Flipping the Switch
One of the many gifts associated with posting here is the opportunity to meet fascinating people I would probably not encounter otherwise.
About a year ago, when I was taking a monologue class, I wrote about working on the character of Mother Theresa from a hilarious (and serious) play by Laurel Haines, The Dianalogues. I was thrilled to get an email from Laurel herself, responding to some of my thoughts. We have emailed sporadically since then, and tried on several occasions to meet, but we both are overbooked and it was hard to find a mutually convenient date.
We finally met for lunch yesterday, and the experience was worth waiting a year for.
At one point, the conversation turned to creative blocks. Laurel described an extended dry period she had gone through several years ago. She had lost her enthusiasm for writing, she said; she would begin a project, lose steam, and abandon it. What had once been a joyous experience of imaginative expression had become, inexplicably, a dreaded exercise in drudgery.
How did she start writing well again? I asked.
She belonged to a writers' workspace. Some of the other members were successful novelists. She started watching them as they worked--and realized that the secret lay in exactly that: they were working. "I was sitting there being a diva, waiting for inspiration, while they were producing." She committed to finishing two plays she had abandoned, and in the process rediscovered her sense of play and love for her vocation.
I voiced some concern about this "method" of overcoming a creative block. I used to have a writing job that I loathed, I explained. Every day I had to steel myself to churn out drek that I didn't care about and, sometimes, violently disagreed with. It completely sapped my desire to write anything at all. After I finally left, it took me over a year to clean out my system sufficiently to try writing my own stuff again.
"I'm not talking about beating myself up, or forcing myself to churn out a certain number of words a day," she said. "It was more about engaging with the material and trusting that if I just kept working, things would start happening again." And they did, brilliantly.
Afterward, I thought about Stanislavsky's admonition to "love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art." I imagine that what flipped the switch for Laurel was the commitment to focus on the plays themselves, rather than on herself as playwright. This is of course much easier to talk about than to actually accomplish, and I'm filled with admiration.
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. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular guest panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.
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