| Blog entry: Jerry Mundis and writer's block |
|
|
|
| Written by Sean Miller | |||||
| Friday, 13 April 2007 | |||||
|
Today I’d like to talk a little bit about writer’s block. This is something I’ve struggled with all my writing life, which began in earnest my senior year in high school--over twenty years ago. I’ve managed to get a few major pieces of writing done in that time. But when I find myself indulging in wallowing in regret, I can’t help but see that vast tract of time littered with half-finished, rusted jalopies for manuscripts, mocking ambitions, and the hordes of roving tumbleweeds that are unrealized ideas. The fact of the matter is that I’ve pissed away a lion’s share of life’s energy procrastinating. This all came to a head a few weeks ago as I was getting myself psyched up to launch myself into another thesis chapter. Once again, I was writhing under the acute anxiety of anticipation, whose temporary relief consisted of yet more preparatory reading--and long walks around the reservoir in Central Park. I got the chapter draft done on time. But the energy I spent in actually writing was dwarfed by the energy I wasted in avoiding working. The ultimate irony of this ridiculous situation was that, late in the game, I managed to avoid writing altogether by spending an entire day--at Columbia University’s Butler Library--listening to a taped course by Jerry Mundis on how to break writer’s block. And the counter-irony to all this is that in that three hour talk, I may just have found a cure for my imaginary, yet nonetheless limiting, disease. The following is a brief summary of the first part of Jerry’s lecture, the theory part. The second part, by far the most important, is devoted to practical techniques for actually breaking writer’s block. If you’re interested in what he has to say in detail, I highly recommend paying a visit to his web site. Be forewarned, though, that, as convention dictates, the page devoted to the course is couched in the form of a direct mail sales pitch. Please don’t be put off by this. It’s probably the only thing that your average jaded consumer responds to these days. Another caveat is that, as one who has recently drunk the Kool-Aid, so to speak, I may well be heavy on fanaticism and light on credibility. I’m only at the very beginnings of applying the techniques--and have yet to prove myself in being able to sustain a productive daily writing routine for the long term. Time will tell. But I can say with confidence that I’ve ruminated on this problem for almost the entirety of those twenty years of my haphazard writing life, and on first impression, I find Jerry’s approach to be the most direct--and the most comprehensive. He simply attacks the problem head on--a profound intervention. I also find it somewhat comforting that if I should falter in my new self-administered regimen, he lives here in Manhattan and makes himself available for consultation. A writer’s block doctor who keeps regular office hours. The central idea of Jerry’s wisdom is that writer’s block is a myth. It’s not a tangible physical or even neurochemical condition. He claims it is a choice not to write that occurs just below the level of awareness--in the subconscious. Writer’s block is the subconscious’s ongoing efforts to reconcile our fundamental convictions with everyday experience. It’s main function is to protect our fundamental beliefs by modifying experience, not the other way around. But writing is, as he puts it, simply the act of putting words on paper (whether fibrous or virtual). You can write regardless of your psychological state. Countless accomplished writers, even some wracked by depression, neurosis, or even psychosis, have done precisely that. Colluding with this myth of writer’s block are all the myths we carry with us about writers themselves, those real writers whose books fill up our bookshelves--and to whom we can’t possibly measure up. Jerry points out eight of them. I list them here in brief: 1. Writers are masters of craft. (Jerry elaborates on all of these myths--providing some interesting anecdotes, analogies, and examples.) The cumulative effect of all these myths--that we bear with us as fundamental convictions--is that they manifest as what Jerry calls the ‘three big killers’. They are: perfectionism, fear, and ‘the baggage train’. Perfectionism is that binary mental operation whereby you judge your writing to be either perfect or crap. A particularly acute version of this is the belief that your work has to be first rate on first draft. Perfectionism leads inevitably to a conflation of the distinct writerly roles of composer and editor. Jerry defines fear as a belief projected into the future, whether near or far. Fear is the emotional manifestation of perfectionism or the baggage train. One particular form of fear is to compare ourselves to those real writers on the bookshelves, and to compare our own drafts to those polished books, which are, in reality, the result of countless iterations of revision and refinement. And lastly, Jerry uses the analogy of a train to illustrate the third big killer. This train consists of two parts: the locomotive and the baggage cars attached to it. The locomotive is the simple act of putting words on paper. The baggage train is all the results that we associate in our imaginations with the simple act of putting words on paper. Some examples of these are: getting good reviews, winning a fat advance, being the Next Great American Novelist, paying the bills, solving the problem of world hunger, saving the whales. We cannot possibly succeed in putting words to paper today when we are trying to save the whales by doing so. Harboring one of this killers will make any attempt to write painful. Contending with two or more simultaneously will be, Jerry warns, completely debilitating.
|
|||||
| Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 May 2007 ) | |||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
