The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (7 page)

Freeze
: a sense of helplessness or hopelessness; an inability to act.

It’s mainly the perfectionism-fueled terror that knocks perfectionists off their “path” and prevents them from returning to it.

So those are the six defining behaviors of perfectionism—each both a symptom of and catalyst for the problem. To make matters worse, there are a whole host of other attitudes and behaviors that also characterize perfectionism, which I discuss in the next section. Many, I suspect, will be familiar.

Invidious Comparisons.
Perfectionists love comparisons. They’ll compare themselves to living writers, dead writers, rich writers, poor (and, thus, “noble”) writers, non-writers who make a lot of money, non-writers who seem to be having more fun, etc.

And they’ll compare themselves on any point, including writing quantity, writing “quality,” worthiness of topic, purity of mission, income, audience, the size of the house they live in, the speed of the car they drive, the glamorousness of the parties they attend, etc.

And they’ll
always
come out on the losing end of any comparison—because the point of a perfectionist comparison is not to yield useful insight, but to serve as yet another club to bash yourself over the head with to try to coerce yourself into more productivity.

Perfectionist comparisons are
always
invalid, and sometimes crazy. A perfectionist with a day job will compare her productivity to that of a friend without one, and somehow conclude she should be able to match her friend’s output. (Often, with a weak rationale, e.g., “My job isn’t that hard.”) Or, a perfectionist will compare the size of his audience to that of another writer, ignoring the fact that the other writer writes in a more popular genre and does more marketing. Or, he’ll compare himself to a writer who got published more quickly, ignoring the fact that that writer specifically chose to take a workshop with a well-connected teacher known for helping her students get published.

Another common comparison is with some illusory or uncommon level of peak performance. “I should be able to write three hours every morning before work,” not just because (a) “three hours isn’t much,” (b) “Anthony Trollope did it,” and (c) “my job is easy,” but (d) because “once in a while I can actually do that.” Instead of measuring yourself against an impossible or exceptional productivity standard, measure yourself against a reasonable one while meanwhile working to uncover, and duplicate, the reasons for your occasionally higher productivity. (Maybe the roommates were out and so the apartment was quiet—and so, maybe you’ll rearrange your day job schedule so that you’re home more when the roommates are out, or look for a quiet place outside the apartment to write.)

Dichotomous Thinking.
Either/or, black-or-white, “dichotomous” thinking is a hallmark of perfectionism—and also of trauma, by the way (Section 2.9). A perfectionist tends to see her projects—and, by extension, herself—either as a total success or total failure, which again reinforces a terror of failure. Here’s a fine example of dichotomous thinking from Gail Godwin’s novel about a struggling painter,
Violet Clay
:

What if Violet Clay wasn’t to be one of the shining ones after all? But: no. I hadn’t yet reached that point of resignation where I surrendered the image of my greatest self. If and when that day came, I might as well be dead.

The eponymous heroine dichotomously envisions only two fates: glory or death. (This brief excerpt also ingeniously manages to incorporate several other perfectionist traits, including grandiosity, over-identification with the work, and over-reliance on external rewards.)

Dichotomization means that even many successes will be classified as failures, simply because they were not total, amazing, 100% successes according to perfectionist criteria—an attitude that, all by itself, will be hugely demotivating (Section 2.12).

Negativity/Cynicism.
Many perfectionists have a strong negative tendency that causes them to devalue not only themselves and their work, but everyone and everything around them. At its worst, this negativity devolves into cynicism, or a wholesale distrust of your own and others’ motives.

Along with clouding your vision, negativity also prevents you from seeking help, either because you see your situation as hopeless, or don’t think others will respond. And, in fact, negativity often does repel others—and particularly the kinds of successful and grounded people you need as mentors.

A writer who finishes a manuscript should be celebrating its completion, not bemoaning its deficiencies. You can note the deficiencies and make a plan for future improvement, but you shouldn’t be dwelling on them or bashing yourself for them. (And, just in case you didn’t catch this, only a perfectionist would expect a manuscript to have zero deficiencies.)

Someone who publishes a book should be celebrating that milestone, not bemoaning the fact that the publisher wasn’t his first choice.

Someone who succeeds even partially in the face of significant obstacles should give herself huge credit for that. (And all successes are partial, by the way.) And someone who utterly fails in the face of significant obstacles should still give herself huge credit for trying.

Someone who planned to write ten pages but only writes one should still be proud and happy about that one page (and set more reasonable goals in the future).

And someone who works for five minutes on a manuscript they haven’t been able to face for months or years—or, who even just opens the document—should also be proud. Learning to recognize and celebrate your successes is a powerful technique for overcoming perfectionism and procrastination (Section 2.11).

Rigidity.
Perfectionists often persist in trying the same ineffective solutions, sometimes for years or decades. There are lots of reasons for this, but the main one is that repeatedly trying an ineffectively solution is, in itself, a fine form of procrastination. Also:

Perfectionists usually misdiagnose their problem (as laziness, etc., instead of fear), and so they don’t have a clue as to how to solve it.

Perfectionist psychology inclines strongly toward one “solution”: coercion. So, in the face of a problem, the perfectionist is unlikely to come up with anything better than, “Just cope, dammit.” And, finally,

Rigidity is a trauma symptom (Section 2.9).

If you have trouble writing in a certain setting—say, because it’s too quiet and you feel isolated, or too noisy and you can’t concentrate—the thing to do is to pack up your gear and try writing somewhere else. A perfectionist, however, is likely to stay put, teeth gritted, and say, “I should be able to write here, dammit, and I’m going to sit here until I do.” And so, his time and energy are wasted on a fruitless struggle.

It’s actually amazing how simply changing your setting or procedure (e.g., switching from on-screen editing to editing on paper) can boost productivity—and this probably has less to do with the change itself than with the empowered feeling that led the writer to make it. Empowerment leads to productivity.

Conversely, “chaining yourself” to a specific location, procedure, or part of the project (Section 5.4) sends a powerful message of disempowerment, which creates fear that can, in turn, lead to yet
more
disempowerment, and an urgent need to escape via procrastination.

Labeling and Hyperbole.
Perfectionists, being drawn to reductiveness, dichotomization, and rigidity, love labels. But the labels they use are almost always harmful in that they either denigrate the writer or increase the pressure she feels around her work. Examples of good labeling would be to call writing “my job,” and the particular piece of writing you’re working on an “experiment” or “early draft,” since those labels tend to ease your fears around your writing. But most of the labels perfectionists use increase their fears, and are thus antiproductive, including those that deem your project to be “hard,” “important,” “my life’s mission,” or “the great American novel,” or those that deem the writing process itself to be some kind of epic struggle or holy mission (Section 2.2).

True, some projects are more important than others. But that shouldn’t matter
while you’re writing
. Prolific writers learn to lose themselves nonjudgmentally in their work, trusting that their skills, their community, and the writing process itself will get them where they need to go. Process over product, in other words (Section 2.3).

I’ve already discussed how harmful it is to label yourself “lazy,” “uncommitted,” etc., but writers never fail to surprise me with their inventive ways of putting themselves down. One writer told me he was afraid of producing works that “polluted” the cultural sphere. What that implied was truly awful: that if he doesn’t write well, he’s a kind of garbage or blight.

As discussed in Section 1.1, our reasons for procrastinating are always valid—but that doesn’t stop perfectionists from labeling their reasons as “excuses,” “complaints,” “whines,” or “being high maintenance.” Don’t do this—and also keep in mind that oppressors often use this kind of labeling as a control tactic. (It’s also often sexist.)

Hand in hand with labeling goes hyperbole. Formulations such as “The project was a total disaster,” “I’m a total loser,” and “It’s going to take a million hours to edit this thing” are not helpful, whereas clarity of expression is. “It’s going to take ten or fifteen hours to edit this thing” is a nonperfectionist statement because it is nonjudgmental and grounded in fact.

Fran Lebowitz refers to her inner critic as a “Nazi general,” a comic but ultimately self-defeating hyperbolic formulation.

Make no mistake: labels create a powerful expectation. Only use those that support your success. (See Chapter 6 for a larger discussion of labels related to writers and writing.)

Of course I know that calling someone a “procrastinator” or “perfectionist” is, in itself, a harmful form of labeling. As I explain in the vocabulary and text note, I use these labels in this book only for clarity. In conversations and teaching I try to avoid using them, although I will use words like “perfectionist” and “antiproductive” to nonjudgmentally characterize someone’s behavior.

Shortsightedness.
Perfectionists tend to elevate their current project to supreme importance, so that finishing it becomes a matter of life or death. Tom Grimes in
Mentor
: “I staked my future on this book. I either wrote it and succeeded, or I failed to and was finished.” This is the opposite of the prolific viewpoint, which tends to see the current project, no matter how large or ambitious, as a way station along the journey of one’s writing career and life. (Grimes later writes that “limiting myself to [the book’s] fate was deeply foolish.”)

Another example of shortsightedness was a woman who, in one of my classes, reported that she had had a busy week and hadn’t written much—“only ten or fifteen minutes a day.” When I asked her how much she had written in the months before she had started the class, she grinned and admitted, “Nothing—so I guess ten minutes is huge.”

She was right. You need to take both the long view and the broad view, which also happen to be the wise views.

Fetishes.
Many perfectionists obsess on a specific aspect of writing that they feel themselves to be hopelessly deficient in, such as “authenticity,” “originality,” or “profundity.” When you talk to them about their writing, they bring it up over and over again.

Sometimes the fetish is that “I can’t do [dialogue or plot or characters, etc.],” or that “I should be doing [longer works or more intellectual work or more commercial work, etc.].” Any highly charged self-critique is probably a fetish, and a fetish is always pointless and destructive. (And probably rooted in a traumatic rejection; see Section 7.1.)

Credentials
(e.g., a lack of a Master of Fine Arts or other degree) are another common fetish. Who cares? You may need an MFA to teach (or would, if there were any good teaching jobs; see Section A.8), but other than that, degrees are meaningless and, in my view, a peculiarly 20th-century concern.

Talent
is probably the biggest fetish of all. There are probably hundreds of quotes out there on how talent is meaningless compared with hard work, preparedness, persistence, etc., but I’ll just give you two:

Stephen King: “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” And,

Erica Jong: “Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”

Unconsciousness.
Perfectionists tend to be unaware of their writing processes—they operate on autopilot. Prolific writers, in contrast, tend to be conscious writers. This is not to say that they don’t lose themselves luxuriantly in their work—they would not deprive themselves of such a pleasure! But they are aware of their processes and techniques, and what works for them and what doesn’t, and they use this information to make conscious decisions that support their productivity and success.

Pathologizing.
Each of these statements—

• “My first draft [or timed writing exercise] is pretty rough.”
  
• “I really need people to support me when I write.”
  
• “It took me forever to write that.” Or,
  
• “I was sick and so I got started late and didn’t really do a great job.”
  

—describes an ordinary episode in a writing session or writing career. First drafts ARE supposed to be “rough”! Most writers DO need a lot of support—not because they’re weak but because writing is difficult (Chapters 3 and 6). Some pieces DO take forever. (Although “forever” is a hyperbolic label that should be avoided. See how the perfectionism sneaks in?) And sometimes you DO get sick and it affects your productivity. Prolific writers experience these events all the time, but hardly notice them, and certainly don’t bash themselves for them.

Perfectionists, however, cite these and similar normal (and inevitable) occurrences as evidence of how unfit they are for a writing vocation.