How much attention should a blocked writer pay to “Time’s winged chariot?”

Andrew Marvell’s recommendation is, “Let’s get it on!”

In his famous poem “To a Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell wrote the following lines in the mid 1600′s:

“But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.“

Marvell was evidently an early incarnation of what we would call a ‘motivational speaker’ in the twenty-first century. In this poem we see him creatively harnessing his communication skills to try to get his girlfriend into bed. And even though I wouldn’t want to equate sleeping with Andrew Marvell with writing a novel, he is raising the valid point that time is limited, no matter what you are hoping to accomplish.

As a writer, this means that there will come a day when the universe will actually put the ‘dead’ in your deadline. Can we use this stark existential reality to assist us with overcoming writing blocks? Maybe.

Everyone is different, but it is true that a bit of time pressure works for many people who might otherwise dilly-dally and fritter their time away instead of writing. If the deadline is in the distant future, however (as death might seem to a someone contemplating writing a novel) it might not generate the necessary adrenaline discharge to bring resistant hands to the keyboard.

Doctoral students often struggle with motivation and productivity problems because they tend to have a long-term, uncertain deadlines for their dissertations. Writers who have no external deadlines at all must learn to utilize motivational resources that are not connected with the fear of missing a deadline. Perhaps if we knew with certainty that we only had a couple of months left on the planet more of us would get cracking, because deadlines with definite negative consequences in the near future seem to work best.

On the other side of this coin, I’ve also known writers with the reverse problem. They were so acutely aware of the passage of time that they lived in a state of constant anxiety and guilt about not producing enough. This inner turmoil then made it harder to write. They needed to relax and get the fear of ‘Times winged chariot’ out of their minds so they could concentrate on the task at hand. One might imagine that Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress may have been less coy and more responsive to his amorous advances if he wasn’t going on and on about her impending death all the time.

So, where does this leave us regarding utilizing alarm about deadlines and death to assist with encouraging the flow of words? ‘Different strokes for different folks’ is useful to keep in mind, but a general rule of thumb is that deadlines that are close at hand and that involve meaningful consequences work best for motivating writers to write. Long term deadlines that are vaguely defined are less effective, and generating excessive deadline fear can backfire.

We may never know whether Andrew Marvell eventually got lucky with his mistress  by employing his carpe diem argument, but at least he got a good poem out of it. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we mortals don’t generally know when Time’s winged chariot will pull into our driveway, so just in case, it might be wise to work on your coy writing project a little bit every day.

I’ll be teaching a Continuing Studies class at Stanford University, beginning September 24th

I am pleased to announce I will be teaching a five-week class through Stanford’s Continuing Education Program beginning on Monday, September 24, 2012 entitled: “Overcoming Writing Blocks and Procrastination.”  Registration begins in late August.

This class will be limited to 30 participants and take place on five consecutive Monday nights at Stanford’s campus. The aim of the class is to assist adult students with their specific writing challenges by offering information, support, exercises, discussion, and readings that address writing productivity problems. The class will be concerned with the process of writing, not the content, and therefore is appropriate for writers of all types including those who do fiction, non-fiction, poetry, business writing, scientific research, academic research, grant-writing, journalism, blogging, etc.

I’ve taught this class several times before and it is one of my most enjoyable and gratifying professional activities. We have a good time and students learn they are not alone and that their issues are not hopeless. Tools are provided that will be useful in an ongoing way.

Some people who are interested will procrastinate and miss the registration deadline. If you turn out to be one of those, maybe I’ll meet you next year.

TV interview with David Rasch about Writer’s Block and “The Blocked Writer’s Book of the Dead”

Dave

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Herman Melville’s Moby Block – a whale of a writing problem

For months before writing the one of the greatest novels in American literary history, Moby Dick, Herman Melville was blocked. Like Ahab’s obsession with the white whale, Melville’s literary ambitions consumed him, but he wasn’t producing.  According to Elizabeth Renker, author of Strike Through the Mask, Melville’s wife didn’t find him to be much fun around the house either. In fact he was emotionally (and quite possibly physically) abusive towards her.

Renker wrote her book about Melville’s tortured relationship with his writing, and how these themes are revealed in his books. Renker connects the terrifying white of the whale with the terrifying white of the empty page for Melville. His central character in Pierre struggles with writing, and I’ve also blogged about Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener in terms of writing blocks.

He was prone to both extended periods of intense binge-writing that deteriorated his health and relationships, as well as recurrent episodes of severe blockage. Somehow he produced an extraordinary collection of books, but the process was agonizing, and he eventually quit writing novels.

I’ve blogged previously about the interpersonal challenges that arise for those people who are intimately related to a blocked writer. Renker explores this issue with the women in Melville’s life (wife and sister), who both suffered considerably from his temper as they accompanied Melville through his challenges with writing and life.

Maybe the ‘pre-Moby’ Melville just needed a good latte. Given the critical role coffee plays for so many writers, it’s not surprising that Starbuck’s took their name from the First Mate of the Ahab’s whaling vessel – Starbuck. I don’t know if it was coffee or something else that got Melville cranking again, but he did finally get Moby Dick written and published.

But alas (adding insult to injury) the initial reviews of Moby Dick were lousy, and he made almost no money from what was later recognized as one of the greatest American novels of all time.

What can struggling writers learn from Melville’s story? 1) great writing may require great struggle, persistence and sacrifice 2) the external rewards of writing are unpredictable, fickle and fleeting 3) you may feel compelled to write, but writing doesn’t guarantee happiness in life, even if you’re good at it.

The writing life is humbling, mysterious and rife with challenges, but if you’re one of those people who feels the urge to write anyway, then you probably ought to chase the whale.

How success can mess with your writing routine

Success is challenging to some writers, and can actually lead to writing blocks of various sorts. You’d think that experiencing public acclaim, publication, best seller sales numbers or winning awards would feed a writer’s confidence and spur him or her on to even greater writing productivity. Sometimes, however, success with writing leads to self-sabotaging behaviors connected with feelings of unworthiness or fears about being the center of attention.

I know writers who had early or unanticipated success and could not write after that. A junior professor in one of my groups stalled completely after her first published article landed her a job at a prestigious university. Several elements seemed to have contributed to her paralysis, including fear of being discovered as an imposter and the daunting challenge of matching her initial success.

It is also important to consider whether anyone important in your life would be threatened, resentful, jealous, or hurt if you were to be successful as a writer. I worked with a young writer who had been blocked for years after her father became enraged and physically threatened her upon learning of her first publishing success. A young professor in a writer’s group was blocked on his writing productivity because his wife had been unable to complete her dissertation, and his progress in academia made him feel guilty.

If you are a writer, the people closest to you will have feelings about what, how or if you are writing.  Even friends, colleagues and family members who think they are helping by constantly encouraging you or telling you you’re great might not realize that their attention could be experienced as pressure to perform or as shame that that you are letting them down.

Whether you experience success or not, writing is a psychologically complex, messy business and your beautiful, sensitive mind is constantly adjusting, questioning and reacting as you strive to produce the written word – even when you’re succeeding. Hopefully, with continued experience, the successes or failures you experience (and there will be many of both) will be less critical in determining whether or not you continue to write.

Perhaps it would help to define success as a writer in terms of the willingness to continue to address your writing goals, day after day, week after week. There are times when it is a monumental success to just get something written down at all.

Allen Ginsberg Howl-ed his way out of writer’s block

Sometimes it’s worth the wait

During a period in the mid 1950′s, after he had moved to San Francisco, poet Allen Ginsberg suffered from a year-long writer’s block. He was profoundly unhappy working at an ad agency, and wasn’t writing.

Finally, his therapist recommended that he do what he really wanted to do: quit the secure job, plunge headlong into the uncertain, bohemian underworld and spend his time writing, getting high and having unusual experiences with his fellow artists and Beat Generation companions.

Ginsberg took the advice to heart, quit the day job and never looked back. He began writing poetry with renewed vigor in a spontaneous style that resulted in Howl.  Howl was a remarkably influential work on both literary and social dimensions, and was the subject of a much-publicized obscenity trial, which heightened its fame even more. The 2010 movie Howl explores this period of Ginsberg’s life, with James Franco in the role of the hipster bard.

What’s the lesson in this for struggling writers? It’s that sometimes we need to check in with ourselves to see if we are following our genuine interests in our work. We might be drawn to create or write that which does not make immediate sense to  ourselves or others. We may need to let go of something that seems to be the “sensible thing to do” in order to find the essence of what we really want to express.

Ginsberg threw himself into honestly expressing all aspects of his life, impulses, sexuality, spirituality, and confusion – knowing that many would react with judgement or outrage. It took courage, and for many of us, addressing a writer’s block may call for a good dose of that. To leave the safe and familiar is scary, but the writers that I know who’ve denied their creative impulses all paid a price in their happiness or their health.

I had the good fortune of living in Boulder for a few years in the 1970s, where I was able to be around Ginsberg and several other Beat writers who taught at Naropa University. I even got to back him up on guitar one night at a concert of some of his songs. This was some 20 years after Howl, but he was still an amazingly creative and energetic presence who also remained a highly productive writer through the decades.

Be like Allen Ginsberg. Do what you really want to do – it may free up your words.

Czech supermodel annihilates Magnum PI’s gnarly writer’s block in “Her Alibi”

Tom Selleck’s writing block never had a chance

In certain rare instances, an intractable, pernicious writing block that torments a writer is actually serving a greater good. Like sparing the reading nation from enduring additional books from an author who might better have left them unwritten. Tom Selleck plays such writer in Her Alibi. 

Unfortunately, by this movie’s end, he has written another awful whodunnit, and international ubermodel Paulina Porizkova is to blame.

Tom Selleck’s character wrote a string of  sleazy murder mystery novels, but ran out of ideas four years ago. His editor is anxious about his own livelihood and urging him to produce, but to no avail. Tom decides to go to the courthouse to get ideas, and there he meets Paulina, who stands accused of a murder.

The next thing you know he has brought Paulina to his home where she throws hunting knives into roaches, eludes gangsters by bouncing on trampolines and shoots Tom in the rear end with a hunting arrow. (One can’t be certain she was intending to shoot an ass, but in this case she most certainly did.) Add in a group of incompetent Romanian secret service thugs who blow up houses and… Voila! Lots of great ideas for his next book!

It turns out that Paulina is Romanian circus performer who defects to America. (And while we’re on this topic of defects, may I say that the dialogue in this movie comes to mind?) All ends violently yet well at a clown carnival, with love blooming and a book finally written.

Despite the presence of a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition 1987 & 1988 cover girl in the credits, it would be far better use of your time to sit down for the 84 minutes you might have spent watching this film, crack open the laptop and tap out a few humble words of your own. Trust me on this.

Magnum PU.