Getting To Know Yourself As A Writer

Getting To Know Yourself As A Writer

Writing is a skill, just like any other, and we can learn a lot about what it takes to execute our craft from classes and seminars, from books on craft, and most importantly, from reading other writers. But getting to know ourselves AS writers, learning what we need to be at our best, is deeply personal and particular, and ever-evolving, not only as our lives go on changing in the way that lives do, but also to each particular project. What you needed to get through that year-long novel will not be that same thing you need to create a cycle of poems, or one short story. Think about musicians and athletes. Yes, a basketball player needs to learn the art of the jump-shot, the skills of dribbling and passing. Yes, a vocalist needs to learn to read music, needs to acquire breath control and phrasing. But even more so, each needs to learn how the day-to-day of living shapes and affects their performance. Each needs to carefully study how their own personal psychology may make them choke up or fumble. And each needs to learn how to prepare and train for the differing demands of each performance, or cycle of performances. The same is true for writers. How we manage the vulnerability of living through a traumatic scene with our characters, how much rest we get, how our digestion is functioning, how stress impacts our neurology and our cognitive function–all of these things also affect how we show up to the page.

I don’t believe that there is any such thing as writer’s block. I do believe that we often lose our courage, or our stamina, or our focus because we are not yet aware enough of how we best (or worst) function in our craft.

Which is not to say the old chestnut of putting our asses in the chair does not have some wisdom to it. Discipline is as much a part of writing as it is of performing on the field, or the stage. But discipline applied without knowledge and insight is just stubbornness, and is often cruel. Nobody writes well from there. Athletes know better than to overdo it when they are injured. Singers know that forcing themselves to hit notes when their voices are tired is a sure path to painful nodes and potential long term damage. Your writing heart and mind are no different.

The only way to acquire the needed wisdom to apply useful and effective discipline is to understand how you can best shape and manage the rest of your life to support your writing time. That may mean making changes to the rest of your life, setting boundaries around your time and attention so that at the end (or the beginning, or the middle) of the day there is still something left for your writing, but first and foremost, it means getting to know yourself well enough to be able to see what it is you need.

This is not an excuse to not write, either. Maybe you are too tired or feeling to emotionally wrung out to dive into that big scene or that particularly vulnerable poem, but you can still spend some time running drills or practicing scales, much as an athlete or a musician does; try your hand at a few long, complicated sentences, using colons, semicolons, dashes, and parenthesis. Try writing a paragraph that is nothing but short, simple, subject/verb/object sentences. Fiddle around with limericks or other nonsense verse.Maybe the drills will give you the momentum you need to keep going, maybe the playfulness and freedom of practice will shake off some of the day’s lethargy. If you don’t have the stamina or the fortitude to write on your current project, use your writing time to practice, instead, and check in afterwards to see how that feels. If you can’t bring yourself to write at all, try typing out a paragraph from a writer you admire. Anything that gets you putting words on the page, even if those word are a string of "Fuck you, Tony, this is a terrible idea!”, will give you a chance to be present for yourself and your writing, and to learn more about how you function best (or worst) in your craft.

I often urge my clients to keep a journal not just about the writing project itself, but about how the process of writing is going for them. Watching carefully to see how writing at a particular time of day or in a particular place affects your writing, learning how much time you need to fully enter into optimum concentration and focus, studying how you may be distracting yourself or even sabotaging yourself and finding ways to circumvent that, all can reveal a lot about what you will need, long term, to have a satisfying and successful writing life.