Destructivity Quiz

February 2, 2012

Volcanoes destroy as they create

You’ve seen dozens of creativity quizzes (and probably scored very nicely on them), but have you ever seen a destructivity quiz? If  you did see one, would you take it? And how would you want to score?

The unwillingness to see ourselves as destructive is a subtle, but significant, source of resistance. Because drafting is one of the most destructive things a writer can do.

How’s That Again?

Before you start drafting, all things are possible. You can create as many scenarios and options as you like and every one of them is marvelous. You’re creating in your head. And as Stanley Kunitz said, “The poem in the head is always perfect.”

But Kunitz added, “Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”

A poem or story or essay or any other kind of writing is perfect in your head because you can hold seventeen different versions and variations of it all mushed together and somehow it all works. But as soon as you start trying to convert what’s in your head into words and sentences, you have to choose: this word or that word or that other word, this metaphor or that one, this plot direction or that.

Every choice you make not only narrows your options, it destroys the sixteen other variations in your head. Drafting is inherently destructive. It’s also creative – you are generating words on the page/screen after all – but it is primarily a destructive stage of writing. As Pablo Picasso observed, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

 A Time To Create, A Time to Destroy, A Time to Revise

Revision, contrary to what a lot of writers think, is actually quite creative. Revision asks us to remember all the variations and possibilities we destroyed earlier and to invent even more options. Of course we resist this because we know, either consciously or unconsciously, that we’ll have to make the painful decision to destroy all but one of our darlings all over again.

If we’re uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as destructive, we don’t want to remember what we destroyed. We don’t want to consider the possibility that we may have made the wrong choice.

Furthermore, the very act of drafting makes what we draft real (that’s the creative part). A draft becomes so real, we can’t imagine any other way it could go, we can’t re-vision it.

This is the true hazard for spontaneous/organic/sit-down-and-see-what-happens writers. You can’t hold all the options in your head, especially with a big project like a novel or book-length memoir; you have to commit something to paper/screen sometime. But when you commit, you destroy all the other options. Drafting too soon can ruin creative vision, like a bright light ruins night vision.

By the way, this is one of the reasons Robert Olen Butler’s dreamstorming method is so effective. It allows us to hold seventeen different versions for each of a hundred different scenes long enough to make more informed decisions about which possibilities to keep and which to destroy. (You’ll find more info on dreamstorming in Butler’s From Where You Dream or in my online Loft class Entering the Flow.)

Will You Take the Destructivity Quiz?

You can refuse a quiz, but the only way to avoid destroying your options is to resist drafting forever. If you take the quiz, if you learn to accept that you are a destructive writer just as much as you are a creative writer, you learn to make more conscious and therefore better choices about when and how to destroy.

Denying your capacity for destruction will only create resistance; embracing your capacity for destruction frees your potential as a creative/destructive writer.

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Posted by rosannebane

Seeing Again… and Again and Again

January 25, 2012

Today's Guest Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

I’m delighted to introduce today’s Guest Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew. Elizabeth is the author of Writing the Sacred Journey, Swinging on the Garden Gate, and On the Threshold: Home, Holiness, and Hardwood. I’ll give the rest of Elizabeth’s bio after she’s charmed you with the post (it’ll mean more to you then). 

I just came across some great wisdom: “Resistance always comes from the desire to not see. When we feel resistance in any form, it’s because we haven’t fully committed to seeing what’s true.” Thanks, Rosanne! You’ve put your finger on why we writers resist revision so fiercely.

The truth is multifaceted. It usually sits smack in the middle of a paradox. When you peel away the top layer of a truth—that is, when you look below the facts—you find layer upon layer of emotional resonance. The only way to find the truth is to look again…and again, and again.

This is why authors claim that writing IS revision: To see the truth in our stories, we must revisit them.

Nonetheless, all writers to varying degrees resist revision. Beginning writers resist revision with special vehemence; after all, they’ve overcome their resistance to writing an initial draft, they’ve gotten their butt in the chair, they’ve sweat blood, they’ve made glorious discoveries, and they’ve arrived! Of course the ego latches on to that initial version of the story. We love an easy truth.

Intermediate writers and writers with several drafts under our belts resist revision because, dang-it-all, we’ve already done so much work! The bit of complexity those first revisions add to a draft bolster our sense of accomplishment. We want the satisfaction of completion. Or, truth be told, we don’t want to see our work’s remaining flaws.

Despite being obnoxiously enthusiastic about revision, I groan at the thought of my upcoming conversation with my agent when she will suggest revising my novel—for the fourth time since we signed our contract. And that’s after five years of work on my own. If a kernel of unseen truth is still hiding in that story waiting for me to peel back the film from my eyes, I’m clueless about where to find it. As much as I’ll resist my agent’s suggestions, I’m also grateful for her sharp eyes and willingness to tell me what she sees.

The gift of writing is language’s ability to gather many layers of seeing into one place. Ever read a memoir and wonder how the author possibly remembered all those details? Ever read a brilliant bit of exposition and feel awed by the author’s smarts or skills with language? Most authors are not unduly brilliant or gifted; they’ve simply had the stick-to-it-iveness and the humility to re-see their story. When we read a beautiful work, we gaze through layer upon layer of drafting. The page can hold multiple insights simultaneously and when we are guided by the page, so can we. This layering is what makes literature. The capacity to sit with a manuscript, re-seeing the content and reworking the language, is what makes an author.

The good news is that nothing is more creative than revision. Seeing again is, in my mind, the ultimate creative act because it not only helps our work grow, it helps us grow. Perhaps our resistance has little to do with writing and plenty to do with how we inhabit the world—how willing we are to see what’s true.

And vice-versa: Writing, and especially revising, can facilitate our seeing along with our ability to inhabit our lives fully. With intention, revision can be an opportunity to deepen our experience of being human and our capacity to be truth-tellers.

Feel a little less resistance to revision or at least understand why you’d want to be less resistant? Check out Elizabeth’s Loft class Form and Function: Structure in Creative Nonfiction (starts February 21st). You can find more of Elizabeth’s insight at her blog and her websites www.spiritualmemoir.com or www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com/

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Posted by rosannebane

Still Lazy After All These Years?

October 19, 2011

Some writers don’t realize that they’ve got writer’s resistance. They think they’re lazy or undisciplined, untalented or don’t really want to write.

All of this is Saboteur-speak, the self-destructive lies we tell ourselves when we’re in the clutches of the Saboteur.

It’s important to recognize resistance for what it is: natural, normal and most importantly, completely solvable.

Still Resisting After All These Years?

Some of you may think that changing the question from “Still lazy?” to “Still resisting?” doesn’t improve matters much.  You might think that the key part of the phrase is “after all these years.” You might worry that since you haven’t done all the writing you want to do by now, it’s not going to happen. Let me assure you there is a solution and there is time to apply it.

I get sad when I think about how many talented people give up their writing dreams because they didn’t understand resistance. You don’t have to be one of those people.

Even if it’s been years since you’ve written the way you want, you can let go of disappointment and come back to writing. You just need to learn to accept and resolve your resistance.

Accept Resistance?

Yes, that’s right. You have to recognize and accept resistance before you can transform it.

So you’re resistant. So what? I’m resistant too. After all these years, I still face resistance almost every time I sit down to write. The difference is that now I sit down anyway. I do what I promised myself I’d do because I know that resistance is a normal state, not something to be feared or a sign that something’s wrong.

It’s an unspoken take-off checklist. “Computer on? Check. File open? Check. Feeling resistance? Check. Write anyway. Check.”

When I’m in the research stage, it’s “Resource available? Check. Pen in hand? Check. Feeling resistance? Check. Research anyway. Check.”

When I’m in a discovery stage, it’s “Paper and markers handy? Check. Central idea for brainstorming? Check. Feeling resistance? Check. Mind-map or cluster or freewrite anyway. Check.”

Not sure exactly what to do? It doesn’t matter. Just do something to get started. Once you’re in motion, you’ll figure it out. If that doesn’t work for you, post a Comment to ask a question and I’ll help you. If it does work, post a Comment to tell us and we’ll all congratulate you.

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Posted by rosannebane

Embrace Mistakes to Sidestep Writer’s Block

September 7, 2011

Mistakes are a sign of success in the making.

Writers hate to make mistakes in print and the fear of that is a common source of resistance. But Niels Bohr defined an expert as a person who “has made all the mistakes that can be made in a narrow field.”

I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I don’t think I’m anywhere near making all the mistakes possible as a writer. Or as a teacher or coach. I’m not sure I’ll ever be a full expert, but I do want to achieve more mastery as a writer, teaching artist and coach. So I guess I’ll just have to keep making mistakes.

I hope to make a fair amount of progress along with those mistakes; I don’t want to make only mistakes. The challenge is that you can’t always tell what move will be a mistake before you take it. If you do recognize a mistake in advance, you’ve probably learned all you can from that one. It’s time to move on, try new things and discover new good moves by making new mistakes.

Mistakes are the tuition to being able learning from your mistakes. Sometimes you need to make the same mistake a couple of times to learn the full lesson.

Mistakes are essential for learning. The small discomfort we experience (because of a drop in dopamine when the anterior cingulate cortex registers the mistake) is part of how the brain learns which patterns to repeat, which to avoid.

You might think that the opposite of “mistake” is “correct” or “getting it right,” but I suggest that the true opposite of “mistake” is “entropy” or “being dead.”

So I hereby announce my intention to learn from my mistakes before publishing a post when possible, acknowledge that I will not be able to foresee and revise all errors, and ask you to turn a kind eye to my mistakes. In return, I promise that embracing my trials and errors will make it easier for you to accept and embrace your own.

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Posted by rosannebane

Revised Definitions of Revision and Resistance

August 30, 2011

Re-vise: def to re-tighten the screws on a vise attached to your head. (Definition suggested by Kurtis Scaletta.)

Re-vision: def to see differently because of the tears brought to your eyes by the tightening of the vise on your head.

Re-sist: def to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that what is, is not because it should not, ought not, can not be the way it is; to shout “It’s not fair” as you throw your weight against the overwhelming weight of the universe and then to be surprised when the universe rolls over you.

Rolled Over by “Should”

One reason “should” is such a dangerous word is because it leads you to this form of resistance. Writers who think in “shoulds” keep putting themselves in the position of being rolled over by the universe.

It’s not heroic to pit yourself against the universe this way; it’s a pointless waste of energy.

Bouyed Up by “Does Not Happen”

Spoiler Alert: I will reveal as little about the plot as I can and still make the point. In Terry Pratchett’s marvelous novel Nation, the main character Mau is battered by catastrophe in the form of a tidal wave. Numbed by grief, he refuses to allow one more person to die.

He sees what is about to happen, what must almost certainly happen, but Mau takes action to prevent it. He declares “Does not happen!” and fights off death. (Death, of course, fights back; Nation would be a short story instead of a novel if it didn’t.)

Heroic or Futile?

Declaring “Does not happen!” and taking action to change reality is heroic; declaring “Did not happen!” because “it’s not fair” or “shouldn’t be that way” and refusing to acknowledge reality is futile.

It’s completely human of course to go into shock at times – to whisper (or shout) “No” and stare blankly at the drain your wedding ring has just disappeared into, at the blood seeping out of your finger because the knife slipped, at the dying screen of the computer that just crashed. After the moment of shock and disbelief, you have the opportunity and choice to either:

  1. willfully and futilely continue to deny reality by insisting this shouldn’t have happened, this can’t be true, this isn’t right… OR
  2. heroically embrace the pain of accepting reality in the moment so that you can act to change the future by turning off the water and getting a wrench (or calling a plumber) to open the U-joint; applying pressure, elevating the wound and, depending on the severity of the cut, getting a butterfly bandage or going to the ER; shutting down the computer and calling Tech Support or the Geek Squad.

Your Choice

The next time you attempt to revise your writing, you have the choice to heroically see and accept reality or to futilely resist. Are you going to be a “does-not-happen” writer who finds a better definition of revision than the tongue-in-cheek one above or a “it-can’t-be” writer who finds more definitions and forms of resistance?

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Posted by rosannebane

Stop Shoulding Yourself into Writer’s Block

August 16, 2011

Writer’s resistance often comes from fear, but sometimes it comes from not understanding and respecting the creative process and our own unique way of working within that process. We get wrapped up in how we think we should write and worried that we’re doing it wrong.

  • “I should have this figured it out by now.”
  • “I should know what I’m going to write before I start.”
  • “I should be able to write the first draft perfectly.”
  • “I should be able to write no matter how chaotic my office or my life is.”
  • “It should be easy to write.”
  • “I should be more productive.”

As David Bayles and Ted Orlando write in Art and Fear, “The artist’s life is frustrating, not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.”

When we believe in shoulds that have no real basis in reality, we set ourselves up for frustration and failure.

When we try to force ourselves to work in a way that isn’t natural, we create friction, aka resistance. It’s not the way we work that’s the problem, it’s thinking that the way we work is a problem that’s the problem.

Here’s a revolutionary idea: What if the way you work is really okay? What if you stopped spending so mental and creative energy beating yourself up for not working the way you should and just worked the way that works for you?

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Posted by rosannebane

Seriously Uncommit Yourself

August 11, 2011

The stress of too much to do destroys creativity

The previous post, Want More Time to Write? Uncommit Yourself!, was tongue-in-cheek because if you can laugh about yourself and your commitments, you can decide to do something positive about the serious consequences of being overcommitted.

Sometimes we truly have so much to do and so many commitments to honor, we don’t know which end is up. But sometimes the frenzy is self-induced. Feeling overwhelmed is sometimes a matter of perception – if you think you have too much to do, you don’t let yourself see options.

Overscheduling is a common form of resistance because it has such virtue appeal. “I want to write, I really do, but I can’t because I have all these other (less satisfying and less scary) things to do.” Overcommitting yourself is one way to keep yourself safe from the risk of discovering who-knows-what if you were to take time to pause, feel what you feel, think what you think, and try to communicate with others.

If you’re willing to take the risk of writing, but realize it will “have to wait” until after you’ve honored a bucket load of commitments you’ve made to family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, community groups, sports teams, book clubs, friends of friends, etc., take heart – you do have alternatives. Hopefully, the previous post’s list of “out there alternatives” opened your thinking a bit.

Now I’m the last person to seriously suggest you don’t honor your commitments. After all, honoring your commitments to Process, Self-care and Product Time are the foundation of a satisfying and effective writing habit. And I don’t really advocate lying to get out of something.

You get to say "No thanks" to other people's priorities

But let’s take a good look at many of the “commitments” you let yourself get talked into, guilted into or found out someone else had signed you up for or assumed you’d take care of. How many of those promises really reflect your priorities?

You have the right and the responsibility to commit to the people, things and actions that reflect your best self, your interests and passions, and your sense of purpose. This is your life; you only get so many days, so why would you spend any of them doing something that is not important to you or being less than the best you you can be?

You have a purpose in life. You can’t fulfill that purpose if you’re farting around doing stuff other people want you to do, especially people you’re not in significant relationships with. The world will be a better place because you honored your commitment to your writing than if you postpone writing to manage the bake sale for a softball league you didn’t really want to join anyway.

You are learning how to commit to your writing. Isn’t it time you learned how to uncommit to other things? Just remember, learning means making mistakes. You won’t uncommit perfectly at first. But keep at it, and you’ll get better at freeing yourself.

You may find you have to limit your commitments even among the people, causes and activities that you are passionate about. You can’t do everything. Fortunately, the world is filled with good, creative people, so you don’t have to do everything. (You do, however, have to trust others to do their part and let go of attempting to control every outcome.)

Be very careful where and how you commit yourself in the future. Ask yourself “Is this really is something that:

  • I want to commit to
  • Matches my passion and life purpose
  • I think needs to happen and can’t be done just as well or better by someone else
  • I really have the time and resources to honor without violating another commitment (like a commitment to my family or my writing)”?

If you cannot answer “yes” to all these questions, decline the request. If the person “inviting” you into a faux commitment refuses to take “No thanks” for an answer, run! Run as if you’re running for your life – you are!

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Posted by rosannebane

Want More Time to Write? Uncommit Yourself

August 9, 2011

Feeling overwhelmed? Have so many things on your To Do list you don’t know where to start? Tempted to postpone your writing – again – so you can take care of all those other things that somehow you ended up being responsible for?

You need the new, patented UnCommit Yourself Method to create spare time! The next time you’re facing a “faux commitment,” that is a commitment you shouldn’t have made, didn’t want to make, got manipulated into, or now realize you just don’t care about, use the UnCommit Yourself Method. Don’t waste your valuable time – use any one of these 30 alternatives:

  • Change it
  • Postpone it
  • Cancel it
  • Reschedule it again and again and again…
  • Play hooky
  • Deny it
  • Forget it
  • Blow it off completely
  • Pass it off to someone else (aka delegate)
  • Hire someone else to do it
  • Give lip service to it, but don’t actually do anything
  • Refuse to do it
  • Lie about it
  • Tell the truth and plead for absolution
  • Shift blame
  • Develop a reputation for being unreliable
  • Claim that one of your multiple personalities must have made the commitment
  • Be late, so late, in fact, that everyone else has left by the time you arrive
  • Invent a laughable excuse and refuse to explain further
  • Pick a fight or be so nasty the other person tells you s/he doesn’t want your help
  • Be so bad at the task you are never asked to help again
  • Claim to have an injury
  • Injure yourself or induce illness
  • Ask your doctor or therapist to write you an excuse (“Suzy is too healthy to do this”)
  • Invent a relative who conveniently “dies”
  • Change religions so the commitment falls on a holy day
  • Change the time, don’t tell anyone else you did that, and then express your anger that no one else showed up
  • Quit
  • Claim to have amnesia
  • If all else fails, grit your teeth and honor the commit and vow to never commit yourself to something like this again.

In my next post, I’ll pull my tongue out of my cheek to take a serious look at when and how we really can uncommit ourselves.

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Posted by rosannebane

When Your Writing Is Stuck, Let Go

May 4, 2011

“I have to send a piece to my writing group by next Thursday and I’m totally stuck,” Pam McAlister wrote in an email to the other participants of last year’s Mastering the Writing Habit telecoaching group. (The members send each other weekly email check-ins to share their writing goals, accomplishments and commitments and let me tag along.)

“I just keep writing crap, but thanks to you all, I know that’s better than not writing. So here’s to shitty second drafts!”

Something in Pam’s email pinged my intuition. So I wrote back to ask “Is there something you think this piece HAS to be or HAS to do? What happens when you let go of that thought?”

Expecting Something Special? Expect to be Resistant!

My intuition pinged partially because I know Pam and partially because I recognized something familiar in my own struggles with expectations. I’d been invited to deliver the end-note presentation at a staff development program because someone on the event planning team had seen me present at another event and appreciated, among other things, that I told entertaining, humorous stories.

My contact and I talked about what they needed for this event: information about the effects of multitasking from a brain science perspective presented in accessible language that a professional, but not scientific, audience could understand and pragmatic, relevant solutions. Oh and some humorous stories would be very welcome.

It’s wonderful when someone recommends you, but it also brings pressure to deliver on expectations. My mental checklist went something like this:

            “Interesting information about multitasking and the brain? Check, I can do that in my sleep.”

            “Accessible and relevant? Check, no problem.”

            “Engage a professional audience? Check, those are my kind of groups.”

            “Tell funny stories? Check. I think. But wait a minute. This is a more serious topic. I don’t have any funny personal stories about multitasking. Uh-oh.” Cue the ominous music.

Every time I thought about writing my presentation notes, I found something else that needed to be done first. In other words, I was resisting moving forward with this project. I got stuck whenever I thought “I HAVE to be funny.”

Trying to Be Funny? Don’t or You Won’t!

As I told Pam, when I let go of thinking that I have to be funny, I come up with good ideas. So I keep reminding myself to just do my research, develop the program and trust the funny stuff will come eventually. As long as I keep reminding myself to let go of the demand to be funny, I’ll find the humor. But if I focus on the expectation, I won’t be able to do anything.

Expectations and demands that our writing MUST be something are a great way to get ourselves stuck.

Pam realized that because she was making changes in the other half of her professional life to give herself more writing time, she felt like she HAD to write “meaningful stuff” and she HAD to “write right NOW.” Armed with that realization, Pam experimented with letting go.

A week later, she wrote “It really helped to stop focusing on writing something that MATTERS. Instead, I played around writing humorous stuff for next year’s Christmas letter, [note: we often put less pressure on ourselves for things far in the future] then ended up working on a piece I’d started before.” Giving herself permission to goof around with her writing eased Pam back into writing something she really cared about.

It’s a paradox: you can only do what you really want to do when you stop trying so hard to do it. Creativity thrives on these kinds of paradoxes.

Pam also realized that labeling what she’s writing in terms of genre is not helpful for her. “Whenever I think ‘write an essay,’ I’m totally stumped. So for now, I’m just writing ‘stories’ or ‘pieces’ without worrying about what they’ll turn into.”

My intuition tells me a lot of those pieces will turn out to be essays that matter – because they don’t have to.

What do you think your writing HAS to be? What would happen if you let go of that demand?

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Posted by rosannebane

Keep Writer’s Block at Bay by Keeping Writing Something You Get to Do Part 2

April 21, 2011

Too busy to do what you most want to do?

Yesterday’s post laid out the problem: If you don’t think of writing as something you have to do, you never find time for it, but if you do make writing something you have to do, it leeches all the joy out of it.

Here’s where a Product Time habit comes to the rescue. The commitment part gives you the permission to say “no” to other obligations and options because you “have to” put in your Product Time – it’s right there on your To Do list.

Product Time serves you when you start believing the hype that you’re so busy you don’t have time for anything that’s not on your To Do list. When you consistently make time for writing, you remember writing is a vital part of your life purpose (an awareness that can be drowned out by the drone of busy-ness).

The variability of what you can do in your Product Time (research, draft, revise, follow a writing prompt, map out strategies for the writing project, play with a speculative project, etc.) keeps the commitment interesting.

The 15-minute upper limit on the commitment means you won’t be tempted to postpone writing for other demands – even at your busiest, you can usually see a way to get 15 minutes of Product Time in the day (especially when you have the momentum of habit behind you).

Keeping Product Time Interesting

You do need to keep Product Time fresh so you avoid the trap of an old married couple who are so used to waking up with each other, there’s none of the spark of new romance. That’s where Targets come in. You’re committed to 15 minutes of Product Time (just like you’re committed to your life partner), but you get to spend an hour or three on your writing depending on how much you can squeeze into your schedule.

Targets change and that keeps them interesting. Targets are not commitments; they’re what you shoot for, what you look forward to. Targets keep writing play, that is, what you are “not obliged to do.”

Targets keep writing something you want to do. A Product Time commitment keeps writing something you “have to” do in the face of competing demands for your time.

Think how handy this will be. You’ll get to say something like “Gee, I wish I could attend another one of Marci’s baby showers – the other four we had for her were so much fun and Marci and I are so close, working in almost related departments and seeing each other at all the quarterly all-staff meetings and all. But I have another commitment. Sorry.”

And that will be the secretly smug “Sorry” that means “I’m not sorry at all, but I am justified and you can’t make me change my mind. I get to go play with my writing.” But let’s be adult about this; keep the “nana nana boo boo” to yourself.

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Posted by rosannebane

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