by Rosanne Bane
James Thurber attests to the observation that writers are working even when it looks like we aren’t. “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.”
Never-ending writing may sound ideal; your unconscious keeps turning the pieces of the puzzle over and over until something clicks into place and voilà, you have another of those exciting and satisfying “aha” moments. But there are times when we need help to stop writing.
Despite having solid writing habits that had sustained her for years, Jackie W. struggled to keep working when she started to write about her infant son’s death in her book about complicated grief. “It’s hard to write about what happened,” she told me in a coaching session, “but I knew it would be and I know it’ll be worth it. The problem is that I can’t stop thinking about those awful memories. I feel drained and emotionally hungover. It’s like the past is leaking out and staining the rest of my life.”
Jackie already had a writing ritual: she lit a candle and asked for spiritual guidance and protection in her writing. I suggested she modify the ritual slightly to include declaring—out loud or in writing—that she was willing to explore those memories during her writing session and only during her writing session. I also suggested she add a closing ritual to declare that she was no longer willing to entertain those memories, ask for protection for the rest of the day, and then blow out the candle. Adding the closing ritual didn’t make the memories less painful, but it did allow Jackie to restrict the memories to when she was willing to work with them. It freed her from dragging the emotional baggage around for the rest of the day.
A closing ritual creates a container for painful memories and material. It also creates a neural pattern to shift your thinking and behavior. A closing ritual complements and completes the opening ritual. Together, an opening and closing ritual bookend the writing session and help us compartmentalize our work. When memoirists are working with painful memories, when fiction writers are writing the dark moments or following the alarming twists of the antagonist’s mind, when any writer is working with challenging, painful material, that compartmentalization is what allows us to do the work at all.
It’s been said that the purpose of art is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. As artists, we have to be willing to go deep, to explore the underside of our society and our own psyches. As human beings, we need to know we don’t have to dwell in that darkness 24/7. We need to know we can stop. We need a ritual to signal, especially to our image-focused right hemisphere, that we are stopping.
CHALLENGE: RITUAL REVERSE
If you use a ritual or routine to get your writing started, think about a way to reverse it to create a logical ending ritual. If you don’t have a ritual, consider what patterns you would like to use as an opening and closing routine. Even when the writing you’re doing isn’t challenging, it’s useful to know when to stop writing and rejoin the world. That way, your partner won’t have to nudge you in the ribs the way Mrs. Thurber did.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: USE IT OR LOSE IT
The human brain is plastic, not fluid; it is capable of profound change, but it is also remarkably consistent.
Myelin is the source of the brain’s consistency. In a healthy brain, myelin never disappears. Once a neural pathway is insulated, it stays insulated, which is why the habits we wish we never formed are so frustratingly persistent.8 After all, myelin is fatty tissue, and we all know how difficult it is to get rid of fat. (I suppose this means it would be accurate to say that the term “fathead” applies to anyone who is entrenched in old patterns of thought and behavior.)
On the other hand, with focused repetition, the brain can create new neural pathways and connections. Because they don’t lose myelin, the old pathways are still there, but they can be superseded by new patterns. Neuroplasticity is a double-edged sword. Because your brain is flexible enough to create new neural pathways for habits and routines you want to cultivate, it’s also flexible enough to replace pathways you stop using. “Use it or lose it” is the corollary to Hebb’s Law.
Routines you practice will remain; routines you ignore will fade, especially if they are relatively new routines (with less myelination). You can’t leave your writing for prolonged periods without feeling that you’re starting over almost from scratch. If you don’t keep employing the neurons you’ve enlisted as your writing neurons, they’ll go work for someone else, performing a different routine.
INQUIRY
“How can I design and practice rituals to support myself as a writer, an artist and a human being?”
7
RECORD AND REWARD
Success Story
Even though she’d published one book, writer and playwright Annette D. wanted to improve her writing habits. She knew she needed structure and frequently felt overwhelmed by the choice of several projects to focus on. She realized that shifting between projects was often a way to avoid making a commitment to any one of them. “Time seemed to slip away with nothing to show for it but good intentions to do better tomorrow.”
When Annette decided to practice Process, Self-care and Product Time, she discovered that checking in each week with other writers about what she intended to do and what she actually did made the commitment real. Recording her progress in a log and rewarding herself when she honored her promises helped even more. And sticking to her commitments to Process, Self-care and Product Time allowed Annette to create structure out of what felt like a vast and swirling ocean of ideas and projects.
“Like any new habit, it was difficult at first. I had an especially hard time making room to pursue some sort of artistic process practice. I tried lots of things—listening intently to music I wanted to explore, drawing tropical fish, journal pages, dance practice—mixing it up to make Process a form of creative cross-training. I still find that Process is the hardest of the three practices to pull off each week, but I do it because I made the commitment and because, like Pavlov’s dog, I look forward to my reward.”
Adopting the idea of rewarding herself was also difficult. Annette couldn’t think of anything that motivated her or felt like a worthy reward. When she admitted to herself that she was motivated by money, Annette started paying herself a dollar every time she honored one of her commitments, setting the money aside in an old check box.
“I had to literally pay myself with dollar bills; otherwise the reward was too abstract, like the money wasn’t really there, or I should donate it or save it for something ‘more important.’ Now my challenge is to spend it on myself so it really is a reward.”
One of Annette’s favorite rewards was spending the money she earned doing her daily practices on a kayaking adventure trip. She also used it to buy special earrings that were more expensive than what she would usually buy for herself. “That’s been surprisingly reinforcing. I wear them almost every day, and I see them, I like them and I’m proud that I earned them. They remind me that I am a writer.
“It’s been well over a year that I’ve been this disciplined and structured about my creative life, and I have a new full-length play as the result. I don’t think I would have gotten this far if I hadn’t used this system of tracking and rewards.”
Writer’s Log: Stardate 2012
Keeping a writer’s journal means different things to different writers: a way to practice the craft of writing, a repository of great ideas, a log of what you’ve researched, a library of opening and closing lines and snatches of dialogue, a place to dredge up memories. Young writers keep journals in the hope that someday fans and English lit majors will want to know how they worked; elder writers keep journals in the certainty that memory is fleeting and fickle.
No doubt you’ll find benefits in any kind of writer’s journal you keep. I’ve observed that the clients and
students who keep daily entries about what they do for each of the three practices of Process, Self-care and Product Time are more consistent in honoring their commitments, build sustainable habits faster, and are more satisfied with their performance and experience than those who don’t keep track. The log can be as simple as a table where you record your commitments for each of the three practices and make daily entries about what you actually do for each. (You can find a PDF of a Three Habits Tracking Table at http://BaneOfYourResistance.com/around-the-writers-block-forms/.)
Emerging novelist and memoirist L. Nygaard credits tracking the three practices with developing her regular writing routine. She observed, “I found that tracking what I did for the practices was almost as important as doing the practices themselves.” As they became integral to her writing life and Process, Self-care and Product Time were as routine as brushing her teeth in the morning, recording her daily progress became less necessary. “But when my routine changes or my practices waffle, I return to a weekly tracking form to record each day’s commitments, targets, and accomplishments.”
Like L. Nygaard, I have enough history with my habits that I no longer need to record what I do for Process and Self-care. But I do keep detailed records for my Product Time. The table I use includes columns for:
Date
Intended target time (when I intend to start and how long I intend to work)
Intended target task (what I intend to work on)
Actual time (when I actually started and how long I actually worked)
What I actually worked on
Reward
How I feel about the day’s effort
What I want to focus on next time
(You can find a PDF of a Product Time Tracking Table at http://BaneOfYourResistance.com/around-the-writers-block-forms/.)
You might notice that I don’t log my commitment to Product Time; this is because it is an unwavering fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, Monday through Friday.
I tally weekly totals for intended target time and actual time and calculate the percentage of the target I actually worked. Day to day, I don’t worry about target time compared to actual time, but I do pay attention to the weekly percentages.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: “ATTENTION MUST BE PAID”
The brain changes in response to what we pay attention to. More important, the brain does not change if we’re not paying attention. When monkeys are trained to detect subtle changes in the vibration frequencies of an object fluttering on one fingertip, the portion of their somatosensory cortex that corresponds to that finger increases significantly. This is classic neuroplasticity at work. However, when monkeys are exposed to the same object fluttering on a fingertip, but are distracted by sounds, their somatosensory cortex doesn’t change.1
Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz observes in The Mind & the Brain, “When stimuli identical to those that induce plastic changes in an attending brain are instead delivered to a nonattending brain, there is no induction of cortical plasticity. Attention, in other words, must be paid.”2
If you want to form a new habit, it’s vital to focus your attention on the new behavior. The more you pay attention to the new writing habits you want to develop, the more plastic your brain can be in acquiring those new habits. Recording what you do for Process, Self-care and Product Time in a log is an excellent way to pay attention.
As the Egyptian pharaohs used to say, “So let it be written, so let it be done.”
Benefits of Tracking
Recording also increases your awareness, motivation and the likelihood of repeating the desired behavior. For example, according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, dieters who consistently record what they eat lose up to twice as much weight as those who don’t keep a food diary.3
Keeping a writer’s log will help you maintain focus and give yourself full credit for what you do. Remember, the most effective way to evaluate Product Time is not by how many words you produce, but simply by whether or not you show up when you say you will. When you’re struggling in Incubation or with a challenging rewrite, it can seem that you’re not making progress. This is when your writer’s log can reassure you that you are doing what you need to do. When you have several months of entries, you can look back on other times you struggled and see what helped you find a solution.
It’s too easy to lose track of all the work you do on a writing project, especially since losing track of time is one of the hallmarks of the flow state we all want to achieve. Yet, in Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identifies immediate feedback as one of the nine components required for the flow state and observes that those who keep doing creative work are those who can give themselves feedback.4 Tracking is one way to give yourself feedback and acknowledge your efforts.
It also allows you to compare what you intend to do with what you actually do and address any potential problems before they get too big. You may not have a precise match between your intention and your actual activity, and most of the time that’s okay. If you have the freedom to change your schedule at the last minute or shift your focus to follow a new intriguing idea, why not enjoy it? But with that freedom comes the challenge of not only motivating yourself, but also holding yourself accountable.
To do that, you need precise information, not just a vague sense of, “I put in a lot of hours this week, I think. Except for Tuesday, or was it Wednesday, when I had to run errands?” Logging in your start and stop times will keep you honest. Comparing the total number of hours you targeted to the total number of hours you worked for the week lets you know whether you should adjust your efforts to meet your goals, modify your target estimates to fit reality, or give yourself a bonus reward in addition to daily rewards.
Including a column for Reward in your tracking log will remind you to give yourself the small, daily rewards that reinforce the routine tasks of showing up, opening the files and just getting started. Once you get into the writing, the challenge of solving the puzzle is its own reward, but the daily rewards support the mechanical steps that make it possible to get to the intrinsic rewards.
Tracking also focuses your attention on how you feel about your writing every day. As you’ll see in the case of a British naval officer’s brush with disaster, below, emotions are valuable information from the limbic system. When we notice how we feel, we can gain conscious awareness of what our limbic system already knows: that something significant is on the horizon.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: WHEN THE LIMBIC SYSTEM IS RIGHT ON TARGET
During Desert Storm, British naval officer Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley of the HMS Gloucester was responsible for monitoring the radar reports of the airspace surrounding the Allied fleet. Early one morning, Riley noticed a blip headed toward the fleet from the Kuwaiti coast that he just didn’t like. If the blip was an Iraqi missile, it was on course to destroy the USS Missouri, an American battleship with hundreds of sailors aboard. But the blip looked just like an American fighter jet, and the American pilots routinely turned off their electronic identification system so they couldn’t be tracked by Iraqi antiaircraft missiles. The only piece of equipment that could give Riley the information he needed, the blip’s altitude, was temporarily offline. Riley simply could not know for sure what this blip was. But he had to make a decision, and fast.5
What was going on in Riley’s mind was probably something along the lines of, “Is it one of ours? If it is, and I give the order to shoot it down, I’ll kill two American pilots. But if it’s not, hundreds aboard the Missouri will die. I have a really bad feeling about this.”
What was going on in Riley’s brain was that his limbic system had detected a deviation in a pattern that his cortex couldn’t detect. It would be months later before a psychologist studying battlefield decision making would notice that the blip that worried Riley appeared on his radar screen a mere eight seconds later than
an American fighter jet would have appeared. When his limbic system detected this eight-second deviation, Riley’s dopamine-releasing neurons stopped firing. It was the decrease in dopamine that gave Riley the bad feeling and that pinged his intuition enough for him to give the order to fire.
The limbic system is not only “to blame” for limbic system takeovers, it is also the source of valuable information the cortex can’t perceive. The limbic system does not include the language centers, so we don’t have words when the limbic system detects something significant. Emotions are the limbic system’s only language. And since the limbic system knows things the cortex doesn’t, paying attention to how we feel about our writing (or blips on the radar screen or anything else) is our smartest move. Of course, you need your cortex to interpret emotions and plan a course of action, but you can trust that your emotions are there for a reason.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: TRACK IT
I recommend you track Process, Self-care and Product Time for at least six months while you’re developing these habits. You can copy the sample table for tracking the three habits shown on page 151 or incorporate your own tracking system into whatever datebook or calendar app you use. You can even post a chart on your office wall and give yourself gold stars or other stickers every time you honor a commitment. Many students admit with a mix of embarrassment and defiance that the gold stars that motivated them in grade school still have the power to engage them as adults. The key, as you’ll see below, is that they are the ones giving themselves the gold stars, not some external authority figure.