Not Writer’s Block    

 I should never have included the words “writer’s block” in the title of my book.  I knew better, but the publisher requested the subtitle “A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block, and I agreed.  I knew it was a mistake.  I knew those two words would be misleading, would limit my readership by conjuring images of women and men in agony, embattled writers wringing their hands as they tried to write–or even thought about writing.

What I understand by writer’s block certainly includes those writers who struggle mightily to write.  Those writers whose stomach churns each time they think about the blank page.  But in all my years of working with writers, I have learned that writer’s block encompasses so much more than the stereotype, so much more than the inability to fill a page with words. 

What I mean by writer’s block is a continuum of difficulties or interferences in the process of writing.  Writer’s block can certainly involve avoidance and procrastination, unearthing every possible excuse to keep you away from the blank page—exercise, taxes, a dirty sink or refrigerator, email to be answered, closets to be organized.  And it can well include hand ringing.

But writer’s block also means difficulty completing a writing project once you have embarked, even if you have managed to write right up until the last page or paragraph.  I’ve had clients who struggled with just this kind of closure, happily sitting down to write, fluidly filling page after page—until it was time to reach a conclusion.  Then, suddenly, they had a new idea, which required revising the entire manuscript.

Oh, you might say, but that’s happened to me, and my revision process was quite legitimate and my final work much improved.  I wouldn’t disagree.  The kind of writer I am thinking about repeats this Eureka moment at the end of the article or essay or story again and again and again, so that she or he never arrives at “The End,” but is continually thrown back to the beginning of the same piece.

I’ve also worked with writers who begin one essay or story, poem or novel, then decide that what they are writing isn’t really the story they want to tell, the idea they want to explore or the poem they want to write. So they tear up the pages and begin all over again—only to arrive at the same conclusion once more.  After several months, they have yet to find what it is they really want to write.

       And that’s not all.  I’ve encountered other writers who after completing their essay, novel, poem or story, slip it into a metaphorical drawer and happily jump into their next writing project.  Over the years, these writers accumulate a trove of manuscripts that have never seen the light of day. Certainly, I understand reluctance to begin the submission process. I know how much stamina it takes to submit manuscripts, find agents and publishers.  And I have certainly experienced the anguish of rejection. What I’m talking about here are writers who have never, or hardly ever, submitted any of their work for publication.  Writers who talk about submitting and publishing some day, but for whom some day recedes perpetually into the future—once I finish this novel, once my kids are in school, once I’ve gotten the rest of my life organized—once, once once.

From where I sit, having listened to and talked with scores of writers, I am fairly certain that the above interruptions are all manifestations of what I would like to reenvision as writing inhibitions, inhibitions that can interfere with any stage of the writing process, from not being able to sit down to begin writing, through not completing what you have begun, and including never submitting writing you have been able to complete.

Each of these inhibitions has similar causes, different perhaps in their particulars for each of us, but similar in the amount of anxiety they unleash.  And it is this anxiety, this extreme discomfort, that makes it so difficult for us to sit down to write, complete what we have begun to write, or send what we have written out into the world.     

Your Ideal Reader

 So often when we sit down to write, we bring with us a chorus of nay-sayers.    All those people we’ve encountered throughout our lifetime who have been unkind to us or critical of what we’ve said or done.   The chorus might consist of one of our parents, a teacher or two, turncoat friends from junior high.  And as we touch pen point to paper, or our fingertips to keyboard, the chorus sings out:  “You can’t write.  Nobody wants to read that drivel.  You don’t know how to spell.  That’s boring.  You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Sound familiar?

 Actually, I should correct myself.  We don’t necessarily “bring” this chorus with us.  For many writers, the chorus barges into the writing space, squeezing through the door and surrounding the desk or chair or bed where the writer, her hopes high, plans to write.  They’ve been waiting for just this opportunity, waiting patiently, ignoring their own lives so as not to miss the moment when they can begin their caterwauling.

 Certainly it didn’t occur to me to invite my fourth-grade teacher into my writing space.  But once I set out to become acquainted with my chorus of naysayers, there stood Mrs. Lauck, front and center, arms still crossed, her lips still set in the familiar straight line, eyes glowering. I quickly “disinvited” her from my writing process by suggesting she return to doing what she did best: teaching fourth graders. 

 The disinvitation worked, up to a point.  What I didn’t know yet was that it wasn’t enough to rid my writing world of threat to make it completely safe.  Once I eliminated the critics, I needed to invite an ideal reader into my writing world—someone I respected, someone who cared for me and respected me deeply, and would watch over me as I wrote. 

 For so many of us, thinking about future readers sends a wave of anxiety shooting through us.  Of course!  We inevitably imagine hostile readers, readers on the attack, just waiting for us to trip and fall.  Who in her right mind would want to write anticipating this reception?

 An ideal reader can be anyone you’ve known, from any time or place in your life—a loving aunt, a close friend, a workshop leader.  Or, if you aren’t fortunate enough to have encountered such a person, create her in your imagination.  Take the best qualities of several people you know and gather them into this character.  Give her a name.  Begin talking to her.  “I think you’d make an excellent reader for my writing.  Would you mind standing by me when I write?”        

 This ideal reader will gradually replace the hostile critics waiting to pounce.  It is she you will bring into your writing space with you, she you will anticipate reading the words you put on the page, her presence that will infuse your writing space with light.

I often ask the writers I’m working with to check in with me after they write.  Nothing elaborate, just a note to let me know how the writing felt that day.  If you are struggling, writing can be a lonely space, so knowing I’m on the other side of the computer screen can be reassuring: Someone out there cares and wants to know how you’re doing. Of course, the reassurance works both ways.  If I know a writer is struggling, I tend to wonder and worry.  Even if they write that the writing went poorly, I want to know.  And I can often offer a suggestion or two to alleviate the struggle the following days.

I didn’t hear from one of my clients this entire week.  Although I have explained that not hearing is hard on me, she believes that by not writing to me about her travails, she is sparing me.  Yesterday I shot her a note asking how she was, and she replied that the writing hadn’t gone well all week, but that she had cleared the weekend to devote to making up for wasted time.

“Please, don’t do that,” I wrote back immediately.  “Instead, set aside only a half-hour writing time tomorrow.  And instead of struggling to form logical, coherent thoughts, simply free write.  Then let me know how you feel.”

I’m pretty sure I understand what went wrong for this writer.  For several weeks, she had been struggling less with her writing.  She felt she was gaining momentum.  Then one day the writing didn’t go so well.  She felt pen-tied, unable to find the words to communicate her thoughts.  Then, unable to find the words, she began to question the thoughts themselves.  Were they even valid?  Maybe she was just wasting her time. Or maybe she wasn’t smart enough to write about the topic she had chosen.

Questioning herself in this way, she became angry and decided that she’d sit in front of her computer for twice as long the next day.  She had to make up for the time she’d wasted.  She’d better shape up!  Be more disciplined!

The next day was even worse.  Etc.

Bad writing days are an inevitable part of the writing process, and are by no means a reflection on us as writers or on what we are writing about.  In the same way that we don’t feel our best every day of the week, our sense of well being fluctuating with our sleep, the weather, our loved ones and their moods, as well as chance, we don’t always write our best.  In fact, some days, we write our worst.  But if we understand that this is not because we have done anything wrong, and if we show up for our writing the following day, for the amount of time we have promised to commit to our writing, chances are pretty high that our experience will be more positive.  It might not be perfect; writing rarely is.  But the experience won’t be as dark as the day before.  And if you keep on showing up, one day will be a good writing day. 

Not turning ourselves over our own knees when the writing goes poorly is one of the best ways we writers have to gather momentum, not only for the essay, the feature, the novel, the article we are currently working on, but for all the other writing we hope to do in the future.

WRITING AFTER A LONG SILENCE

 This is a confession and a celebration.  I haven’t been writing for quite a while.  My silence on the page was due mainly to a book proposal which my agent loved but which none of the editors she showed it to felt would sell, along with troubles with my family-of-origin (which is a long story in itself).  I was busy enough with the rest of my life, my teaching and my writing clients, that I kept quite occupied.  Time never yawned wide enough for me to feel the emptiness that not writing creates.  And although I knew I wasn’t feeling my best, I could attribute that to other, and legitimate, causes. 

Now, for an inexplicable reason, I’ve begun writing again.  Perhaps enough time has passed that the disappointment, wound actually, of not seeing my book published, has begun to heal.  Perhaps I have just a bit more time on my hands, and I began to feel the emptiness of not writing.  Or perhaps I was inspired by a reading I attended recently, where Pam Houston delighted the audience with her newest book (yet to be published), demonstrating to me once again how much joy writing offers both writer and reader.

In the end, I shouldn’t really be trying to ascribe an exact cause to my taking up the proverbial pen again.  That’s not what writing is all about.  Instead, the call to put words on the page and to allow those words to take you on a journey, leading you to a place you might never have predicted, nor understood you wanted to land, is a mystery and a grace.  So let’s just say that I’m writing again, and grateful to find myself in front of my computer on a regular basis, allowing words, thoughts, ideas and feelings that reside deep within me to find their place on the page.

Because I understand how delicate the relationship between writer and her writing is, I’m starting very slowly, demanding little of myself.  I don’t want to become overwhelmed, and I know how quickly this can happen.  I’ll start by worrying about my writing itself, wondering if it’s good enough.  If I get by this hurdle, I’ll wonder just where the writing is taking me; will it amount to publishable piece, and what kind of piece?  Then there will be the B question: Do I have enough material here to constitute a book?  If I do, will anyone want to publish it?  Will anybody read it?

To avoid the tsunami of doubt, I’m writing now five days a week, for only one-half hour a day.  That way, I don’t have time to doubt myself, to ask myself the killing questions.  But I do have time to capture something on the page.  And even more important, by writing on a regular basis, I am beginning to build up momentum for my writing, momentum that will help even more with quelling the voices of self doubt that are so eager to be heard.  At the same time, I’m opening up that space in my day and within myself that invites writing in and allows it to blossom. 

Banish Outlines

 Last week, two of the writers I work with told me they thought they were stuck because they hadn’t written.  “I have to know where I’m going if I’m ever going to get there,” one writer told me.  The other “confessed” that his brain was so chaotic, it wouldn’t let him think straight.  Maybe an outline would straighten his thinking out.

I have an almost visceral response to the topic of outlines–especially when a writer proposes creating one before he or she has allowed any spontaneous thoughts and words to appear on the page.  To write an outline, you have to close your eyes and scrunch up your face so that you can no longer able to see what surrounds you. Outlines make me think of blinders on race horses, where they function to force the horse to run like hell and get to the finish line first.    

I know I’m extreme, but I was once a writer of outlines, tens of them at the very least, for every term paper I was assigned during college.   I can still see myself sitting in front of my robins-egg blue electric typewriter, straining to order a jumble of thoughts onto the page in a linear fashion, struggling to recognize what was a thought in the first place, and then to organize and heirarchize those thoughts into a logical progression.

It was only once I’d learned– experienced actually–that writing is a very personal process, one enacted differently by every single one of us, that I understood the true dangers of outlines, which imply uniformity of thinking and writing, and instead of ushering us into the writing process, actually bar us from it. 

No two of us write in the same way. My writing became fresher and more exciting once I stopped over-thinking what I was going to write. Not all that many years ago, I’d cast about for a topic, then think about it for weeks before I began to actually write words onto the page.  I’d think about what I was planning to write when I walked the dog, waited for the bus, washed the dishes after dinner.  I’d think about it as I fell asleep, and as I lay in bed dozing in the morning.  And I never sat down to write until I had decided on the first sentence of whatever it was I wanted to compose.  Never.

Now I begin writing as soon as I have an idea.  I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter where I begin, because what I’m writing is a draft, which I will revise multiple times before I consider the piece finished.  I’ve learned that my first draft will create my raw material, my gold mine, from which I will select my material, then elaborate and refine it through several cycles of writing.  When I sit down to write now, I have no idea what I’m going to say.  Discovering what I didn’t know I knew or wanted to write about is part of the great joy of writing for me.

Though my writing process is mostly linear, some of the writers I work with write in fragments, which can be quite long or rather short, depending upon how much the writer discovers he or she wants to say.  Once these writers have accumulated enough fragments, they go back and elaborate, add flesh to some fragments, muscle to others.  At some point in this process, as they elaborate, they begin to see what they have been writing about, and along with that, a possible organization.  The next stage is cutting and pasting, followed by more elaboration and refining.

I work with other writers who begin writing at some point fairly far along in whatever story or essay or article they are working on.  They find it frustrating or overwhelming to imagine the whole that lies before them, so beginning nearer the middle or the end, frees their creative juices. It is only once they have finished writing their first draft or two, that they sit back in their chair and ask themselves where the piece actually begins.

If you allow yourself to write naturally, without imposing all kinds of rules and limitations on yourself, you will eventually discover your true, your natural process.  And once you do, the writing that follows will feel authentic and real.  Even more exciting, writing will become for you a perpetual act of discovery.  What more can we ask of life?

PERFECTIONISM I

 Most of the writers I work with have wrestled with perfectionism at some point during their writing career.  When I struggled most with my own writing during college, I rewrote my opening paragraphs so many times that when I finally turned a term paper into the professor who assigned it, my first page was so dense and convoluted, it was nearly impenetrable. 

Perfectionism is not an isolated phenomenon, but an umbrella term that stands for a whole collection of worries around writing: my writing isn’t good enough, smart enough, grammatical enough; people will think I’m stupid; I don’t know what I’m talking about; who cares, etc.  Perfectionism is the way some of us translate our anxiety around writing.  Instead of admitting or even allowing ourselves to feel just how anxious writing or the thought of writing makes us, we hurl a litany of other insults at ourselves, then worry every single word and sentence to death in order to diminish our discomfort. “If I find just the right word, or if I construct perfect sentences,” we tell ourselves, “I’ll feel better about what I write.” 

The problem is: acting on perfectionism only begets more anxiety.  It stands to reason.  If we were already uncomfortable about writing, reaching for perfect—which we all agree, in our more rational moments, does not exist—can make us feel only worse, more stupid, less informed, in short, all the more nervous about the outcome.

In The Plague, by Albert Camus, one of the characters within the novel is writing his own novel as the story begins.  And throughout the entire plague, as hundreds of people die and scores of others risk their lives to save their fellow citizens, this character writes and rewrites the opening sentence of what he hopes will be his magnum opus.  He wants his work to be so striking, that after reading the first words, the critics will be so impressed, that they will rise from their seat and applaud the author.

The first time I read The Plague I was a very blocked writer, and didn’t understand the irony of this character’s desire.  It was only years later, once I was less blocked, that I grasped how sad and ridiculous this character was, revising and revising the first sentence of his book while people were dying and risking their lives all around him.

Although many of us can sympathize with this character, none of us wants to be like him.  But it doesn’t work to simply try to push our perfectionistic tendencies aside.  When I tried to do this in college, I became more anxious, not less.   Instead, we need strategies to help us negotiate with our perfectionism.

One such strategy is to understand that when we begin writing a novel, a story, an essay, a term paper, a feature story, we are not by any means writing the final version.  Far from it.  What we are writing is only the first draft.  One of many drafts, each of which will give us the opportunity to revise.

This strategy may not work for everybody.  In the early stages of working through my writing block, my perfectionism had too strong a grip for me to even consider composing an entire draft of anything before I revised.  I needed to work toward the draft approach more slowly.  So I made a contract with myself that I couldn’t revise until I had at least one page completed.  Once that page was finished, I could take it from the top, returning to the beginning and going through a single revision of that initial page. What this meant was that I couldn’t behave like the character in The Plague, revising and revising my first sentence.  I could read through the first page only once, revising as I went along. Then, once I had completed the second page, I was allowed to begin revising at the beginning once again.  And once again, I was permitted only a single revision. 

If the prospect of finishing an entire page feels too daunting to you, try progressing paragraph by paragraph, until that becomes comfortable.  And then lengthen your writing interludes to two, then three paragraphs, and finally to an entire page.

This is only one of many approaches to dealing with the perfectionism that plagues many writers.  But it’s an important one.  And a good start.

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.