For How Long Should I Write?

 I’ve been reminded recently, both by clients and by my own hectic life, that we often stay away from our writing because of a misconception about just how much time we should set aside before we even think about sitting down to write.  I bet if I took a poll, most people would tell me they need to find at least a two-hour block of time before they can consider writing.  Some of my clients have even claimed they can’t write without a free four-hour stretch ahead of them.

Thinking we need to find such picture-window opportunities to write is frequently a contributing factor in writing block.  If a writer who has stayed away from the page for too long and, consciously or without being aware of it, feels anxiety around the prospect of writing, tells herself that to make a writing session worthwhile, she has to set aside at least two hours, she is actually creating an obstacle to achieving her goal.  If you are already anxious, why would you want even to think about spending two hours with your stomach churning and your heart pounding?  Anything sounds more pleasurable than that prospect, even getting on your hands and knees and scrubbing the toilet! 

The amount of time you write is not important.  What counts is that you write.  So be easy on yourself.  If you find that despite your best intentions, you haven’t been writing lately, if you have stayed away from that novel or story, memoir or essay, the column or feature you’ve been intending to work on forever, set aside 15 minutes writing time tomorrow.  And if the thought of 15 minutes makes your stomach churn, make that five minutes.

I know what you’re thinking.  Fifteen minutes doesn’t even count.  Whenever I ask my clients or students to curb their writing time to 15 minutes for a week or so, they look at me incredulously.  “15 mintes!  I will barely get started,” they all say.  “That will never work.”

But the next time we talk or meet, inevitably they’ll confess that I was right.  Although they haven’t written pages and pages, they have written.  And just as important, they feel that they have gained momentum for their writing.  Now when they approach their computer or their notebook, they no longer feel as if they have bags of sand on their feet.  For the past few days, they often tell me, they have been off and running the moment they sat down.

Our biggest resistance to writing can actually be an aversion to sitting down—not to the writing itself.  That’s why, people often find that once they manage to place themselves in front of their computer or notebook, what they thought would feel awful, feels good.  Of course, for some writers, the act of writing itself creates anxiety.  And that’s where the time limitation comes in.  Imagining trying to write for two hours, let alone four, sets the stakes much, much too high.  But for most of us, fifteen minutes—or fiveif that’s what works for you–doesn’t feel like any time at all.  It doesn’t really count, so there’s nothing to risk.  “Sure, I can put words on the page for five minutes.  No big deal.”  And once you commit to this, I promise, you will be on your oway to writing that novel, story, essay . . ..

An Experiment

One of the writers in my workshop this semester was struggling with what to write.  On a deeper level, she was wrestling with a larger and much more frightening question: should I be writing at all?  One night during class, after she had run through a variety of topics and rejected them all for one reason or another, I gave the whole class a writing assignment: Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and write about your experience.

In throwing out this assignment to all the writers in the class, I was hoping to accomplish two things.  First, I wanted to lower the writing stakes for the struggling student.  If what she had to write was merely an assignment, not a topic of her choosing, a topic that, because she writes nonfiction, she felt had to be deep and important, the outcome wouldn’t matter all that much.  Not only that, but the assignment wasn’t one I had given much thought to; it was an idea that had simply occurred to me one night during class.  How big a deal could that be?

In addition, I was hoping to demonstrate to my class that the same assignment would inevitably generate an unpredictable number of very different and personal responses.  In other words, I wanted them to experience just how rich even the simplest of topics could be, to see how many variations on “walking across the Golden Gate Bridge” one writing workshop could create.

In the end, it isn’t the subject we choose to write about that counts.  It’s what we bring to the topic.  And often, because the stakes seem lower and we feel safer, we’re able to bring more of ourselves—more of our intellect, our emotional life, our spirit—to a subject that doesn’t loom too grand in our eyes.  Decide you’re going to write about “death,” for example, and you might immediately feel overwhelmed and intimated– gosh, this is such a large and profound topic; so many brilliant women and men have written about it; there’s so much to say.

However, if you settle on an infinitely smaller topic, like choosing your grandmother’s casket, you’ll approach the writing with much more confidence—and you’ll feel so much less vulnerable–and as a consequence, you’ll be less concerned with doing a good job as you write.  And being less concerned with doing a good job allows you to be more fully present as you write, to travel uncharted paths and take more risks.

If your first time visiting Yosemite, you set your sites on Half Dome, you may well decide to stay in your cabin for several days.  You’ve set the bar so high that venturing out is a tremendous risk.  Decide however to spend the first few days exploring what is most accessible around Yosemite, you be relaxed and attentive enough to discover and make observations about the local flora and fauna, the rock formations, the river currents, the clouds.

Walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and writing about the walk is avoiding setting your sites on Half Dome and then waking up the morning of the climb so full of anxiety, you decide to leave the Park and return home.  It’s learning to think small, and to discover just how large a topic what at first glance appears inconsequential can become.

Suggestion for a Writing Practice

Here’s a suggestion for finding your way out of a writing block or period of frustration:  Think of something you do on a regular basis.  It can be anything, as mundane as brushing your teeth or taking out the trash.  I’ve worked with some writers who have selected quite ordinary activities like making coffee each morning, feeding their cats, or watering their garden; and others who have chosen an apparently more spiritual activity like their meditation practice.  It doesn’t matter what you choose, I promise.

Once you’ve selected an activity, every day after you’ve performed the activity, sit down—in front of your computer, your notebook, your legal pad—and write about that activity and your engagement with it.  You can write anything.  You can describe the activity in detail, capture yourself engaged in the activity, focus on one element or component of the activity, reflect on the activity and its importance in your life, etc.

For example, if you were to be writing about brushing your teeth, one day you might write about your toothpaste and how you settled on Tom’s of Maine or Crest.  Another, you might put your brushing technique under your writer’s microscope. Yet another, you might write about your relationship with your teeth, and from there your entire mouth.  And another day, it might be your dentist you focus upon.

Don’t worry about your style.  The point of this practice is to reconnect you with your writing and demonstrate to you how much you really have to say. The way you say it doesn’t matter for now.

What is important is that you not wander off into unfocussed journal writing.  It’s not that I have anything against journal writing.  Many of my clients find it an essential component of their writing lives.  But for some reason journal writing has never led any of my clients or students away from their block.

Writing for a period of time about one activity in particular has.  Not only can this writing practice lead writers to the page, it may lead them to important discoveries about your writing.  One client realized through this practice that, although she had always written nonfiction, it was fiction she was actually drawn to.  Another client discovered that what she really wanted to write, at least for a while, was poetry.

It was a writing practice like this that transformed me into a writer: someone who writes every day and feels most alive when she is writing.  For a year I wrote about walking around a local track for three miles every morning.  At first, I wrote about my literal, physical experience.  But within a month or so, I found myself making associations between something I noticed or experienced at the track and my larger life.  The form I eventually settled into was the short (4-6 pages) personal essay, and at the end of the year, I had, coincidentally, written 52 of them.

If you have any questions, ask away.

Good luck!

Weeding Out Your Critics

I’ve known for a long time that internal critics loom large in keeping writers from their writing.  I learned this first for myself, when I realized that one of the people responsible for my block was Mrs. E. Dora Lauck, my fourth-grade teacher.

Mrs. Lauck was a “good” teacher in the old-fashioned sense of the term.  A handsome woman, who pulled her hair back in a high bun and dressed in sheer blouses with full slips underneath, she believed in pushing each student to perform to the best of their ability—even if this meant humiliating one of us in front of the class.

I was one of Mrs. Lauck’s special projects.  My family had lived in India for a year when I was seven, and when I returned to the States and entered third grade, I proved a lackluster student.  For Miss Schubert, my third-grade teacher, this posed no great challenge.  She was quite content for me to spend the year in the middle reading and math groups.  But Mrs. Lauck sensed potential in me, and she was determined to wring it out, no matter what the cost.

The cost included one particular incident that remains more vivid than the rest.  Our class had moved to a newly constructed elementary school sometime in the middle of my fourth-grade year, and it was time to lay the cornerstone.  Toward participation in the ceremony, every class was to collect the signatures of each student on a thick piece of paper, the collective signatures to be lodged in the cavity at the corner of the building, before the stone was in place.

The morning of the ceremony, Mrs. Lauck gave elaborate instructions on just how we were to sign our names on the sheet—in a straight line, boldly, and, it goes without saying, in our best cursive.

I sat somewhere near the center of the class, which was arranged in rows of desks, about six desks per row.  Stephen Hickey, who sat in the first desk on the left-hand side of the room, so that Mrs. Lauck could keep an eye on him, was the first to pen his name.  Once Stephen passed the sheet to the person behind him, the classroom fell silent, and with each additional signature, the tension mounted.  Who would make the first mistake?  After all, somebody was bound to, especially in Mrs. Lauck’s classroom, where we were accustomed to being called on the carpet for even minor errors.  “Pitcher!” Mrs. Lauck would exclaim, whenever one of us mispronounced the word for “image.”  “Pitcher, that’s a vessel used to hold water.  What’s the correct word for what you are trying to say?”  Or, “Stuff? What in the world is that?” she’d query the hapless nine-year-old who had let his guard down and allowed the evil word to slip innocently into a sentence.

By the time the sheet of paper had circulated throughout the classroom, some of the tension had dissipated.  Apparently everything had gone smoothly.  Now all that remained was for Mrs. Lauck to affix her signature to the document, and certainly she would make no mistake.

But as Mrs. Lauck plucked the sheet from the last to sign and looked down at our handiwork, her shoulders rose, her face turned to stone, her eyes to slits. “Jane Anne Pomerantz,” she yelled, her voice rising to an operatic contralto, “Your name isn’t straight.  You’ve ruined the sheet. Now the whole class will have to sign again!”

All my life I’ve had difficulty filling out forms, any kind of form, from credit card applications to retail surveys.  It was only once I recalled the signature incident with Mrs. Lauck that my anxiety around filling out official documents became clear.  And once I had a talk with Mrs. Lauck, some 40 years after the triggering event, a great deal of my anxiety around writing disappeared.

“Mrs. Lauck,” I said to my fourth-grade teacher, “I appreciate all the help you gave me in fourth grade.  And I appreciate that you still care about the quality of my work.  But I know other people who can help me with my writing.  And there are plenty of fourth-graders who would benefit greatly from your presence in their lives.  Why don’t you leave me and offer to help some of those younger students?  I’m sure you’ll be appreciated.”

Since my work with Mrs. Lauck was so helpful in diminishing my writing inhibitions, I usually urge my clients to engage with their critics, particularly early in our work together.  But every once in a while I slip up.  I either identify the wrong critic/s.  Or I miss the strong presence of a critic altogether.  This happened recently with a writer I’ve been meeting with for quite some time.  Toward the end of one of our meetings, she mentioned, in an offhanded way, an editor who had offered her a contract many years ago, then rejected the book once it was completed.  As soon as I heard the editor’s name, I felt a charge run through me.  Although this writer had been working through her writing inhibitions, our work was progressing more slowly than I had expected. Suddenly I knew why: I had overlooked a major deterrent to this client’s completing the book she is now writing. I understood at that moment that whenever this client sat down to write, the rejecting editor was present, reminding her that her previous book had failed.

Unfortunately, our meeting had to end, soon after my epiphany.  But I am looking forward to our meeting this week, when we will kindly dis-invite the discouraging editor from my client’s writing process.

Choosing to Write

Although I’ve been working with writers for many years, exploring with them and within myself, all the misconceptions and anxieties that keep us from writing, I still do not understand fully—as if we ever understand anything fully—why it is so easy for most of us to slip stealthily away from our writing.  I’ve worked with writers who have published several books, then unexpectedly find that they can’t begin the newest project.  They feel stuck, and not only do they have no idea why, they are amazed that, after years of writing on a regular basis, they suddenly cannot get themselves to the page.  “Could I have suddenly been afflicted by laziness?” a client once asked me.  She was a full professor at a major university, popular with students, on countless dissertation, departmental and tenure committees, involved with her extended family and friends, with never a free moment, and yet she asked me, in all sincerity, if I thought she had become lazy.

Other writers who are experiencing difficulty castigate themselves for lacking discipline.  These writers may exercise daily, sustain rich professional lives, with all the duties and obligations these lives entail, yet because they are unable to write, claim laxness and negligence in the writing realm.

“Look,” I want to reprimand these writers, “just look at yourself and your life.  How can think of applying the word ‘lazy’ to yourself?  How in the world can you think you lack discipline?”

“Well, I must be lazy or I’d be writing the book I have a contract for,” a writer might reply.  Another might say, “If I were disciplined, I’d find time to write.  Some of the writers I’ve worked with have been so insistent on claiming themselves lazy, that I’ve had to ban the word from my office.

In the future, I’ll explore some of the many reasons writers find it difficult to write.  Today, however, I want to talk about a semi-behavioral response to feeling stuck: Whether we are new to writing or veterans with several books behind us, each and every day, sitting down to write involves a choice.  For some of us, it is a conscious choice.  For others, it might be made below their radar.  But whether we are aware of it or not, each iteration of writing involves choosing to write.

While a great deal of our behavior may be conditioned or instinctive, and while establishing a consistent writing practice moves us toward a conditioned relationship with writing–in other words, makes it more likely that we will write—putting those first words to the page each day never takes place automatically. Writing requires us to be proactive; it asks that we either give ourselves permission to write or opt to write over surfing the Internet, answering email or scrubbing the kitchen sink.

Some days I am only marginally aware of a voice in my head that says, “I’m going to write now.”  Other days, days when I feel sluggish or discouraged, I remind myself that I want to write, that I always feel better once I’ve written, that simply making the choice to write will move me toward an improved state of mind.

Once we realized that writing will never be automatic, that it will always involve a choice on our part, we are less likely to impugn ourselves as lazy and undisciplined.  We may well feel freer to make the choice, and once we feel freer, it becomes that much easier to choose to write.

A Change of Pace

A local radio station announced an intriguing contest this week: they invited writers who had written or wanted to write a 60-second story to call the station’s number and read the story into the phone.  The station would then choose a collection of these stories to be read on air, for a half hour every night for a week.

I decided to ask the writers in my workshop to enter the contest, and we spent the last half-hour of class writing a draft of our stories.  The results were fantastic!

Why, you might ask?  How could everybody think of a story to write in the first place?  And how could they write well when you were forcing them to write?  People can’t write on demand!  They need time and space.  And inspiration.

Not true.  The myth of inspiration is over rated.  What helps writers write is setting aside a time each day, or at least several times a week, to write.  And then honoring the commitment they have made to themselves.  If you wait for inspiration, you will write so sporadically that you’ll never gain the momentum necessary to complete a piece.  But if you show up for the page regularly, you’ll be there when inspiration just happens to visit you.

Contrary to popular opinion, writing is not fueled by inspiration.  It’s nourished by the relationship between a writer and her writing, and this relationship—like all relationships—requires consistency and kindness.  What is more, inspiration is more likely to visit you when it has nothing to fear, nothing to drive it away.

There’s another reason as well, that the 60-second stories my workshop wrote were fantastic: the stakes were low.  We had only 15 minutes to create a draft, and the resulting piece, after all, needed to be only one page long.  Too often writers expect themselves to spend too much time on their writing, setting aside a full Saturday, for instance, to write.  And much too frequently, they set their sights too high, thinking about the entire novel, collection of stories or essays, the whole memoir they plan to write, instead of paying attention to the page they are working on at the moment.  Not only do they think too large in terms of output, but in terms of results as well; they want to win prizes, accumulate rave reviews, acquire multi-book deals. By thinking too large, they feel overwhelmed and defeated.  Of course, they have trouble sitting down to write.  What’s the point?

One of the writers in my workshop struggles with writing to deadline, beginning to write only when she has a piece to submit the very next day.  Yet she whipped off a jewel of a 60-second story, one that is full of intrigue and tension.  I bet she’ll be one of the writers selected to read her story on the air.  More important, however, I hope she understands now that lowering the stakes might be her best avenue of inspiration.

Discovering What You Are Writing Toward

In a recent comment, Jamey Genna suggested that cracking an egg each time you sit down to write can help writers, not only break through a block, but become less afraid to waste.  While I like the idea of cracking open an egg (literally breaking through a block) and seeing the richness inside the casing as a way to open yourself to write, I balk at the idea of associating waste with writing.

In my experience, writing is never a waste.  Even when your writing is going poorly, when you are stuttering and stammering on the page, when what you read back to yourself sounds just like gibberish, you are not wasting your time.  Far from it. You are writing toward a destination you are not yet aware of.  You never know just when the stammering and stuttering will lift, when the clunky sentences and bland words will become charged and you will bump your toe on buried treasure.

That’s what I find so thrilling—and often moving—about writing.  It is an act of faith, which means you engage in it because you believe in the process.  Not because you are anticipating a particular outcome within a delimited amount of time.

While I have experienced this moment of connection again and again in my own writing—discovering where I am headed just when I feel hopelessly lost—it is when I witness this moment of fission with my clients that I feel most exhilarated.

It might take days, it might take weeks, but I have learned to walk with my clients as they fumble about on the page, encouraging them whenever they despair.  And so often we are rewarded.  Not always, and certainly not often when we expect to be.  In fact, frequently, it is just at the moment I begin to wonder if I’ve misled the writer sitting on the loveseat in my office, wonder if it is time to admit my error, to suggest that we have followed a false lead, it is often at such moments of doubt, that the shape on the page jumps out at me. That where there had been a scramble of lines adding up to nothing, an image surfaces.  Not just any image, but the perfect image, one that calls all the seemingly random lines home.

I had this experience with a writer just yesterday.  He had been writing toward something for over a month.  And while we both knew that he was most likely headed somewhere, we hadn’t been able to discern just where.  Then suddenly, as we were talking, the truth he was writing toward appeared to both of us.  And this truth was so striking, so profound, that I felt it physically, like a jolt to my heart.  Suddenly his path was clear and he was now free to scamper along it, following it to its necessary end.

Writing in the Face of Discouragement

I have a confession:  Even when the universe and common sense seem to be telling me that writing is a waste of my time, I feel better after I’ve written.

Rejections hit most writers very hard.  Whether it’s an essay I’ve submitted to a literary magazine or an editor who has decided my book just isn’t for her, each time I read a rejection letter, I feel as if somebody has punched me, not once, not twice, but repeatedly, in the solar plexus.  And that’s just the physical response.  What happens in my head best remain there. Letting it out to breathe air and see the light of day would create a public danger!

Usually the thick, mania envelope bearing my spidery scrawl announces the outcome of the submission before I have to face the actual words of the rejection: sorry this isn’t for us; we receive so many submissions and can only publish a very small number of them; this doesn’t fit our needs at the moment, etc.  Any writer who has ever dared to risk rejection knows the variations all too well.

Yesterday, however, the shock was more intense, much more intense, than ever before.  The SASE I discovered in my mailbox was exquisitely thin.  Oh my goodness, I thought.  They’ve accepted my article.  And without my usual restraint, I ripped the contents out of the envelope, delirious with joy.

“Unfortunately. . . .” was the first word I read.

The rest of the day was awful.  Doubly awful.  Not only had the journal rejected my piece, I had been duped by the envelope the rejection arrived in.  How could I have been so _____, _____, _______.  You can fill in the blanks.

Yet today, by 9:00, here I was at my desk, my fingers tapping on the keys, lulled by the familiar clickety clack of my keyboard.  In the past, before I established by writing practice, days would have passed before I could even consider writing again.  Days spent insulting myself, convincing everyone who would listen, that I was a lousy writer, a failure, that I had been wasting my time, that I should give up writing.

Not now.  I have learned to ride the tsunamis of rejection.  Not that I don’t feel devastated.  I do.  But some time ago, I realized that, while publishing is certainly something I hope for, it is by no means the reason I write.  I write because when I’m not writing, I feel unmoored.  I write because hardly a day passes that I don’t think about writing, don’t feel the itch to sit down and watch the words tripping across my monitor screen.  I write because writing is what makes me feel full and rich.  Because writing is how I recognize myself.  Because, each day of writing is a new beginning, a chance to invent a story, communicate an idea, narrate an experience anew.

I am because I write and I write because I am.

When Sitting Down Isn’t Enough

I’ve been writing long enough that I don’t usually have a problem sitting down to write.  Oh, I admit that some mornings, I do more than my allotted share of puttering.  In addition to scrubbing out the kitchen sink, which I always indulge in before going off to write, I might head to the refrigerator, and straighten out items on the shelves or toss a pile of wilted greens into the compost bin.   Despite momentary setbacks like this, I generally manage to be seated in front of my monitor within fifteen minutes or less.  But there are indeed those days when, even though I sit with my hands hovering above the keyboard and know what I want to write, the words seem stuck someplace deep within my skull.

On mornings like these, straining to put words down, I find myself typing and deleting, typing and deleting, typing and deleting.  I urge myself forward, take a deep breath and try to relax, but to no avail.  I can’t seem to make it past the first few words.  There’s a kink somewhere in the line, and nothing can seem to get through.

Instead of throwing my arms up in despair and bounding up out of my chair, what I’ve learned to do on these days is to begin writing about my frustration.  And rather than trying to write full sentences and choosing my words carefully, I simply write whatever comes to mind—or hand–not necessarily stopping at the end of a thought.  Not worrying about periods and commas and capital letters.

Unfettered, free writing at the beginning of a session can help in several ways.  In the first place, it allows you to get into the rhythm of typing or writing and seeing words appear on the paper or screen.  You begin to feel the writing in your body, viscerally, and the flow begins.

In the second place, by writing freely, whatever happens to be getting in the way that particular day may find its way out of your unconscious and onto the page or screen.  This in itself can be liberating.  The discomfort moves from within you to someplace outside, where it has less power.  Not only that, but understanding that there is indeed something troubling you, helps you move from self-blame to understanding and compassion.  And if you learn just why the writing is a bit more difficult this day, you might well be able to move beyond your frustration and toward fluency.

In this way, a few minutes of this kind of free writing, or venting, can dislodge whatever is blocking the writing flow, and you may well be able to segue into what it was you had planned to write about that day.

For Whom Are You Writing?

Recently, several clients have talked about how lonely and isolated they feel when they are writing, how the solitude is difficult for them to tolerate. As I’ve reflected on the struggle of these writers, I realized that their difficulty is not that writing requires solitude, but that even when they sit in a room with no other person present, they are not really alone.  Instead, whenever they write, they invite a host of other voices with them into their writing space: critical parents and teachers, magazine editors, judgmental readers, competitive friends.  “Invite” may be too strong a word.  Perhaps “permit” is more appropriate.  Often, writers who struggle as they write, have not made it perfectly clear to the critics in their life, past and present, that they should stay away.

Of course, these writers are not all aware of their uninvited guests.  The only way to learn who, in addition to you, inhabits your writing space is to focus your awareness on the voices in your head.  Most of us are conscious of these voices, at least some of time.  But we don’t often hear them as we write.  To do this effectively, you need to become their scribe.  As you write, keep one ear tuned, then write down—either in parentheses or in a space on the page set apart for just this purpose—everything the voices say.   At first, you’ll likely catch them telling you that you’re writing is boring.  Or that nobody will want to read what you’re writing.  They may criticize your grammar.  Or your spelling.  Or your prose.

These critics want to be heard, and if they become worried that they are losing control, they escalate.  That is why if you continue to listen and transcribe, the criticisms may become more toxic. Anything to keep you from writing.

Once you become aware of the voices and who they may represent, you can let them know that they are no longer welcome in your writing space.  When you do this, it’s important to treat them kindly.  You don’t want to create tension and darkness around your writing.  Instead of banishing the critics, suggest another activity for them, anything to distract them and keep them focus off of you.

I once had a client who realized that her mother came into her writing room with her each morning and prevented her from working.  To create the true solitude she needed, this writer learned to get up out of her chair and walk her mother across the room to the door.  “Mom, thanks for visiting,” she told her each day.  “It was good to see you.  But right now, I’m writing, and I need to be alone.  Maybe you could do some shopping.”

When I identified one of my harshest critics as my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Lauck, I learned to tell her that I appreciated her concern, but that I didn’t need her any longer.  “However, there are plenty of fourth graders out there who could use your help.  Why don’t you look for one of them to support?”

Being alone with yourself for a period of time each day can be renewing.  Without distractions, you can focus all your creative energy on your writing.  But if you have not cleared your writing space of unwanted guests, what looks like solitude is quite the opposite: open season for the critics in your head.  No wonder so many of the writers I work with have a difficult time being alone when they write.

Writing is indeed a solitary act.  And if you can achieve true solitude, which involves intimacy with yourself, you have gone a long way to creating an ideal writing situation.  It is when you allow “others” to enter your writing space, that trouble begins.