How you make writing hard on yourself (and what to do about it)

Stop tripping over yourself and get started (with a twist at the end)

What if it's not that writing is hard, but that you only perceive it as hard because you've been fooled?

A few days ago I read an essay that made me ask that question.

Let's back up a few steps before I dive into that. Let's get into the phenomenology of writing.

How it goes is like this. I sit down at my desk with a fresh-baked idea motivating me to commit it to the page. I write until the motivation runs out, which it always must since motivation is only a transient state of excitement. Then I survey the carnage and think, this is trash. One more stillborn project for the "one day" folder, knowing that one day means never.

What's going on here?

1- High motivation kicks off a burst of creative effort.

2- Motivation stalls and the true magnitude of the project sets in.

3- Without the magnetic shine of motivation, the idea looks silly and stupid, your work like garbage, and furthermore, you're an idiot for ever thinking you had the skill to realize that image you held in your mind.

There's errors behind every step of that mental process. Simple errors, obvious errors, and ultimately fatal to any writer (or any artist if we speak in general).

Can you spot them?

I have clear-eyed readers that I know for sure can. I also know that this pattern of behavior is so widespread among self-declared writers that I venture most cannot.

The reason is that the errors don't look like errors. When experienced from the inside, they're felt as how things are.

You've either got it or you don't. You feel it or not.

What's "it"?

If my experience is any indicator, it's some inner feeling or mood that one might call by words like "motivation" or "inspiration". The rabble operate on the assumption that you must be in the mood to create, that the Muse herself must whisper into your ear.

Motivation is the experience of transient excitement. It comes and goes by its own laws. Feelings are fine and necessary, but our culture tends to look on them as powers unto themselves, insensitive to our thoughts and actions, which is an awful lie.

One of the best-kept secrets of motivation: the best way to find it is to get started.

Which is the real puzzle here. I often find that writing is a pleasant and rewarding activity when I'm doing it. I get interested and absorbed in the work, the flow state kicks in, and we're off.

That is not the case with getting started.

Why?

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Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

I'm sure you've noticed that those lightning-flashes of clever ideas, insights, and solutions to problems always hit you at the oddest times.

You'll be in the shower, washing dishes, out on a walk or fiddling around in the garden when BANG there it is.

The reason why this happens is down to a strange fact about brain anatomy. Your brain is split into two mostly-equal hemispheres, one on the left and one on the right.

I won't linger on the details of this here. What's important is that the left and the right have their own ways of attending to reality. In general terms the left hemisphere is like a microscope that zooms in on the parts and fine details. The right hemisphere zooms all the way out, taking in the greater context and finding the meaning in it.

The left has a monopoly on language, discursive thinking, and verbal expression. The fact that the left hemisphere can speak, combined with its myopic detail-focus, leads to a certain bias in its favor.

Iain McGilchrist, the neuroscientist who has written a great deal in defense of the split-brain hypothesis, argues that much of our society is set up to favor left-brain cognition and behaviors. We value what is explicit, visible, tangible, and measurable. The key mental skills are reasoning and observation.

Why does the world look ugly?

The right's cognitive style isn't based in words. It favors images and feelings, making often wild intuitive leaps of association and analogy rather than the strict inferences of logic. The right's key mental skills are imagination and intuition.

Because the right side is non-verbal and slower-moving than the frenetic left side, it's often hard for us to notice it. And this is made worse by our collective preoccupation with the fast, obvious, and measurable, leaving the right brain's preferred modes at a disadvantage.

This is quite the bind for us artists and writers, as it's only when we slow down, relax, and distract the busy chatter of the conscious ego -- grounded in the left hemisphere -- we experience the silence and space necessary for the right hemisphere to make itself known.

So writes Colin Wilson in "Fantasy and Faculty X", found in the 1987 anthology How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy Science Fiction by J.N. Williamson.

Wilson makes three major points which I found profoundly useful for understanding the obstacles to getting started.

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1- We think too fast.

... perhaps the most interesting discovery made by Sperry's team was that the right and left hemispheres operate at different speeds: the right is slow, the left is fast. And this explains why they are out of contact much of the time. They are like two men going for a walk, and one walks so much faster than the other that he is soon a hundred yards in front, and conversation is practically impossible.

Although our brains cleverly knit the two streams of consciousness into a single flow of experience, we can become aware of the occasional glitch.

The lightning-flash of creative insight is one of them. When the silent "stranger" in the right brain makes itself known, it can feel like a bolt of divine inspiration.

The trouble is, we live in a fast-paced "attention economy" where you aren't meant to slow down. Impatience born out of speed and a full "To Do" list is our game. That keeps the left-brain cruising at top speed while the right languishes. If you never pay attention to it, and fill it with junk from social media and "the news" [sic], no wonder you'll never hear anything from it.

No wonder you're ruled by distraction, lack of focus, and endless negative, critical self-talk.

We can consciously act to bring the two hemispheres back into sync. There are two methods for doing this. One is relaxation, such that the left slows down to match the right. The other is excitation, so that the right speeds up to meet the left.

My takeaway is to use the mind's power to direct thoughts at their objects. Relaxing or stimulating the mind with deliberate intent can summon up energy which you can then direct at whatever you're doing.

The key detail here is the effort and determination. Boredom saps your energy, which makes it too easy to head on a quest for stimulation. A double whammy.

Physical and psychological stress can keep you so keyed up that you forget that you can do this. The neurotic voice of anxiety tells you it's impossible and not worth trying.

The sad irony is that the left brain's defeatist voice saps your energy, making it feel impossible, which further saps your energy and desire.

Waiting on "motivation" is the road to failure.

Focusing the mind, even commanding it in the face of tiredness and impatience, is the solution.

The effect is to make the left slow down—like a man in a hurry who suddenly remembers that he has left his train ticket at home. In other words, we can make the left slow down by taking thought. The left can order itself to slow down.

You can practice this. But how?

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2- Embrace the spooky X-factor of the creative mind

In a book of mine called The Occult, I coined a name for this odd ability to put oneself into another time and place; I called it Faculty X. You might say that it is the ability to—be in two places at the same time to project your mind totally into some other time and place.

Let's talk about the magic in writing.

Yes, I said the "M" word and I mean it. Whatever you think of the supernatural, it's clear that the larger parts of creativity are non-conscious, non-rational, and non-verbal.

The magical and occult traditions in the West all tell of using the will and imagination to deliberately transform consciousness. This has deep significance for creation and art.

Wilson's careful to stay agnostic about the overt supernatural or magical properties of Faculty X, although -- with more honesty than today's fashionable intellectuals -- he doesn't rule out a connection.

These connections run deep, right under your nose.

Matt Cardin

who writes the lovely

The Living Dark

here on Substack, recently tweeted thus:

Believe or don't, that's not for me to decide.

Considering how little the present age values the powers and acts of imagination and creativity -- not to be confused with the products of such -- you may wish to rethink your skepticism.

My interest begins in admitting how little we truly know about ourselves.

We have little-understood reserves of vital energies that can, on occasion, can break through the unconscious barrier into waking life.

Wilson's Faculty X offers the fascinating possibility that the mind can truly see into other times and places, using our power to summon up mental images which are then fueled by the will.

Equally important, this power can work against you. Most of us, I suggest, do this unconsciously to some degree. We allow negative thoughts and outside events to create images of failure and despair, which encourage negative attitudes and keep the cycle going. It’s all images in the mind.

The value of this ability for any artist ought to go without saying, in particular where these self-imposed blocks get in the way.

Here's one way to put it to work.

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3- See, don't tell

When a writer says to himself, "I have an interesting problem...," he induces in himself the same state of mind that a child feels when his mother says, "Once upon a time ..." This is the proper starting point of any novel. For once the writer had induced that feeling in himself, he has also induced it in the reader. His problem is to visualize what he is describing with such clarity that he feels as if he is actually present.

You've heard the old saw "show, don't tell".

It's one thing to know what you should do.

It's another thing to know how it's done.

Wilson tells of the difficulties he faced when setting out tell a story. Even the most excellent storytellers became a bad influence.

By imitating the telling of a story, the writer copies the product while blind to the process that created it.

"I became oddly self-conscious," Wilson writes, "like an inexperienced liar trying to convince someone he is telling the truth."

Once I learned not to try to tell a story—that is, to try to make it interesting—but merely to try to visualize a scene until it was real, I had discovered the basic secret. That secret is to try to persuade the "stranger" to cooperate in the telling of a story: to try to induce a condition approximating to Faculty X.

The words came when he stopped trying to tell a story and instead immersed himself in the imagined world, rendering it before his mind in such vivid and concrete detail that he could scarcely tell it from the real space around him.

That technique of beginning by seeing, rather than struggling to tell, made it all but impossible not to render it precisely on the page.

The work you do before and away from the keyboard, the daydreaming and deliberate play with images in your mind’s eye, is a vital and neglected step. It could be that the secret to writing has almost nothing to do with putting words on paper.

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Here’s a pitfall to watch for.

Phrases like "quieting the mind" and "silencing the critical voice" suggest an active, vigorous use of force against force. That's the left brain's approach sneaking back in. It's insidious.

Here's a different way.

If you've ever suffered insomnia, the worst thing you can do while lying in bed counting the cracks in the ceiling is to try and make yourself fall asleep. The more you use effort while trying force sleep, the more you excite yourself, the more attention you place on the problem, and the harder it gets to nod off.

Opposing an unwanted force strengthens it. Get out of its way, open up an empty space in front of it, and watch it burn out under its own energy.

The trick is to, as the police like to say, stop resisting.

Take your attention away from what is wrong and place it where you want to be. This is the aikido-throw strategy.

Allow your mind to wander and play. You’re still in charge, though the goals and methods differ. Play is a right-brain activity.

Besides walking, moving, and breathing deeply, consider writing by hand. As excellent and essential a tool as the keyboard may be, it's at once a barrier between you and your words, and a rapid-fire mechanism that closes off space for thought.

A pen or pencil forces you to slow down, creating the needed space between your thoughts and the words on the page.

Right there we’ve got three reasons why it’s so hard to start, even when we know the reality won’t be painful.

We go too fast and won’t slow down for the creative mind to speak.

We fail to use the intuitive and imaginative parts of our mind, allowing negative thoughts and images to rule it.

For that reason, we focus too much on the mechanics of getting words on the page and not enough on using our minds to create and play.

If you feel stuck, there’s a game plan for you.

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📣 YOUR LINK HERE

If you'd like to have your link here, email me with the subject line "Link exchange"

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Thanks for reading.

-Matt

p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.

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