Authors: Jerry Cleaver
LAND OF LUNACY
Some common notions: Artists and writers are a little crazy. You have to be loose in the head, detached, unhinged to create. You need a special sensitivity, perception, and self-awareness to be creative. None of it happens to be true. Your personal psychology has nothing to do with it. You can be plenty wacky and be a good writer. On the other hand, sanity is no disadvantage. Writing is apart from all that. Writ-
ing is an act of discovery. You write not because you have awareness, but to achieve awareness.
That doesn't mean that the state of mind you get into when you create is the same as what's needed to function in everyday reality. It also doesn't mean that it won't feel crazy or drive you nuts at times. To create, you must go to a place in yourself that you must avoid in order to survive and function in everyday life. It's looser. It's wilder. It's open to anything and everything. You draw on it briefly, now and then, in normal activity, but it's not a place where you can dwell and fulfill normal, everyday responsibilities.
For example, it might strike you, in a tense conversation with your boss, how much he reminds you of a squat, jowly little bulldog you saw on the street that morning. In that situation, you would have to scramble to keep your mind on what he's saying and to push the idea out of your head before you smile or even crack up and get into trouble. But, if you were writing, you would explore that idea—how he looked, your smiling and telling him what he looks like, and walking out. You also can't be open to anything and everything that presents itself when you're walking along the street. If you were, you wouldn't last long.
The creative state of mind is unusual. You're not in your right mind by normal standards. And to get there you have to let go of the normal defenses, protections, and controls that you must maintain to function everywhere else. Giving up your defenses, going from secure to insecure, is never comfortable. Once you get there, it's never so bad, but crossing over is always a problem. One explanation for the resistance is that in order to create you have to
let go of your mind
and implicit in the letting go is the fear that if you let go of your mind you could
lose your mind.
That may be the extreme case, but I think some version of that worry is what makes it difficult to let go.
You can feel good about yourself, your life, your talent, your writing. You can know what you're going to write, know exactly where you're going and what you're going to do and feel good about all of it. But, even with all that in your favor, even with everything as good as it possibly can be,
there's always resistance to putting down those first few words.
That's because you must move from security to insecurity, because you're letting go of defenses, barriers, protections and opening yourself up to the unknown. Such resistance is not only natural, but constitutes self-preservation in the normal world. But then we're not going to the normal world. We're going to the land of vulnerability, of maximum exposure.
This chronic resistance is not the kind of death grip that's got you with an acute block, but it can lead to one if you don't watch out. You could easily start thinking,
If everything's great and I'm still having trouble, how am I ever going to do this? Maybe I don't have what it takes.
Again, everything that happens to you is right. You're OK. It's not you. It's the craziness of the process. You're fine.
You're fine, but what can you
do
about the resistance? Well, let me tell you my routine. I have a little ritual I go through each morning. I have a cup of coffee and a doughnut and I play the Jumble (scrambled word) game in the paper. What I used to do when I sat down at my desk and started tensing up was to tell myself, "Relax. Take it easy. You don't have to write yet. You get these treats first." That was a relief. I didn't have to face it yet.
But the longer those few things took and the closer I got to having to write, the more my resistance and dread began rising and the more I dragged out finishing my coffee-doughnut-Jumble. And the longer I put it off, the more the resistance increased. OK, but, hey, didn't I have a right to my coffee, doughnut, Jumble? Yes, I did, and I didn't need to deny myself. But I did need to find a way to prevent the resistance and avoidance from building while I had them.
What I learned to do was
write an instant line.
Now, as soon as I sit down, I set my coffee, doughnut, and Jumble puzzle to the side and tell myself, "It's OK. Just do this little bit, then you can have your treats." (Big baby!) Then I immediately write a line or two or a paragraph of what I'm working on. Doing an instant line or two (more if they come easily) as soon as you sit down,
before
you do anything else, breaks the resistance. One line is enough. Don't start pushing for more, but if more come, put them down.
The instant line accomplishes a couple of things. It breaks the resistance, connects you to your subconscious, and helps you feel,
Now that wasn't so bad, was it?
It also starts things (your story) moving on the deeper levels of your mind. Often when you get back to your work (now you have a line or so to look over), ideas triggered by your instant line will be there waiting for you. (See chapter 12 for a full explanation of this.) And because I've started things moving, ideas often start coming to me in the middle of the treats. The writing is drawing me in. That's the best.
I know a lot of this seems pretty silly and wimpy and infantile. That's because it is. We're all big babies when it comes to opening up in this way. We're going to the baby in ourselves, as we must. I've seen macho, body-builder tough guys sweat and shake when I was about to read their writing to the
class,
even though I wasn't going to give their names. Silly, yes. But these are the kinds of games we have to play with ourselves if we're going to avoid getting hung up, doing nothing for long periods of time.
The old "Just do it!" is lousy advice. It may be OK for sports, where you can power your way through, but it's worthless for creating. If you can power your way through, good luck to you. Most writers, most of the greatest, had to play nursemaid to this kind of "silliness." Creativity requires that you go where lunacy dwells.
A quick footnote about putting things off. When it's time to write, you will often start seeing all kinds of little things that need doing, little housekeeping tasks or calls to make or bills to pay—things that once they're out of the way, you just know, you'll be able to really get going. The answer at that moment is to tell yourself, "OK. Fine, you can do all of that—right
after you finish 'writing.
" Write first. Save those attractive little tasks as your reward for writing. The strange thing is that after you've written those things are never as important as they were before.
THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
We've looked at the condition of being blocked and what we do to contribute to it, but not at the root cause. For that we have to look at the creative process itself and uncover what it is that brings on these attacks. The problem is that the very skills we have to master in order to create a story can also cripple us. A carpenter's best tool may be his saw, but not if it's used the wrong way, slips off the table, and cuts into his leg.
There are two processes that you must master in order to create anything. The first is the
flow process.
The flow process is what happens when you open up and let whatever is in you flow onto the page. It's what you must do to get something to work with. This part of the process is quick, fluid, messy, emotional, and most of all
nonjudg-mental.
If you're lucky, this flow will go on for several pages; if you're very lucky, it will go on for an entire draft.
But there's more to it than getting loose and pouring something onto the page. Eventually the momentum (flow) stops, and you have to go back and look at what you've got and decide what to do with it— decide what stays, what goes, and what gets redone. That going back
and that evaluating are the
editing process.
The editing process is slow, deliberate, organized, intellectual, and, most of all,
judgmental.
Now, when things are going well, you can switch back and forth from flow to edit in an instant. You write a stretch (flow). It's not quite what you want (edit). You cut some (edit), then dash off some more (flow). It's better, but it's not there yet (edit). You work it again (flow). Ah, that's it (edit). You have a feel for what you want, and you keep working until you get it. So, flow and edit work together—two parts that make up the creative process. Neither one is better or more valuable than the other.
So, what happens when you get blocked? What happens, and this is all that's happening (it's enough), is this:
you're editing when you should be going with flow.
Being blocked is editing run amuck. At its worst, you edit yourself out of the picture entirely—
I have no talent. I'll never publish. I'm. wasting my time. I might as well give up.
Or you may be editing ideas in your head—discounting them, telling yourself they're lousy—before they even get to the page, before you get a good look at them and give yourself a chance to turn them into something that works.
Remember:
Nothing counts until it's on the page.
Do not work in your head. Unless you have a special genius for it,
never, never edit in your head.
Get it out on the page where you can get a good look at it.
OK, that's all fine and good, but no matter what I say, you will edit in your head, you will turn against yourself, you will get blocked. We all will. What can we do about it?
TREATMENT
You're blocked. What do you do? Well, I once had an inspiration that got me out of a block. I was feeling,
This is crazy? Why torture yourself?
Life would be so much easier without writing.
But I had a bit of perspective and realized that I was in the dumps and that it was no time to be making a serious decision (which means it wasn't a severe block). So, I said to myself, "I'm going to write until it gets good again, and if I still want to quit, I will." And that got me back, plugging away,
not trying
to be good. Not only did it get me back to work, but it felt like the solution to getting unblocked. So, I made a little sign and hung it on the wall I was facing. NEVER QUIT ON A BAD DAY, the sign read.
Now, the next time it was my turn to get blocked, I did. But now I had my sign, and I looked up at it. What do you think happened? Did it get me back to work the way it had the last time? Did I start writing instantly? Had I truly found the single key to unblocking myself? No. In fact, my reaction was more like, "Yeah, yeah. B.S. Not this time."
If only it were so easy. No, you have to tailor your remedy to each attack. As time passed, I made notations, other solutions, on my sign. "Never trust your emotions when they're negative," worked—
once.
"Everything that happens is right" was another. It reminded me that a writer is blocked because of the process and that it has nothing to do with his or her talent or anything else. That realization
might
work. It did for me a couple of times. But these are ideas—idea solutions. They're in the head. Just as you don't write or edit in your head, you rarely get unblocked in your head. No,
you will never think or talk your way out of a block.
To get unblocked
you must do
something.
You must act.
Just as action is what moves a story, taking action is what will move you back onto the page, which is where you need to go.
IDEAS THAT HELP
That doesn't mean ideas are worthless. They can work sometimes— especially with a mild case. (I'm contradicting myself, I know.) But you can't count on them to do the job. Stronger medicine is needed for a severe block. But ideas can help. They can loosen you up and make it easier to act. Here are some ideas that I've found helpful.
The Muse:
What about the Muse? You know, the spirit or goddess who inspires writers and artists, the source of inspiration, a magical presence that pours wonderful ideas into your head. When ideas are flowing out of you as fast as you can think, when you can just barely keep up, when it feels like a voice is dictating to you, that's the experience of being in touch with the Muse. If you write enough, you will experience her, sometimes for brief periods, sometimes for long stints. It's a thrill. It's the kind of energy and surprise, in one form or another, that keeps us writing. But it's not something you can count on, something you wait around for, or something you need before you can start writing, or something you need to write well. Just as you don't wait until you
feel
like writing to do so.
The best way to connect with the Muse is to start writing, because
the Muse is you.
It's all a matter of getting in touch with what's inside of you and letting it out. Easier said than done. One reason this is difficult that I haven't touched on is that our culture, with its strict puritanical ethic, does not help or encourage us to get into that place in ourselves, because doing so requires letting go, giving up, being empty.