself, but the book project continues. This blog post—a short one for me—is part of that process. Three videos are in production. Sending out promotional copies is on my to-do list, though I think I’ll wait until after Christmas before I brave the post office to send stuff to people.

There is a famous saying that a work of art is never completed, only abandoned (from Paul Valéry). I have always thought about that saying in terms of being willing to let the work go in the sense of not messing around with the work itself once it reaches a certain point. But as I write this post, I see a different view of it: not only can you abandon the work itself, you can abandon the larger project as a whole. One possible option I face is to simply let the book go. Not make any promotional effort. But that just doesn’t seem like a good idea in terms of my larger career as a writer, writing coach, and editor. Having invested a lot of effort into my book, and having gotten support for it from my publisher, it seems to be worth the continued effort to see if I can help it along its way.

I was recently pondering what it means to be a writer. Without wanting to get into a semantic debate, it seems to me that part of being a writer is this indeterminate nature of projects. They don’t just grow and finish. They jump along in fits and starts with multiple drafts reviewed by multiple people, and include all sorts of related effort to promote the book—first to agents or publishers, then to potential readers.

At this point, my feelings about being done are mixed. As, indeed, my feelings about projects generally are. On the one hand, I have my conviction that my book and my ideas provide dissertation writers with valuable insights. My book can help negotiate some of the problems with the early stages of writing a dissertation, in particular, problems in dealing with the literature and in designing/defining and developing a research project. And it’s done! On the other hand, I made a lot of choices—what to include and what to exclude; how to present ideas, etc—that maybe weren’t the best choices. I must admit anxiety over potentially bad reviews (and I expect there are a lot of people who would reject my ideas out of hand if they read them). And I have even greater anxiety over the book not being noticed at all! Into this mixed-bag of emotions is thrown the choice of whether to keep working on this project—at this point to produce promotional materials and to reach out to people—or not.

On a final note, I want to say that even though the project is still ongoing, there is still reason to celebrate an important accomplishment within that larger process. Yes, I may not be done working on my book, but I got my book published!

Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice

How to Become a Better Writer (2): Work Past Criticism

My original plan for this series of posts has been somewhat lost since I originally formulated it about six weeks ago, but my general goal for my blog as a whole, and indeed for my work as a writing coach, dissertation coach, and editor, is to help people become better writers, so it’s pretty easy to fit something else in that heading (indeed, there’s some question as to whether I shouldn’t just drop the whole “how to become a better writer” title). And, given that I personally write and strive to become a better writer, I’m often thinking about how I can become a better writer, and so have ideas that can be translated into a blog post on the subject of becoming a better writer.

The past several days, I was working on the copy-edited files for my upcoming book, and one of the things that I was dealing with was with working past criticism. On the one hand, I was dealing with the criticism of the copy-editor, which, admittedly, was not about content, and was pretty easy to deal with. And on the other, I was dealing with my own internal criticism, which was somewhat wider-ranging, and was rather more difficult. But whether your own internal criticism or the criticism of others, if you want to become a better writer, you have to learn to work through criticism. If building skill depends on practice, then criticism cannot be allowed to break that practice.

Different purposes for different writers

There are varied reasons to write: some people might write just for their personal satisfaction, others might write for fame, and others might write because their careers demand it. Different kinds of writing will expose you to different kinds of criticism. The better you understand your reasons for writing, the easier it is to deal with criticism that is irrelevant to your writing.

For example, if you’re writing for the therapeutic value of writing and exploring your thoughts, then criticism regarding your spelling and punctuation are mostly irrelevant to your purpose. Spelling and punctuation are conventions that are used to help writers communicate with others, but if your intention is to use writing to evoke ideas and work through them, then you may understand yourself sufficiently without the least concern for the formal conventions.

Or, for example, I’m writing a blog generally aimed at highly educated writers who are seeking advanced degrees, so criticism that my sentences are relatively complex might be misplaced. I choose this example because I have an SEO plugin for my blog that always tells me that my writing will do poorly in search engines because the sentences are too long and the text too difficult. (According to the SEO plugin, this post scores poorly on the Flesch Reading Ease test, and it also has sections, paragraphs, and sentences that are too long.) I recognize that criticism and work past it. But, to me at least, that criticism seems off-base, because the people I want to appreciate my writing are people of high intelligence and competence. (Admittedly, I’m not sure about this being the right course of action—after all, if the search engine won’t rank me, then no intelligent, competent people will even learn that I have written.)

Knowing your purpose in writing is valuable in working past criticism because it helps you ignore criticism that isn’t suited to your purpose.

Self-criticism

Self-criticism can be paralyzing. Too much self-doubt and projects get abandoned. As I worked on the draft of my manuscript this past week, I was constantly battling with the sense that I had not done enough or that I should have done something better. These thoughts were a significant drain on my energy and limited progress. Instead of just checking to make sure that the copy-editor had not missed anything or introduced any new mistakes, I pondered over sentence after sentence, and paragraph after paragraph, wondering how much to change, and how much I could change (the publisher had explicitly stated that changes should be kept minimal). These internal debates raged as I moved through each chapter, bemoaning the work that realistically was that outcome of years of effort on my part, not to mention several different reviews of different drafts, so it’s not as if that manuscript over which I was so tortured had never gotten any support. To be sure, my book has flaws. It also has strengths.

One particular difficulty in the moment of editing is that you are looking for problems at a very granular level. My book isn’t really about details, but rather about big core ideas. Looking for problems, especially at the level of sentences or paragraphs, simply isn’t very sensitive to larger-scale issues like narrative flow or overall argument (where I believe/hope my strengths lie) because the attention is focused on finding small-scale problems. Emotionally speaking, the editing process forces a focus on weaknesses, not strengths, which can sap the necessary confidence to keep working.

Criticism from others

Criticism from others can also be paralyzing, especially if it links into self-criticism. Whether the criticism concerns something you already see as a weakness or something about which you feel pride (or something in between), it can trigger significant doubt about the ability to progress and reach a satisfactory conclusion.

In some ways, it’s easier to deal with criticism from others than self-criticism, if only because it’s sometimes easier to ignore or dismiss what others have said. When I get feedback from other people, I always ask myself whether they’re right or not, at least at a granular level, with respect to specific concerns. (If someone dismisses my work out of hand, I’m not particularly inclined to worry about that—it’s usually a waste of time trying to please someone who won’t be pleased. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, however, and that’s one reason feedback can be more difficult than self-criticism—more on that below.) When I get detailed feedback, I have generally find that some of it is really helpful, some of it difficult but helpful, and some of it less helpful or even wrong. I know that I have made mistakes when giving feedback to other people, and I know that people have made mistakes in giving me feedback. So, in processing feedback, I try to sort out the stuff that I do want to use from that which I don’t. And that sorting allows greater equanimity in dealing with the feedback—it’s less of a challenge to my confidence (and even a boost to my confidence, sometimes) to see the feedback focuses on things that can be easily fixed.

Of course, as I suggested above, one of the difficulties in receiving feedback from others is that there are times when you simply cannot avoid it. If you’re a student and your professor insists on something, you’re pretty much stuck. If an editor at a journal or publishing house insists on something, you’re not quite as stuck, but there’s a compelling reason to deal with it, especially if finding a publisher or journal that will accept your work is not a matter to be taken for granted. It can be very difficult to try to do something that is outside your vision for your work.

Keep working

The emotional barriers are pretty high, but finishing work depends on getting past those sticking points. In the effort to become a better writer, practice is central. And the crucial first factor in any practice is the actual engagement and effort involved. As a writer, that means working even in the face of criticism. There is a necessary perseverance for the writer who wants to get better. This, more than anything else, is the crucial step. Undoubtedly, it’s better to be able to learn from criticism and to use that criticism to keep growing: by hearing, understanding, and adapting to criticism, your practice and your efforts are guided and directed. But even if you just ignore criticism and keep working, that will help you become a better writer. An undirected, sloppy practice whose only discipline in its regularity is still a better road to improvement than a highly structured but irregular practice. Within reason, anyway. I’m not sure how to measure this at the margins: is a highly structured practice carried out for 3 hours a week better than a loose practice carried out 4 hours a week? I can’t be sure when comparing such small differences in practice. But I’m pretty confident that a sloppy practice for one hour a day, seven days a week, is going to do more for skill than a highly disciplined practice for two hours each Saturday with nothing on the other days. And for that reason, I place such a high value on working past criticism including, criticism of one’s own practice schedule: better to practice badly than not practice at all.

A long time ago, I read about a empirical study that had followed a group of people developing skill (I can’t give a citation; can’t remember the source; and don’t want to go looking right now), which basically found that the people who accurately assessed their work were less likely to develop skill over a longer period than those who over-estimated the quality of their performance. The primary difference was that those who over-evaluated themselves did more work because of their (over)confidence. We could say that the people who faced the least self-criticism did the best. But, ideally, practitioners learn from self-criticism, thus refining their ability by responding to their various strengths and weaknesses. Which means that to really excel, you need both the criticism to guide and refine your work, and the ability to work past criticism to continue your pursuit of your goal to produce a good written work, and also to become a better writer.

Becoming a Better Writer: Frankenstein vs. the Cloning Vats

About a month ago, after watching a video on how to practice music, I started to write a post on how to become a better writer, with the basic theme being practice and my intentions aimed at discussing some ideas about developing a good practice. As I worked on that post, however, I got sidetracked into a three-post digression into discussing what it means to be a good writer because how do you become a better writer without knowing what a good writer is?

In my posts on what it is to be a good writer, I discussed three general dimensions of being a good writer: (1) producing good written works; (2) enjoying or feeling a sense of accomplishment when writing; and (3) having a writing practice that leads to growth. The first of these three dimensions is the one that most people think of with respect to “good writers,” but the others are important, too, because of their relationship to the key factor in becoming a better writer (in all three senses): practice.

As I said, I started this series of posts about a month ago, when I had a certain vision of what I wanted to do. But in the course of that month, things have happened that give me new ideas, or at least lead me to revisit old ideas. This post is related to becoming a better writer—it is about one specific question in how to practice writing effectively—but it is a bit more specific than I was planning on. However, I’ve decided to go with this because the idea for it was sparked by a recent interaction with a writer.

Re-animating old work vs. growing a new draft

This writer was talking about using previous papers as a foundation for a new draft, and spoke of “Frankenstein-ing a draft,” meaning to pick chunks of old work, and to stitch them together into a complete whole. Reflecting on this plan of action (and looking through the old drafts to find pieces that could be used for the “Frankenstein draft”), I came up against a principle that I strongly believe helps writers use their time and effort more effectively.

Because the language of the discussion was one from science fiction/horror, I framed a comparison in terms of the genre: is it better to create a Frankenstein draft, or is it better to get something out of the cloning vats? The idea of a Frankenstein’s monster is pretty clear: a body stitched together from several different parts, perhaps awkwardly. My idea of “cloning vats” isn’t something I can associate with any single cultural work (a search for “cloning vats” turns up a lot of science fiction games). In this particular analogy, I’m imagining the “cloning vats” as a system in which old organic matter is recycled to provide the raw materials from which new creatures are grown. In terms of writing practice, I’m really focusing on the choice between revising and rewriting—the choice between trying to reuse old material and trying to generate new material.

A newly grown draft will better embody new ideas

The first reason I recommend this is that we learn as we go: if you have learned something new or thought of something new, that new idea will be much easier to bring to life in a new draft than it will if you’re trying to stitch it into a Frankenstein draft. The pieces from which a Frankenstein draft is built are a reflection of what you thought at some previous time. Trying to make new ideas conform to demands of a draft built on old thinking can push you away from what you have learned.

Perhaps most crucial in “new ideas” are the shifts in the purpose that drive any given draft. In the specific case that inspired the post, the writer wanted to reuse material that was originally written to answer questions from professors. That material was admirably suited as answers to the questions, but not so well suited to the present need, which is to explain the foundations of the dissertation they are trying to create. Even if the two drafts share most of their content, the difference between writing an answer to a question like “what methods can be used to research…?” and the question “what methods were used in this specific project” is a massive one. One question asks for an overview of methods; the other asks for explanations of why specific methods were used.

Growing a new draft helps build skill at writing to the blank page

The second reason I recommend writing a new draft is that it’s more practice as a writer. Writing a new draft is going to challenge your skills more. This is not to say that there’s no skill developed in the attempt to build a Frankenstein, and I could be convinced that you learn just as much in either process. So maybe I shouldn’t include this as a reason to rewrite instead of revising. It depends on which ability is more valuable to a writer: the ability to revise, or the ability to compose on a blank page. Offhand, I would say that the latter is more important, but it’s a question that might be worth exploring: in particular, I’m thinking about my own personal problems with revision and my tendency to get frustrated with my own work.

Growing a new draft builds the confidence that you can write a new draft when needed.

A third reason I argue for the rewriting rather than revising is that, in the context of a larger practice of writing, or a career that involves a lot of writing, it’s good to start to think in terms of writing quickly and easily. Writing is always going to be difficult, but the question is whether that difficulty is intimidating or not. Speaking is difficult, but people speak when needed. Some people avoid public speaking, of course, but no one would argue that such avoidance places limits on the person in many career contexts. Avoiding writing is a lot like avoiding public speaking: it’s giving up a valuable tool. Willingness to rewrite takes some confidence in writing ability, but it can also help build that same confidence. In a way, this last point might be the most important in terms of becoming a better writer: it’s much easier to be a good writer if you think that sitting down to write will be productive.

Growing a new draft can be easier than revising old material

A fourth reason I argue for rewriting is that in my experience it can be easier than revising. People are often intimidated by a blank page, and turn to an old draft because there is comfort in the completed work. Many think that revising will be easier than writing anew, but in my experience that’s not necessarily the case. Revising is hard work. Writing is hard work, too, but bot necessarily as hard as many feel it to be. Writing, the verbal expression of thought on the page, is not really more difficult than speaking, at least in the sense that the real difficulty in both writing and speaking is finding words to express ideas. Writing is harder than speaking because writing does require consideration of punctuation and spelling and the such—but those are minor details that are secondary to the difficulty of finding good ways to express ideas. With practice, issues of spelling and punctuation become less difficult and demand less attention, and interfere less with the main task of expressing ideas. That people can produce a lot of words in a short time when they don’t worry about punctuation and such is evidenced by the exams that students write. I’ve known plenty of people who struggled with writing blocks when given a lot of time to write, but almost all of them have successfully written essays in exams with limited time. It’s not as if these people somehow lost the ability to write a lot of words in a short time, it’s more that there is some inhibition stopping them from writing so quickly. People who wrote 500 or 1000-word essays in 3-hour exams could also write 1000-word essays in 3 hours of writing time, if they made the same compromises they made in the exam: to write something, no matter how messy, and no matter that they may not be entirely confident. If you believe that you can write 1000 words in a few hours, suddenly rewriting a 4000-word chapter doesn’t seem nearly as intimidating.

Context-dependence

Which technique is best, depends on context (not surprisingly).

For one, the less time you have, the more the reason to Frankenstein something, especially if you only have a very short time. If you only have a day to put together a presentation, then stitching together a Frankenstein makes good sense simply because it’s hard to generate lot of new material in a very short time.

For two, I would say that Frankenstein-ing is more valuable when dealing with recent material. The longer it’s been since you have written something, the more likely that you will have learned something that might shift how you approach that subject.

For three, the quality of the work influences whether to try to re-use it: the better the work, the greater the incentive to try to make use of it.

But re-using material isn’t always a good idea because you don’t want to over-repeat yourself. There are contexts in which re-using material is fine. Rough drafts or material written for coursework is fine for re-use (though perhaps lacking in quality). Previously published material, however, may not be acceptable if you’re supposed to be creating something new and original.

Conclusion

Sometimes, it’s great to have old writing that you can reuse. Having fragments that can be patched together into some whole, however, awkward, can be immensely useful in a tight spot. But on the whole, being able to compose a new work readily, and having the confidence that you can do so, is the more valuable skill for a writer. Don’t tie yourself to the limitations of old work if you can create something new that does a better job of integrating the old material. And don’t assume that trying to piece together old work is easier: often it’s much harder and more frustrating because old work doesn’t capture any new learning since the old draft was written (especially learning about your purposes: is what you are trying to accomplish now, the same as what you were trying to accomplish then?).

If you want to be a better writer, try to write new things, instead of relying on your past work.

Work on One (Little) Thing at a Time

I have previously written about Henry Miller’s dictum to work on one thing at a time until finished, but it’s a subject and idea that is important to me, so I’m coming back to it, from a slightly different angle, even if I have discussed the same ideas before.

Personally, I have a lot of things to write: I have correspondence with various individuals, both personal and professional; I have blog posts; I have new books to follow the one I’m just finishing (available for pre-order already!). And, in addition to these projects on which I have already started investing effort, there are lots of ideas I have that might become something, but they’re just ideas for the moment, not yet risen to the level of “project.”

There are times when ideas come to me clearly as coherent pieces that could be captured in an essay. These times, however, are rarely when I sit down to write. When I go running, in particular, I often have ideas for writing, and often compose writing in my head. The idea and the expression seem clear in my head when I’m running. But when I return and sit down to write, that clarity is lost.

Indeed, one of the more frustrating experiences of being a writer is that the ideas come at times when it’s inconvenient to write them down, and then when there is time to write, I get stuck. This is not so uncommon. I have worked with many writers who have plenty to say but are still struggling to write.

My best response to this is to pick one small thing to focus on, and to work on that one small thing. That way, I get away from being overwhelmed by all the things that I could say and just focus on one single thing. This focus helps avoid the distraction and confusion of trying to say everything that needs to be said. It’s hard to say several things at once. It’s hard enough, really, to say one thing at once, if you want to say it well.

If I choose to focus on something small, and on something relatively easy, it makes it easier to overcome emotional barriers to writing—my fears that I will write poorly, that my writing will be ill-received, etc. A focus on something small and easy (or at least easier) allows engagement with less at stake.

When I think about focusing on something small, I often think about an anecdote related in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he relates his experience as a writing teacher with one particular student who was having trouble writing. The problem started with a student who wanted to write about the United States. Sensing this was too much, he suggests just writing about Bozeman, Montana, the specific town in which the university was situated. The student failed in this, writing nothing. To help, he reduced the scope of the project, suggesting the student write about one street in the town. Still, the student remained stuck and unable to write. The anecdote recalls how, in frustration, the teacher suggests writing about one specific building on the street, and even goes so far as to suggest starting with one specific brick in the facade. This insight came at least partly from his recognizing that he himself had had problems related to having too much to say. (“A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say.” [pagination changes in different editions, so I won’t give page numbers. The passage from which I quote here and in the next paragraph is right near the beginning of part III — maybe 15 or so paragraphs in.])

Interestingly, he goes on to explain the problem as being a problem of trying to repeat other people, which seems like a different issue (“…the narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious that she had to do some original and direct seeing”). I don’t see how he made that logical leap. As I see it, getting stuck because you have too many things to say is distinct from getting stuck because you’re trying to repeat others rather than expressing yourself. Yes, one dimension of getting stuck when trying to repeat others is the choice of what to repeat, which is a flavor of having too many things to say, but repeating others is often also a sign of fear to express oneself. It is absolutely crucial for writers to develop their own voice: where else will originality come from? (And when I speak of developing one’s own voice, I mean this more in an intellectual sense than a stylistic one: it’s about the ideas you choose to express, more than about any way of expressing them.) But the problem of finding one’s own voice is not the same as the problem of having too much to say, a claim which I make based on my own personal experience: I frequently get stuck because I have too many things to say for this brief essay, and only occasionally get stuck trying to find or express my own voice. So, regardless of finding one’s own voice, a good step for a stuck writer is to choose to take one little step that allows focus and immediate progress, perhaps by picking one idea to write about, even if there are others that are also important to you.

Oftentimes, the problem of having too much to say manifests as a competition between ideas, with each vying for attention as the most important. A writer once described her experience as a traffic jam of ideas, a metaphor that most of us can understand, where the problem of motion is not caused by the vehicles (the ideas) or the road (the writer’s ability to put words on the paper) but by the vast number of cars (ideas) competing for that limited road space and thus interfering with each other. It’s easy to spend a lot of time thinking about which idea is most important. And spending that time thinking about what to write, often means not writing. And not writing, and spending a lot of time thinking about what to write, can be stressful and can trigger anxiety about ability to write, which sets off down a difficult path.

If you have a lot to do, or a lot to say, picking one thing to do, however small, can be a good way to get started. Picking that one thing allows you to focus, put aside distractions, and get something done. Personally, it’s better to do something than to feel stuck: if I do something small, even if relatively unimportant (e.g., a blog post), I can cross it off my to-do list, and I get that little satisfaction, which can often help me engage with some other, larger and more intimidating project (e.g., my next book). So start small and focused, and see if that can help you get unblocked.

The Writer’s Paradoxes of Passion

What are good principles on which to base a writing practice? In seeking such principles, it is pretty easy to find intractable problems or unanswerable questions. Sometimes these intractable problems are tradeoffs, like the tradeoff between time and quality: you can always spend more time to improve the quality of a work, but timeliness is itself an important characteristic, so one is trading quality for promptness. There’s no right answer there, but it’s not quite what I would call a paradox in that it is not inherently self-contradictory. When it comes to passion in writing, however, there are paradoxical elements: you need to have a passion for what you do at the same time as you remain apathetic about it. This can manifest on a few different levels.

Passion for abstract quality.

Whether artist or scholar, writers have a sense of what will make a work good. Having some vision of what you want to create—a sense that it must be just so—that it must have certain specific qualities—this is crucial to doing work of quality. Sensitivity to the finer points of your work is invaluable, and a passion to get them right is important in finding the energy to deal with all the necessary details.

This same driving passion, however, can be paralyzing, as anyone who has ever struggled with perfectionism knows. So the writer (or other practitioner) simultaneously needs (1) to be passionate about creating a work of quality and (2) able to accept flaws in that same work. This first paradox of passion is, perhaps, not so much a clear paradox in the sense that it is inherently self-contradictory, but rather a matter of finding the balance between the passion for precision and surrendering that care at certain moments. It is a matter of striking a balance where something is good enough despite imperfection.

Passion for personal significance.

If you care about something passionately, that can be motivating, and it can also be problematic. There is a dissertation-writing book that suggests that the best topic for a dissertation is basically something that you don’t care about but that can tolerate because caring too much can be a problem. I’m not a big fan of that idea or approach, but I do understand and agree that passion for a subject can be problematic in research. There are two problems: (1) passion about a project can certainly lead to being over-ambitious, which can lead to difficulty in completing a project, and (2) passion can lead to disillusionment when the grand ideas meet the practical difficulties of bringing a project to completion. That’s the basic argument for how a passion for personal significance can interfere with action.

The flip side of that argument is that personal significance is crucial for motivation and for avoiding emotional malaise. The basic principle of Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning is that people are emotionally healthier and better able to overcome difficulties if they see a meaning in what they do.

Personally, I agree with Frankl. I think it’s crazy to start a project that you explicitly choose for being uninteresting. I think that’s a good recipe for ensuring that you’re miserable with your work. Still, there is some truth that the same passion that motivates us and makes work fulfilling can become an impediment to dealing with practical limitations. Our passion may be sparked by a grand, sprawling vision, and the work that we can personally realize may be so frustratingly limited as to disappoint, and thus interfere with motivation.

On a certain level, this is a question of risk and reward: the more passion you have for a project, the greater the impact you feel from any success or failure. (There are, of course, other factors in measuring risk and reward.) As the level of personal care increases, there is greater motivation to reap the potential personal rewards of success, but that can be accompanied by an uncomfortable increase in apprehension about potential bad outcomes.

In any event, in this sense, we can say that there is a paradox of passion because the passion for personal significance can both help and hinder the creative process.

Passion for communication.

If you’re writing to reach others—if you have some message that you want to share—there is an important role for caring about communication and communicating well. Writers often care deeply about what their audience will think. This passion can directly contribute to fear of writing: plenty of people get stuck thinking about the negative feedback they might receive in the future (especially if they have struggled to deal with negative feedback received earlier). If you’re writing a journal for yourself or making notes to explore some idea, of course, then there’s no real relevant concern for others. But most writing has to do with reaching an audience.

I would guess that the first audience most of us write for is our school teachers, which has the unfortunate consequence of getting many to think of writing as an unpleasant task whose primary upshot is criticism of the limits of our writing. As a result, thinking about writing for an audience triggers anxiety about writing well enough and about receiving negative feedback. Because of this association, one of my principles for developing a good writing practice is to write without concern for what others will think. If you’re spending your efforts worrying about other people, it takes your attention from your subject, and increases stress related to potential outcomes of your effort. You need, in other words, to put aside a passion for communication to write easily so that you can focus on your own ideas. But that’s an approach that is really only useful for breaking through anxiety-based writing blocks.

Once, you start to actually write, it’s valuable to think about your audience and what they would like. Focusing on your audience and on trying to understand them and their interests helps because writing is about communicating with others (at least sometimes). Thinking about writing in terms of communication can help shift the sometimes problematic relationship with grammar and punctuation: if you think of grammar, spelling, and punctuation as complicated rules that you have to follow or be punished, then it’s natural to fret about whether you’re getting them right or wrong. If, however, you think of them as tools that help you communicate more effectively, your focus will remain on the ideas you want to communicate, and difficulties with grammar, etc. will not bring your writing to a complete halt. Thinking in terms of communication helps keep the focus on the ideas that you want to express: what is the message that you are trying to express? Please note that I distinguish between thinking about how to communicate your own ideas to various audiences, and trying to write what you think that audience wants to hear. A passion for communicating your own ideas is good, so long as that focus on your own ideas doesn’t blind you to the difficulties in communicating to different audiences.

Writing is hard for many reasons. Passion can carry the writer through those difficulties. On the whole, I strongly recommend trying to find things that you do care about when you write, and to care about how well you write. Nonetheless, passion can lead into some problems, too, and thus the paradox: the same passion that is beneficial can also inhibit the work.

Taking Small but Useful Steps.

Some writers get stuck by anxiety about what to do next or anxiety about how to do their work. Recently I was working with a writer who does fine, once working, but who gets stuck by anxiety.

We were talking about analyzing some qualitative observations. Our discussion was focused on analytical and theoretical concerns, so we didn’t discuss the practical point I’m suggesting in this post.

If you are struggling with writer’s block of some sort, or you feel stuck when you are trying to write, especially if anxiety is an issue, it can be useful to focus on taking the smallest steps that you can that also make progress.

The writer and I were talking about analyzing statements made by people, and our discussion was concerned with dealing with the bridge between the statements and the analyses. And so what we didn’t talk about the specific practical difference between (1) trying to develop and present an analysis based on a whole corpus or even a sizeable chunk of a corpus, such as an entire paragraph, and (2), trying to develop an analysis based on a single sentence or even a single word.

Often, by focusing on the smallest possible unit, you can define a piece of work that is small enough that it doesn’t seem intimidating. Focusing on one sentence or one word and trying to explain why it is significant to your work can be much easier than trying to explain a whole paragraph.

Not all words or sentences will be good choices for such focused attention, but if you’re struggling to deal with a larger mass of text—a whole paragraph or more—then one way to approach that text is to simply focus on one feature of interest–one word or phrase or sentence—and explain why that feature seems significant to you.

This is one possible suggestion as an alternative to trying to engage a larger text en masse. It’s a way to get moving and to engage with a project when anxiety might be problematic. In the long run, the whole corpus must be analyzed and discussed, but in the immediate moment, every individual step matters, and if you’re concerned about your progress and struggling with anxiety, taking a single small step can feel like making progress and that can reduce anxiety. And reducing anxiety is often the real key in starting to write.