The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Tips can help break writing paralysis
Psychologists have observed that two years of pandemic really messed up our perceptions of time. As we were yanked in and out of plans and routines with unrelenting news of death and illness, hours and days blurred into a sludge of disappointment, anxiety and grief. Now 2022 begins with a pandemic conclusion still dreadfully elusive, and we may struggle to get started on creative work. But consider a few tried and true ways to break paralysis.
Reflect on immediate motivations: Are you a new writer, testing the imaginative waters? Are you in the middle of a project requiring new attention before the next step, such as submitting for a conference, contest, publication or even an agent? Are you seeking personal invigoration to break that frozen feeling and regain a sense of flow?
Gather necessities. Maybe all you need is the computer or phone. Maybe you want to compile some earlier writing, or sort photographs, or tape printedout pages of a draft along a wall. When I’m early in a project, before I even turn on the computer, I want college-ruled paper and a softleaded pencil with a working eraser. Locate space and time “of your own,” even if it cannot be an entire room, as Virginia Woolf famously recommended, and even if you cannot close the door, as Stephen King urged. Your creative spot doesn’t need to fit anyone else’s picture of writerly space. But claim a purposeful haven. Near a window? At the dining room table? In your car? In a café with ambient noise and socially distant company, with or without noise-canceling headphones?
Banish expectations. Ignore the ghosts of judgy relatives or teachers, but also release phantom friends you may hope to impress. Anne Lamott suggests picturing negative influences as mice you lower into a jar. You could picture fog lifting and drifting away from you. It doesn’t matter how, but find a way to tap the mute button. Later, you will decide when, how, and with whom to share — if you share.
Conjure your literary allies. Re-read a favorite poem or open a beloved book to graze the words of a description, a patch of dialogue, a favorite ending. Maybe read the words aloud or handwrite a stanza. Keep two or three (or more) of your sacred texts nearby in a proud stack, like friends on your team, or inspiring company.
A classic, of course: Break large projects into doable chunks. Under contract last year for an 80,000-word manuscript I had already outlined in detail, I set a 1,000-wordper-day target to finish a draft in three months (leaving several months afterwards for revision before submitting). I jotted each new tally on a sticky note every day. Usually, I hit my goal and some days I fell short. But as momentum grew, I often exceeded my target. The sticky note ladder stretched out across my desk even when my computer was closed, a visual reminder of progress. Staging tasks for smaller projects may appear to be simpler (three paragraphs, a list of images, two pages to clear mental static). But concrete, daily, imperfect follow-through is the common denominator for building.
Create a mess — on purpose. (This is different, by the way, from expecting a sincere first draft to be bad.) Identify your creative task and write to make it exquisitely, intentionally awful, at least according to your internalized standards of quality. Use clichés. Mix up verb tenses. Ramble. Disorganize. It is amazing how messiness can be more interesting than Insta-filtered perfection, freeing us to surprise ourselves. Almost always, a gem of discovery is jostled loose in our “worst” work, which is rarely bad as we assume anyway.
Set a limit: This helps me most when I am stalled or just starting. I set the oven or phone timer for as few as 15 minutes, and no longer than 90. The sense of a finishing point creates an urgency, but more than that, it establishes a limit to my effort for the day. No more vague ideas of working “all night” or “all morning.” When time is up, I stop. All the better if I still feel like writing. That lingering anticipation stokes momentum for the next day.
Any step that works for you may stop working, so reconsider, recombine, scrap and reinvent along the way. The American artist Corita Kent used a special list of rules for art classes at Immaculate Heart College. Every rule is worth considering, but my favorite is No. 6: “Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.” Elsewhere, Kent wrote, “The person who makes things is a sign of hope.” Whatever the new year brings, we can be makers. It’s the hope we need.