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The topic of my email newsletter this past week was overcoming writer’s block, and in it I wrote:

There’s a reason so many advice books instruct the cultivation of a writing practice, but I would argue the point is somewhat mislaid. It’s not the writing that requires practice. Instead, we must practice writing through the discomfort of our own mediocrity. And then, if you’re lucky, every once in a not-so-often while, the universe blesses your practice with a tiny shred of grace.

Today, I’d like to expand this thought and really deconstruct what it means for overcoming writer’s block.

Why most techniques for overcoming writer’s block fail

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[/one_third][two_third_last]In highschool, I spent the year of my creative writing class faithfully performing a ritual of timed writing practice in which one never lifts one’s pen from the page until the allotted practice time is up. This approach was based on the ideas in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, and in theory it makes sense. After all, writer’s block happens in the pauses when we get stuck in our own heads, when we allow the small voices inside our head — the voices that whisper that our words are crap and that we’re never going to be good enough — writer’s block happens when we allow those voices to win.[/two_third_last]

But what I found in developing this practice was that I never wrote anything useful. I filled an entire notebook with words but wrote not a single word of story, and hardly a handful of poems, in the course of nearly 9 months of regular practice. So clearly, just writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough just to sit down and put one word after another blindly, without weighing the impact of each word and defining the reach of a story.

But Natalie Goldberg gets something very right: it’s in those moments of stillness, the moments when we put the pen down and ponder the direction of our story. It’s in those moments that we open the door for the doubts to flood in. In moments of narrative indecision, we authors find ourselves at our most vulnerable. Because not only are we neck-deep in the inherent vulnerability of crafting art from nothingness, but it is in those blank moments that we must accept that we may never find the perfect next word, or sentence, or page. As an author, ever moment of pause gives pause: and as authors we must grapple with and overcome that uncertainty in order to ever have a hope of finishing a poem/essay/novel/etc.

Why writers could learn a lot from meditation

In Pema Chödrön’s book  How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, she argues that meditation builds five essential skills (heavily paraphrased here):

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• Meditation cultivates steadfastness. Through meditation we develop loyalty to ourselves and our experience of the present moment.
• Meditation cultivates clear seeing. Through meditation we start to catch ourselves at the beginnings of neurotic mental chain reactions that limit our ability to experience joy and connection.
• Meditation develops courage. In meditation we sit with everything that comes up, the good and the bad. The practice of allowing ourselves to experience our emotions as they are requires courage and the practice grows our courage over time. [/two_third_last]
• Meditation awakens us to our lives. In meditation we develop awareness of the present moment as it is, not as we fear or hope it could be. “When we learn how to relax into the present moment, we learn how to relax with the unknown”.
• Meditation teaches “no big deal”. Meditation teaches how to be flexible to the present moment. Things happen, this moment passes into the next, and we keep on keeping on. It’s all “no big deal”.

 

Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on meditation. In fact, I’ll freely admit I’m an abominable meditator. I can’t stick with it, I get bored and fidgety, and I cannot begin to tame my monkey mind. Plus, after a few failed starts, I’ve mostly given up trying. But as a writer, I think that these five skills have everything to teach us about overcoming writer’s block. And, I think that you don’t have to cultivate a meditation practice to succeed; you just have to cultivate the right writing practice.

How to use the teachings of meditation in overcoming writer’s block

As authors, we must acquire and utilize these five key skills of meditation.

• We must be steadfast in our practice; no one ever wrote a novel before they wrote a page, and then a bunch more pages.
• We must see clearly in the quiet spaces between words when the doubts creep in we must recognize them and then we must be clear-headed enough to let them go. This is where many writers might use a mantra or a prayer, to say: I hear you doubts and I acknowledge you and now I choose to let you go (Elizabeth Gilbert gave an interesting TED talk on this subject).
• We must have courage. Some days the writing sucks and each and every word is a struggle. We must have the courage to persist, on the good days and also on the bad.
• We must write in the moment. Thinking too much about the outcome will remove us from being present with our story and opens the doors for the doubts to flood in. Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by the rest of the story. Just write the next word, and the next, and the next.
• Finally we must approach the practice with an attitude of “no big deal”. Writing will have its brilliant days and its worthless days. As authors who wish to keep going we cannot attach significance to the whims of the writing on any given day. We cannot just write on the brilliant days and we cannot fail to write because we dread the worthless days. Instead, we must take each day as it is and do what we can with whatever we have.

The trick is to make the most of each day exactly how it is. Write less on the worthless days if you have to; a paragraph on a worthless day may be a bigger accomplishment than a whole chapter on a brilliant day.

Accept your accomplishments and your failures and move forward. Release any attachment to the outcome.

Move on to the next word.

 

Now I’d love to hear from you! Do you struggle with writer’s block? If so, which of the five skills do you most need to work on? Have you got any tricks for overcoming writer’s block? Let me know in the comments below.