In Oprah’s Next Chapter, life coach Tony Robbins says, “We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves… Is your story empowering you… or is your story causing you to fall short?”

I wondered, “What story am I telling myself about my writing?”

Almost immediately, I heard this voice inside my head say, “I’m not ready.”

And immediately after that, I heard “Well you better get ready!”

You Can’t Give Yourself a Guarantee of Success, But You Can Give Yourself a Guarantee of Failure

Limiting life stories are at the heart of most writing resistance. There’s no guarantee that rewriting your story will forever banish writer’s resistance, but it’s a certainty that if you don’t rewrite the story that holds you back, the resistance you face will be harder to move through.

I know there’s no guarantee that if I get ready, my book will reach the thousands and thousands of writer-readers I want to help. But there is a guarantee that if I don’t get ready, I will not be able to effectively share what I’ve learned with all the writers who could benefit from it.

If I fall back into telling myself I’m not ready, that I don’t how to promote my book, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know which of the many options I should pursue first, I don’t have the contacts and resources I need, then Around the Writer’s Block‘s pub date of August 2 will come and go without my book having the impact it could have.

What I do know is I need to get ready. So everyday from today until August 2, I will take at least one action a day to get ready for my book to reach and support as many writers as possible. (If you’re curious about what I did today, I asked my agent about getting review copies to the people who plan writers’ conferences.)

But I really hope you focus your curiosity, not on what I’m doing, but on asking yourself these questions:

• “What is the story I tell myself about my writing?
• “Does this story empower me as a writer?”
• “What would be an even better story to tell myself about my writing?”

Please share your story in a comment.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

“A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I respectfully disagree with Mr. Glass only about the suggestion to finish a story a week – that kind of pressure can be the source of resistance, even full-fledged writer’s block. You do need to write often and a lot, but I still think the best way to do that is with the 15 Magic Minutes.

“What If It’s No Good?”

Far too many writers get stopped with the thought “What if it’s no good?” This isn’t all that surprising since we learned to write in grade school and writing is associated with school more than any other creative pursuit. And what did we learn in grade school? That you’re supposed to get the answer right the first time. You’re either right or wrong. If you’re not sure you’re right, the best strategy is to shut up until you are sure. Which translates to “I better wait until I know what I write will be good.” The longer you wait, the better the writing has to be to justify the length of time you waited.

The problem is the only way to write something good is to start writing no-so-good stuff, get your shitty first draft done and then revise. Of course in school no one ever rewards you for a shitty first effort; people think you’re stupid if your first effort is anything less than perfect.

You just have to be willing to suck for awhile. Actually you have to be willing have your first efforts suck forever. Even when you’re an experienced writer who’s practiced the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell observed it takes to achieve mastery, your first drafts will still be shitty.

So what are you waiting for? Go write some crap. The sooner you put in your time, the sooner you get through the phase where everything you write is crap and move to the place where your first drafts are shitty, but there’s hope for your second drafts, promise in your third drafts, real potential in the fourth drafts and so on until your final drafts are finally good.

If it's all in your head, you've got a problem!

If we, like James Thurber, don’t know when we’re not writing, why do so many of us have a nagging sense that we’re not doing enough? How can we always be writing, but never moving forward?

If all James Thurber did was write in his head – if he never brought “The Unicorn in the Garden” to life, if he never revealed “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and those fantasies remained only in Thurber’s mind – he would have been just a daydreaming curmudgeon. And we wouldn’t care what he had to say about writing or not writing.

If all you do is write in your head, the nagging sense that something’s wrong is right. On the other hand, if all you ever do is put words on the screen or page, your writing will most likely be self-absorbed and tedious, but this is a much rarer problem.

It’s not that you can never write in your head, it’s that you can’t write only in your head.

Take a look back at what you’ve been doing with your writing. If it’s been several weeks (or more) since you’ve done anything but write in your head, you’re either incubating a very large project (and I suggest you break it into smaller pieces) or you’re stuck in resistance.

Either way, you need to do something different. Get out of your head and into the tangible world:

• draft something
• do some research by interacting with people, places and things (not just the internet)
• make a rough approximation of the structure of what you want to write with a mind map, cluster, outline or scene cards
• write a character sketch
• draw a map or make a collage
• make something up

Do something!

Here’s How in 3 Easy Steps

Step 1. Go to your writing space.

Step 2. Get a pen and paper or open a file in your computer.

Step 3. Write one sentence. Don’t worry about how awkward, silly, incomplete, illogical, imperfect or flawed it is. Just write one sentence.

And now you’re writing. You’re putting the unicorn in the garden. Repeat as necessary.

“Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing something.’”

We can “write” in our heads while we’re driving, working out, at the dinner table or lying in bed drifting off to sleep. We can work out a piece’s structure or imagine a crisper specific detail while we’re doing the dishes, knitting, playing with clay or shoveling snow. It’s said that everything is grist for the writer’s mill, so in a sense, we’re always doing research. It seems that writers can work anytime, anywhere.

Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto

This is one reason I use the phrase “Product Time” instead of “writing time.” Despite the portability of a writer’s true office – her or his brain – the image most associated with “writing time” involves fingers on a keyboard or pen on paper, and there is so much more to it than that.

I define Product Time as time you invest in moving a writing project forward. What activities will be most effective for you to do during your Product Time depends on which stage of the creative process you’re in. (I explain the stages of the creative process in depth in Around the Writer’s Block; if you don’t want to wait until August to get a copy of the book, we also discuss this in my Writing Habit class which starts March 12.)

Sometimes Product Time is staring out the window, wondering “What if…” and “Why not…” Sometimes Product Time is brainstorming, freewriting, mind mapping or making collages (of characters, setting, plot, images, etc.). Sometimes it’s doing research – in a library, online, with an expert in person or via telephone or Skype, or even riding a mule into the layered depths of the Grand Canyon if you end up writing about the Grand Canyon. Sometimes Product Time is even drafting, revising and editing. This list isn’t complete; Product Time (what Thurber called “writing”) can be so much more diverse.

So When Are You Not Writing?

This makes it difficult to distinguish when you actually are and are not, in Thurber’s sense of the word, “writing.” Especially when you can’t always tell in the moment whether you’re just living life or doing research. For example, snorkeling scenes are significant in my novella, but when I was snorkeling in Hawaii four years ago, I had no idea I was doing research. Is it right to call that snorkeling trip research? Or was my later recall and recollection of the experience (via notes I made in my fish spotter’s journal) the real research?

If we can fall into “writing” in a Thurberesque way – while we’re driving, pretending to listen, walking the dog or vacuuming the living room – how do we know when we’re writing/doing Product Time and when we’re not? And if we can fall into writing/Product Time, can we also fall out?

We’ll explore this further in my next post, but until then, consider these questions:

• When and how do you fall into writing/Product Time?
• When and how do you fall out?

Nothing will block you faster than an expectation that your first draft should be good

Do you think you have to write something good, that if you’re going to take the time to sit down and write, you should produce something worthwhile? And by good, most of us mean perfect or almost perfect, logical, fascinating, funny, grammatically correct, sexy, grab-the-reader-by-the-throat thrilling, coherent, deep and wise and inspirational – despite the fact that some of those qualities are contradictory.

Expectations that your writing should be good are an all-too-common source of resistance. So I’m delighted to introduce today’s guest blogger, Lois Greiman, author of over 30 novels, to dispel the myth that writing has be good. At least at first.

Soldiering On by Lois Greiman

For me and a lot of writers, it’s a constant struggle to believe in myself long enough to get anything done. Oh sure, I have times when I think, “Hot damn, this is the best thing ever written. This is fabulous. Better than fabulous. This is unique. This is too good for publication.” Those times generally last about thirty-two seconds or long enough for me to sit down at the computer. After which I topple into despair. I know I’m a hack or a has-been, or even worse…a never-will-be. But… Glory be! I have a solution.

Here’s what I do: Every morning after feeding my menagerie of farmyard friends, I go for a run, brew myself a little tea, chant, “I don’t suck, I don’t suck, I don’t suck,” four hundred times, and settle into my work chair. That’s it. That’s the entirety of my secret. I sit down, I put my fingers on the keyboard and I write something.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t write anything good. Nothing noteworthy or hopeful or even remotely creative. But I do write. I have a goal for the day and I meet my goal. Generally, it’s 10 pages of rough draft every twenty-four hours. And when I say rough draft, don’t underestimate the roughness. Think cat’s tongue rough, extra coarse sandpaper rough. That first attempt is barely legible. If someone read it, I would, in fact, have to change my name and take a lifetime vow of silence. But day after day and week after week it gets written.

I don’t edit. I don’t second guess. I don’t whine. (Okay, that last one was a total lie. I whine all the time. But nobody listens anymore so it hardly even counts.) What I do is soldier on…through the terrible dialogue that makes me want to weep for my lack of creativity, past the nonexistent scenery, over the plot holes as big as battle ships…on. And voila, after about forty days of this dogged, but totally uninspired soldiering, I am rewarded with 400 pages of …drivel.

Rewarded with Drivel

I mean seriously, did you expect it to be good? No. It’s awful. Worse than awful. It’s nonsensical. Because without fail when I was writing page 77, I discovered that I hated my hero’s name. Who ever thought the male lead should be called Kismet? I’m obviously deranged. But do I go back and name him something manly and dynamic like…King George? I do not. I remind myself of my cardinal rule: no edits shall be done until the first draft is complete. Do I go back to page 83 to add the gun with which Kisment will shoot Destiny on page 122? I do not.

I soldier on until I have a first draft, a literary backbone, if you will. Granted, it’s a weak backbone. It has scoliosis and rickets and some osteoporosis, but it’s still a backbone and once I have that, I can move on. I can inject a little calcium into the vertebrae, add flesh and muscle and pigment. I can shape and hone. I can change my poor misbegotten hero’s name for God’s sake.

So there it is, the entirety to my secret. It’s not very exciting. Not very sexy. In actuality, it’s pretty painful, but I’m willing to hack up 400 pages of drivel if it’ll get me one step closer to a polished manuscript. So I dare you to try it. Be brave, be committed, sit down and write 400 pages of slop. Because really, writers have to write. It’s what we do. And it’s better than having to change your name. I mean really, what if you can’t think of anything better than ‘Kismet?’

Lois Greiman is the author of Uncorked, the 7th book in the Chrissy McMullen mystery series, She invites you to follow her on Twitter or on Facebook at either www.Facebook.com/Lois.greiman or www.Facebook.com/chrissymcmullenmysteries and to visit her website just for the fun of it.

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.

“Book em Danno.”

“What’s up Doc?”

“Just the facts Mam.”

“Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”

“D’oh!”

“To be or not to be…”

“How YOU doin?”

Can you spot the two anomalies in these Catch Phrases?

While you’re pondering that, I’ll distract your eye from the answers to that question, by identifying the speakers of the catch phrases listed: Gollum, Steve McGarrett (both vintage and contemporary), Bugs Bunny, Detective Joe Friday, SNL hosts, Homer Simpson, Hamlet and Joey Tribbiani.

I’ll go out on a limb and argue that “To be or not to be…” is not a catch phrase. Certainly, it’s famous; you know who said it and it reflects the character’s true nature. But Hamlet did not run around the castle saying “To be or not to be…” all the time. Some people may disagree (and they’re entitled to comment below or write their own blogs), but for my purposes, a catch phrase is something that’s repeated often enough to immediately call to mind the character who delivers the line.

I’ll also argue that “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night” is not a catch phrase because although it’s repeated every week, it’s said by a different person each week.

Two Catch Phrase Challenges

Your first challenge is just for fun: Tell us your favorite catch phrase in a comment here on my blog or on my Around the Writer’s Block Facebook page.

Your second challenge will help you reduce writing resistance: Identify your Saboteur’s catch phrase. What is the thing your Saboteur says often enough that you can start recognizing that it’s your Saboteur talking? This may take a little longer to figure out than the first challenge, and it’s worth the time and effort.

My Saboteur often whispers “It won’t matter if just this once… Tomorrow I’ll…” It also utters variations on the theme of “It’s not good enough. It’s not perfect. It’s too… (too simple, too complex, too long, too short…).”

Freewriting is one way to recognize your Saboteur’s favorite phrases (a.k.a. forms of attack). What do you say to either let yourself off the hook for not writing today or to keep yourself on the hook of endless revising, never moving forward, never being good enough?

Another way is to recall the inner dialogue you had running through your head the last time you felt unworthy, unrecognized, unprepared, inadequate or “less than” in any way. What do you say to yourself to make yourself unhappy about your writing? Your Saboteur’s favorite forms of attack are there.

Once you recognize your Saboteur’s catch phrases, you can tell yourself, “That’s my Saboteur talking, and since it always lies and never has my best interests at heart, I can just ignore it and go back to my writing.” The Saboteur doesn’t go away, but you stop letting it push you away from the writing you want to do.

When you figure it out, please post a comment with your Saboteur’s catch phrase. Laughing about the Saboteur in public helps deflate its power. Writers who are struggling to identify the voice of their Saboteur can get a lot of insight from reading what other writers attribute to the Saboteur, so please share!

What do you do when there's nothing to do?

Pam McAlister, my friend, fellow writer and former student, sent an article from Southern Living with this observation;

“I thought you might enjoy this little piece on piddling. Reminds me of my wrestling with what IS process and   what ain’t…”

Because the author of the article, Rick Bragg, gives such a charming description of the attitude that is at the heart of Process, today’s post consists of the intro above and an enthusiastic invitation to read The Fine Art of Piddling.

After you read the article, I invite you to go piddle yourself. Or if that phrase makes you think you need to invest in Depends, go play with Process.

Here’s my usual invitation to comment: What you do when you’re piddling? Is that the same as Process for you?

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/

Borrowing from the storyboarding technique screenwriters use, Edwidge Danticat starts her novels with collages. After creating several collages, she uses “blue book” college exam notebooks to draft a novel before touching a computer keyboard.

Danticat says “I like the tactile process. There’s something old-fashioned about it, but what we do is kind of old-fashioned.”

Recent brain science explains why the old-fashioned tactile approach can be so effective. Sharon Begley observes “Although most of us think of motor skills and cognitive skills as like oil and water, in fact a number of studies have found that refining your sensory-motor skills can bolster cognitive ones. No one knows exactly why, but it may be that the two brain systems are more interconnected than we realize. So learn to knit, or listen to classical music, or master juggling and you might be raising your IQ.”

Almost any kind of creative play (what I call Process) can have the effect of increasing creativity and other cognitive functions. Take your pick from collage-making, doodling, painting, coloring, dancing, fooling around with a musical instrument, playing with clay or Play-Doh, making models, gardening, photography, quilting, etc.

This as-of-yet-unexplained connection between sensory-motor skills and cognitive abilities can also help explain why clustering and mind-mapping break through mental blocks to deliver creative insight. Sometimes you need the image or the sensory-motor experience before you’re ready to make words flow into sentences and paragraphs.

Stop thinking about your writing problem straight-on and sidle up to it instead. Get your body moving so your mind can wander. Let your hands move of their own volition; sometimes another part of the body has wisdom the brain hasn’t clued into yet.

The next time you’re facing writing resistance, pick up your pen or your colored pencils, markers or crayons. Or your paintbrush, scissors, glue stick, harmonica or guitar, modeling clay, knitting needles or whatever activates your sensory-motor system and makes you happy.

My favorite ways to do Process are coloring and making collages. What’s yours?