Around the Writer's Block

by Rosanne Bane

  CHALLENGE: MAY YOU HAVE YOUR OWN ATTENTION, PLEASE?

  Any or all of the following challenges will help you reclaim your own attention.

  Identify what times of day you are best able to focus your attention. Is it first thing in the morning (like it is for me), or is it midday when you can hole up in the library or coffee shop? Devote some of your most focused time to your Product Time. Perhaps the less obvious step is to allow some of your most focused time to be downtime; don’t wait until you collapse from mental exhaustion.

  Identify what distracts you and prevents you from focusing on one thing for fifteen minutes. What tempts you to try to multitask? Is it email? IM or text messages? Your phone? People you work with or live with? Your pets? Establish times of the day when you simply refuse to give your attention to these people or things. If you want help, applications like DoNotDisturb and RescueTime will block websites and programs you select for a specified amount of time. Unless you work in an ER or for a bomb squad, no one is going to die and nothing is going to blow up if you don’t pay attention to him/her/it for fifteen to thirty minutes. (And if you do work in an ER or for a bomb squad, you know it’s vital to give your brain downtime so that when you are working, you can focus completely on the problem in front of you.)

  Every once in a while, see how much you can get done without your computer and other electronics. At a minimum, Incubation, Illumination, and Hibernation can and should be computer-free. How would you know you’re having a eureka moment of Illumination if you’re constantly talking or texting on your cell, sending and receiving messages, playing games, and processing information? I’ve started “email-free Tuesdays and Thursdays” to give myself two days a week when I don’t let myself get interrupted by constantly wondering whether I should check my email.

  List the top ten things or people you worry about. For each, identify one or two specific action steps you can take to alleviate anxiety. Give yourself five or ten minutes a day when you focus exclusively on worry, frustration and fear. Any other time you start to fret, ask yourself what you can do in the moment, and if there is nothing to do, postpone the anxiety until your next “worry session.”

  Create a “time budget.” Before attempting to create a monetary budget, experts will tell you that you need to identify how you are currently spending your money. The same is true of time. Before you can intentionally decide how to use your time, you have to know how you are currently spending it. Use the Time of Day Chart on the next page to record how you actually spend your time. If you want to skip the data entry or don’t trust yourself to notice how times flies when you’re online, check out time-tracking applications like RescueTime. Whether you’re recording manually or electronically, gather several weeks of data. Don’t judge or feel guilty about how you spend time; this is just information. After you’ve recorded how you spend time, ask yourself where you want to spend more time. More significantly, consider where you’re willing to spend less time so you have time for the things that matter most to you.

  MEDITATION

  Success Story: Quietly, Mindfully Refilling the Well

  Freelancer E. S. Fletcher sees a commitment to Self-care as “a reminder that I can’t simply draw from my creative well—I also need to replenish it. My favorite way to take care of my creative self is through the silence and stillness of meditation, though I’m not rigid about the method. Most days I meditate—often right before my Product Time—but some days I go for a walk, soak in the tub or I doze with my cats on the couch.”

  Fletcher applies a variety of Self-care, depending on where she needs the most support on any given day, to nurture what she calls the trinity of mind-body-spirit. “The better my whole self is functioning, the easier it is to get into a creative space because I’m not distracted by that ache in my shoulder or by the errands that need to be run. These practices support me in more than one way: A walk usually clears my head and gives my body the stamina to sit at my desk and write. A catnap slows my body down and relaxes me. Meditation energizes and centers me and helps me transition from the daily dross of life into creative space. It’s a simple ritual that helps quiet my chatty, critical left brain and gives my right brain some room to play.”

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: DIFFERENT LIFE, DIFFERENT BRAIN

  Buddhist monks, lamas, and nuns live a different life from most of us—one of contemplation and service, marked by hours and hours of meditation every day. Because they live a different life, they have different brains. EEG and fMRI brain scans of master meditators (those who have the 10,000–plus hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell correlates to mastery) show increased activity in several areas of the brain, including the insula and caudate (two areas linked to empathy and maternal love), the anterior cingulate, somatosensory cortex, cerebellum and left prefrontal lobe. Meditation decreases activity in the orientation association area in the parietal lobe, which orients you in space and time and allows you to differentiate between yourself and the world.35 Interestingly, losing the sense of separation between yourself and the world is both a key element in developing empathy and a key characteristic Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ascribes to the flow state of peak creativity.36

  Master meditators also show significant increases in gamma waves, while novice meditators show smaller increases. Gamma rays show up when the brain exerts itself, especially when neurons from several areas of the brain are working in concert. “They appear when the brain brings together different sensory features of an object, such as look, feel, sound, and other attributes that lead the brain to its aha! moment of yup, that’s a lilac bush.”37 Gamma waves seem to be required to achieve the aha! of Illumination, the highly prized fourth stage of the creative cycle.

  The fact that most of these brain differences are present whether the master meditator is in a meditative state or not means the changes are not just temporary brain states, but consistent brain traits that are the result of structural changes in the brain.38 The prefrontal cortex and anterior insula, for example, are thicker in the brains of meditators.39 This implies that writers should be able to draw on the strengths and benefits of meditation not only when we’re meditating, but also when we’re in the semimeditative state of writing.

  As E. S. Fletcher and countless other writers demonstrate, you don’t have to be a monk or a nun to bring the benefits of meditation to your writing life. Even novice meditators can see modest improvements fairly quickly. Dr. Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, who has been aided by the Dalai Lama in his studies on the effects of meditation, reports that people can experience brain changes, including increases in gamma waves, in as little as two weeks of meditation practice.40,41

  But you do need to make a commitment to meditate regularly. Research has shown that the more hours you spend meditating, the better you can sustain the kind of focused attention required for creative work. Davidson observes, “We’ve gotten this idea, in Western culture, that we can change our mental state by a once-a-week, forty-five minute intervention, which is complete cockamamy. Athletes and musicians train many hours every day. As a neuroscientist, I have to believe that engaging in compassion meditation every day for an hour each day would change your brain in important ways.”42

  WRITER’S APPLICATION: WHAT KIND AND HOW MUCH?

  There are a variety of meditation methods you can explore: Zen, Transcendental Meditation, compassionate meditation, mindfulness meditation, yoga, tai chi, qi gong. Meditation can be as simple as observing your breath and consistently bringing your attention back to your breathing when your mind wanders. Some people prefer moving meditations; swimming can be a great way to meditate (there is a built-in reminder to focus on regular breathing, after all).

  In the Entering the Flow class I teach at the Loft, my students and I use focused breathing and mindfulness meditation as routes into the writer’s trance. One of my Self-care practices is to meditat
e a half hour a day, six days a week. When my mediation practice is solid, I’m more relaxed, more creative and better able to focus on my writing for longer periods, so I’m more productive. I recognize that meditating for an hour a day would give me more profound benefits, but I also know that the half-hour commitment to sitting in mindfulness meditation is one I can and do consistently honor. An hour feels so big, I might be tempted to skip it far too often.

  If you haven’t meditated before, or if it’s been awhile since you meditated, start small. Five minutes can be an amazingly long time to try to meditate when you first start. You might want to explore sample meditations in The Blooming of a Lotus or other books by Thich Nhat Hanh. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Full Catastrophe Living and one of Richard Davidson’s research collaborators, has a collection of guided meditations available on CD.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: THE POWER OF THE QUIET

  In one of Davidson’s studies, employees at a biotechnology company were divided into a test group who attended weekly classes in mindfulness meditation and meditated an hour a day for six days a week and a control group who did not attend classes or practice daily mediation. At the end of eight weeks, the test group not only reported feeling calmer, more focused and more creative, their brain scans were significantly different from their “before” scans taken at the beginning of the study and significantly different from the brain scans of the control group. Most notably, the test group increased the activity in their left prefrontal cortex.43,44

  Previous studies demonstrate that people who consistently have more activity in their left prefrontal cortex than in their right prefrontal cortex tend to be “alert, energized, enthusiastic, and joyous, enjoying life more and having a greater sense of well-being.”45 On the other hand, these studies indicate that people who have a more active right prefrontal cortex tend to be more worried, anxious, sad and discontented with life. Greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex has also been shown to inhibit the amygdala, so we can reasonably assume that meditation will reduce the frequency, duration and intensity of limbic system takeovers, thus reducing writing resistance and leaving your creative cortex in the driver’s seat more often.

  Other than this asymmetrical increase in activity in the “optimistic” left prefrontal cortex, meditation tends to even out activity in the right and left hemispheres. It also increases the overall size of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (areas that are related to focused attention and processing sensory data). Meditation reduces the levels of cortisol, the stress neurotransmitter. Cortisol is a leading cause of the negative effects of excessive stress, which include significantly reducing fluid intelligence (a.k.a. creative thinking) and impairing nearly every other cognitive function: mood, memory, learning, planning, self-control and motivation.46

  If that’s not enough to convince you to take up meditation, consider that stress also hampers the immune system, accelerates the aging process and interferes with your metabolism so that you’re more likely to gain weight. Not only did meditation improve the immune systems of the meditators in Davidson’s study, the degree of improvement could be predicted by the degree of increase of activity in the left prefrontal cortex.47 Not surprisingly, study after study shows that the more hours you spend meditating, the more benefits you receive.

  PLAY

  Success Story: The Play’s the Thing

  The old saw about everything being grist for the mill when you’re a writer is true. Your hobbies, passions and idiosyncrasies will inform your writing. For example, my novella features Nikki Wade, a ninety-two-year-old who realizes she isn’t just losing her memories—they’re being stolen and sold on the black market. This story draws on my memories of snorkeling in Hawaii, taking a zip-line tour of the jungle canopy in Costa Rica, visiting my grandmother when she lived in an assisted-living facility, playing countless games of cards with friends, working as an administrative assistant in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, and a comment I made twenty years ago about traveling vicariously while looking at someone’s vacation photos and thinking “Vicarious Vacations” would be a neat title for a science fiction story.

  The fiction I’m working on now comes from the synchronistic combination of hearing a physicist explain his secret interest in time travel (not the topic a serious scientist trying to earn tenure advertises) and having recently taken up geocaching. I wondered what a GPS would be like if we could enter coordinates not just for latitude, longitude and altitude, but for the fourth dimension of time as well, and what a younger Nikki Wade would do if she could travel to parallel universes.

  You never can tell when a piece of your life is going to spark a story element or poetic image. Who would have guessed that the field trip my class took to a brewery in Milwaukee when I was in grade school would be key research for a character in my novel who runs a distillery?

  It’s not surprising that I write about dogs in both my fiction and nonfiction since I’m as passionate (some say crazy) about dogs as I am about the brain. What’s surprising is that the impetus to sign a contract for this book with Tarcher came at a dog agility trial. I was talking with a fellow competitor who mentioned she’d just returned home from a conference. We rarely talk about our occupations at trials—we’re all dog geeks after all—but when I asked about the conference and discovered that this woman worked for Penguin Books, I mentioned that I was on the supply side of the business. And that was, as Bogie says in Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  Every experience you have has the potential to end up in your writing in some way. Everything you do is research. Your entire life is one gigantic field trip. However, don’t expect the IRS to agree—I wouldn’t even try to write off my trip to Hawaii as a business expense, although I will check with my tax advisor about deducting the entry fees for that dog trial. And don’t try to get out of your share of household chores or social obligations either by telling your partner that staring at the ceiling or playing a game is work. Those household chores and social obligations also feed your creative work.

  Play Is Serious Business

  Despite what our Puritan forerunners asserted, play is not sinful. It is not a waste of time that could be better spent doing something “productive.” It is not just a reward for hard work or an amusing diversion we squeeze into a busy schedule when we can.

  Play is typically defined as a seemingly purposeless activity a person or other animal voluntarily engages in because the activity is inherently attractive. In other words, play is fun for fun’s sake. The other elements that define play include the absence of time restrictions and expectations about outcomes, lack of concern about how others perceive us, and a willingness to improvise and entertain new possibilities.48

  Some experts fear that we are losing creativity, cooperation and compassion because children and adults in industrialized countries don’t engage in enough free play. Free play is defined as “imaginative and rambunctious fooling around that involves moving—jumping, running, wrestling—and aimless and creative actions.”49

  Play helps us figure out how to navigate our bodies through the physical world and how to navigate our psyches through the emotional and social world. We learn all kinds of important social skills in play: how to negotiate, argue constructively, act collaboratively, challenge ourselves to excel without trampling others, and how to lose gracefully and persevere.

  Play is the natural way to learn, to practice, to rehearse without penalties. Play expands the imagination. Play is essential for creativity.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: THRIVING ON PLAY

  According to Dr. Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself, “monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to maintaining brain plasticity.”50 Or in layperson’s terms, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  Play gives us something to do with our big human brains. In fact, play ha
s played a big part in the evolution of our big brains. Animals with comparatively larger brains for their body mass play more than animals with comparatively smaller brains. And the more playful behaviors a species typically engages in, the larger and more developed its frontal cortex and cerebellum are.51

  Play is essential for brain development and helps the brain organize itself.52 Play, especially active play, stimulates BDNF (a.k.a. Miracle-Gro for the brain) in the areas of the prefrontal cortex that make executive decisions.53 As we have seen before, BDNF supports the growth of new neurons, encourages existing neurons to make new connections, and fights the effects of stress.

  While some forms of play are solitary, play often gives us playmates. This social interaction, which has been shown to be vital for brain development and well-being, may be part of why play improves mood. Research indicates that if we don’t get enough play, we accumulate a play deficit, just as we accumulate a sleep deficit if we don’t get enough sleep. While we don’t know yet how harmful a play deficit is, we do know it makes us more pessimistic and unable to enjoy life.54

  Because play promotes neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) throughout our lives, it keeps us young. People who play reduce their chances of getting Alzheimer’s (by up to 63 percent in one study). Play postpones the onset of and mitigates the seriousness of age-related cognitive losses.55 A variety of different forms of both physical and mental play keep the brain and the rest of the body flexible and strong. People who play are not only less likely to develop dementia, they’re less likely to have heart disease.