Around the Writer's Block

by Rosanne Bane

  For many of us, resistance is a shape-changer, shifting from one form to another. Just when we start to realize what’s going on, the resistance finds a new form.

  All of this is normal. It’s not comfortable, but it is normal. Resistance is part of the writing life. What makes or breaks us is not whether or how we experience resistance—it’s how we respond to resistance. Most writers respond badly: we criticize ourselves; we push and drive; we threaten and bully ourselves; we question our ability, our commitment, our character. We must stop doing this! It is completely ineffective. It drains the joy out of writing. And sometimes, in the worst-case scenarios, the resistance wins out, and someone who could have been a good writer gives up on writing altogether.

  Resistance Can Be Resolved

  Resistance is not about laziness, lack of willpower, or the failure of intellect and imagination. It’s about neurology and psychology. And when we know what’s happening in our brain when we feel resistant, we can learn how to respond effectively.

  The best response is to write around the resistance. We need simple practices that bring us to our writing space regularly. We need commitments that are meaningful enough to engage us and small enough to give us confidence that we can keep showing up no matter what.

  Around the Writer’s Block will give you the information, encouragement and pragmatic tools you need to move through resistance and get your ideas on the page and into the world. This book explains, in easy-to-understand language, our best understanding of what’s going on in a writer’s brain when she/he experiences resistance. It combines the insights of recent neurological research with my twenty years of experience in teaching creativity, coaching creative people, and studying the creative process.

  As a teacher and coach, I’ve challenged and encouraged thousands of novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, poets, memoirists, nonfiction writers, songwriters, storytellers, bloggers, graduate students, and business writers to share their unique perspective with a variety of audiences. I continue to talk with writers across the country about how resistance has affected their writing, how they’ve tried to overcome resistance, and what actually works for them.

  I’m going to give you proven practices and methods that I’ve seen work for my students, coaching clients and colleagues, including established professional writers, aspiring and emerging writers, and people who need to write well in academia and business. These practices will work for you, too.

  CHALLENGE: RESISTANCE INVENTORY

  My coaching clients determine what projects they want to work on, what goals they want to achieve and what action steps they’ll take to get there. They set the agenda, but occasionally I’ll suggest a challenge to them. Challenges can be accepted, modified or declined altogether. I offer challenges rather than “homework” or “exercises” to honor my clients’ commitment and autonomy. I’ll do the same for you. Throughout this book, you’ll find challenges, which you can accept as is, modify to better suit your situation, or decline altogether.

  If you want to decline a challenge because it simply doesn’t interest you or apply to you, that’s fine. But if a challenge intrigues you, and especially if it disturbs you, respond to it right then using whatever tools are available. If you find that all the challenges seem boring or irrelevant, consider the possibility that this might be a form of resistance and push yourself to do the challenges, particularly the ones that “bore” you the most or seem the “least relevant.”

  You’ll often freewrite your responses to challenges. If you are not familiar with the term (coined by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones), don’t worry. Freewriting is writing nonstop without judgment, editing or second-guessing yourself. Whatever comes into your head goes on the page. Don’t worry about how it sounds or whether you’re using the best word. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, making complete sentences or even making complete sense. Just keep your hand moving, even if you have to repeat yourself or write, “I don’t know what to write,” over and over or make stuff up. Set a timer for ten minutes and just keep your hand moving until time’s up. And if you want to keep writing when the timer goes off, by all means, go for it.

  By the way, it doesn’t really matter what you use to respond to these challenges. If you keep a writer’s journal, you can write your responses there. Or you can collect responses to the challenges in a computer folder, a notebook, a three-ring binder, or leave them scattered wherever they fall. It doesn’t even matter whether you keep your responses to the challenges; feel free to recycle them as soon as you finish them if you like. The important thing is doing at least some of the challenges.

  Whatever you do, don’t use the lack of an “official challenge journal” as the reason you tell yourself, “I can’t do this now. I’ll just skip over this now and come back later.” Because in all likelihood, you won’t return, and keeping the promises you make to yourself is crucial in establishing the kind of habits that will support your writing.

  Here’s your first challenge:

  Step 1: Freewrite for ten minutes about what resistance has cost you as a writer and what it has cost your community. What opportunities have you lost? What dreams have you delayed? What stories have you left untold; what images and insights have you left unshared? What problems could your writing help solve?

  Step 2: Freewrite for ten minutes about what you truly want to do with your writing energy and time.

  What are you willing to do to resolve your resistance so you can start doing what you really want to do?

  The Power of a Writing Habit

  For more than ten of the twenty years I’ve instructed writers on the creative process at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis (the country’s largest and most comprehensive independent literary center), I have taught a class called The Writing Habit. For many, this is their first Loft class, their first experience with writers teaching writers, and their first bold claim that maybe they are writers, too.

  Other students turn to The Writing Habit after taking several craft-focused classes at the Loft in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry or other genres. Some have MFAs or advanced degrees in writing or literature. Some are trying to complete their dissertation. Some are or have been professional writers who discover that they’re great at meeting deadlines their bosses and editors set, but they need a different kind of structure to keep them accountable when they’re working on projects that don’t have deadlines yet.

  One of the common things I hear from my Loft students is a bemused confession that, even though they love to write, they seem to have an unending supply of excuses for not writing what they really want to. They are shocked by how much time has passed since they wrote consistently, or surprised they aren’t writing regularly even though it’s been months since they’ve finished what they thought was delaying their writing—earning their master’s degree, getting the kids out of diapers, getting the kids off to college, completing a major project at work, retiring.

  That’s where we start: with the awareness that their current methods aren’t working. I promise my students they can have a sustainable and satisfying writing practice based on three basic habits—Process, Product Time (a.k.a. writing time) and Self-care—and that these three habits will make it possible to show up for their writing. Then, and only then, can they return to the joy and satisfaction that comes from doing what they love to do. It’s still difficult at times, because resistance is omnipresent, but they know how to show up and write in spite of the resistance.

  If you want more joy, consistency and productivity in your writing life, I promise you that you too can discover how to build the habits that allow you write your way around your writer’s block.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: NEURAL PATHWAYS

  A habit is a neural pathway in the brain. Neurons that are stimulated more often grow a thicker layer of myelin, which insulates neurons. The thicker the myelin sheath
around the neurons in a particular pathway, the faster and more accurately the signals along that pathway travel. The more a behavior or thought pattern is repeated, the more efficient the neural pathway for that behavior or thought becomes. A habit is nothing more than a well-myelinated neural pathway.1

  WRITER’S APPLICATION: GETTING OUT OF THE RUT

  Back when I was in college, I hiked part of the Appalachian Trail. There were sections of the trail so overused that the ruts were just a little wider than a hiking boot and nearly knee-deep. Because these ruts were so deep and narrow, it was difficult, even painful, to walk in them. But given the nature of the trail in those spots, there was little choice. The repetition of hiking boots falling in the same places made the ruts deeper and narrower as the years passed.

  This is what bad habits are: neural pathways that are so well traveled, it is extremely difficult to get out of the rut no matter how painful it is to repeat the old behavior.

  As we’ll explore in more depth in chapter two, the good news is that the brain is highly plastic—that is, capable of significant change, not just in childhood, but throughout our entire life. Behavior is both determined by brain activity and the determiner of brain activity. That means that we can learn new habits, and, as we myelinate new neural pathways, the old habits fade.

  INQUIRY

  If I were your creativity coach, I’d give you a different open-ended question to ponder at the end of each coaching session. In this book, I will give you an inquiry at the end of each chapter that reflects the issues the chapter is likely to raise for you. These inquiries acknowledge that you know your writing practices and life better than anyone else, and are designed to encourage you to own the information and the change process you’re embarking on.

  Here’s your first inquiry: “If I could wake up tomorrow with any habit I want ingrained in my brain and my behavior—without the effort of practicing daily for many weeks to develop that habit—what habit would I want?”

  2

  WHY IS IT SO HARD TO WRITE?

  Why Do We Do That?

  Why do we sit down in our writing space, only to pop out of the chair to look for answers in the refrigerator, empty the dishwasher, check the mail, or get another book to use for research?

  Why do we have great ideas when we’re in the shower or driving on the freeway, then freeze and not know how to start when we get to our writing space?

  Why do we distract ourselves with a multitude of other things to do and think about?

  Why do we paralyze ourselves with self-criticism and perfectionism?

  Why is it so damned hard to write?

  If I Only Had a Brain

  The reason so many of us are left asking, “Why?” is because we don’t have a brain—we have a brain system.

  Just as the digestive system consists of separate organs with different jobs that work together to make it possible for the body to digest food, process nutrients and get rid of the excess, the brain consists of separate areas, each performing a separate, distinct purpose.

  As noted neurologist Joseph LeDoux points out in The Emotional Brain, “Although we often talk about the brain as if it has a function, the brain itself actually has no function. It is a collection of systems, sometimes called modules, each with different functions.”1

  The separate yet integrated areas that make up the brain—the cortex, the thalamus, the cingulate system, the amygdala, and so on—are intricately connected and coordinated through a complex circuitry of neurons and an intricate dance of electrochemical activity. The various components of the brain collaborate to achieve amazing feats, all the way from keeping the lungs breathing and the heart beating to the miracle that is consciousness: using language, making plans, knowing who we are, imagining we are someone else, choosing actions according to our moral code, and struggling with the knowledge of our own mortality.

  But even with the profound collaboration among brain components, there are times when different parts of the brain compete. It is the potential conflict between the limbic system and the cerebral cortex that is most relevant to questions about our writing.

  Brain Basics

  Scientists typically identify three major systems of the human brain:

  BRAIN STEM

  © 2011 medicalartstudio.com

  The brain stem, or “lizard brain,” which is located at the core of the entire brain system and maintains body functions like respiration, digestion and circulation.

  The limbic system, or “leopard brain,” which surrounds the brain stem and provides the capacity for emotion and relies on the fight-or-flight instinct in response to threats.

  LIMBIC SYSTEM

  © 2011 medicalartstudio.com

  The cerebral cortex, or “learning brain,” which surrounds the limbic system and gives us the ability to solve problems, use language and numbers, create, anticipate the future, motivate ourselves, and reflect on and modify our behavior.2, 3

  CORTEX

  © 2011 medicalartstudio.com

  The human limbic system is sometimes called the “leopard brain” because it is very similar to the limbic system in other mammals. It processes sensory experiences and passes that sensory information to the cortex. But the limbic system also gives emotion to our sensory experiences so that by the time that sensory information is perceived by the cortex, the information has an emotional association. The limbic system is made up of the thalamus, hypothalamus, pituitary gland, hippocampus, pineal gland, mammillary body, fornix, cingulate gyrus and, as we’ll see later in this chapter, the star of the limbic show: the amygdala.

  The human cortex, particularly the prefrontal cortex, is significantly different from the cortices of other mammals. This “learning brain” makes humans truly human. The cortex consists of four lobes: the frontal lobe (a.k.a. the “executive lobe,” which conceptualizes, forms goals, devises plans, motivates behavior, and evaluates results and the appropriateness of behavior), the temporal lobe (which processes sound, comprehends speech and handles some aspects of learning and memory), the occipital lobe (which processes vision), and the parietal lobe (which integrates all sensory information, controls movement and orientation, and calculates and handles some aspects of recognition). Within each lobe, there are areas that have particular functions. For example, Broca’s area is central in producing language, while Wernicke’s area is responsible for comprehending language.

  The brain stem is composed of the cerebellum, midbrain, pons, medulla, and the reticular activating system (RAS), which monitors information coming in from the senses and filters what you pay attention to and what you ignore. For example, in a crowded room, you can’t hear what someone ten feet away is saying, but if that person says your name, your RAS makes sure you hear it.

  Who’s Driving the Bus?

  If you’re not used to thinking of your brain as a collection of these three major systems, you might think of your brain as the driver and your body as the vehicle. You might even think of your brain as a highly skilled driver capable of split-second decisions and lightning-fast reactions, in total command of the Ferrari race car that is your body. But a better metaphor would be to see your body as a bus and your brain as a group of drivers, all jostling for the opportunity to get behind the wheel.

  Your cortex is the driver who cares about writing and has the “executive functions” needed to write: imagining the future, envisioning possible outcomes, setting goals, making plans, and motivating and monitoring your own behavior. As long as your cortex is driving the bus, you’ll care about your commitments to write and take action to fulfill your writing goals.

  But your cortex isn’t the only driver. The reticular activating system not only filters what you pay attention to, it also serves as a kind of toggle switch that determines who’s driving the bus: the limbic system or the cortex. When we relax, the RAS fli
ps control to the cortex and we are capable of the symbolic, logical and creative thinking that is the hallmark of human evolution. When the cortex is behind the wheel, we’re able to focus our attention on and take action to support our creative aspirations.

  Limbic System Takeovers

  But when we perceive a potential threat, the RAS flips control to the limbic system and we rely on our instinctual fight-or-flight response. The amygdala is engaged and triggers the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Heart rate increases, vision tunnels, the palms sweat, the hair on the back of the neck stands up, blood moves from the torso to the large muscles in the extremities to allow fast movement. In this state, our emotional reactions are intense and we can say and do things that we will later regret. Road rage is one result of a limbic system takeover; the brain-freeze of being unable to think of a response to a rude person until that person is long gone is another; and jumping back or running away from a spider or a snarling dog is another. When the limbic system takes over, creativity is dismissed as trivial compared to the need to take immediate action to stay alive and safe.

  When the limbic system has been activated, we react automatically from instinct or training. Combat soldiers endure intense training and airplane pilots practice emergency maneuvers in flight simulators so that their training will override their instincts when their limbic systems are activated.