Writing to Write
Or: Sometimes just doing the thing is the thing to do
One of my favorite genres is the “curing writer’s block by writing about writing”. The best example is the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink — a movie that is a visual metaphor for writer’s block written when the filmmakers were experiencing writer’s block. The point is to write about the problem to write your way out of it.
I like this genre, not because it is useful, but because it is a trick. It makes a liar of the writer and the block.
Seth Godin has famously argued that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. It wasn’t a thing 100 years ago. People just wrote. Or didn’t. But the concept was created in the last century and then suddenly everybody gets it and can’t get out of it. The more obvious understanding is that once the malady was named, we could say we have it and not have to do the next thing.
Writing one’s way out of the writer’s block is a bit disproving that the writer’s block even existed in the first place. Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t struggle, just that the block — it’s permanence, really — is the end of the thing.
When I learned to drive in northern Michigan, it was important to teach us how to operate on snow and ice (for obvious reasons). The lesson was intentionally counter-intuitive: steer into the skid. At sixteen, I was a bit pedantic and needed clarification on which way counts as the skid, but it was their way of noting that our reflex may be to try to get out of the skid, wrenching the wheel back toward the road, for instance, which would result in sending the car in a circle. Turning toward the skid is a way of accepting the direction and helping the car find traction.
The idea of writing our way out of a writer’s block is a bit of both of these ideas. When we tunnel our vision toward the writing, we can get some traction. In the Coen Brothers’ case, this was writing a story about writer’s block and finding a more captivating story than the noir gangster movie (Miller’s Crossing) they were working on. It is a subject and inspiration.
As Godin suggests in the above blog post, we usually don’t have writer’s block — just a fear of bad writing. Sometimes, it is just the supposed scourge of the empty page and not knowing what to write about. I suspect that this is actually one of the reasons so many writers like to write about writing — it is both easy to write about it and there is a tremendous audience wanting to read about the craft of writing well (and also avoid doing the writing themselves because: more research!).
Austin Kleon’s writing trick makes sense, too: “open the document: stay in the document.”
My issue? I tend to think:
I should write something.
What?
Well, what are people interested in right now?
Let’s research and find out.
Nothing is popping. Back to square one.
or
What is most useful?
Look through ideas.
None of these are what people need.
Notice the pattern? I’m setting up a binary that everything must be appealing or else useful. Sometimes the most useful and appealing starts, not from the greatest idea, but simply steering into the turn or opening the document and staying there until it is done. That’s what I did today. I bet you could, too.
Be Well,
Drew
Five Awesome Things
Something, something inspirational.
1. School starting
I love when school starts and I get to see other people’s pictures of the first day of school and my own kids go off to school and I don’t feel bad about focusing on other things for the day.
2. Writing a post and then deleting it
I’m currently reading Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier and nine of them are really good. I generally take issue with political bothsidesing and mismatching political division with the obfuscating character of social media, but he is absolutely right that it is designed to make us unhappy, precisely because engagement is tied to outrage. Posting less is important. But recognizing just how much social media is about manipulating our public image to produce likes and clicks, maybe choosing to reject the whole thing is more important.
3. Taking the scenic route
When we drive up to northern Michigan, I take the old highway that follows the lakeshore and runs through towns like Tawas City and Oscoda. My parents and Google Maps both prefer cutting through the forest up 33, a lesser-used highway with fewer stops and straighter paths. Living away from the big water, I want to spend as much time near it as possible.
4. Fewer shortcuts
Like taking the scenic route, our lives are full of shortcuts, mostly intended to make our lives easier, or at least more productive. This, after all, is the point of the shortcut: not merely to take less time on a thing, but to make the human experience more full of things. And rather than take the fifteen minute savings on a two-hour drive and using it to go swimming, stopping at a new bookstore, or eating good food, we’ll get to our destination sooner so we can get back on our phone. Now take this idea and, instead of applying it to driving, apply to communication and how we talk with each other. Skip ahead, assume what others are thinking, spend less time listening and more time judging, evaluating. How are those shortcuts treating us?
5. Walking in the heat
OK, this never feels that awesome. Unless, of course, you like being in a sauna and instead of relaxing, you choose a physical activity and the prospect of running into someone else feeling all gross. But there is, if we’re willing to see it, something also kind of great about it. It reminds me I’m alive and in a body that moves through space. A body that gets hot and sweats and needs to wear a hat so my bald head doesn’t burn and now my head is the sweatiest part of my body and there isn’t any hair to soak it up, so now my hat itself is like a towel I’ve inadvertently dropped into the tub or the lake. All of the traveling we did this summer was on the hottest days and we walked everywhere and it was so energy-sapping, but damn, did it feel real, like being alive. Sure, 70’s are better, but 90 and stuff to do? It reminds me of walking with my daughter in Georgia summers and those walks were worth it, too.
dreaming is a newsletter about the brave act of dreaming in a culture of now. Join in the revolution.