Sometimes, I get stuck as a writer because I start feeling overwhelmed by myriad issues, none severe in itself, but in combination more than enough to distract from the focus required by writing.
There are any number of potential distractions that interfere with writing. Chores and regular life continually present many demands. Maybe no chore or errand is crucial or particularly difficult, but they gain weight in combination as other responsibilities multiply: taking out the trash is trivial if you have plenty of time, but when you’re running late, it can be significant. Everyday life is a constant background noise that can contribute to feeling overwhelmed.
For me, an additional drain on my focus comes as I consider the state of the world. In my opinion, it is a civic duty for the citizen of a democracy to remain aware of news, and reading the news is, on one level no more than a necessary chore like washing dishes. Except for the fact that the news is so vexing. I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by the enormity of the real problems that face humanity, starting with climate change, but including the vast range of issues. Sometimes, the process of writing can provide some refuge, but these problems are present and demanding attention, and again contributing to a sense of being overwhelmed.
And then on another level—much more specific to the process of writing—I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with my own limitations as a writer. For all my practice, for all my effort and work, each new attempt to communicate my ideas involves significant effort and frustration, even when things generally go well! Even if sentences are generally flowing, and I’m writing a fairly large amount, there is, at the second-to-second or minute-to-minute level, a series of pauses and struggles as each new sentence struggles to fit into both the structure that I imagined when I started and the vision that has developed in the process of writing. Add in to this mix all the doubts I have—have I spelled correctly? have I punctuated correctly? is my phrasing going to be clear? how will different people read that statement? Am I repeating something I wrote before?—and it’s pretty easy to get weighed down with the multiplicity of concerns.
And then on yet another level, I often find myself overwhelmed with ideas. This is a common problem, I think: someone wrote to me recently to complain of a “traffic jam” of ideas. Having too many ideas is consistently one of the problems I see in writers who generally do good research: their project bogs down as they try to address every different dimension of a general interest. In writing this post about feeling overwhelmed, for example, I had manage all the different ways in which I can get overwhelmed—the complication and difficulty comes from the many different threads that can contribute to the larger fabric of feeling overwhelmed, and I can’t talk about all of them at once, and until I make a choice among them about which to discuss first, I can become stuck.
The more choices a writer has, the easier it is to become overwhelmed, because each choice demands attention. In combination, writing presents difficulties that can be compounded by other difficulties, and these can lead to feeling overwhelmed.
When that happens, I find that my most effective response is to try to focus on something small—something that I need to do, perhaps, and that can be done pretty easily. But only one thing. So, for example, I take out the trash, without worrying about cleaning the whole house. It’s one step in the right direction. When I would get stuck writing my dissertation, I would often pick one small thing—a citation or page number I needed, for example—without having to fix all the problems that I knew were waiting. When feeling swamped by ideas and other concerns, I can focus on one thing—one idea, one problem—and work on that without concern for other issues. Focus doesn’t solve all my problems, but at least it helps me solve some of them.