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!

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.