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 . . ..

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.