Chapter Thirteen

Devices and Desire

“… As far as productivity goes in writing, I just find a quiet life is much the best kind to write out of. It is true that you need to kind of know what makes the world go around so entire quietness isn’t to be desired either, but by and large regular habits and making a firm alliance with a few people seems to me to be a nice way for this particular set of genes and muscles to go through our vale of tears.”
—John Updike

Writing with quiet hands means writing from a calm and centered, energized and engaged place. That said, maintaining that kind of grace and grit during the creative process can be a challenge. Approaching writing as a craft can help you avoid the dubious devices some writers use to face the blank page.

Or, as Hunter S. Thompson put it: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Not really, since he blew his brains out, just like his idol, Ernest Hemingway, did. Both were great writers who died too soon.

These are extreme examples, to be sure, but the writing life does present a number of greater and lesser challenges that can interfere with the happy production of good work. Better to adopt a role model like John Updike, whose craftsman-like approach to his work resulted in an astounding body of work—novels, short stories, poems, essays, and criticism described by the New York Times as “so vast, protean, and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors.”

Updike dedicated his mornings and early afternoons to writing in his study on the second floor of his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, setting a quota of at least three pages a day. He was a man of work habits, who, when asked what advice he would give writers, invariably spoke of work habits and quotas. Joyce Carol Oates, another prolific author of the first order, writes every day, “almost all day long with interruptions” in her study upstairs (as Updike did) in her home not far from Princeton. Both have been accused of writing too much, but neither Updike nor Oates, longtime friends, put much stock in the idea that their productivity was exceptional in any way. Updike called himself and his pal Oates “blue-collar writers” who approached the business of writing seriously and applied their writing energies in an orderly way—as opposed to devoting those energies to “the pursuit of the good life and happiness and drugs and drink and celebrity.” Writers with good work habits can write “an alarming amount” over the course of a lifetime.

You, too, can write an alarming amount over the course of your lifetime, if you form good work habits and avoid the distractions that may lie in wait along the writer’s path.

“I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”
—E.L. Doctorow

Keeping the Drama on the Page

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
—Graham Greene

My talented client Richard writes very dark noir, so dark that many editors found his work too relentlessly bleak to publish. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy dark here. But he’s a wonderful writer, and I knew we’d find the right editor for him eventually. And we did.

When the editor from a Big Five publishing house called me to make an offer on Richard’s novel, I told him that I’d have to get back to him, but that it might take me awhile, as I knew that he was on vacation at Disney World with his family.

“Disney World?” The editor laughed. “I find it hard to believe that the guy who wrote this story, of all stories, is at The Happiest Place on Earth. That’s the last place I’d expect to find him.”

Richard may write about mean streets and psychopaths, evil deeds and bad ends, but in real life he’s a family man working on his master of fine arts. His work may be the stuff of nightmares, but his writing life is organized, ordinary, and productive. Richard is a craftsman of the first order—and he’s got five Pushcart Prize nominations and a multi-book deal to prove it.

The trick is to keep the drama on the page. Be a blue-collar writer: Sit down every day and write. When real life threatens to overwhelm your writing life, fight back. If you’ve formed good work habits, you’ll be better prepared to ride out the days of drama that we all inevitably face—and write right through them.

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
—Octavia E. Butler

Block(ed) Head

“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on.”
—Orson Scott Card

Some writers claim that there is no such thing as writer’s block. That real writers write, no matter what. Tell that to best-selling author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who suffered from what she called “writer’s blockade” for decades.

She’s not alone. I know writers who have agonized over an inability to write—for weeks, months, years, and more. Sometimes, despite all best efforts, writer’s block happens. I know, because it happened to me. I’d been a professional writer and editor for ten years—and then I stopped writing my own work. I still wrote and edited at work—copywriting, ghostwriting, editing, and rewriting other people’s projects—but I simply stopped working on my own projects.

I could no longer face the page.

At the time, my life was all about drama—one familial and financial disaster after another—and I lost myself in the chaos. I couldn’t face the truth of my life, and so I couldn’t face the page. Because writing is about telling the truth, one way or another. After nearly ten years of silence, I found my voice again, and I started writing again. By this time I’d made big changes in my life—got a divorce, moved across the country, bought a house—and my life was relatively drama-free. More important, I’d found myself again—and what I found was a writer ready to tell the truth once more.

Pour your nightmares, sorrows, and obsessions into your work. Too much drama in your real life can keep you from writing your best work, or from writing for a lifetime, or from writing altogether. Drama in real life is ultimately exhausting and can exhaust your talent and your drive, not to mention your body, mind, and soul. Burnout, for many writers, equals writer’s block. And for a writer, writer’s block is a kind of death.

Other Reasons You May Be Blocked

“I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I’m having trouble with the novel I’m writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer’s block by always writing something.”
—Jess Walter

If your life is relatively drama-free, then there may be other factors affecting your ability to get your work done. Most of these have to do with fear, perfectionism, and unpreparedness. Here are some strategies to help you deal with these issues:

Work on more than one project at a time. Isaac Asimov worked on up to a dozen or more projects at a time. He placed tables with typewriters around the perimeter of his study, one typewriter for each project. He’d sit down every morning at the first typewriter, work on that project until he got stuck, and then move on to the next typewriter—and the next project. He wrote or edited more than five hundred books in his lifetime, from classic science fiction novels like I, Robot to works on Shakespeare, science, and history.

Most of us couldn’t keep all those projects in our heads at one time—and I, for one, wouldn’t even want to try. But many writers have at least two projects in progress at any given time, mixing up fiction and nonfiction, book-length works and shorter pieces.

Do more research. You may need to prime your pump to keep the words flowing. If you’ve run out of gas, then you need to go back for more source material. To paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson, you may have to turn over half the library to make one book. Do more research, conduct more interviews, dig deeper into your material, and go about “poking and prying with a purpose,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it. Priming your pump is often enough to kick-start your subconscious and get your juju back.

Back-burner your story for twenty-four hours. Sometimes you just need a break from the story to let your subconscious work out whatever storytelling problem is holding you back. Tell your subconscious that you are taking this one day off and that you are not going to think about your story. Put it on the back burner—but don’t leave the room. Organize your files, paint a wall red, build some bookshelves. Stay in your work space—and try not to write. By the time the paint dries, you should be ready for work.

Lower your expectations. Malcolm Gladwell swears by this technique—and, per usual, he’s on to something. Perfectionism is the worst kind of sabotage—and can shut down your creativity with a hard stop. So give yourself permission to write badly. Very badly. Your mantra: I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it later.

I use this one all the time, because I tend to think that every day’s work is awful. But I tell myself that I’ll fix it later, and I shut off my laptop when I’ve met my word count goal for the day. The next morning, I reread what I wrote the day before, and it’s almost always better than I thought it would be. If it’s not, I fix it.

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”
—Norman Mailer

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
—Paulo Coelho

The Mindful Art of Distraction

“The only time I really feel I can get away from the physical act of writing is when I am running or walking, because then I can think about the writing from another perspective.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

One of the best things you can do to exercise your writing muscles has nothing to do with writing at all. It has to do with the rest of your body. Study after study reveals that thirty minutes of moderate physical activity three or four days a week literally grows your brain.

You may not want to hear this. But odds are that if you spend enough time writing, you’re going to get what we call in the newspaper business “writer’s spread.” When I was editing an alternative weekly newspaper in Northern California more than twenty years ago, I took one of my junior reporters with me to a newspaper conference in Los Angeles. We were sitting in the hotel ballroom with some five hundred journalists when the twenty-five-year-old writer turned to me and said, “If I stay in this business, am I going to be fat, too?” I looked around, and sure enough, the majority of the middle-aged people in the room were noticeably overweight. This was anathema to my native Californian colleague, who’d grown up where everyone was a slim vegetarian—or trying to be.

The truth is, sitting on your butt long enough to write a body of work is going to take a toll. Even if you’re slender, you may suffer from back trouble or neck pain or carpal tunnel syndrome. New studies say that “sitting is the new smoking”—that’s how bad it is for you.

Not to mention that as writers we tend to be in our heads a lot—or as my mother used to tell me, “You think too much.” Physical activity is the perfect antidote to all that sitting and thinking. If you do nothing else, do this: (1) get up and move around for ten minutes of every hour you spend seated and (2) take that thirty-minute walk every other day, if not every day. Do it for your body and your brain—and don’t forget: As we saw in chapter two, many successful writers count their daily walk as a way to summon the muse.

The Om of Writing

“It’s all about paying attention.”
—Susan Sontag

You already know that yoga and meditation practice is a big part of my writing life; it keeps me centered and calm and helps me write with quiet hands. But yoga and meditation have physical and mental benefits as well.

Yoga keeps you flexible and can help relieve back and neck pain, arthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome that often afflict us writers. I suffered a neck injury as a child, and it flares up whenever I sit hunched over my laptop too long (in what my yoga teacher trainer calls “computer asana”). But as long as I do my yoga practice, I remain relatively pain-free.

Deep breathing and meditation—with or without yoga—are beneficial as well. Learning to quiet the mind and pay attention to the breath can help you do the following:

• lower blood pressure, relieve depression and anxiety, reduce stress, improve mood and behavior, boost the immune system, and increase energy levels.
• improve focus, enhance creativity, increase happiness, develop intuition, gain clarity, and promote emotional stability.

Many of my most prolific clients are active people who balance their writing time with physical activity. Two are yoga teachers, and two are farmers. There’s a stay-at-home mom in New Jersey and a stay-at-home dad in Chicago and a stay-at-home mom in Australia who all juggle writing with running around after their respective small children. Two are chefs running restaurants, and two are martial arts experts, and several more are law enforcement and/or military personnel who work out religiously. You may prefer gardening or golfing (skip the cart and walk) or hiking or biking or swimming. Anything that keeps your body moving and your brain chilling is good for your writing. So just do it.

Writing is not for the faint of heart. Writing well requires mental acuity, emotional courage, and physical stamina. Staying in good shape—mind, body, and spirit—is critical to doing good work.

“The imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.”
—Brenda Ueland