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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part II

July 30, 2009

Sorry, but I have to start this Part II of “Blocking Writer’s Block” with a correction to Part I. In Part I, discussing Rule No. 1 – Don’t Care, I suggested that you might tell yourself from the start that what you are writing was stupid.

What I really meant here was to tell yourself that what you are writing is a DRAFT, that it can be stupid, that it doesn’t matter, that you can change it, that you WILL change it.

It’s a draft, right?  So you can throw it away if you want, you can burn it.

But keep in mind that maybe, just maybe, there will be some scraps of this draft that you will want to save.  And, if not–if the draft really is stupid– that it will at least have allowed you to work through some of  the junk clogging your voice, to break down some of the fences in your head. Even if all you unclog or breakdown ends up on the bonfire, this is terrific.

So just do it, get started, don’t care.

Rule No. 3 – Get a friend.

Get a friend. By friend, I mean writing buddy. Not someone you can show your work to.   That kind of friend is great. But the kind of buddy that you need when you are suffering from writer’s block is someone you can actually write with, at the side of or across the table from. Someone who is writing too.

I’m not talking about collaboration here. Collaboration may be nice but it’s an awfully lot of pressure for someone with writer’s block.

I’m talking about company.

Having a writing buddy is a bit like going to the gym or taking an exercise class. If you’re an Olympic swimmer, you can probably jump into an absolutely deserted pool, and swim three hours without stop. But if you’re tired, grumpy, out of shape (and as a writer, possibly fearful), it’s useful to be with someone going through the same travail. Energy is contagious; companionship can replace discipline; even the feeling that you are performing (which comes simply by doing something in front of someone else) can be a useful goad.

Choose someone you trust, or that you can learn to trust. Because the second part of writing with a buddy is reading aloud what you have written. (I will write more about reading aloud another time, but only will say now that this technique is again derived from Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones.)

Arrange to meet with your buddy regularly if you can. If you can’t meet, set a time when you and your buddy can write over the phone. This means that you call up your buddy, set a time limit and topic, then hang up the phone and you both start writing until one of you calls back. (Remote companionship is better than none.)

Be friends with your buddy, but limit the small talk;  socializing can eat up limited writing time, and the urge to procrastinate is great. If you have something to say, write it down. (Then, as we’ll discuss later, read it aloud.)

Rule No. 4 – Cultivate Solitude.

It’s useful to have a writing buddy. But writing is an inherently solitary process. When you are writing, it’s just you and the words, just you and the page or the computer screen, just you.

Learn to enjoy that solitude, even to crave it. Find company in your words, your page, your screen.

It helps to be quiet. (This is a rule I need to practice a lot more.) Try not to talk through every story or emotion in your telephone calls—save some of your voice for your work.

Don’t mindlessly turn on the radio or the t.v.; don’t mindlessly speed-dial or text. It’s so easy in the modern world to be addicted to constant stimulation; give it a rest.

Even pull yourself away from friends and relatives sometimes.  Loved ones, as much as they love you, will rarely say, ‘hey why don’t you take time for yourself to  write?’   You have to be the one to pull away.  (And you won’t always want to.)

Still, if you want to write, if you want to break through a block, it is something you may need to work on.

The advantage of quiet for the writer  is that it gives you something to fill up, a fresh blank page.

If the blank page is just too stark, write in a public place—a café, a library, a subway car, a park. Your surroundings can be your subject matter.

But, even in this public space, work hard to keep some quiet in your head, to maintain some loneness, the “you ” that is separate from the place, looking out.  Meaning be friendly to others, but if you’re there to write, write.  Meaning don’t think about the dirty laundry, that call you need to make, that other homework you haven’t yet done.  Those are uninvited guests, pests; kick them out.

The words that are trying to come out of your hands need quiet to be written.   At first, these are often very shy words.

To be continued….

P.S.  Check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249001844&sr=8-1

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Writer’s Block (How To Overcome It) – A Series

July 29, 2009

Okay, I’ll stop.  No more writing about Robert Pattinson.  (For now anyway.)   Let’s turn to writing itself.  Writing and writer’s block.

First admission:  What I know about is getting something down on paper, or, if you prefer the computer screen.  So this post is not about writing for commercial success.  Though I’d like to know more about that, this is simply about writing.

Second admission:  I rarely personally suffer from writer’s block.  I suffer from writer’s foot-in-mouth disease, writer’s tinnitus (an ailment whose symptoms are manifest by a ringing in the reader’s ears), and increasingly both writer’s dementia (meaning that I write about crazy subjects like Robert Pattinson), and writer’s senility, meaning that I frequently simply mistype or live out words (like “live” instead of “leave”).

But I somehow avoid writer’s block.  I like to think that this is because of my lifelong attempt to follow the rules set down here.  I hope they will be useful to you too.

Before putting down a couple of these rules, I also want to give credit to Natalie Goldberg, author of  the wonderful Writing Down the Bones, who has been an inspiration for many years and founded many of these techniques (or versions of them).

Rule Number One:  Don’t Care.

Don’t care so much. Tell yourself from the start that your writing will be stupid, the story will be boring, the paper will be ridiculous.  Don’t even care if all you can write is, “I have nothing to say, I’m an idiot.”  So what?  There are many idiots in the world.   Don’t worry about it.  Just make yourself sit down and start.

If you’re having trouble not caring (and trouble starting), a pen and paper may be better helpmates than a computer.  There’s a flow of hand and pen which can produce a genuinely pleasant sensation, like swallowing a cool drink.  More importantly, most people have a fairly hard time reading their own handwriting (a definite assist on a first draft.)  The computer, in contrast, flashes extremely legible words back at you as you go.  It’s worse than a mirror; it can make you cringe before you even complete your image.

The computer can also be hard for the resistant because it allows for such easy escape.   Most composition books have no internet connection.

If you can’t write smoothly by hand, and you must write on the computer, and you get paralyzed there, then train your eyes to look away.   Stare into space, a wall.  Only check the screen often enough to make sure you haven’t gotten onto the wrong keys.  Frankly, even a few sentences of gobbledygook may be better than hours of paralysis.   (Remember this is only for those with writer’s block–if you don’t have it, look at the screen!)

If you are lucky enough to feel comfortable with pen in hand, go for one that can gather momentum—a roller, a fine-tipped felt, a fountain pen.   Cheap ballpoints can be as bad as rubber soles on concrete, sticking and tripping you up.

Once you get started, don’t stop to re-read until you reach a clear breaking point, perhaps set by a timer in advance.  Don’t cross out, don’t correct.  Don’t care.

(Not until the second draft anyway.)

Rule Number Two:  Care.

Care.  Think that your work is worth doing, think that you are worth the doing of it.

If you have an idea, care enough to stop whatever else you are doing and sit there with your pen and paper or your fingers and keyboard and write it down.  Care enough to write when you are walking, eating, on the train.  (Care enough to be impolite if you must.  Tell your kids to turn off the music or t.v.   Shut the door.)

If you don’t have an idea, care enough to turn off the t.v. yourself.  Remove yourself from the internet.  Care enough to stay at home on a beautiful day or even a work day or even a Saturday night if you are working or feel like you might.

If you’re stuck,  take a walk,  let your mind take a walk too.  Care enough to carry a composition book, even though you tell yourself you probably won’t need it, so that if an idea does come, you can write while you walk (being impolite if necessary).

Think:  if not now, when?  As I heard outside a garage in Greenwich Village one Saturday night:  “come on.  Life’s too short to enjoy it.”

To be continued.

PS:  Check out 1 Mississippi on Amazon, counting book with numbers, elephants and steamboats.  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248915782&sr=8-1

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5 Good Reasons To Blog

July 26, 2009

1. People, even husbands (who, for the moment, have to live somewhere else because of their work) really don’t like being called at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

2. Writing is an inherently lonely activity. Living can be also.

3. Reading a new book, a great book, can make the mind gleeful for solitude.  It allows one to range deep into the night with no turning off of lights.  The glee can sour though as hours pass and the too-many-pages-turned hangover closes in.

Reading a book one has read many times before sometimes works better–sleep can be attained at a more reasonable hour–the book can be picked up at almost any random, much rumpled, page, the best parts can be quickly found and re-savored.  But at a certain repeated read–say, the twentieth–the mind begins to slip again into its neediness.  This happens, in part, to me , because the books I choose to read again and again are often not books I consider great, or even good  (those books are sometimes too disturbing to bear repeated reads)  but are soothing, stereotype-affirming, not too challenging experiences.  They are a bit like the nice hot bath I’ve taken so many days of my life, that true attention is not required.   I don’t worry about slipping, just check the water’s temperature, then step in, lie back and relax (usually with a much read book in hand.)

But even the most comfortable bath eventually feels tepid.

4. There are many thoughts, such as those about Robert Pattinson and also about some of those same mindless books  (silly teen novels) that I’d just as soon not email to my friends, but somehow don’t mind shouting out into the void. (What seems like the void.)

5. You can always edit, delete a blog, even after it’s been published;  it’s one of those rare vehicles in which words can be taken back; the shouts reeled in.  The tongue doesn’t even need to bitten.  You can simply click, click, click.

—ManicD, in a less than manic moment, but feeling better already.

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New York Noise/Excerpt Nose Dive

July 25, 2009

Silence in New York.  Hard to find.  It’s like an animal here, furtive, shy, our native snow leopard.   Barely glimpsed, in this case, heard (or perhaps not heard would be a better way of putting it).

I am lucky enough to find it usually. I live at the bottom of Manhattan where winds require closed windows in the winter and concrete floors hurt joints but make an effective barrier to footsteps, bass beats, gnawing arguments next door, moans through bedroom walls.
But now it’s summer; the windows are  open wide and the constant whoosh of a broad courtyard of air conditioning units sucks silence like a vacuum right down its multiheaded tube. Drives me crazy at night.   In the day time, I can almost ignore, the sight of sun, leaves, windows overwhelms, the low whoosh, but at night, there’s that big vacuum sucking at my consciousness.

I think “car waiting” when I first hear it, but it’s a car that never drives away.  Whoosh is not the right word as that implies movement and these air conditioners do not move on.  But there’s too much airflow for hum,  and  it’s just too level for roar.
And it goes on and on and on. I know I’m hopelessly spoiled. When I lived in the West Village, three a.m. was frequently shattered by wailing arguments and the harsh splats of breaking bottles, slaps,  cries of “I trusted you.” And then of course there was that bass beat, woofers on every side.

Speaking of noise, Greenwich Village and Bass beats, here is an excerpt from a novel I’m about to publish called “Nose Dive.”

Yes, it’s a teen novel, but it’s funny, and I like to flatter myself- Hiassen-esque.

Check it out below.

Also check out my picture book.  1 Mississippi, available on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248518809&sr=8-1

All copyrights preserved.

NOSE DIVE excerpt, copyright Karin Gustafson 2009:

I remembered the night I first brought up the nose job.

“Mom,” I pleaded, “can’t you just focus on me for a minute?”

“Celia,” she protested. “I am focusing on you.”

But what she was actually doing was bending down on all fours, one ear pressed to the floor. She can often be found in this position these days.

“Why do you think I’m trying so hard to get them to turn down that bass?” she went on. “It’s for you.”

The problem is that my mom has become obsessed by noise. This is a big problem. Because, unfortunately, New York is not a particularly quiet city. Even more unfortunate is the fact that we don’t live in a particularly quiet part of New York. We live in the Village, a place with small, echoing, streets that people like to roam at night, often after drinking heavily.

We don’t even live in the quietest part of our building. We live in an apartment that is partly over a pizza parlor, partly over a Lebanese deli, and sort of catty-corner above a bar.

My mom’s obsession began when the bar got a new sound system and, informally, introduced dancing. At approximately the same time, the staff of the Lebanese deli brought in a private boom box, which, when their energy got low—let’s say at 3 in the morning—they’d turn up to brickshaking levels.

My mom went berserk, quickly jumping into full battle mode. “Battle” meant calling the bar and/or the deli several times a night and going down to talk to them in person every other day.

Victory, which took some months to attain, meant (a) the bar soundproofing every spare surface, and (b) the owner of the Lebanese deli, a super nice guy with thick eyebrows and a sweet, sad smile, making his staff get rid of their boom box.

But just as my mother was feeling gleeful, though also a little bit guilty—she gave a huge tip to the deli staff—the pizza parlor turned up the volume.

“It is them!” she cried. “When I called, they said it must be a car, a woofer—” She pushed herself up from the planking. “Who do they think they’re kidding?”

“Mom, it’s not that bad.”

“Can’t you hear that bass?”

“Probably. If I pressed my ear to the floor.”

Actually, that wasn’t true. I could hear the bass even without my ear pressed to the floor. But I didn’t want to encourage her.
“Let’s just go in the living room,” I pleaded.

“How are you ever going to get to sleep with all that racket?”

“Mom, it’s only 8:30.”

“Come downstairs with me.”

“I really don’t want to stand there while you complain.”

“I’m not going to complain. I just want to take a listen. You can pick up a slice.”

“I don’t like their slices. And I’ve got work to do. And I really really really need to talk to you.”

“Please, Celia.”

I got my jacket. But as we stepped down into the street and she positioned her ear on the glass store front right next to the words “Sal’s Pizza”—

“I’m going back upstairs.”

“Celia, please. They may recognize my voice.”

“You mean they may think you’re that nutty woman upstairs?”

“Stay positive.”

We pushed into the vinegary smell of warmed-over bread—no wonder the slices weren’t great—and yes, music.

Which wasn’t all that loud.

The bass was a little insistent—the melody barely peeked over the drum beat. But it definitely wasn’t deafening.

My mother’s eyes, confused, searched the counter, the walls, the oven—

The pizza guy nodded, waiting for our order.

I went to the refrigerator case, got two bottles of water, took them to the counter.

“Aha!” my mom nudged, staring pointedly upwards. A small boom box was jammed onto a teeny shelf right above the soda machines, about two inches from the ceiling—

I paid the pizza guy, then dragged my still upturned mom to one of the small wooden tables.

“It’s not the volume; it’s where they’ve got it sitting,” she whispered. “Celia, I know. Ask him to move it down.”

“I can’t buy two waters, and ask him to move the boom box. Besides, they’ve got all the pizzas down there.”

“So ask him to turn down the bass.”

“You ask him.”

“Please Ceel. They already think I’m a nut case—”

“You are a nut case—”

“Please.”

I wished (and not for the first time) that I was my sister. Maddy was the kind of person who would either (a) just tell the guy to turn down the bass, because she truly believed that my mother’s rights, as the upstairs residential tenant, were being infringed upon, or (b) just tell my mom to shove it because she truly believed that the guy had every right in the world to listen to slightly loud music before 10 p.m. on weekdays. Either way, Maddy wouldn’t just sit there, feeling like an idiot; she’d have a position.
But I wasn’t Maddy, and, at that point, I still hoped to get my mom’s help with my nose. I stepped back to the counter.

“Would you mind…uh…turning down the bass?” I pointed up to the boom box. “My mom’s a little, you know, funny—” I circled my finger at the side of my head, the universal gesture for looniness.

Then felt a sudden swish of sound and air. Uh-oh.

When I turned towards the door, I expected not to see anything except the far side of my mom’s back. Instead, there was windswept blonde hair. A chiseled nose. Grey-flecked seriously profound eyes that, thankfully, were not looking at me at just that moment.

My cheeks heated up like a slice about to be served. I quickly turned back to the counter.

The pizza guy had propped a chair next to the soda machine. He stood on it reaching up to the boombox. “What you want?” he asked, looking down at me.

What I wanted was to sink into the smudged floor tiles.

“Lower?” the guy asked as the music dropped to a whisper.

“It’s just the bass she wants lower.”

“What you say?”

I refused to allow myself to look in Brad’s direction. Still I could feel him, now to my left. At the refrigerator case.

“The bass,” I tried again.

The pizza guy stared at me quizzically.

Praying that Brad was too involved in the refrigerator to pay attention, “the BASS,” I repeated, voice deepening.

The music swung between whoosh and whisper as the pizza guy fiddled with the boombox. In the meantime, I watched Brad out of a corner of my hair.

He didn’t have his girl moat. Which meant I could actually talk to him, say hi, or hey, or Brad! I could remind him that he knew me from math.

He was taking out a beer now.

A beer?

I gently shook my hair to get a better view. Suddenly the green bottle, which I thought I’d just seen at his fingertips, was no longer visible; I could have sworn it went under his jacket.

“There’s no bass control?” my mom asked, coming up to the counter.

“There just this one button.” The pizza guy turned the volume control back and forth again with one large flour-dusted hand.

Cold air swept the space behind me. I knew, without looking, that Brad was gone.

The music was barely audible now. The pizza guy, holding the soda machine for balance, stepped down from the chair. His face was red from the heat of the oven. I realized that he’d been standing about two inches below and to the side of my bed upstairs. No wonder that part of my floor was also always warm.

“Thank you so much,” my mom gushed.

But the pizza guy just stared at her, wiping his hands on his apron, then turned and went back to the kitchen.

Her face turned almost as pink as his had been. “Oh I feel awful,” she moaned. “Am I absolutely terrible?”

I couldn’t answer her. All I could think of was that Brad had stolen a beer while we were distracting the pizza guy.

I tried to tell myself that I must be wrong, that I really hadn’t been watching him.

And anyway, maybe he had some kind of arrangement with the place. You know, because he was a minor and they weren’t allowed to sell him beer.

So he stole it?

Come on Celia, I told myself. This is Brad, you’re talking about.

But I didn’t actually know what that meant.

As we trudged upstairs, my mom’s voice vacillated between triumph and guilt while I tried to not think about Brad.

That’s not exactly accurate. I tried to not think about Brad’s fingertips clasping the beer. What I tried to think about was his beautiful tanned face, his announcement that he was in charge of the spring musical, and my certainty that he was going to have a lot to do with the casting.
“So now can we talk?” I asked.

copyright Karin Gustafson 2009

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