Psychology of Writing

Exercise, Writing, Momentum, and Control

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I’m often fascinated by the psychology behind the way we do things, usually because there are all sorts of parallels between other things and writing.

Case in point: I was recently pointed towards Gretchen Reynold’s article about exercise while perusing  Lifehacker, and was immediately struck by the similarities between the way she talked about regular exercise routines and the way I think about submitting short stories.

Endurance…fades if you skip exercising for too many days in a row. The same is true, sadly, with motivation. In study after study, researchers have found that one of the primary reasons people continue exercising is that they enjoyed yesterday’s exercise or the exertions of the day before; they felt healthier and more physically masterful afterward and wish to relive that sensation. Longer periods between exercise sessions potentially could dull that enthusiasm.

Ask Well: How Often to Exercise, The New York Times

Now one look at my somewhat portly figure should tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between me and exercise, but that’s not why I latched onto this quote. ‘Cause it articulates something I’ve never really been able to nail down.

See, ever since I started submitting stories again, I’ve kinda noticed that things are…better. Over the last week or so I’ve been writing more, blogging regularly, and generally rocking my day-job with a little more energy than I had.

This isn’t a surprise; I knew this response would happen, ’cause I’ve been through this cycle before. When I’m not submitting work, I get all lethargic and it’s actually harder to start making things happen. The moment I get back into the habit of sending work out, things pick up speed. Submitting work begets more short-story submissions, which in turn begets more writing.

The longer I go between submitting stories, the harder it is to focus on writing. After fifteen plus years doing this, the act of putting words on a page for their own sake isn’t what gives me a charge (I know how easy it is to write without moving forward; it’s the latter that I’m chasing). Even having work accepted and published lacks the kind of energy that’ll keep me going, since that’s one of those aspects of the job that’s out of my control (outside of submitting the best work I can to the right markets).

Submitting new work is the thing that makes me feel productive and in control of my career, and it’s the sensation I want to relieve on a regular basis. Like most short-story writers, it’s one of those things I find hard to give up – the stretches where I’m submitting nothing, even if they’re filled with work on longer-form novellas or novel drafts, feel like dead spots in my writing calendar.

So, how about you guys? What are the psychological hot-spots that make you feel like you’ve got momentum and control over the things you love doing?

10 Thoughts On Shame and Writing

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Spokesbear

ONE

I rocked up to Angela Slatter’s place for Write Club earlier today, went through the usual process of getting buzzed into her apartment block and climbing upstairs. When I finally reached the front door, Angela pointed out that I didn’t really sound like me when I talked into the intercom.

“Huh,” I said. “It’s probably because I was cheerful.”

TWO

I spend a lot of time thinking about shame these days, particularly in the last few weeks. I ran out of money back in late June, for certain definitions of running out of money that triggered all sorts of bad instincts that built up during my three years of unemployment.

This means I immediately went into the same coping mechanisms that got me through that period, counter-productive as they were: I cancelled social engagements; I hid from the world; I avoided any activity that could potentially draw attention my way, including writing (If you want to trace exactly when all this started, go back and look at the point where the novella diary stopped being posted).

This is a pretty natural response to feeling shame. It’s an emotion that’s predicated on the desire to cover yourself, to turn away from things, to hide.

When we blush, our own body works to obscure us, throwing a scarlet camouflage across the face to protect us from prying eyes.

THREE

The worst thing about shame is the way it betrays you, revealing the gap between who you are and who you believe you should be.

Shame highlights different levels of interest. Shame goes to the heart of who we think we are. In this sense, shame puts one’s self-esteem on the line and questions our value system…once I’ve felt that hot flush, I’m reminded of what it is I hold dear.

Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn

The most destructive thing about shame lies in its ability to tear you down with the things you hold most dear.

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging

Daring Greatly, Brene Brown

The most terrifying part thing about shame is that it’s easier to embrace the impulse to retreat than it is to become the person you most dearly want to be.

FOUR

In 2010 I had a moment of lucidity amid the crushing self-loathing that dominated my life, and I wrote a blog post about shame and money as it pertains to writers. It examined my own habit of spending money to cover my secret fear about money, and talked about the steps I needed to take in order to get out of debt.

It’s telling that my first impulse, upon emerging from last month’s cash-flow crisis, was buying a shiny new Android tablet within twenty-four hours of receiving money.

I spent 2010 trying to keep my internal monologue, driven by self-loathing, from seeping into the outside world.

It would be nice to say that things have changed, but I’m still that exact same guy. True, there is nothing like prolonged unemployment to bring on crushing ’bouts of shame, but in my case it merely punctuated a proclivity towards such personal censure. In high-school I blushed at the merest provocation; as an adult I blush less, but I’m better equipped to hide myself in a multitude of disguises. I still carry a list of things I do not do, for the simple fact that I’m still ill-equipped to deal with the shame they inspire.  .

I do not love. I dare not belong. These are reflex responses, safe places to hide.

The are so many things I want that simply seem too big, and my first impulse is always to hide or apologise for those desires

FIVE

Writers need to equip themselves with tactics to deal with shame. It’s a career that puts you in direct opposition to a multitude of cultural assumptions, based on gender and social worth and your economic status.

It seems like an easy thing to shrug off, but I’m still haunted by a litany of moments that I bet many writers will echo in some ways:

  • There is shame in telling your parents or family that you’re going to be a writer, only to have them suggest alternate careers “for while you’re breaking in,” or explain the astronomical odds against writers making a full-time living.
  • There is shame in having no regular paycheque, especially if you’re being supported by a partner. This lingers long after the relationship is done, especially if you believe this is a contributing factor to your break-up.
  • There is shame in telling someone you write, only to have them set the bar higher than you’ve achieved by asking “can I find your book in stores?” How dare you presume to such lofty heights, when all you’ve achieved is some unpublished scraps?

We’re similarly haunted by the things we learn about craft, all the helpful advice and career guidance that does more damage than good. In a career where you’re already battling shame because you’ve internalised all sorts of social expectations, it’s so easy to grasp simple advice and use it as a bludgeon to keep yourself from working.

They may be little hits, the kind of thing you barely notice, but sooner or later those little hits add up.

SIX

My personal tactics for dealing with shame is this:

  • learn to recognise it and embrace shame for what it is – a reminder of what I think is important, or a thing I’ve inherited from the world without thinking’
  • Make a decision about whether or not it’s something I really want to engage with., then ditch the stuff you’ve inherited from other people and chase the stuff that’s mine.
  • Having recognised the gap between where I am and where I want to be, figure out the next steps I need to take in order to get me where I’m going (I work small and take it bit by bit, tackling the things that matter most to me. I carry a lot of shame around, and I’m not going to eliminate it all in one go).

A simple set of tactics, but like most simple things, its not really easy to do. In fact, it’s hard as hell. I consistently get ambushed by things I thought I was over. Or I get busy and stop noticing shame as it seeps into my life. That’s when I turn to easier ways of coping with what’s happening: telling myself that things aren’t fair; telling myself things aren’t important; making fun of something I dearly want, simply because I think I can’t have it.

SEVEN

So yeah, I’m kinda cheerful this week, ’cause I’ve bridged a gap between me and my idea of me as writer that’s been getting wider for quite a while. It’s got nothing to do with getting words down, or even getting things published.

It’s got everything to do with not sending work out, which has bothered me for a while.

In my head I’ve always been a prolific writer, even in the periods when I’m not. I went from submitting dozens of stories a year to submitting, at most, three.

More important, I’d gone from seeing myself as a writer with momentum to seeing myself as a writer whose career had been hideously derailed. I’d spent so much time hiding from the world while unemployed that I didn’t want to let work out, not unless it was perfect and going to get me back-on-track.

I spent a lot of time chasing that story, over the last twelve months. Which is pretty goddamn stupid, ’cause it doesn’t really exist, and all I set myself up for was new round of shame regarding the stories I’d written that weren’t up to snuff.

In my head, a writer writes, but they also submit.

When I’m not sending work out, the internal dialogue starts: you call yourself a writer, huh? Well, look at you, you’re just a fuck-up. Sacrificed any real chance of a life for this shit, and you can’t even be arsed putting effort into it. Now you’re going to die all alone and unloved….

EIGHT

The funny thing about submitting all those stories? The ones I’ve been telling myself weren’t good enough to go out? It doesn’t really matter if I was right or wrong on that front. They may never be published, but they’re still doing their job.

They’re fighting back the shame, freeing up the mental space to devote to other stuff. Which, in this case, seems to be finishing more stories, ’cause a whole bunch of things I’ve been stuck on for the last few years have started working themselves out.

It’s not going to fix everything, ’cause dammit, there’s been some cowboys knocking about around inside my head, but I’m tackling the things that bother me one thing at a time, and every time it frees up a little more energy to tackle the next step.

NINE

Someone smart is going to come along and point out the logical correlation between this post and my post about Stephen King’s writing advice.

Let me save you some time: you’re perfectly right. I dearly wish I could be the kind of writer who wrote 2,500 words a day. In my head I’m a shining paragon of productivity, capable of churning out brilliant stories and supporting myself with my writing.

And every day I not doing that, I have the chance to beat myself up with the knowledge. Some days I do. Most days I do not.

TEN

…This is a story about how I learned something and I’m not saying this thing is true or not, I’m just saying it’s what I learned. I told you something. It was just for you and you told everybody. So I learned cut out the middle man, make it all for everybody, always. Everybody can’t turn around and tell everybody, everybody already knows, I told them. But this means there isn’t a place in my life for you or someone like you. Is it sad? Sure. But it’s a sadness I chose.

That Power, Childish Gambino

So yeah, we’re swerving into a non sequitur ending for this blog post, but this flashed into my head as I started going back-and-forth on the issue of making this live. How much of this is important to know? How much is just me trying to cope with things by over sharing? How much is useful and how much me trying feeling sorry for myself?

I’ll admit there’s a fundamental connection between shame and writing, at least in my practice. Everything I write is just a source of shame writ large, an attempt to transform myself into a person I’d really like to be and the world into a place I’d really like to live. Even this blog is a persona that’s put forward, a moderated version of myself that’s shaped for the consumption of the outside world.

But then, most blogs are.  It doesn’t help. I still second-guess myself, my reasons for writing this up. I go back-and-forth on various sections, wondering if they should be cut out.

In the end I’m erring on the side of posting it in full, ’cause I honest do believe that managing shame matters, particularly when it comes to writing. Shame is at it’s best when we don’t talk about it. It’s one of those negative emotions we reject as a polite topic for conversation, for the very reasons it’s a powerful means of tearing yourself apart.

Then I’m going to go hang-out with the Spokesbear for a stretch. At least until the flutter of nerves dies down.

Why King’s “On Writing” Can be Dangerous to New Writers

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So my boss caught up on the Novella Dairy yesterday and commented on the fact that I was crapping on Stephen King in my post asking for feedback about the future of the project.

“I crapped on Stephen King?” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.”

“Sure you do,” she said. “You basically quote him and then talk about all the ways he’s wrong. You’re all It’s all very well for Stephen King to write about sitting in the chair until he hits 2K a day, but some of us have day jobs…”

I’ll admit, at this point, that my record of this conversation probably isn’t 100% accurate, but it captures the gist. It refers back to an ongoing conversation we’ve had at work, where I’ve brought up the fact that I think On Writing has the potential to be a dangerous resource for some new writers and it bothers me that it’s so…omnipresent, I guess, as a source of advice.

So I figured I’d take a moment to unpack the reasons I used King as an example, particularly when it comes to the particular passage I quoted in yesterday’s post.

First Up: Stephen King Gets A Lot Right

Lest we get off on the wrong foot here, I’m going to state right at the outset that On Writing is actually a pretty useful book. It gets a lot of information right and it offers a pretty solid foundation for people who are getting into writing for the first time.

Better yet, his metaphor of the writer’s toolbox? Fucking brilliant. Simple, effective, well-explained. All the things that it needs to be. That it’s immediately followed by a point of contention for me (King and I disagree on the merits of plain style and not reaching for new language) is kinda beside the point, ’cause I don’t necessarily consider work with the language you’ve got bad advice in isolation.

Basically, while I think it has the potential to be problematic, I’m not really leveling the criticism at Stephen King’s advice so much as writing advice in general. On Writing is serving as a stand-in for a whole lot of conventional wisdom when it comes to writing, mostly because that conventional wisdom is presented very clearly in King’s book.

The overall gist of the advice? Write regularly? Submit your work to magazines. Embrace persistence, especially in the face of rejection. Build up your tools as a writer and make sure you’ve got them down.

It’s good stuff. I endorse it in principle, based on seeing it work for hundreds of writing students over the years. Advice goes, it’s useful.

Right up until it’s not.

No Writing Advice Survives Contact with the Enemy

The best writing advice is like a little explosion in your head. You read it, you put two-and-two together, and you suddenly realise why it’s taken you so damn long to realise how they come together to make four. You sit there thinking, wow, that’s so damn easy, how did I miss it.

The worst writing advice sits in your head like a stone, weighting you down and keeping you from moving forward. You sit there, looking it over, and thinking, wow, holy hell, why am I not doing this? It’s so damn obvious.

The weird part is that the good writing advice and the bad writing advice can be exactly the same; you’ve just heard it a different point in your career, or it works really well for you but not the next writer down the queue. I keep writing this in various places, but writing advice is not one size fits all.

The advice that helps you out isn’t even consistent year-to-year in your writing career. The things you need to hear when you’re starting out are rarely the same things that’ll help you five years in.

I Don’t Believe in Monolithic Entities

Church. State. Grand narratives about life and existence. They’ve all collapsed in the face of modern world, embracing a kind of pluralism that’s only just starting to seep into writing advice.

Stephen King’s career is a kind of monolith in some respects. It’s too successful, too big to ignore, and it’s built on the strengths of a very particular kind of writer. The career advice outlined in On Writing reflects that in a lot of ways; it’s the kind of big, monolithic conventional wisdom that is all too common in writing.

The simple core of Kings guide – write a lot, submit a lot, keep repeating and don’t give up – syncs directly with my own experience with regards to what works when you’re starting out. The details of getting there, though, that isn’t the same at all. I had very different experiences as a formative writer. I work in very different ways. Approaching the process of writing 2,500 words a day the same way King does will frustrate me at the best of times and depress me at the worst.

I know, because I tried just a few months ago. I set a daily word count throughout January and February. I set my routine and went for it, forcing myself to sit there until I hit my word count.

It worked for a short stretch, but by halfway through the month real life intervened. I’d aim for two thousand words and get to fifteen hundred. Staying at the computer wasn’t a choice, ’cause I either had to head off to work or I had to get some sleep before heading to work the following morning.

I am, after all, thirty-six. My brain doesn’t work well on five hours sleep anymore.

Victory Conditions and Sacrifice

Here is my least-favourite sentence in the how to write section of On Writing, when he talks about your daily practice and target word count:

As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this low at first, to avoid disappointment. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. (King, On Writing)

I mean, really? Magnanimous? I’m resisting the urge to be snotty here, especially since it comes with the implication that one day you’ll level-up as a writer and be above such things.

Writers are fond of setting victory conditions. I do it myself – the novella dairy is predicated on the 1k a day goal – but the problem with setting a victory condition like you will write 2,500 or 1,000 words a day is the counter-point that not reaching that word-count means that you’ve failed. Nothing wrong with that if you’re strong enough to shake things off and get back on the horse, but that isn’t always a given. Some days you don’t have the energy to give yourself that kind of pep talk.

The rhetoric offered to aspiring writers is all about sacrifice and martyrdom. If you can do anything but write, don’t write. If you want to make it, you’ll plant yourself in front of the computer and work until you hit your word count. If you want to be a writer, you’ll sacrifice and sacrifice…and if you aren’t able to sacrifice, you obviously didn’t want it enough.

Some days I wonder if that’s a bad thing.

How many writers have we lost because planting themselves in a chair and writing two thousands words in a single sitting was impossible? How many have we lost to the belief that you need to block out hours to give to writing? Or even a single consecutive hour, where you lock the door away?

I know why the advice is offered and I understand its place, but presenting it as a monolithic given is a mistake. The process of writing is individual and idiosyncratic; writers themselves, imminently adaptable. Some days it’s okay to chill the fuck out. Sometimes you can admit that maybe, somewhere along the line, you’d like to be a writer and have a goddamn weekend to yourself.

But beginners never hear that. You can put out the argument that perhaps they haven’t earned it yet – they need to hear the monolithic lectures about sacrifice and forcing yourself to write because otherwise they’ll never figure out their process or get to the end of the story. It’s like beginners need to be bullied into doing things, ’cause otherwise they’ll surely fail.

Lets be Honest: Writing is Hard

It’s not hard like brick-laying is hard or running a conference is hard, but it’s got its own difficulties.

It’s hard when you start writing because you suck and, as Ira Glass mentions in his brilliant video about creative success, you know that you suck. There’s good odds that you’ve embraced the creative side of yourself because you’ve got exceptional taste, and it’s frustrating to enter into that period where your skills aren’t yet in synch with your ambition.

It’s hard when you’ve had some success as a writer because you’re invested in your career. You know you can achieve and you want to achieve more, only now you’ve got to make sure that every new thing is better than the work that came before it and you’ll occasionally be visited by the spectre of you’re done, it’s all been a mistake, and you’ll never be published again.

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that it’s even hard for guys like Stephen King, who have an audience with huge expectations and a million demands on their time. Things that are, technically, work, without actually being writing.

You know what all that misses?

Being a writer is fucking awesome.

Make no mistake, it’s a career path that’s got its ups and downs. There are days when I wish that I’d chosen something else to do with my life. Overall, though? Best fucking job in the world, whether I’m getting paid for it or not.

It just got a lot better, for me, when I stopped forcing myself to be the square peg squeezing into a round hole.

Here’s What You Need to Remember About On Writing

It’s a how-to-write book that reflects the way Stephen King set about building a writing career. The advice offered within worked really well for Stephen King, both in the general and the specific sense. It’s worked well for a whole bunch of other writers too.

But it doesn’t work for everyone. It presuppose a pace that you want to finish things, and in turn that’s predicated upon some very specific career goals. It assumes you want to be a novelist. It assumes you want to be writing full time. It assumes all sorts of things that may not be true for your particular path into writing, but unless you realise that, it’s easy to buy in ’cause you haven’t actually considered what you really want.

And, yeah, I got a personal beef.

There was a period of my life where sitting at the computer until I’d written 2,500 words a day nearly killed me. I was unemployed and desperate and really struggling to stay positive, and every time I failed to hit that goal it was like a mallet thumping against my already fragile self-confidence.

It never occurred to me that I was doing the wrong thing. That Stephen King’s approach probably wasn’t for me. That my attention span, short and fragmentary as it is, is better served by walking away and coming back a few minutes later. And it wasn’t like I was new to writing. I’d been doing this for years, had a whole bunch of stories published. I worked under the illusion that I knew what I was doing, even though I didn’t.

Here’s the important bit.

Writing is one of those places where we don’t really examine our habits and processes. We fall into habits. We believe the things that are repeated, loudly and repetitively, rather than figuring out what works best for us. When I’m talking about the kind of advice offered in On Writing in something approaching a negative light, it’s usually because it’s a stand in for a whole bunch of conventional writing wisdom that I find enormously frustrating.

It would be easier if we could transform that baseline into something more sensible. Figure out how you write. Figure out how you finish your projects. Figure out what your career is going to look like.  

The problem, of course, is that stuff is all easier to see in hindsight. When you’re eager and just starting out, wanting to run as fast as you can even though you haven’t figured out how, the kind of advice your offered is all about getting you to the next phase of your career: finishing things, sending them off, getting paid for your work.

To go back to the Ira Glass video I mentioned above, the only way you can get your work up to the level of your ambition is producing a body of work. That’s more or less the gist of King’s book as well, although it doesn’t explain it quite so explicitly and its approach to doing so is prescriptive  That’s part of its charm and appeal; writing is presented like a magic trick you can master, after which its all book contracts and puppies.

You need to read the first half, the biography, and read for the subtext to learn that sometimes it’s not. That there are things that derail even Stephen King (although, mad respect, it appears that it took a life-threatening  injury to keep him from writing). So read On Writing. Try its approach on for size. And if it doesn’t work – keep bloody looking for models. There are so many ways people approach this writing gig that there’s bound to be some advice that works best for you. Right now, I’m deep into the twenty-minute writing groove. It may change, it may not, but I’m going to test it and keep testing it to see how it’s working.

The smartest thing you can do is figure out what your approach looks like and keep making sure it’s right for you, your life, and your goals.