And another thing about The Other Sky. Aron Wiesenfeld's images will appear on two new book covers this Spring: Nin Andrews' Why God Is A Woman from BOA
and Joseph P. Wood's YOU. from Etruscan
I look forward to seeing these books from two of my favorite poets.They have something in common besides the images: Nin tells us why God is a woman, and Joseph explains why man is sumpin else.
Meanwhile, here's an address given by H.L. Hix at the Wilkes University Low-Residency Creative Writing graduation banquet.
I do not take lightly the privilege of speaking within a community of writers committed to their craft, led by a distinguished and dedicated faculty, so let me reiterate my thanks to Bonnie Culver for the opportunity to join your work in this way. Her vision and her tireless labor have created an environment in which we all of us here may flourish as writers.
Wilkes University is an institution of higher learning, and the creative writing M.A. and M.F.A. programs are advanced degrees. To live up to such a context, I should offer you something august and effete, something profound and magisterial. Instead, the title of my talk is:
I Took My Writer’s Block Out Back and Shot That Sucker Dead
My claim is simple: there is no good reason to endure writer’s block, ever.
My argument, too, is simple: the very concept of “writer’s block” congeals out of a number of misconceptions, and correcting those misconceptions clears the way to eliminating the problem.
My methodology will be equally simple: I’ll identify two of the relevant misconceptions, propose alternative conceptions, and derive from those alternatives practical techniques that guarantee you need never give in to writer’s block. Then I’ll hint at other misconceptions and solutions we could pursue in a longer talk than this one will be.
Here’s a place to start. The field of psychology has a guidebook known by the acronym DSM, short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that attempts to identify, describe, and classify mental disorders. Its aim is to guide professionals in their diagnosis and treatment of mental issues. But suppose a major entry, one often consulted, such as the entry on depression, were anachronistic and misleading. Suppose it described depression as the direct result of childhood sexual trauma, rather than as a symptom of particular variations in brain chemistry. The result would be a lot of unnecessary suffering by a lot of people. A lot of patients would spend a lot of hours talking out their sexual histories with a lot of bored therapists, while their serotonin levels just kept right on being low.
If there were a DSM for writers, a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Writing Disorders, surely Writer’s Block would be a frequently consulted entry. The DSM for writers I’m imagining here currently describes Writer’s Block as a debility that one suffers, and for which there is no cure except waiting it out: sitting passively at one’s desk, staring at the blank page or blank screen for as long as it takes, until something comes. But I say that’s as profound a misunderstanding as the notion that people who are depressed all have unresolved sexual issues from childhood, and need to talk them out.
The real DSM doesn’t make that mistake, though popular culture does: professional practice of treatment for mental disorders has predominantly to do with psychiatry; popular portrayals, with psychotherapy. And there are similar discrepancies in other fields. There is a popular image of the scientist, for instance, that one can see in films and in cartoons: the wild-eyed man (yes, it’s usually a man) with furious hair, wearing an ill-fitting lab coat, hunched over bubbling beakers and test tubes, concocting some potion. Fortunately, real scientists know better than to imitate that popular vision. They know that science almost always has to do with experimenting, and almost never with concocting. There is much more method than madness.
Something analogous holds, I suggest, in regard to writers. There is a popular image of the writer as a genius, who sits in a café wearing a beanie or who hunches in a shady dive sipping absinthe, scribbling the mysteries that flash across that racing mind, the way the rest of us might scribble our dreams upon waking. Real writers don’t often fall for that clumsy popular notion: I know a lot of writers, but none of them wear beanies, and if they’re sipping absinthe they haven’t been sharing any with me. Still, writer’s block is a way of falling prey to more subtle misconceptions.
Inspiration
So here is one example of a misconception about writing, and the cure for writer’s block implied by a more accurate conception. One popular conception assumes that writing happens in a flash of inspiration. This is a widely-held view among those who do not write, but it is also a tempting one for those of us who do. Remember the story Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells about the origin of his poem “Kubla Khan”? It’s a perfect example: I had taken — upon doctor’s orders, of course — “an anodyne” (laudanum, an opiate whose effects many leisured Brits of the nineteenth century much appreciated), so I was sleeping, and I had a vision. When I woke up, I wrote it down word for word, but while I was writing I was interrupted by a visitor, and when I returned the vision was gone, so I was left with just a fragment. Coleridge’s words offer the ultimate writer’s fantasy: “The Author” (Coleridge speaks of himself in third person, as “the Author,” capital A), the Author “continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”
Alas, however, Coleridge’s tale about the writing of “Kubla Khan” is to the reality of the writing process what Baywatch is to the reality of life in America: fine as escapist fantasy, perhaps, but neither accurate as a description nor sound as an ideal. And just as I might find myself unlucky in love if I took seriously the tv’s insinuation that only men with square jaws and women with round boobs are desirable, so I might find myself in writer’s block if I took seriously the insinuations in Coleridge’s poetic creation myth.
A more accurate conception of writing, though, wards away the danger. The misconception we call “inspiration” pretends that writing occurs in a single step. The inspired writer just writes the work, start to finish, first word to last. Again, think of film depictions of the inspired writer, rapidly scribbling brilliant words across the tablet, barely able to keep up with the rapid dictation of the muse. The truth is that writing is a two-step process: first, one gets something on the page, then one revises. On such a conception, writer’s block goes from inevitable to impossible. Suddenly what I call “the Stafford solution” is available to us. I call it that by appeal to the funny — and beautiful and wise — answer the poet William Stafford gave once in an interview, when asked what he did when he faced writer’s block. He replied, “I lower my standards.” The insight in Stafford’s reply is that the quality of the final work bears no relationship to the quality of what is first written down. If writing is a one-step process, then everything I write has to be brilliant. If writing is a two-step process, then the quality of what I put on the page in step one need bear no relationship to the quality of what will be on the page after step two. Because there is a step two, step one (“put something on the page”) can really mean “put something — anything — on the page.” What I first put on the page can be terrible, even stupid, and that implies nothing about what will be there after I’ve revised. If we make explicit what is implicit in Stafford’s reply, we take away its wit, but we make the point plain: I solve writer’s block by lowering my standards in step one of the writing process. If my writing doesn’t have to be brilliant at the start, if it can get brilliant along the way, then I’m unstuck.
Improvement
While we’re on the subject of revision, it’s worth adjusting also a misconception that is about revision. It’s more subtle than the nonsense about inspiration, but it still enables writer’s block. The misconception is that revision is the process of steadily improving one’s work. Sounds nice, but actually it’s paralyzing. If it were true, it would mean that every change I make has to be a change for the better. And how could I make that the case if I didn’t know in advance what changes will work? That’s just as stifling as the one-step it’s-brilliant-from-the-first-moment fantasy of inspiration. Instead of everything I write having to be good, and my having to know it’s good when I write it, the requirement just gets shifted to revision: every revision has to be good, and I have to know that when I make it.
The adjusted conception I propose is that revision is an ongoing process of experiment. It may result ultimately in improvement, but things might get worse before they get better. This change is the sister of the one I just suggested, a recognition that revision in particular, like writing in general, occurs in two steps instead of one. Instead of thinking that in revising I am directly and immediately improving the draft in question, I would more aptly think that I am creating a comparator, an additional alternative, and then selecting between them. That sounds like a subtle difference, and maybe it is, but in relation to writer’s block the result is huge. If revision were improvement, then I’d have to understand what was wrong with the draft in question and know how to fix the problem before I could revise. The two-step revision process allows me to extend the Stafford solution to revision: I can continue to have low standards! The new draft that emerges from my revision can be worse than the old draft being revised: so what? If that turns out to be the case, then in step two, selection between the alternatives, I just choose the older draft. Then I run through the process again. I can produce as many bad drafts as I need to, and I just keep choosing the old draft until I finally happen on a new one that is better.
Notice the practical difference this makes. To make improvement steady, I would have to be smart: I would need to identify the problem with the current draft before starting in on the next one. But if I’m just creating a second item in order to choose between the two, then I don’t have to be smart at all, and I don’t have to have figured out what the problem is. I can make myself a list of variables, and mechanically apply rules that relate to them. One variable is length: I can add enough to this poem or paragraph to make it half again as long, or cut enough to make it half as long. Another variable is point of view: if the current version is in first person, I can change it to third. And so on through any number of variables. The ease and power of this is that the rule being applied doesn’t have to be rational. Regarding the variable of word choice, I once wrote a sequence of poems in which the step from one draft to the next was that I applied the rule that I had to take a word from the first poem and substitute it for a word in the second poem that had the same number of syllables, then take that word and put it into the third poem, and so on, all the way through the sequence. It’s a silly-sounding rule, but think of what it did for me. It’s important to avoid “flat” diction (predictable words in predictable places), but it’s also hard to identify which words are predictable. I didn’t have to find the predictable words: I just started substituting words one for another, and let the predictable ones get replaced. There’s always a rule to apply, and applying them is always safe, because I’m not at risk of making a false step: I’m just creating a second version so I can compare the two and choose whichever I prefer.
Etcetera
You get the idea. In relation to substance addiction, there’s a term, “enabling,” to refer to ways in which those associated with an addict can (without meaning to) “enable” the addict to fulfill the addiction. In relation to writer’s block, misconceptions about writing itself act as enablers. We could extend the list well beyond the two I’ve just described.
• The idea that writing is always self-expression leaves no options at moments when one has nothing to express; recognizing that writing can also be discovery is freeing.
• The idea that writing results primarily from introspection leaves no options at moments when I look inside and there’s nothing there; recognizing that writing can result from various forms of research frees me to go find things elsewhere.
• The idea that good writing is wholly original leaves me no options when nothing original is coming to mind; recognizing that writing, even the greatest writing, makes use of conventions, allows me draw on conventions also.
And so on. I’ll conclude by simply noting that this writing program emphasizes the point I’m making. The idea that writing is a solitary endeavor is also an enabler, one that is shut down by the recognition that writing occurs within community, and that one can find, in a community such as this one, help from others: writing teachers and writing friends. This beats writer’s block anyday.
H.L.Hix
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