Around the Writer's Block

by Rosanne Bane

  Verification

  This is where you transform the insight and passion of the Illumination into something tangible that can be shared with others. This is the “fingers on the keyboard, pen on the page” stage when you do the things that most people consider “writing.”

  Product Time during Verification is pretty much what you expect: drafting, reading your work, revising, editing, reorganizing, asking for and incorporating feedback. Brainstorming tools like clustering and mind-mapping are also effective.

  On rare occasions, Illumination is lengthened beyond the typical brief flash to allow you to do Illumination and Verification together. At these times, you start drafting almost as soon as you get the flash of insight about how the pieces fit together. When you’re lucky, you enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow” state,4 that blissful experience of seeing or hearing your characters or narrator with your mind’s eye or mind’s ear, knowing exactly what to write while your fingers race to keep up with the images and ideas flooding your mind.

  More frequently, the Verification and Illumination are separate and distinct, and you need to draft, edit and revise from the memory of your last Illumination. Sometimes wrestling with a draft in Verification (a.k.a. editing) gives new inspiration (a.k.a. re-vision). You might have a string of Illuminations each followed by Verification. But typically, new Illumination comes from the willingness to move through Incubation, and Incubation is fueled by the research done in Saturation. This is why Verification usually raises new questions that bring you back to First Insight, and you cycle through the whole progress again.

  But sometimes—if you’ve completed a big project or if you’ve skimped on your Process—you leave Verification drained of creative energy. The tired, flat feeling that you’re crawling through a desert without an oasis in sight is the sign that you’ve entered Hibernation.

  Hibernation

  Like Incubation, Hibernation is sometimes mistaken for a creative block because you simply don’t have the energy or insight to do anything creative. And like Incubation, Hibernation is a normal and natural part of the process. Writers who consistently let themselves play with Process typically experience hibernations that are shorter or less intense, but no one can postpone Hibernation indefinitely. Why would you want to? Hibernation is the equivalent of letting a garden go fallow in the winter. It’s the quiet time when you recharge your creative energy and refresh your perspective. The urge to be constantly producing something, constantly busy doing “something important” may be as American as apple pie, but it doesn’t serve our creativity. Downtime is essential to long-term creative effectiveness.

  Product Time during Hibernation might feel self-indulgent because you need to do whatever will feed your creative spirit: rest, nap, have quiet time alone or in the company of people who don’t drain your energy, and spend as much time as you can in beauty. Be in nature, visit museums and galleries, read really good books, flip through coffee table books of photography and art, watch great films. Sometimes you can work on another project—it’s not uncommon to be in different stages with different projects—and sometimes you have to work on another project, but when your overall creative energy has been drained, you need to make time to do the things that restore your spirit.

  The Second Key: Fifteen Magic Minutes

  The first key to making Product Time work for you is to show up and give yourself credit for all the work you do each and every time you show up. The second key is to commit to no more than fifteen minutes.

  Eileen Peterson has discovered the magic in fifteen minutes. “The thing that amazes me about Product Time is how much I can get done in only fifteen minutes. Incredible revelations come to me about who my characters really are, what their motivations are, and where the story is going—all within a fifteen-minute session. My novel and essays are getting done in fifteen minutes a day, one day at a time.”

  Some writers worry that they won’t be able to really accomplish much in just fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, these are often writers who haven’t accomplished anything for weeks, months or longer because they just can’t seem to find big blocks of time for writing. In my opinion, a little something regularly repeated adds up to a whole lot more than what would be a lot of something if you ever got around to it but never do.

  Besides, I’m not suggesting that you never do more than fifteen minutes. I’m recommending you commit to no more than fifteen minutes a day, four to six days a week. If you work beyond that commitment, fabulous! You can even schedule and reserve a target time beyond the fifteen-minute commitment. But the commitment never goes beyond fifteen minutes.

  There is magic in the fifteen-minute commitment, and there’s brain science behind that magic.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: THE POWER OF FIFTEEN MAGIC MINUTES

  Remember how the limbic system will push the creative cortex out of the driver’s seat when you feel threatened or stressed? Planning to sit down and write for hours on end is often stressful enough to trigger a limbic system takeover. One of the biggest benefits of habits is that because they are familiar, they tend to soothe the limbic system and keep the creative cortex engaged.

  The smaller the time commitment, the smaller the likelihood of a limbic system takeover. You need a time commitment small enough that you can do it no matter what else happens on any given day, and small enough that you can repeat it four to six times a week. For many writers, that’s fifteen minutes; for some it’s ten minutes; for some it’s five minutes. (Technically, I suppose I should call it the “Magic of No More Than Fifteen Minutes,” but “Fifteen Magic Minutes” is more memorable.)

  Committing to no more than fifteen minutes goes a long way toward eliminating the resistance so many of us feel before we get started. If you do feel a bit of trepidation, you can reassure yourself, “It’s just fifteen minutes. I can do fifteen minutes. It’s nothing to freak out about.” In other words, you calm your limbic system enough to keep your cortex online.

  On a practical level, it’s usually easier to find time for and always easier to actually show up for five fifteen-minute sessions throughout the week than to find one seventy-five-minute session when you won’t procrastinate, postpone and distract yourself or be interrupted and delayed by others.

  Showing up five times a week will create a stronger habit sooner than showing up once a week. The power of habit lies with Hebb’s Law, which states that “neurons that fire together, wire together.”5 When a group of neurons frequently fire together or in sequence, a layer of fatty white tissue called myelin insulates the neurons in that neural pathway, making the circuit more effective.6 The more often you give the collection of neurons you use for writing the opportunity to fire together, the more myelin gets wrapped about those neurons, the stronger the network that connects those neurons becomes, and stronger the habit becomes. Conversely, if you don’t consistently give your “writing neurons” the opportunity to focus and fire together on your writing, they’ll become part of some other neural pathway, that is, some other habit.

  First Things First

  First you have to build the Product Time habit. For the first couple of months, focus on showing up for Product Time when you say you will and don’t concern yourself with what you’re working on or how “good” it is. Until your habit is strongly entrenched as part of your life, what you do is far less important than the fact that you honor your commitment.

  At first, this just means putting in Product Time at some point on the days you have committed to working; gradually, you’ll hold yourself to a more rigorous standard so that you’re showing up at an appointed time of day.

  When you have a solid habit of showing up for Product Time, that habit will keep you going even when you’re in a stage that’s challenging for you, when the topic is difficult, or when you’re going through some tricky life issues.

  Ten Reasons to Keep the Commitment Small<
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  A Product Time commitment of no more than fifteen minutes is small enough to not intimidate or overwhelm you, so your limbic system is less reactive.

  If you do feel a little anxious, you can talk yourself down: “It’s only fifteen minutes—the world will keep spinning, and my family, friends and colleagues will keep breathing.”

  It’s easier to find smaller bites of time than big chunks of uninterrupted, unscheduled time.

  Short Product Time sessions are more likely to result in actually showing up repeatedly. Repetition strengthens habits, and habits, in turn, reduce the likelihood of a limbic system takeover.

  Repetition also builds momentum. Your unconscious will continue to work on the writing challenge even after your conscious mind has moved on to other tasks.

  Small commitments lower expectations. Because you’re going to work for such a short time, it’s okay that what you do today is imperfect and incomplete.

  Because the time you’re committed to is small, you break the task into bite-size pieces, which are easier to start and easier to imagine yourself completing.

  If it’s for only fifteen minutes, you can justifiably postpone other tasks. You can reverse procrastination—instead of procrastinating the start of your writing, you procrastinate following the distractions that used to keep you from writing.

  You can envision letting go of all the other things competing for your attention and allow yourself to really focus, because it’s for only fifteen minutes. This kind of focus, where we get lost in the writing, is one of the biggest joys of writing.

  A small commitment gets you started, and once you get started, it’s easy to keep going.

  Past Initial Inertia

  Fifteen minutes is usually enough to get writers past their “Initial Inertia.” (Newton’s First Law states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest; likewise, a writer not writing tends to continue not writing.) Initial Inertia is another name for the paralysis that precedes the limbic system’s fight-or-flight response. Keeping the commitment small keeps the cortex driving the bus.

  Once writers get started with a small, nonthreatening fifteen-minute commitment, they often get into the zone and want to keep writing beyond that fifteen-minute commitment.

  Writer and homeopath Pam McAlister has found that “making a commitment to no more than fifteen minutes of Product Time each day encourages me to show up (rather than making me want to put it off). I almost always spend more than fifteen minutes on Product Time, but even if I only spend fifteen minutes, I still get to feel good about having done what I committed to doing.”

  WRITER’S APPLICATION: READY, AIM, WRITE!

  Like Pam McAlister, many writers who write well beyond fifteen minutes a day acknowledge that if their commitment were larger, they would skip days when they felt “too busy” or “too stressed” to write. Keeping the commitment small keeps them showing up. Once they get started, they want to keep going, so they reserve time to accommodate that.

  John Drozdal discovered that “after a few weeks, I often wrote for more than fifteen minutes. I made sure not to schedule anything right after the Product Time period so that I could take advantage of the momentum.”

  I have a standard commitment to show up for fifteen minutes of Product Time a day, five days a week, Monday through Friday. At the beginning of the week I look at my calendar to see how much more time I can reserve for Product Time and still honor my other commitments to coaching, teaching and speaking. The time beyond my fifteen minutes is my target time. Targets are stretch goals, not commitments. If I get on a roll and want to keep going, I can. If something unexpected comes up and I have to give up some of my target time, it’s acceptable. The fifteen minutes are nonnegotiable.

  When you’ve consistently shown up for the Product Time you said you would for several months, you can then start adding targets for longer writing sessions or specific tasks you want to focus on in the Product Time. But the commitment should never increase beyond Fifteen Magic Minutes.

  Jacquelyn B. Fletcher has worked hard to get to the point where “my entire workday is my Product Time. And the funny thing is, the more Product Time I do, the more Self-care and Process playtime I build in as well. When I fulfill my Product Time commitment, the feeling of accomplishment is a major reward. That feeling of success propels me into more Product Time, more accomplishments, finished novels, signed contracts . . . the list goes on!”

  You can set a target that varies each day, like I do (e.g., thirty minutes on Monday, two hours on Tuesday, five hours on Wednesday, etc.), or you can set a target for the week (a total of six hours this week). You can also set targets for completing specific milestone tasks (e.g., finish first draft of chapter five by August 1). Just remember that targets are stretch goals, so there’s no guilt, anxiety or regret if a target isn’t met.

  We need wiggle room in the target dates for completing specific tasks because we are creating something we’ve never created before. Every book, every poem, every essay is different from the ones we’ve created before. We can make estimates, but because of the novelty of the task, they are rough estimates. We aren’t manufacturing widgets on a production line, so we can’t expect assembly-line predictability.

  Surrender Illusions of Grandeur and Expectations of Perfection

  We’d all like to think that when we get inspired, we’ll write amazing prose or brilliant poetry, that we’ll get into the flow and the writing process will be easy, even blissfully perfect. So the temptation is to wait for the day when you’re that inspired, which is a setup for endless procrastination. The danger is that we start to expect that that’s what writing should be: amazing, brilliant, easy, perfect. Thinking you have to do it all and do it perfectly is a setup for a limbic system takeover.

  When you’re committed to writing for only fifteen minutes, you know you can’t do everything. You know you can’t write perfect prose or poetry in just fifteen minutes, which frees to you to write something imperfect today that you can refine in your fifteen minutes tomorrow.

  To write well, you must be willing to write badly. To eventually write something good, first of all you have to write something, and to write something, you have to be willing to surrender your expectations and demands that what you write today must be great.

  We can never tell on any given day whether today will be the day we write amazing stuff or the day we do nothing but shovel dreck, writing what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts.” That’s why Product Time is never evaluated in terms of how “good” the writing is, only by whether or not you show up. Over the long haul, you will write good stuff—you just can’t predict or demand when that will happen.

  You have to hold an intention that eventually you will achieve a specific writing goal, and at the same time, you have to surrender all expectations about the quality of any day’s writing. Fortunately, Process, where you have no expectations or intentions and play just for the sake of playing, prepares you to maintain this tricky balance.

  CHALLENGE: I NEED, I WANT

  Talk with a writing ally or trusted friend about a time when you moved easily into your writing, the writing went really well, and you were deeply satisfied with the writing experience. Talking will help you remember details you might not otherwise recall.

  Then list what you absolutely have to have to write well, what you prefer, and what you can live with or without. Compare your lists to the reality of your current writing space and time, then create an action plan of what you need to change. In some cases, you can change the situation and the environment; in others, you may need to change your assumptions and expectations.

  CHALLENGE: START YOUR PRODUCT TIME HABIT

  I suggest you copy and fill out the Product Time Commitment Form below. (You can copy the PDF of this form at http://BaneOfYourResistance.com/around-the-writers-block-forms/) Sign and date your Product Time
Commitment Form. Ask a friend to sign and date the form as your witness to make the commitment real. Post the completed, signed and dated form in your calendar, planner or work space. Reserve the time in your calendar or planner (whatever system you use to keep track of your appointments and commitments), recording both commitments and targets (if you have them).

  The commitment should be no more than fifteen minutes, five or six times a week. Remember it is better to make a small commitment you keep than a grand commitment you can’t honor. If you want to reserve time beyond the fifteen-minute commitment so you can keep writing when you’re on a roll, you can indicate that in the spaces for your target. Or you can indicate a specific task you want to focus on as your target. Remember the commitment is nonnegotiable—no matter what, you’ll do the commitment—and the target is a stretch goal. If you honor your commitments but don’t meet all your targets, you still celebrate your success with no guilt or regrets.

  My Product Time choices are: (list a single, specific writing project or multiple projects or “discovering my next writing project”; you may not need all four lines)

  1. __________

  2. __________

  3. __________

  4. __________

  I will show up Product Time for (number of) __________ minutes a day (no more than fifteen minutes)