This talk is the result of a long email exchange between author Michael Welker and myself. Michael wrote Blockbuster Blueprint, and if you write fiction, it's a how-to book you definitely need to have on your shelf. Michael is also a former student of mine. He's one of those whiz kids who knows so much about everything it's hard for him to focus on the one thing that he wants to pursue that will change the world in a positive way. He's currently living in Japan and working for Universal Studios, but his plan is to retire when he's forty.
Anyway, Michael and I have kept up a regular email
correspondence since he graduated high school in 2003. At some point a few
years back, we were both chastising ourselves for not spending more time on our
professional writing, and we asked each other why. At the time, Michael
happened to be studying neuroscience. Not in college. Just recreationally.
Because he was interested. When I was in college, I majored in literature but I
minored in psychology. So, between the two of us in our email discussions, we
came across some steps that have worked for us to enlist our subconscious minds
in making us more productive as writers.
Three
years ago, I was so happy to be able to start saying I was "retired." Until I got to
thinking: No, I'm not. I'm not retired; I've just transitioned to my dream job,
which is writing full time. From home. In my pajamas. You are not retired,
either, if you're writing.
I want to change your brain about that.
Of those of you who are... self-employed as a writer... How
many of you are writing 1,000 words a day?
Why not? Go ahead, think for a minute of all the reasons
you're not writing a thousand words a day.
I want to change your brain a bit.
More specifically:
Help you change the story you've been telling yourself so
you can be more productive in your writing.
This time, I'm hoping you'll be able to include your own personal superpower in that story.
What I say today will sound a bit like New Age-y Hocus
Pocus. It's not. It's based on neuroscience, which is the science of how your
brain works.
I just ask that you listen and keep an open mind.
Having said that, let me say this:
The Buddha said: Our lives are shaped by our minds; you
become what you think.
Have you ever written the beginning of a
story or the first chapter (or three) of a book but then stopped and never
finished.
What did you tell yourself when you didn't finish? 'When I
get time, I'll get back to that.' 'When I figure out what happens next, I'll
get back to that.' 'When I edit what I've already written and I'm satisfied
with that, I'll get back to that.'
Sound familiar?
My personal favorite is: "When I get time...."
I've been keeping a personal journal since college. Some years ago, I spent the summer re-reading my journals back for ten years. And let me tell you, I had ten years' worth of long, repetitive journal
entries--written out in cursive--wherein I complained vociferously about not having enough time to write. Seriously. See where this is going? 'I would write that novel if I
only had time to write'—I WROTE REPEATEDLY FOR TEN YEARS.
Why is this?
Our subconscious minds are protecting us, sometimes in a
gentle sweet way, and sometimes viciously.
My current dog, Thomas, is a cattle dog mix. If we are hiking, and he senses something that he perceives as potentially dangerous, he leaves my side and walks directly crosswise to my path, attempting to gently turn me away from danger. This is quite different from the behavior of a dog I once had and loved dearly. Alex Haley was a Rottie-Chow mix who was, most of the time, a huge, lovable, shaggy puppy. Unless a stranger came around, at which point he would bark! bark! bark! to try to keep me protected from the danger he perceived.
To both dogs, this was just doing their job as loyal canines, but in different
ways.
Your subconscious does the same. It protects you.
In psychology, this is called a defense mechanism, and this
concept has been around a long time. When your subconscious wants to protect you
from something that will cause you anxiety, it throws up a defense mechanism.
I don't want to spend time explaining defense mechanisms if
you're unfamiliar, and I'm not an expert on them anyway, I just find them
fascinating. With a simple online search, you can find out a lot more about
them.
Relevant to our purposes today: Your subconscious is either
your villain or your super-hero. When you begin a project or have an idea but
don't follow through, most likely it is your subconscious stopping you from
this anxiety-producing activity, either in a gentle way—"Here, why don't
you click over here and scroll through Facebook while that idea gels some
more"—or in a more direct way by barking at you—"Why waste your time
on that? No one's going to read it anyway. Remember what happened the last time
you finished something and sent it out? Nothing. Nothing happened. And nothing
will happen again. So why don't you grab a beer and turn on Dancing with the
Stars?"
It's not the writing itself that produces anxiety—it's the
potential finished product that scares us into stopping (or not starting at
all).
When I wrote the prologue to Tainted Legacy, it was one of the scariest writing projects I ever undertook. That memoir is about my mother and her childhood and her beloved grandmother--who was, of course, accused of multiple murders--and my relationship with my mother had always been tenuous. What if I hurt her deeply? I put off starting for months--telling myself I didn't have time. And then one day I had to have work done on my truck, and I had to wait for it, so I grabbed a notebook and simply began writing the book. I wrote for over an hour without stopping. My hands never stopped shaking. But I knew better than to put that notebook away when I got home. I kept going. Three months later, the book was finished.
As for those people who say, "I don't care if it gets
published, I'm just writing for myself, so I don't worry about that," okay,
that's fine. But if you're saying that, you should know that it's probably
"denial," a clearly defined defense mechanism. It protects you from
ever having to suffer rejection.
Writers write to be read. That's the truth. You know why?
Because we're sublimating.
Sublimation is a very positive, very effective defense
mechanism. Writers take all the experiences that have caused them pain or anger
or grief and they turn those feelings into poems and stories and novels and
memoirs. It's very powerful.
So we need to write, and we need to write every day, and
don't get me started on having the discipline to put your posterior in a chair
every day because that's a whole other talk but trust me, you just have to.
Think about this:
If you write a thousand words a day, in 60 days, you'll have
a novel.
Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay it Forward and a
gazillion other novels, manages to write two books a year and still have time
to ride her horse every afternoon. She's 64. By the way, she started writing full time in 1980. Pay It Forward,
her first real commercial success, was published in 1999.
Author Douglas Clegg said: "I believe the great
American novel will be written by someone who writes." Not the smartest,
most educated person with an MFA from the best program, but simply the person
who writes and writes and writes.
Consider that young Southern woman who wrote that one
bestseller. You know, Nell Lee. We know her better by her middle name, Harper.
Talk about the great American novel! To Kill a Mockingbird is still in print,
sixty years after its debut.
How do we do that?
Harness your superhero. Make your subconscious work for
you. It's that easy. You become what you think.
1. Decide that you're going to have a time and place to
write—uninterrupted—every day (or six days a week or whatever).
Be reasonable but also be resolute.
Also be goal oriented. (A word of advice: Never use time as
a goal. Use a tangible accomplishment: One page a day. (It's how a young lawyer
named John Grisham wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill.) Five hundred words.
A thousand words. Three paragraphs.
2. Show up. This used to be the hardest one for me until I
heard Harry Cauley speak. Harry said something I immediately wrote down and I'll never forget it: Writing is one of the loneliest professions there is. No kidding. I'm older and single. My kids are busy living their best lives, and my grandkids are working or in college or both. I spend a lot of time alone. Sometimes the only people I talk to for days have fur on them. Scrolling through Facebook makes me feel less alone in the world. It is also a bottomless rabbit hole, a giant time-eater that calls to me early in the morning. After all, who doesn't want to look at photos of a friend's new puppy? Or kitten? Or grandchild? Or their breakfast plate?
3. Be aware that your subconscious is going to block you at
every turn—because it's protecting you from anxiety—because WHAT IF you sit
down and there are no words or what you write is terrible or what you write is
wonderful but you can't figure out where to send it to get it published or you
do send it out and it gets rejected? Huh? What if that happens?
4. Take a few really deep breaths.
5. Narrow your focus; you're not sitting in the writer's
seat to consider what may happen in the future with this particular piece of
writing. You're sitting there to express your true identity, to be your most
authentic self. Be present in the moment and let that sink in.
Just as a side note here, I highly recommend ten minutes or
so of meditation. Not the sort in which you attempt to reach Nirvana or 'clear your mind of all thoughts.' Writers are intelligent, curious, creative people; our minds are
constantly awhirl with thoughts and questions and ideas. Meditation in the
sense of allowing your brain to begin ignoring all outside distractions and focusing
on the task at hand. What do you want to write today? Focus simply on that and
nothing else in your meditation. Keep breathing.
Did you know that when you are fully immersed in writing you
are in what's called a "trance state"? You may think of it as being
"in the zone," and you may have had one of those experiences in which
you begin writing and everything else fades away and you look up some time
later and realize you've been writing for three hours and you've missed lunch.
The quickest way to enter a trance state (no, you don't have to wait around for
it to happen) is to meditate.
6. Give yourself a mantra and say it aloud or write it down.
My favorite: I'm just going to write one sentence, and I'm perfectly capable of
writing a decent sentence. A neural pathway opens in your brain every time you
speak an affirmation aloud. (Now there's some New Age-y hocus pocus for you.)
We sometimes call this self-hypnosis or the power of positive
thinking: Repeating aloud the sentence "I am a non-smoker" is how one of my husband's quit smoking when all else failed. True story.
Use whatever works, and, again, be mindful of those
subconscious messages. As soon as they pop up—"Why are you wasting your
time?"—smack them back down with a positive affirmation: "My writing
is an important part of who I am."
That's a great mantra! If you say it every day, it will
become embedded in your subconscious mind.
What's the story you've been telling yourself? That you're not good enough? You are. That you don't have time? You do. That it won't be perfect? It won't be. It doesn't have to be perfect. To Kill a Mockingbird is not a flawless novel. But it's beautiful and powerful and still in print after sixty years.
Our lives are shaped by our minds. We become what we think. Change the story you've been telling yourself. Unleash that superhero and feel the power!
