Stuck on a Project? Try Stealing This Tip from Psychology

In the final weeks of 2018 I sat down and read Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. As someone who deals with anxiety on the reg, this was a pretty good book for exploring how and why anxiety occurs, and using that to frame why already familiar techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are used.

This was, by and large, an expected and hoped-for effect when I picked up the book.

What I wasn’t expecting when I read it was the sheer number of times I would sit down and start making notes that were associated to writing and building a writing career.

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I spent a good chunk of last Thursday trying to write this blog post and failing. I was just back from an academic conference–an event that is really high on the list of things that trigger my own social anxiety–and my brain kept trying to put together a frame that would make that clear. A subtext that would make a request of the reader: Understand that I’m not at my best, and take pity on my failings.

Which is, weirdly, why Hendrickson’s book proved useful in a writing context, because one of the core ideas she talks about is the fear of The Reveal that lies at the heart of social anxiety:

It’s the sense that something embarrassing, deficient, or flawed about us will become obvious to everyone…Social Anxiety isn’t just the fear of judgement, it’s the fear that the judgers are right. We think there’s something wrong with us, and we avoid it to conceal it. In our minds, if The Reveal comes to pass we’ll be rejected, humiliated, or exposed.

How To Be Yourself, pg 32

Writers exhibit this fear all the time. It’s right there in the questions new writers ask: how did you get published? Can you take a look at my work and tell me if I’m wasting my time? Can you really make a career out of this? It’s there in the way many of us promote our work, or the constant imposture syndrome that most writers seem to grapple with.

And I think this fear of the reveal comes part and parcel with trying to make a living as a writer. When delivering workshops to new writers, I will often talk about the bizarre binary of the way people talk about writing: you’re either a massive, phenomenal success, or you are a failure. A multi-time bestseller, or destined to die in the gutter, penniless and probably mad.

If we consider the questions referenced above, they’re a natural consequence of a dichotomy that leaves little space for development, growth, and a pluralistic definition of success.

If you tell most people that you want to be a writer, the subtext of conversations that follow will normally involve a level of how dare you, or you poor deluded fool, and that’s rich terrain for social anxiety to kick in. Couple that with an industry in which your work is constantly being evaluated and measured in terms of both its potential for generating social and financial capital, and its easy to understand how anxiety may kick in.

Every engagement with a publisher, ever agent, every critic and reader is a moment where you fear the reveal is going to happen. Is it any wonder that writers–particularly new writers for whom validation is rare–have a tendency to procrastinate? It’s the easiest form of avoidance we have, an easy way to delay the reveal when a work is actually finished.

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There’s a practice that Hendrickson recommends as a basic means of understanding the reveal. Hers runs something like this:

When (insert social situation here), it will become obvious that (what my inner critic says is wrong with me).

How to Be Yourself, pg 81

I’ve started doing something similar as part of my pre-writing process, particularly if there’s a project I’m specifically avoiding or that I’m stuck on:

When I finish (insert the project/scene that I’m working on), it will become obvious that (insert what my inner critique sees as a potential problem).

This is proving a really useful way of honing in on the things my inner critic is using to try and derail the forward progress.

• When I finish Warhol Sleeping, it will become obvious that it’s experimental wank rather than an engaging story.
• When I write this motorcycle chase scene through the city, it will become obvious that I don’t know how to block a good action scene in fiction.
• When I write this interrogation scene in a bar, it will become obvious that I’m riffing on genre conventions instead of a grounded setting.
• When I write this scene in which a character hides beneath the corpses of the dead in a battle, it will become really obvious that I don’t understand what it really means to be in that situation.

The useful part of this process is tapping into what my internal editor is actually worrying about, which isn’t always obvious when I get stuck on a project or start developing avoidance behaviours. Getting specific with the problem makes it easier to focus on what can be done in order to fix it–I have a specific thing I can research, or a particular weakness in the scene that needs to be fixed, rather than defaulting to “I need to rewrite everything from the ground up, and Gods, that’s so much work. Fuck it.”a useful thing when my default response is “rewrite everything from the ground up.”