Watching New HD Flat Screen vs Writing Something

Is this a Stunning Advance in Entertainment Technology … Or Satan?

I just purchased a new gi-normous TV. I really had to get a new one, evidently, because we rearranged the furniture. What else could anyone do?

Unfortunately, the quality is significantly better than the old TV. There is now a constant, compelling impulse to turn it on, just to see how big and good the picture is. In fact, the technical brilliance of this machine far outpaces the quality of 99% of the execrable programming available on the gazillion channels to choose from.

I am experiencing first-hand just how truly insidious and heinous this invention is. It makes you willing to watch abject crap just to see how good the picture looks. Then, to top it off, there are some actual good shows and movies and internet portals available as well. With no commercials.

Now, it is true that the voracious appetite of Hollywood demands buckets  of writing, and this provides work for many of our ilk. Fine… but what about my writing? How do I choose to sit alone with only my own jumpy thoughts to entertain me as I attempt to wrangle words out of my skull, when high-grade visual heroin is calling, siren-like, from the next room?

My answer so far is to watch movies about writers, because then I can appear to be working on my craft as I avoid it. How far this strategy will take me is uncertain. The fact that I’m blogging about the issue may mean there is a crack developing in the seams of my well-armored rationale. I expect that my inner turmoil will boil and fester until I eventually make some rigid rules about when I can allow myself flat screen viewing. Rules that I will violate.

Hopefully I will find ways to turn this HD lemon into literary lemonade as I confront the most daunting challenge to my artistic fate.

Am I a flat-screener or a writer?

Multiple dead albatrosses hanging around multiple writers’ necks in the movie “Albatross”

Is it love…or just a mad quest to find one’s words?

Samuel Coleridge is credited with introducing the phrase  ”having an albatross around your neck” into the vernacular with his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Interestingly, Coleridge was also one of the first documented cases of severe writer’s block. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Let’s leave Coleridge and his opium dreams for the moment, and jump now from 1798 to 2011, when the release of the movie Albatross  shows us that not much has changed. English writers still have albatrosses around their necks. In this film we have a middle-aged man, Jonathan who has been blocked for 20 years, after the startling success of his first novel. A horrid case of second novel syndrome, Isle of Man style. Ever determined, he labors fruitlessly in his office and suffers the caustic insults of his frustrated wife, Joa, who keeps the family afloat by running their big house as a B&B.

Enter the new maid; a brazen, adventurous and funny 17 year old girl, Emelia Doyle, who lets slip that she is the great-grandaughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Intrigued by her talent and fed up with trying to write, Jonathan begins giving her creative writing lessons with a missionary zeal. Then, as is often the case with elder mentors and their younger charges, missionary zeal turns into missionary position and the plot heats up.

Jonathan’s albatross was the success of his first novel. It ruined him as a writer. His block is an albatross for Joa, who has to struggle to pay the bills and live with a depressed, non-productive, and eventually unfaithful husband.  Emelia’s albatross is her mother’s suicide and her literary lineage, which she feels she can never live up to. Multiple dead albatrosses hanging around multiple necks. And nobody’s writing.

So – how does it end?  Let’s just say that there is a completed manuscript shown in the final scene, so all is well. This is a bittersweet, funny, well-acted movie, and if  Coleridge was alive today, he’d probably enjoy taking a few puffs, watching Albatross on Netflix, and marveling at how much life his big, dead bird still has.

A violent, philandering, misogynistic Sean Connery slugs his way out of writer’s block in “A Fine Madness”

Joanne Woodward attempts to resolve Sean Connery’s writing block with a headlock

One important lesson you learn by watching A Fine Madness , is that you better not mess around with your psychiatrist’s wife. In his portrayal of a wild, rage-aholic, blocked poet named Samson,  Sean Connery does just this (in a hot tub with Jean Seberg) and his reward is a double lobotomy.

Evidently Samson is blocked up because the scope of the  poem he is working on is of such an epic magnitude that he enters a profound agony when trying to write. Such issues often occur for writers who undertake major projects, and a degree of emotional volatility is frequently part of the territory. In this stunningly pre-women’s liberation farce (1966), Samson’s frustration expresses itself through wacky wife battering incidents and serial infidelities. Finally his wife, a long-suffering codependent portrayed by Joanne Woodward, sets him up to see a shrink.

The analyst becomes interested in Samson’s case until he witnesses his wife’s hot tub romp with his new patient, at which point he prescribes the double lobotomy. One would suppose that such a procedure would not only address Samson’s anger management issues, but also terminate his career as a writer. In this case however, a double lobotomy turns out to have no impact on Samson’s impulse control problems (he cold-cocks his wife when she tells him she’s pregnant) and he ends up completing his poem to boot.

If you are considering ordering this movie from Netflix, you may want to consider a lobotomy before watching it. In the world of writer’s block treatment, the “A Fine Madness” approach is certainly the road less travelled, but Sean Connery does show us a path – a sociopath.

The Wheel of Suffering: The Procrastination/Binge Writing Cycle: Summary of Blog Posts

In response to several inquiries, I am listing below the links to previous blog posts that explore the “Wheel of Suffering” for procrastinating writers. The basic concept of the wheel is that we perpetuate non-productive behaviors in a recurring, repetitive cycle of avoidance and binge-writing.

Often we don’t know how or why we perpetuate these problems. Here are links to posts that will provide further explanation. A more detailed discussion is available in my book, The Blocked Writer’s Book of the Dead.  

Many a blocked writer languishes on the “Procrastination Wheel of Suffering” 

Spinning on the Procrastination Wheel: Part 1- Unrealistic goals, delay start. 

Spinning on the Procrastination Wheel: Part 2 – Fear of Failure, Anxiety, Resentment

The Procrastination Wheel of Suffering: Part Three – Internal Pep Talks and Daydreaming  

The Procrastination Wheel of Suffering: Part Four – Avoidance, Worry, Lying, Self-Criticism  

The Procrastination Wheel of Suffering: Part Five – Anxiety, Deadlines and Binge Writing

The Procrastination Wheel of Suffering: Part Six – Writing Binge, Disappointment, Rationalizing  

Can a shrink, a dog, and a stripper cure a writing block? Yes, if “The Dog Problem” can be believed.

Giovanni Ribisi needs a shrink, a dog and a stripper to get his words back.

Perhaps inadvisably, I often watch movies about blocked writers as I search for new and effective strategies for helping writers write. The archetype of the blocked writer must be universally compelling because there are literally scads of these movies in circulation.

Screenplays are created by writers, so it doesn’t surprise me that they inject writing issues into their plots, but the solutions presented are sometimes too far out of my comfort zone to actually recommend them to clients.

Case in point: The Dog Problem. Giovanni Ribisi stars as Solo, a neurotic, broken, broke writer who had great success with his first novel The Naked Abyss, but now feels the book was bad and is afraid to try to write another. This struggle leads him into 5-day a week psychoanalysis with Don Cheadle that he pays for by borrowing lots of money from a mobster loan-shark. It could happen.

Struggling with a second novel is not a novel struggle. It happens, and especially if there is early success. Usually the worry is “OMG, will I be able match my initial, undeserved, success?”  Here, Solo is worried about writing another novel he hates. Fair enough up to here.

His shrink tells him to get a dog, and this leads to stressful encounters with the mobsters, a rich dog-loving woman, and a stripper with a heart of gold who likes to read literature.

There is an inviolable rule in Hollywood that, in a movie, a failed writer must learn to love before s/he can write again. Solo starts his quest by first learning to love his dog, then progresses up the evolutionary ladder until he is eventually capable of loving a human stripper. This accomplished, he moves to New Mexico and his words flow like a river once again.

I must be therapeutically blocked because though I might recommend getting a shrink, and maybe even a dog, but I’m not yet prepared to go full “Dog Problem” with my blocked writer clients.

I’m not currently blocked, but I’d like to try the “Buy a Villa in Tuscany” treatment anyway.

Diane Lane absorbs the block-busting radiation of the Tuscan sun

The movie Under the Tuscan Sun shows us a treatment option for overcoming writer’s block that is both expensive and time-intensive, but evidently quite effective. Especially if you’ve dreamed of 1)living in sunny Tuscany, 2) having an affair with a sexy Italian, and 3) writing an phenomenally popular best-seller.

In this movie adaptation of Frances Mayes’ popular book, Diane Lane stars as Frances, a secretly blocked author who is publicly recognized for helping one of her newly published ex-students overcome his writing block. Frances only gets to bask in the glow of this adulation briefly because in the next scene, she gets surprise-dumped by her cheating husband. Shattering life events like divorce do make the writing harder, and she sinks into depression.

Frances finally seeks solace by taking an all-gay bus tour of Italy, though she is not gay. She eventually gets off the bus and impulsively buys a villa, renovates it for months with a crew of eccentric Polish immigrants, and has a wild fling with a fickle but hunky Italian.

When my writing isn’t flowing I sometimes have impulses too, but they are not quite this grand. Maybe I’m missing out. I might get an impulse to go to the refrigerator, or check my email, but it never occurred to me to overcome my work stoppage by traveling abroad, buying and renovating a villa, and having unprotected sex with a blue-eyed stranger. Now I know.

Needless to say, by the time the credits roll, our protagonist has resolved her grief, found and kissed her true love, and completed her manuscript. A unique and pricey approach, but each to his or her own when it comes down to finding the key to better writing productivity.

I’ve been through two home renovations, and neither one helped my writing at all. Au contraire, they were energy sapping nightmares. But maybe I left out a key step in the formula, like making sure the house is in Tuscany or using Polish carpenters.  Or being in a movie.

 

QDWPIP: A Quick and Dirty Plan for Overcoming Writing Blocks

Making a Writing Productivity Improvement Plan  is an act of commitment to yourself and your writing that will increase the odds that you will make a positive change to your writing habits.

The process of creating your plan involves:

1) remembering and honoring your desire to write

2) deciding what writing project is most important to start with

3) knowing your strengths and challenges, selecting realistic and appropriate steps to take, and

4) developing strategies for reconnecting to writing if you fall off the wagon.

Here is a quick and dirty template adapted from my book, The Blocked Writer’s Book of the Dead for organizing your own personal -

Quick and Dirty Writing Productivity Improvement Plan

(QDWPIP)

1. In a single sentence, explain why it is important for you to write regularly.

2. What writing project(s) would you most like to make progress on?

4. List three primary challenges to your writing productivity.

5. For each challenge identified, generate one idea for addressing some aspect of the problem that you can take action on in the next week.

6. Generate one idea for addressing each of your three primary challenges that you can take action on in the next month.

7) Generate three ideas about what you will do if you realize you’ve stopped writing.

Update and amend the QDWPIP as needed. Post a copy of this where you write, on your refrigerator, and anywhere else it might be helpful to have it. Make a check mark on it and note the date each time you implement a planned solution.

Keep in mind that even though QDWPIP is quick and dirty, it’s as easy to avoid doing such a plan as it is to avoid writing. If you’d like to experiment with a more time consuming and cleaner Writing Productivity Improvement Plan, you can find one in my book.