I’ve recently had the privilege of teaching several writing workshops and working with a number of talented writers. Since I have never actually taken a fiction workshop, I’m always putting my workshops together out of issues I’ve faced and cures for writing ailments that have worked for me. The thing about writing, about any art form, is that what we create reflects our individuality—our interests, our passions, hopes and fears. Could anyone but Hemingway have written For Whom the Bell Tolls? Could anyone but Toni Morrison have written Beloved? I always marvel at the many different ways artists can be creative. Even in one workshop there can be quite a range of temperaments and styles.

And though the way out of our writing dilemmas will be unique to our own processes and inclinations, often on a trial and error basis, there are certain general techniques that can benefit most of us. Here are nine of my favorite ways to get unstuck. Please feel free to dip in and also add yours to my list.

 

Nine Helpful Things I’ve Learned About Writing

1. Wherever you start, it’s the right place. Really! Don’t fret. Trust your instincts and keep moving forward. When you finish a draft, you can then assess the need for changes.
2. Write using every part of yourself: brain, mind, guts, heart. Write from your wholeness and not just your intellect. You are not just a head with feet attached.
3. Every day, all day, observe. Watch what catches your attention—is it the magnolia tree in the park or the brown dog under it? The girl with the Yoyo or the couple scrapping behind the bushes? Attention follows interest and what interests you will be a key to what makes your writing powerful.
4. Ask questions—to yourself, to your characters, to the work itself. A character may be quite willing to tell you why he’s acting bratty, or why she isn’t talking to her mother. The project may be happy to reveal its covert stories! Have something handy to write down the answers and be prepared to be surprised.
5. Understand that all your drafts have been necessary and not a waste of time. Just as mountain climbers can’t ascend from Base One to Base Four without going through Bases Two and Three, so each draft must be written to bring you closer to your final vision. The goal is to write a great book, not a fast one.
6. Try breaking up your writing time with meditative walks whether you’re in the city or country, and carry a Dictaphone.
7. Read widely and avidly. Share your thoughts about what you’ve read with others.
8. Don’t stay wedded to a predetermined outcome. Trust yourself and the material and the integrity of the project.
9. Send out your hopes and dreams to the universe. How can it hurt?

Annie Dillard had it right when she said:

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Vulnerability. Dr. Brenė Brown, a researcher and popular TED-talker who writes about shame and vulnerability, defines the V-word as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.” I concur with her definition and also her conclusion that embracing vulnerability is crucial to living a passionate, creative life.

Vulnerability is a word writers toss around a lot, mostly in relation to how exposed they feel to the judgment of others: readers, critics, editors, publishers, agents. The whims of the marketplace, the fancies or fantasies of the book-buying public.

Less often do writers talk, at least publicly, about the vulnerability of putting oneself at risk in front of the blank page (or canvas or stage), where the risk of failure stares back with nothingness on its face, fueling what is sometimes called writer’s block or just plain frigin’ being stuck: the project has fizzled, your muses fled to wherever muses go to loiter and complain.

But I want to talk about another kind of vulnerability necessary to embrace if we want to engage our creative selves. It’s the part of us that gets shut-down early in our lives by parents, teachers, a world that repeatedly encourages us to play it safe.

But within us, I believe, is a self-part that shuns limitations and prescriptions and wishes to cast off the constraints of convention, class, ethnicity, religion or gender. This is the rule-breaker part (even if the rules are ones we set up for ourselves) that seeks to take us to an “edge” inside ourselves, a border that marks an entrance into unknown territory—our very own terra incognita. 

Think here of those ancient maps that marked such boundaries, the edges of the known world where serpents and dragons lurked.

And yes, scarily, this is exactly the domain a writer needs to explore, beyond the known, the certain and predictable, though lets face it, predictable is definitely a more comfortable place to hang out. Anne Lamott recommends writers “write toward vulnerability,” a phrase that sounds counter-intuitive, but isn’t. We spend weeks on an outline for our next novel. The outline gives us a sense of security and purpose, but on another level it feels confining. Dare we tear it up and proceed without it? Dare we trust instinct over intellect? Dare we trust our own individual, unique way? You bet!

In his essay on America for the New York Times Magazine, the Norwegian author Karl Knausgaard remarks that for a country that prides itself on individualism, we have a strong preference for conformity. (See our chain hotels, our ubiquitous Taco Bells and Arbys, our Gap and Pottery Barn-filled shopping malls.) Unlike so many other places on the globe, we Americans do not tolerate our eccentrics or eccentricity itself very well. Isn’t part of the American expectation that one can go to any country in the world and find a safely familiar Holiday Inn and nearby McDonalds? We are not, I’m afraid, so fond of Difference.

The carry over for a writer in the corporatization of all things American is the pressure to write the next Harry Potter series, the next Fifty Shades of Grey. The next American Sniper. The next novel about a.) Vampires b.) Terrorism c.) Post Traumatic Stress.

Not that there aren’t worthy and necessary stories to be told about these subjects, only that what might be determining their telling is more the lure of the marketplace than anything else. We like new ideas if they fit with our old ideas, and we especially like new ideas that reinforce what we already believe, that is, old ideas dressed up in new clothes.

It takes enormous courage to embrace vulnerability as a strategic and crucial aspect of our creative selves. The poet Rilke asks us to “live the questions.” Carl Jung suggested the project of individuation is to “live ourselves.” All creation begins in chaos, begins in the formless void where all possibilities live. For those of you reading this who are writers or creators of any stripe, the risk is to follow our hunches and explore our instincts without any assurance for success. My friend, the writer Kevin McIlvoy, calls this state ‘blessed insanity,” and how right he is! Isn’t it true that what frightens us most about taking a risk isn’t our failure in the eyes of others, but the fear that we have failed to risk living our desires?

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