Sometimes a student feels that their original idea, data or written work is taken by an advisor who then presents the work as his/her own, or who gives credit to another student, without adequately acknowledging the first student’s contributions.

A student may have in inflated or misguided notion about the extent of their contribution, which also puts them in conflict with an advisor or peer. At other times it’s a challenging to try to clearly determine who contributed what to a research product, especially when there are multiple contributors over a lengthy period of time.

There are also situations involving multi-authored papers in the sciences where disputes arise about what order the authors should be listed in. An advisor has wide discretion to determine how a paper for publication will be presented, and a student may feel that their role is not fully noted in the final product.

In more extreme cases, a student may feel that they are held hostage by an advisor who threatens their future recommendation and professional future unless they agree to accept unfair treatment regarding written acknowledgments of their contributions. This may happen to a student who is especially gifted, and whose ideas are valuable to the advisor for promoting his/her career ambitions.

Written publications are the currency for career opportunities in academia, and it’s to be expected that everyone involved in research writing will have a desire to have it serve their career, as well as to advance the discipline they are involved in. Graduate students generally have to achieve well with their writing to be successful in their program and job search, but they frequently have limited power in the decisions that are made about their written work.

The authority regarding evaluating a graduate student’s work lies with their advisor, which is appropriate and right, unless the quality of that mentor’s moral fiber and character is compromised. A graduate student’s future is highly contingent on receiving a good recommendation from their primary mentor, especially in academic careers, and consequently it’s often highly risky for the student to openly confront perceived unfairness around authorship.

A student may also find it hard to write if they feel their work or ideas will be exploited by their advisor. They may feel they will be damned if they write, and damned if they don’t write. Changing to a new advisor is theoretically possible as a way to resolve such a problem, but this option is fraught with difficulties, especially in the sciences where funding constraints and difficulties finding faculty knowledgeable in a specific area of research limit the possibilities.

When there is enough good will among all parties, a negotiated settlement is usually possible, sometimes with the help of a mediator or ombudsman to assist with the discussion. If something less ethically palatable is going on and negotiating is not possible, an advisor generally does have considerable authority to make final decisions about research and authorship, and there are many ways to be punitive to a student who mounts a challenge.

Next blog entry: What can a graduate student do to advocate for themselves in an authorship disagreement with an advisor?

Be that as it may, I did have enough material to submit to a the Monterey Weekly’s 101 word story contest, and as luck would have it I was awarded second place for one of the stories and honorable mention for another (http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2012/dec/27/unpredictably-genius/).

Not too shabby for a writing regimen failure.

For this achievement I was awarded a $50 gift certificate at a local brewery, which may not seem like a lot for a year’s worth of writing, but hey – if I could build up to winning six of these a day it would be a living. Sort of.

Bottom line – now I’m planning a small book project around some of these stories that will include illustrations. The moral of my story is: Just do it. You don’t know what will happen, but something will.

The Words is a story in which Dennis Quaid, who lost his wife, gives a reading of his novel about a writer, Bradley Cooper, who finds and copies Jeremy Irons’ lost novel about losing his wife. Bradley then has enormous literary success from his copied novel but he feels tremendously guilty about this and then loses his wife. Although maybe Dennis Quaid’s novel is really a story in code about how he dealt with his own writing block through plagiarism and then lost his wife. The movie was written by Brian Klugman, and I hope he didn’t steal a screenplay about a writer who lost his wife and wrote about a writer who stole from another writer and lost his wife because, he might lose his wife like the rest of them.

I see why they entitled it The Words, because it takes a lot of them to summarize the plot. In any case the moral is clear: If you plagiarize, you lose  your wife (or your husband if that’s what you’ve got). Don’t let this happen to you, no matter how desperate you become at the keyboard. Maybe if you’re single it’s safer to try.

You’d think Bradley Cooper would have stuck to brain enhancing drugs, which was how he overcame his writing block in Limitless. In that movie he didn’t lose his wife either –  he wrote a book and got the girl.

The Words is a good portrait of the stresses a writer can endure, and of how tempting it can be to be to seek a quick and dirty path the success. In the end a writer has to live with himself, and his wife has to live with him too. And vice versa. A good movie to watch twice.

A tiger tale inspires a blocked writer in “The Life of Pi”

In the movie The Life of Pi, adapted from Yann Martel’s novel of the same name, we have a story within a story about a struggling writer who is looking for a story. Martel inserts himself into the plot as a blocked writer who has abandoned a novel he can’t finish, and is searching for a tale to tell. He is led to a man named Pi who provides the amazing story he needs to get himself writing again.

Much of Pi’s story involves being alone in a lifeboat, trying to survive while negotiating a relationship with the tiger who shares his vessel. On some level, I wonder if this story is an allegory for the life of a writer. Pi struggles alone on a sea of uncertainty, as writers do, and he experiences inspiration, exhaustion, exhilaration and hopelessness during his voyage. He must find a way to coexist with the tiger in his boat, or all will fail, just as writers have to learn to deal with mysterious and powerful forces of their own nature in order to produce their work and share it with others.

It may be that the frequent appearance of the blocked writer in fiction and movies is explained by the fact that the writer’s life resembles  the “hero’s journey,” as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Writers are heroes, whether they are acclaimed or not, by virtue of taking on this daunting, lonely challenge and having the courage, curiosity and fortitude to stay in the boat with their tiger until the destination is reached and the story is shared.

But a compliment can also be a double-edged sword for many writers. Praise can activate harsh perfectionism and/or low self-worth issues that shut down the writing factory. None of this is the speaker’s intent, but the writer’s self-sabotaging inner dialogue may get energized in an unfortunate way.

Some writers cannot assimilate compliments in  a useful way because they do not believe them, due to low self-esteem. Their discounting thought in reaction to praise is something like; “If someone likes what I write, they must be stupid or trying to make me feel good. Can’t they tell that I’m just an imposter?”

Positive feedback can also trigger ‘fear of success’ reactions like this; “If  I really have success, then I’ll be held to a standard of excellence that I’ll never be able to match again. Better to stop writing now before I’m set up for public humiliation.”

And there is always, “I don’t deserve success as a writer.”

Or how about this one; “If someone thinks my draft is pretty good, then I have to really perfect it so it’s magnificent”. In this case, the rewriting process is endless, and it kills the writer’s passion and the quality of what they had in the draft.

In all of these cases, the compliments or positive feedback backfire because the writer focuses too strongly on the self, the ego, the past, the future, or the public’s reaction. These issues are always in the mix, because we’re all human, but is there a way to limit their negative impact on productivity? I often recommend shifting attention away from questions about whether we are brilliant or pathetic, or whether the public adores or reviles us, and bringing the focus back to the project itself.

Many people who are plagued with chronic low self-esteem and serious self-doubts can and do produce the written word, and they often do a pretty good job of it. It’d be wonderful to go through life brimming with confidence every day, but you can’t wait for this if you want to write. When distracting praise reactions hijack your productivity, try shifting your attention back to the argument, the words, the story, the characters, the rhymes, etc., of the project in front of you.

And ask yourself, “What does my writing want or need? not “What does my ego, or someone else, want or need?”

Repeat as necessary.

Don’t worry…he’s not dead –  just blocked, grief-stricken, alcoholic, and paralyzed. And it’s only a movie

Sometimes dying is a great way to overcome writing blocks, and this appears to be true for the much admired actor Morgan Freeman, who was recently survived a widespread social media death hoax. Following his resurrection, he starred in The Magic of Belle Isle as a bitter, lonely, paralyzed, writer of westerns, who now finds solace in bourbon while his typewriter lies fallow on his desk.

Like many a writing block movie protagonist, Morgan was once the toast of the literary establishment, but he’s since lost his mojo, and now has only has 90 movie minutes to get it back. He is blocked by grief over his wife’s death (not his) and has been wordlessly languishing for six years.

This reminded me of the famous American poet Robinson Jeffers  who stopped writing and drank heavily for several years after his wife passed, then began writing again. In the Magic of Belle Isle, it’s Virginia Madsen, playing a single mother, and her three daughters  who eventually work the magic and resuscitate Morgan’s writing.

One strategy for kick starting your writing is to help another writer, and Morgan does this for one of the daughters who wants to learn about telling stories. His number two strategy is falling in love with a divorced mother of three, who is decades his junior, and this works pretty well too. Sadly, however, he moves away, but happily, he predictably returns and guess what; now he’s writing up a storm and getting together with Virginia.

This movie is pretty slow and very tame. You can follow it and write at the same time, and safely watch it before bed and have no trouble falling asleep. You might even fall asleep while watching it. In addition to a budding romance and a writing renaissance, the happy ending also includes Morgan swapping out his ancient typewriter for a shiny new Macbook.

Can we believe the way this low-budget movie portrays writing blocks?  True or False:

1) A parent with a past that involves heart-breaking writing disappointments may have strong feelings about an offspring’s writing career. True

2) Unresolved interpersonal and familial conflicts can reduce or stop writing productivity, especially when the conflicts are about writing. True

3) After these conflicts are completely resolved during a stroke coma awakening hug, an award-winning screenplay will be burped out in a matter of minutes. False

4) Writers tend to be very poor dancers. True

Florida Road also includes extensive scooter-riding montages, an African slum kid subplot, a tepid romance, extensive Indian family dynamics, and a happy ending that shows you (spoiler alert) you’ve been watching a movie within a movie that has the exact same plot as the outer movie, but like, with different characters; or at least some of them anyway. I’m a little confused.

Florida Road is a first movie for screenwriter Fred Fontana, and his own struggles might have informed the plot.  While it’s not of Academy Award caliber, at least it adds some new cultural wrinkles to the writing block cinematic genre.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In describing their productivity, writers often discuss the presence or lack of a ‘flow’ of words. There is a body of psychological theory and research, initially developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that addresses the concept of flow in a general way, and much of this work is applicable to the writing process.

Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as accompanying an experience of ‘flow.’*

1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered

6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience   

   Those aspects can appear independently of each other, but only in combination do they constitute a so-called flow experience.

   *Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow theory and research. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 195-206). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For blocked and struggling writers, you can conclude from the description above that a state of flow has many advantages, but it’s not necessarily something you can generate at will. Flow involves a shift of attention away from self-consciousness in order to become deeply immersed in the project at hand, and sometimes this occurs in unpredictable ways.

Some of the barriers to writing, such as fears about failure, criticism, overwhelm or success, are not part of the writer’s experience when he/she is in the ‘flow.’ OK, that sounds great, but how do you get there, especially if flow is something you can’t will into existence?

Probably most writers have had some experience of being totally absorbed in their work to the point of losing track of time and feeling full engaged. Sometimes the words just flow, and we give thanks to the writing gods for their good grace, but often this is not the case, even with very high-quality and successful writing. Flow might best be understood as a possible experience in writing, and one that alternates with periods of what I call ‘unflow.’ I’m most interested in unflow, because most of our lives, and writing, involve that state.

As the opposite of flow, unflow is characterized by enhanced self-consciousness, partial engagement in one’s work, a separation of action and awareness, a sense of stress and strain, boredom and frustration. In short, all the things that contribute to avoiding, resisting, blocking, procrastinating, etc.

Fortunately, humanity is capable of wrestling amazing creativity and productivity out of the unflow, one way or the other. Episodically you might be blessed with periods of flow states that come and go, and that is wonderful, but you can’t count on that or wait for it. You also have to flow with the unflow to keep things moving. For writers, this means continuing to sit down at the laptop to work, even if your words are flowing like cold molasses.

If you make greater peace with the unflow, and don’t use it as an reason to avoid, you end up having more opportunities to actually find the flow, because you’re showing up regularly at the keyboard, which is where the flowing takes place.

It’s easy to love the flow. Love the unflow too.

In the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, when Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, informs Dorothy of her power, she isn’t referring to Dorothy’s writing block, but she could have been. Like a struggling writer who’s lost touch with the muse, Dorothy had lost her connection with her home, Kansas.

As we journey toward our OZ’s, we musn’t lose touch with our Kansas’s.

Writing frequently starts out as a grand Yellow Brick Road adventure, but sooner or later the flying monkeys of procrastination, the poppy fields of sloth and torpor, and the green witches of anxiety start plaguing us, trying to prevent us from reaching OZ. Eventually we realize we are confused, lost, hopeless and not in Kansas anymore. And to top it off, if we finally do reach OZ, the Wizard turns out to be something different than we expected.

Glinda is heartily rebuked by the Scarecrow for not telling Dorothy sooner about her power, and Glinda responds, non-defensively, that Dorothy wasn’t ready to hear it earlier and had to learn things for herself. If you have ever tried to tell a blocked writer to have more self-confidence, you know this is very true.

Talent that is obvious to others may be partially or completely  concealed from the angst-ridden writer’s awareness. You can point towards it, but at the end of the day a writer remembers their power to go to Kansas in their own time, and frequently only after a good bit bewilderment, frustration, anxiety, wizard disillusionment and bad witch melting.

Nevertheless, it normally doesn’t hurt to, every once in a while, encourage a lost writer (or ourselves) to tap the heels of our red shoes together three times. Right Todo?

There’s no place like writing.

Paul Dano overcomes writer’s block when he meets the girl of his dreams…literally

Armed with only a recurring dream about a marvelous girl and Eliot Gould for a shrink, Paul Dano manages to bust through a tenacious ‘second novel syndrome’ writer’s block in the movie Ruby Sparks. Unfortunately, he relapses, but fortunately, he starts writing again until, unfortunately, he stops writing once more, until fortunately, he resolves his personal issues and writes an entirely different, better manuscript that (spoiler alert) becomes published and receives wide acclaim by the final scene.

It is not uncommon for an author to mine his or her dreams for creative inspiration, and geek, genius, wunderkind Paul Dano uses this technique to find his muse after Eliot Gould recommends that he write about his dream girl. Problem is, he then begins to find unexplained women’s undergarments in his desk drawer, until eventually, he finds the dream girl herself scrambling eggs in his kitchen. The science-defying space-time dynamics that made this fascinating development possible are never fully explained, but somehow Dano manages to write a girl character (played by Zoe Kazan) into three dimensional existence using his electric typewriter. He falls in love, of course, and complications ensue.

While this movie employs many of the expected conventions of the ‘writer’s block’ film genre, it does so in unconventional, delightful and surprising ways. Hollywood frequently presents a writer  protagonist who: 1) is brilliant, 2) has had fantastic success with first novel, 3) is blocked on the second novel, 4) has unresolved personal problems with relationships and love, 5) meets someone who helps him learn and grow despite his flaws, and 6) finishes the movie with a new book published and new love blooming. Ruby Sparks has all these elements, but scrambles them up in unexpected ways that keep the movie engaging.

This movie also presents ideas about character development, and how writing can be either a vehicle for self-aggrandizement or a means of serving the story being told. Mainly it is enjoyable, quirky, and funny as it explores some serious themes with a bizarre plot. If you’re a writer, check it out.