by Rosanne Bane
We’ve long known that the brains of children are more plastic than those of adults, which may explain why children are more willing to engage in creative play and find it easier to learn all kinds of things, like a second language and figuring out how to use every function and app available on a smartphone (as any adult who’s had to ask a child to decipher an electronic device can attest to). But we now know that the brain’s ability to change persists throughout our lives. The brain is designed to keep learning, changing, and growing.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO FAIL
Not only is the brain more plastic than we once thought, it is also more capable of healing than we once assumed. Stroke patients, for example, are more capable of recovering brain function than we realized was possible even as recently as ten years ago. Because we previously didn’t think stroke victims could recover, they weren’t encouraged to do what they needed to do to recover, and the belief became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A stroke kills neurons at the heart of the injury site. It also injures neurons surrounding the site of the stroke. As these surrounding neurons are repaired, the brain can recover some of its former ability. What’s amazing is how much ability can be reclaimed and how contrary this reality is to what we once believed was possible. Dr. Edward Taub pioneered a treatment method that allowed people to regain the use of completely paralyzed hands, for example, that was successful even for patients who had their stroke years before treatment.13
The most important factor in recovering from a stroke is the patient’s willingness to practice what she/he did effortlessly before the stroke.14 If recovering neurons aren’t challenged to do what they did before, they’ll go work for some other function. If a stroke patient believes she/he can’t recover use of her/his right hand, she/he won’t practice using the right hand, and the belief becomes reality. Patients who refuse to give up, who face the frustration and keep practicing even when they’re awkward and imperfect, are the ones who recover the most function.
I always tell my writing students that to write well, they have to write. And to write, they have to be willing to write badly. People who are willing to do something badly and keep practicing are the ones who improve; people who give up because they aren’t willing to do it badly, don’t.
As Malcolm Gladwell observes in Outliers, most so-called geniuses have logged at least 10,000 hours of practice before they “make it.” What distinguishes the brilliant from the merely adequate is not “talent”; it’s practice.15
CHALLENGE: RETRAIN YOUR BRAIN
Choose a physical activity you usually use your dominant hand for, like brushing your teeth or drawing or coloring, and practice doing it with your other hand. Or practice a simple activity you’ve never done before, like a specific series of ten dance steps. Allow yourself to do this activity badly. Don’t worry about making mistakes, just practice. Record your progress for a week or so and notice how long it takes you to learn the new behavior and how long it takes for you to become proficient at it. Perfectionists think that insisting on near-perfect performance from the outset and criticizing themselves for every mistake will make them learn faster, but this actually impairs performance.
INQUIRY
“How many things have I given up in my life because it was too hard or I couldn’t do it well enough? What do I love enough to be bad at?”
SECTION 2
Three Habits
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
JIM RYUN
3
HABIT ONE: PROCESS
Success Story
Travel writer Ann Lonstein says, “I have been working on my habits for forty-five minutes a day and doing it! What helped me was to start each day with them, regardless of when I get up or what else I have to do. I do not drive myself crazy by setting alarms or working to a time commitment. I simply do them. I am also working on concentrating on doing only the task I am working on, not thinking, ‘Oh, I should be doing this or that.’ It has made a huge difference in what I get accomplished.”
Ann is following an essential step in resolving resistance, one I give all my students and coaching clients: Make a little time on regular basis for the three habits of Process, Product Time (a.k.a. writing time) and Self-care. Practicing these three habits will give you profound results in your creativity.
These simple and flexible practices have a cumulative effect. The more history you have with your habits, the more effective they become for you. The longer you honor your commitments, the more momentum you have to carry you through tough times. I’ve seen this happen again and again with myself, my coaching clients and my students.
When I surveyed my current and former students and coaching clients, 338 established and aspiring writers responded. An additional twenty writers who attended a convention where I spoke also responded. Eighty-eight percent of those who were familiar with the three habits I recommend reported that the practices reduced resistance. Eighty-seven percent reported that the practices made it easier for them to face their resistance and still show up for their writing.
Process Time
The first of the three habits I encourage you to cultivate is Process. Process involves doing something fun that puts you in the creative flow. You do Process just for the sake of doing it; it’s creative play for play’s sake. It’s not about the outcomes—it’s just about being in the creative flow on a regular basis. Practicing your ability to enter into the flow with a simple, regular Process activity of your choosing will increase your ability to draw on your creative power when you sit down to write.
When Julia Cameron urges readers of The Artist’s Way and her other books to do morning pages (fill three pages in longhand every morning with strictly stream-of-consciousness writing), she’s advising a type of Process. Process is also what Dorothea Brande is talking about when she encourages getting up early to “write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant” in Becoming a Writer.1 Natalie Goldberg’s freewriting, first introduced in Writing Down the Bones, is another form of Process.
When Brenda Ueland writes in If You Want to Write, “So you see the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering,” she’s talking about the value of Process. She continues, “These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas. . . . But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”2 Amazingly, Ueland wrote that in 1938; what would she have to say about us today? We need the moodling found in Process more than ever.
Process can be morning pages or journaling, but there are many other options to choose from. Writers often benefit most from having a nonverbal Process practice. Here’s a list of just some of things my clients, students, and I play with in our Process time:
Keeping a dream journal
Freewriting
Listening to music
Coloring in a coloring book
Drawing mandalas
Making collages
Scrapbooking
Sketching
Painting (anything from finger painting to oil painting)
Playing with clay or Play-Doh
Taking photos
Fooling around with an instrument
Singing
Daydreaming
Dancing
Knitting
Watching people on the bus
Any kind of creative play that appeals to you, captures your focus, and allows you to get lost in the doing without fretting about the outcome is a good choice for Process. For example, listening fully and getting lost
in music is Process, but half listening while you’re busy doing something else is not.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: HANDS ON, BLOCK OFF
One hands-on solution to resistance is to literally get your hands off the keyboard and pick up a pen. According to Newsweek, “Brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing.”3
These aren’t just any old sections of the brain being activated when you wield a pen. Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, refers to brain scans that show “sequential finger movements activated massive regions [of the brain] involved in thinking, language and working memory.” These areas are essential for creative work and using a keyboard just doesn’t engage them in the same way. Berninger points out that a keyboard allows you to select a whole letter with one touch, but handwriting “requires executing sequential strokes to form each letter.”4
Another, even more hands-on solution is to back away, not just from the keyboard, but from words themselves, at least for a while. Borrowing from the storyboarding technique screenwriters use, Edwidge Danticat starts her novels with collages. After creating several collages, she uses “blue book” college exam notebooks to draft a novel before touching a computer keyboard. Danticat says “I like the tactile process. There’s something old-fashioned about it, but what we do is kind of old-fashioned.”5
Recent brain science explains why the old-fashioned tactile approach can be so effective. Sharon Begley observes “Although most of us think of motor skills and cognitive skills as like oil and water, in fact a number of studies have found that refining your sensory-motor skills can bolster cognitive ones. No one knows exactly why, but it may be that the two brain systems are more interconnected than we realize. So learn to knit, or listen to classical music, or master juggling, and you might be raising your IQ.”6, 7
This may be one of the reasons Process is so effective in loosening up our creativity. This as-of-yet-unexplained connection be-tween sensory-motor skills and cognitive abilities may explain why creative play breaks through mental blocks to deliver creative insight. Sometimes you need sensory-motor experiences that engage your body and fill your mind with images before you’re ready to make words flow into sentences and paragraphs.
Follow Their Lead—or Create Your Own Dance
My coaching clients and students have a marvelous array of Process practices and receive an equally intriguing variety of benefits from their practices. Gordy Paquette, for example, relies on morning pages, which are for him “a form of prayer/meditation I address each day to my late grandmother and younger brother, Mark. Because so much of my writing involves the unfolding of memories, I turn to Grandma and Mark to help me sort out, face, love, and own all the parts of my life—and to honor them in the remembering. In return, I experience the morning pages as a sort of safe harbor where Grandma and Mark help me navigate the shoals at my day job where competing demands and office politics threaten my balance during the day.”
Laura Sommers, copywriter and novelist, makes jewelry, gardens and sews for her Process. She observes, “I spend a lot of my time in a two-dimensional, black-and-white world, stringing together one word after another up in my head. So I follow these other creative pursuits purely because I love the doing of them. Today, before I wrote this, I hung several strings of glass beads I just bought in the window by my writing desk, just to catch the sunlight. I have a lot of writing work to get done today, but the beads will remind me to make time to play, too.”
Stephanie Watson, author of Elvis & Olive, Elvis & Olive: Super Detectives and the upcoming picture book The Wee Hours, does comedy improv for her Process, which she performs every week in front of a live audience. “For someone who’s used to creating and perfecting things in private, it’s terrifying to make stuff up on the fly. Improv gives me the green light to be imperfect, embarrass myself, and take the emphasis off a polished product. Sometimes I am a big fool and fall flat on my face. Sometimes I am brilliant and get a big laugh. But it doesn’t matter—either way, I walk away with the renewed ability to ‘just go for it’ in my art and in my life.”
Sarah Tieck, editor, writing educator, and author of numerous published essays, articles, and children’s nonfiction books, finds that Process is often a way to recharge her creative energy and fill the well. “With a full work schedule, I’ve got to be very intentional about Process—and flexible. Lately, I’ve been making elaborate and luscious meals. Sometimes I’ll bake and decorate cupcakes. Other times, I garden, go to the movies, take photos, take a class, or try something new at the gym. When I write just for fun, I consider that Process, too. I’ve found that later, when I’m writing with more of a product focus, those just-for-fun pieces add glimmers of the unexpected into pieces that I otherwise might not be able to be as creative with. And when I’ve been doing a lot of creating and generating, there’s something magical and satisfying about weeding my garden.”
Surrender Expectations
Sarah Tieck highlights that some writing is clearly Process play, while other writing has “more of a product focus.” So how do you know which is which and when you’re truly doing Process? The essential difference is that you do Process with no expectations about the outcome. If you’re journaling to discover a character’s backstory, to identify the questions you need to address in an article, to explore issues you want to write about—in short, if you’re writing something that will lead to writing you intend to publish or share in some other way, it’s not Process. Those activities are what I call Product Time writing—that is, writing with a purpose in mind. We’ll examine Product Time activities more closely in chapter four.
If something wonderful comes out of your Process time, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not Process. The important distinction is that when you’re doing Process, making something might be a side effect, but it is not the goal. My friend Julie Theobald knits beautiful scarves, shawls, and baby blankets. Julie knits because the rhythm of her fingers repeating the same motion, the click of the needles and the repetition of reaching the end of the row and turning back again relaxes her and gives her quiet satisfaction. She sells or gives away most of what she knits so that she’ll have the opportunity to choose another beautiful combination of yarn colors and textures and knit some more. The things she knits are the by-products; getting lost in the knitting is the real goal.
Process is about letting go of the demand that we need to always be Doing Something Significant. It seems that we fear that if we stop doing something significant, we will stop being significant. We’re so focused on doing constantly, we’ve forgotten how to just be. Process challenges us to surrender expectations and simply follow creative impulses without concern for the outcome. Process reminds us what we knew when we were kids—that it’s easy to create when you stop worrying about what you’re doing and just let the doing follow your being. The more often you access your creativity in Process when you don’t need to care about outcomes (because they just don’t matter in Process), the better prepared you’ll be to direct that creativity during Product Time when you do care about the outcome.
Of course, playing around with Play-Doh for Process isn’t going to improve your ability to handle dialogue or pacing. You have to practice those and other craft skills in your Product Time. But playing around with Play-Doh might open you up to new possibilities and make you more willing to experiment when you do tackle dialogue or pacing in your Product Time. Process helps us surrender the fears—of making mistakes or not knowing where we’re going—that cause resistance.
One of the ways I do Process is to color in coloring books of mandalas and other geometric shapes. Coloring is fifteen minutes of freedom from the 201 things I have on my mind. It allows me to take a hiatus from “have to,” “need to,” and “should.” When the biggest decision is whether to use the orange or green pencil next, and when there is no wrong choice because it doesn’t
matter what the end result looks like, my mental chatter diminishes and sometimes disappears altogether. As I surrender to the here and now of letting my imagination play in the present moment, I can hear the soft voice of my intuition again. Sometimes Process gives me new insights and ideas; it always gives me confidence and relaxation.
When your imagination is at play, you’re in Process. When you let yourself just relax into the soft focus of play, where you are engaged without straining to concentrate, when you’re active, but you’re not pushing, you’re in Process.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: A RIGHT-HEMISPHERE STATE OF MIND
Differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres are particularly relevant to creativity. Fortunately for us, Jill Bolte Taylor shares a unique and valuable perspective in her book My Stroke of Insight.8 Dr. Taylor was a thirty-seven-year-old neuroanatomist working for the Harvard Brain Trust when a rare type of aneurysm burst in her brain, causing a severe stroke. My Stroke of Insight describes her amazing observations of remaining conscious while area after area of her left hemisphere shut down, leaving her unable to move the right half of her body, speak, comprehend how to use a telephone to call for help, and eventually to know who she was.