Writing Medicine

One of the main problems you may have with your writing projects is having too many of them, each of which takes too long to do.

How might you put “more” and “faster” together, when it’s already so difficult to write slowly?

Let’s consider the possibility that starting a writing task by working at it carefully and painstakingly may not be the most efficient way to
get it done.  (Note the etymology of the word “painstaking,” which seems to include “being in pain,” as well as “taking pains” in an
attempt to “get it right the first time”.)

Writing to “get it right the first time” is like driving a car with the emergency brake on.  In order to write more good stuff faster, and
suffer less, you need to focus on removing the stalling, obsessing, and nitpicking from your composing process, and to think about a
different kind of process.

Writing slowly is often a stop and start operation.  But if you pay attention to your own thought processes, and try writing down whatever comes into your head in the course of a few minutes, you’ll note that your transcription moves quickly, and sometimes presents you with surprising ideas.

Here’s a different way to write that can produce less suffering:

–When you start out, try writing faster, and lowering your standards (this isn’t a typo, I really mean to say “lowering”).

–Don’t allow yourself to get stuck on one idea, or seduced by working on a very small piece of your prose for too long.  Your aim should be to get as much of a zero draft as possible, as quickly as you can. Later on, you can revise to your heart’s content, and work toward “getting it perfectly right,” so long as you realize that you’ll only approach, and not achieve that goal.

One of the liberating surprises if you tackle “writer’s block” is that writing cures anxiety.

A few more observations:

–Writing slowly tends to increase anxiety;

–Writing quickly tends to diminish anxiety, to get you past it, and into your real work;

–Being overimpressed by your own anxiety isn’t useful.

–But writing scared can be very useful:

If you can’t bear to ignore your fright, write about it while in the midst of your text (just remember to delete it before you pass your
paper on to your coauthor!);

Some writing anxiety is quite functional: it provides the edge that you need to leap into a project;

It’s useful to find out that you don’t need to wait for your anxiety to go away in order to write.

There is a joke about this problem among therapists who work with academics: that there are more efficient ways than psychoanalysis to cure writer’s block (this is what passes for humor in my profession). I’m a clinical psychologist, deeply invested in helping people understand what holds them back in their lives.  One of the things I’ve found out in the course of a career devoted to working with stuck writers is that pragmatic and behavioral stategies are often of much more use to them in getting their writing work done than deep therapy (I send them off to other therapists to deal with their other pain), that indeed, writing can cure (some) anxiety.

Writing faster accomplishes several things at once:

–It breaks through the stuckness that often occurs when you set out to “get it perfect the first time,” and allows you to get past “first
sentence terror.”

–It gets a lot of ideas written–and it doesn’t matter that not all of them are fit for the final product, or even necessarily correct.

–It encourages thinking, because it more closely matches the speed at which ideas come.  Slow writing can make us forget or ignore the ideas that speed through our minds, these thoughts that are a potential source of our richest work.

Cheers,
Joan