Fernanda: I offer the following knowing that we all have different styles of thinking and writing. Just because the following has saved me in the midst of a number of writing projects, doesn't mean it would work for everybody.
I had to learn how to aggressively, firmly and purposely quit at moments when no amount of pushing through the pain was leading to ideas or insights.
This was much more than simply being kind to myself. I'm a big fan of being kind to myself, but I slowly learned another benefit of purposeful quitting. Again and again, in the hour or two after deciding not to write, even trying to force myself NOT to think, the ideas and words and phrases came.
At first, as your standard neurotic NY college professor, I felt silly about playing these mind games with myself. I wondered whether I was simply trying to put a respectable and strategic veneer on the plain fact that I wanted to give up struggling. (Talk about self-flagellation!) But it simply worked too many times to stop.
I remember once having four ideas in my head that I somehow knew were pieces of a puzzle that somehow fit together. But I was stuck on how they fit together. I immediately realized it was a time to defiantly quit, to deliver a full-throated "F---- You" to the computer screen. I walked to Prospect Park, looked at a tree, and noticed one big thick branch that was hosting a group of smaller branches. And I realized that my four ideas were less a puzzle than four branches emerging from a big branch, a more fundamental idea.
I also learned to accept that I was simply not a linear thinker, that I couldn't control when ideas would come. Focusing on one project, I would occasionally find myself flooded with words about a part of a manuscript on which I wasn't working. Or something I had never even thought of before. It didn't take me long to learn that no flood of words and thoughts should go ever unwritten at, or close to, the very moment they show up.
Eventually I saw the more fundamental insight revealed by all my games. I had to stop imagining that I was a linear writer, even stop imagining that there was such thing as the mythical organized, linear writer I couldn't stop admiring.
When I stopped worrying whether I was focused enough; when I realized that ideas had minds of their own (sounds silly, I know) and might take their own sweet time, I was at peace.
There's a lot of what you wrote here that I love, Steve, including this passage: "I had to learn how to aggressively, firmly and purposely quit at moments when no amount of pushing through the pain was leading to ideas or insights." I wish I'd known that early on in my career; it would have saved me from the destabilizing self-doubt that's so common among writers and from engaging in the type of flagellation that you described so well. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and advice. May the ideas and words always keep coming, for you and for me.
I am laughing out loud. I just, for the first time, read your short entry "Quitting is an Action."
Yup.
Fernanda: I offer the following knowing that we all have different styles of thinking and writing. Just because the following has saved me in the midst of a number of writing projects, doesn't mean it would work for everybody.
I had to learn how to aggressively, firmly and purposely quit at moments when no amount of pushing through the pain was leading to ideas or insights.
This was much more than simply being kind to myself. I'm a big fan of being kind to myself, but I slowly learned another benefit of purposeful quitting. Again and again, in the hour or two after deciding not to write, even trying to force myself NOT to think, the ideas and words and phrases came.
At first, as your standard neurotic NY college professor, I felt silly about playing these mind games with myself. I wondered whether I was simply trying to put a respectable and strategic veneer on the plain fact that I wanted to give up struggling. (Talk about self-flagellation!) But it simply worked too many times to stop.
I remember once having four ideas in my head that I somehow knew were pieces of a puzzle that somehow fit together. But I was stuck on how they fit together. I immediately realized it was a time to defiantly quit, to deliver a full-throated "F---- You" to the computer screen. I walked to Prospect Park, looked at a tree, and noticed one big thick branch that was hosting a group of smaller branches. And I realized that my four ideas were less a puzzle than four branches emerging from a big branch, a more fundamental idea.
I also learned to accept that I was simply not a linear thinker, that I couldn't control when ideas would come. Focusing on one project, I would occasionally find myself flooded with words about a part of a manuscript on which I wasn't working. Or something I had never even thought of before. It didn't take me long to learn that no flood of words and thoughts should go ever unwritten at, or close to, the very moment they show up.
Eventually I saw the more fundamental insight revealed by all my games. I had to stop imagining that I was a linear writer, even stop imagining that there was such thing as the mythical organized, linear writer I couldn't stop admiring.
When I stopped worrying whether I was focused enough; when I realized that ideas had minds of their own (sounds silly, I know) and might take their own sweet time, I was at peace.
And they came.
Steve
There's a lot of what you wrote here that I love, Steve, including this passage: "I had to learn how to aggressively, firmly and purposely quit at moments when no amount of pushing through the pain was leading to ideas or insights." I wish I'd known that early on in my career; it would have saved me from the destabilizing self-doubt that's so common among writers and from engaging in the type of flagellation that you described so well. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and advice. May the ideas and words always keep coming, for you and for me.