On Tuesday, October 23, I will teach a course on overcoming fear of success at mediabistro.com, 494 Broadway. If you will be in the New York area, please check it out.
WRITING IN STONE
Dear Dr. Sue:
After years of doing the denial two step, I’ve finally admitted to myself that I want to be a writer and I’ve started a couple of novels and a screenplay. My problem is in that word, “started”…see, I can get going with wonderful energy, but as the piece grows longer and more complex, I can’t seem to make myself go back and re-read anything. So I just keep plowing forward, growing more and more confused, until I finally give up the whole project in disgust.
I suspect that part of the reason I cannot bear to re-read anything is my lingering fear that I will discover that I don’t have any business stringing words together, but I also feel like once I read something, it becomes absolutely fixed in its present condition. Once it’s written, I can’t seem to use the same imagination that created it to create alternatives to it. So I get stuck in first-drafts-ville, and thus never have something that I would be proud to send off and show to others.
Any advice on how to face my fears of the full-page, and learn how to keep my imagination engaged throughout?
Mardougrrl
Dear Mardougrrl:
Congratulations on discovering and acknowledging your vocation. Like all profound commitments, this one can, indeed, be fraught with anxiety and fears of inadequacy. While it’s possible to avert the possibility of failure by never finishing or rereading our work, as you have discovered, this is not the most effective way to grow as an artist or move forward with a career.
Some degree of cognitive rigidity is common when we’re embarking on a scary new adventure. (And no matter how confident you’ve been about your skills in the past, writing as a writer is still a new enterprise.) Novice mountain climbers rarely deviate from a narrow route or look back to enjoy the scenery. As we become more practiced and secure, we can play and experiment a bit more.
As you point out, though, this may be only part of the issue. Some writers continue to struggle with a sense of inevitability even after years of experience, as another correspondent, K, illustrates:
Dear Dr. Sue:
What should I do about my problem of writing in stone? I've published two nonfiction books and a novel. I've just finished a new novel after a long, intense struggle, and my pattern is clear: Once I have a hard-wrought draft of something, it becomes almost impossible for me to see where and how it needs to be changed. I always know that a first draft (and a second and third and fourth) will need further work. Themes must grow richer, characters must deepen and complexify, conflicts must be drawn more dramatically, with greater detail. The problem is that knowing doesn't help me with seeing. I still rely on other people's eyes to see what I think, by now, I should be able to zero in on, myself. I'm not talking about small or subtle things but big ones! Plot holes, boring stretches, loose ends, really basic stuff. Can you help me?
K
Dear K (and Mardougrrl):
I have not dealt with the problems of blind spots, or resistance to revising, in my practice, and I have not been able to find reliable information about possible causes and remedies. However, I would like to relate an experience of my own in the hope that you will find it useful.
Years ago, I had a very disturbing dream. On awakening, I knew I needed to turn it into a story, and I did. I wrote quickly, almost in a frenzy, desperate to get the story down. I was afraid of losing momentum, and also, I think, afraid of the powerful feelings the dream had unleashed. I wanted to shape the story, to mold it quickly, both to capture my original vision and to control and manage it.
The story I wrote was unsatisfactory, though. Despite my strong feelings about the characters and the main themes, I realized that I had been unable to translate the passion and the terror I felt onto the page. The characters felt flat, and although the plot held together on a superficial level, the conflict seemed tacked on. I showed it to more accomplished writers, who were able to point out weaknesses, but I had trouble considering revisions or even rereading the story because I also felt it was engraved in stone—I had worked so hard to transcribe it, and the associated feelings were so strong, that even the idea of changing the course of events or a character’s history or attitude felt overwhelming.
I believed that my dream, and the story I had spun from it, contained the seeds of a powerful narrative, one which I wanted desperately to write. But I sensed that I had rushed too quickly to capture my vision on the page. Now it had set like plaster of Paris, and I couldn’t alter it without breaking it into pieces.
After I had tried and failed repeatedly to deal with this story on my own, I read about an online class called “How to Procrastinate Your Way into Writing a Novel.” The teacher was M.J. Rose.
Unlike most of M.J.’s students (I imagine), I wasn’t trying to overcome procrastination—I hoped to embrace it! And embrace it we did.
M.J. assigned pre-writing tasks such as assembling a scrapbook of magazine cutouts illustrating important people and events in the lives of key characters; shopping and interacting in character; and creating journal entries in a character’s voice and handwriting.
Each exercise forced me to make choices I hadn’t considered in my rush to write. I wrote detailed histories for all of my main characters, going back to their grandparents; I leafed through decorating magazines, selecting the characters’ furnishings and then arranging these into room plans; I chose characteristic clothing and hair and eye colors for even the most minor characters. I captioned all of these pictures with handwritten comments by my narrator, and frequently with responses from other characters. And as I did so, I became increasingly immersed in the world I was creating. Each decision forced me to consider what it was that I really wanted to communicate, and how this could best be embodied in a character’s own choices. The central conflict of the story became clearer, and side issues that had initially appeared indispensable fell away.
By the time we got the go-ahead from M.J. to start writing, I had achieved unprecedented (for me) clarity about the theme of my story, its characters and conflicts, and how I wanted to structure it. I found that I needed to revise my outline as I wrote, because my sense of time is unreliable (in real life as well as in fiction) and I sometimes crammed too many days into a week, or skipped over major holidays in the time period the narrative was supposed to cover—but these were mechanical issues, and I knew how to solve them because the overarching plot and themes were so real and present to me.
The novel that eventuated from this class is one of the strangest pieces of writing I have ever done. I think that this is because I was able to be true to my authentic vision, without relying on conventional structure and plot lines—because I had postponed writing until I was clear about what I wanted to write, and why.
I am still tinkering with this novel; I’m not completely satisfied yet. I recently showed it to a writer I respect, who suggested that I bring the main conflict out earlier in the story. I looked at the manuscript and thought, I know how to do this. And I do.
Unfortunately, M.J. isn’t teaching this course anymore; otherwise I would want to sign up for it again. But I try to duplicate the effect by imposing a marination period every time I get the idea for a new story. I am too lazy to make a scrapbook for every character, but I do make sketches of them, their homes, and their wardrobes, and if I’m having trouble with dialogue, I try to write the story “inside out,” from the point of view of the more minor character, just to see what she or he really thinks and wants. I seldom use this material in the finished story (although sometimes an exercise turns into a story of its own) but the work to create and become familiar with a three-dimensional world allows me much more flexibility in writing and revising, and allows the story to clarify and set before it is committed to the page.
All of this would have seemed counterintuitive to me before I tried it. I would have imagined that it would be harder to revise after so much thought and research—that the more real the characters and situations became, the more they would feel “set in stone.” But it works the other way. Characters that leap straight from the imagination onto the page can sometimes resemble robots that are programmed to perform only a narrow range of actions. Real human beings can change, adapt, and grow, and still remain true to their essential selves. And when we try to make a more developed character behave in a way that would be false, the character lets us know.
I hope this helps. I’d appreciate it if writers who have thoughts or advice that might benefit Mardougrrl and K would share them in the comments section.
Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity, is now available in bookstores. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.
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