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8 Overcoming Obstacles to
Extended Writing
It can be fun to write for ten minutes one morning, and yet it can be daunting to face writing every morning over enough days, weeks, and months to produce something valuable or publishable.
One group of a dozen writers (nine women and three men, as we recall) listed these obstacles:
• Time
• Motivation
• Discipline
• Perfectionism
• Money
• Style
• Fear of failure
• Hating to write for all the above reasons
Here are some solutions that group came up with:
Time, that is, scheduling a regular time for writing every day. Make it a habit, like brushing your teeth, and over a period of several weeks it will find its place in your daily routine.
Motivation, in particular, not letting yourself become distracted by television, cats, the teapot, what’s going on outside your window. Build in a reward, contingent on your doing your writing for the day, week, or month, with the size of the reward indexed to the size of the accom-plishment. A square of chocolate for writing for ten minutes, a weekend off for writing every day for a month. As we mentioned earlier, one of our acquaintances rewards himself by playing computer golf.
Discipline. If you reinforce an activity with a system of rewards, gradually it becomes an ingrained, pleasurable habit, and that’s all we really mean by discipline.
Perfectionism. Freewriting in first drafts—writing as fast as you can,
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can turn your attention away from trying to be perfect. Another effec-tive tactic is, as William Stafford said, simply to lower your standards.
Money. Ask yourself, Can I afford to spend the time writing? How much time do you spend now in activities that don’t bring home the bacon? Six hours a day, perhaps? Can you turn some of those minutes or hours into writing time without losing any income? A fiction writer we know, who has a regular eight-hour job, goes to a coffeehouse each noon and sits at the back and writes as she eats her lunch.
Style. Maybe your style of writing doesn’t fit the style of the maga-zines in which you want to publish. When you’re writing, you can write however you wish, but publishing may require making compromises.
You may have to alter your style to fit the magazine. It may be a better choice to seek out magazines that seem to be using writing like yours.
Donald Barthelme’s surrealistic short stories changed the style of the New Yorker, but you shouldn’t count on something like that happening in your favor.
Fear of failure. Build rejection into your expectations: plan to have magazines reject your writing, and treat it as a gift when you get published. As hard as it is to accept, every failure is a chance to learn.
Ted has found this useful: When something he’s written is rejected, he says aloud to that distant editor, “Well, you know, I did the best I could. If I could’ve written it better, I would have.” If you do the best you can, it may not be what somebody wants to publish, but you’ve done the best you can for that time and that stage of your development as a writer. And you’ll get better the more you try!
Hating to write for all the above reasons. If you reward yourself for tackling one or two of the biggest obstacles you face, or if you focus first on the things about writing that you like, you may find that your other reservations fade away. One person who voiced this objection found that freewriting eased her mind and made her a more contented writer. It seemed that perfectionism was her biggest obstacle.
Robert Boice, a professor who helps other professors with their writing, studied the “self-talk” of a group of forty blocked writers.
Here are the seven things they said to themselves that kept them from writing. We’ve given our responses, leaning on one of our favorite teachers of writing, Brenda Ueland:
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1. Writing is too fatiguing and unpleasant; almost anything else would be more fun. Brenda Ueland exhorts her students with every fiber of her being to take a more positive tack. “Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting.
It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.”
2. It’s ok to put writing off, to procrastinate. Somebody taught us, and we believe it, that refusing to decide is itself a decision. Deciding to procrastinate is deciding not to write. It’s also a positive decision to do whatever you do when you put off writing. Maybe you decide to take a shower instead, or go listen to Lucinda Williams, and those can be excellent choices, but they’re not writing.
3. I’m not in the mood to write; I’m too depressed or unmotivated to write.
The prolific novelist William Faulkner said, “I write when the spirit moves me. And the spirit moves me every day.”
4. I feel impatient about writing; I need to rush to catch up on all the projects that I should already have finished. Right problem but, we say, wrong solution. On the one hand, every writer has many projects in mind or outlined or at some stage of research or contemplation. But sitting at her desk, a writer can only set down one word at a time, can only write the one poem or story or article that is before her.
5. My writing must be mistake-free and better than the usual stuff that gets published. If you say this to yourself, the legendary writing teacher Brenda Ueland has got your number: “Don’t always be appraising your-self, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. . . . Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.” Glib writers who are satisfied with their work are the unfortunate ones, she says. “To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.”
6. My writing will probably be criticized and I may feel humiliated. Brenda Ueland says this attitude arises from a lack of self-respect, not from modesty—she says that women especially are “too ready not to stand by what we have said or done. . . . It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.”
7. Good writing is done in a single draft, preferably in a long session. Every writer knows that the opposite is true. It is done in many briefer sessions, and every writer goes through many drafts to arrive at the finished piece.
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even express it, is an elemental fear that goes something like this:
When I write, I expose myself, and that makes me afraid. Yes. How does anyone overcome a fear? By experience, it seems to us. You write and find that nothing bad comes of it. And you always control and have the right to control what you expose about yourself in your writing.
You may never overcome that fear completely, but you may overwhelm it with the joyful and contented habit of writing every day.
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