February 15, 2012

Do you have the dreaded cognophobia? It’s a Latin term that translates literally as “fear of thinking,” or fear of facing your own thoughts. You may experience it as writer’s block.

“A writer must feel comfortable expressing herself in words, letting them flow before critiquing them or subjecting them to examination,” say Linda Metcalf and Tobin Simon in Writing the Mind Alive. “Many people who have an ambition to write are held back at the starting gate by some form of this [cognophobia] condition.”

Judgments From Within

Is silencing those premature judgments a problem for you? Do you sit frozen at the keyboard, considering and then tossing out ideas and sentences that sound “dumb” or “trite” or ”silly” or void of any literary content at all?

I do it–every time I try something new or try to write on a more difficult level or subject. Like this month.

I took a work-for-hire assignment a couple of weeks ago that is giving me fits. It’s for an age group new to me, and it’s a form of writing I’ve never tried before. After my first effort, the editor very kindly asked me to go back to the drawing board and try again. (He was right to ask.) If I don’t snatch myself bald before I’m done, it will be a miracle.

Advice from the Greats

Help came from an unexpected source today. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading and loving The Literary Ladies: Guide to the Writing Life by Nava Atlas. This morning I remembered some advice from the literary greats that helped me–and might help you too.

We are blessed to have so much written correspondence from writers of the past. I hate to think of all the wonderful material that would have been lost if famous authors e-mailed and texted back then. These quotes particularly struck a chord with me.

Edna Ferber blamed writer’s block on “trying to write better than you can.” Anna Quindlen agreed: “People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.”

In It Together

Even Margaret Mitchell  who wrote Gone With the Wind had this trouble. She said, ”I had believed that established writers, writers who really knew how to write, had no dificulty at all in writing. I had thought that only luckless beginners like myself had to rewrite endlessly, tear up and throw away whole chapters, start afresh, rewrite and throw away again. I knew nothing about other writers and their working habits, and I thought I was the only writer in the world who went through such goings-on.”

But that was Margaret Mitchell on writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. What about the rest of us? While none of us may be hoping for a Pulitzer, we are hoping for a book contract, an agent, good reviews, and good sales of our children’s writing.

What’s the Answer?

Nava Atlas in The Literary Ladies says the blocked state is a “self-consciousness that causes you to seize up and shut down… the answer to this is to be where you are with your writing, and not try to write as the Pulitzer Prize-winning fantasy version of yourself. There’s no way to reach soaring heights without taking all the tiny steps to get there.”

And we all have some kind of fantasy writer version that we aspire to. You may not be conscious of it, but you do. Usually it’s helpful, but when that fantasy version of ourselves becomes an inner critic, you have trouble. This judge can kill your words before they ever reach the light of day.

How can we keep this from happening? Anais Nin said this about her own writing: ”The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practicing, I wrote every day. There was no more than that.” She didn’t study writing or go to conferences or take classes. She simply sat down and wrote about her experiences at the end of every day, without fail. She is most famous for her published diaries too.

Our Own Worst Enemies

Perhaps we make things too difficult for ourselves. Maybe our self-induced cognophobia that could be eliminated if we lowered our expectations.

I know that Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life advocates writing sh*^#@ rough drafts instead of holding yourself up to such high inner standards. As one literary lady suggested, we need to stop despairing of writing eloquently–and just write instead. Get the words down, no matter how bad they may sound. The Pulitzer-type writing (no matter who you are) comes in the rewriting.

With that in mind, I return to the work-for-hire project. Like the Literary Ladies of old, I will be content today with just getting some words down.

How about you? Is there a piece of writing that is stopping you cold because you don’t yet write as well as you want to? Would you benefit from the advice of these Literary Ladies?

9 Comments »

1. 

   Thank you ALL for the great posts below. A couple of them are so meaty that they’d make great blog posts all by themselves! I’m sure that I learn as much from your support and ideas as you get from me.

   Comment by Kristi Holl — February 15, 2012 @ 12:40 pm

2. 

   Despairing to write eloquently gets me every time … so yes, I just get *something* down. I’m on my third draft of my book and things are better, but oh, they could be so much better. Pulitzer or Printz better. I have dreamed of winning the Newbery even though I have not yet written a MG novel. How conceited is that?

   Comment by Vijaya — February 15, 2012 @ 2:53 pm

3. 

   I liked the Anais Nin quote. Her approach seemed to take the pressure off. It was interesting that she mentioned pianists. I’m currently taking piano lessons, and my perfectionism manifests itself there, too. My teacher is often telling me to relax. And I’m learning to be more expressive and not so uptight about getting a song “correct.” I’m hoping that as I learn how to “let it flow” in music, that I’ll also learn to “let it flow” in writing.

   Comment by Debbie Watley — February 15, 2012 @ 9:06 pm

4. 

   Cognophobia! I love it! LMAO! And it certainly applies to other areas in life – (like writing checks to pay bills.) Can one get disability for this? LOL! All of the quotes you mentioned succinctly nail it. It seems to me, that it all comes down, to paraphrase many, as the way to learn to write IS to write. The good stuff is there, but I needed to RAISE my standards at getting good at ~downloading~ all the prestuff. Like letting a rusty faucet run a bit to clear it out. But I have found that when I am writing daily, even if it is drivel, that it keeps the cache pretty clean, so that it at least things come better, faster.

   What I love, and directly proved to myself in regards to the direct quotes you have put here, is that you can have NO idea of where you are going, yet in slopping words on the page, little twinkie-gems will start tumbling out like magic! I did not believe this would happen for the longest time. Certain story forms defeated me because I refused to write badly and haltingly, long enough. There are certain genres that in facing the paper, I am walking off a cliff path into fog, literally without a clew. It took me awhile to realize that the sequence IS the sequence, and there was no path, let alone a destination, until I spun words, and the spun words become the clew! (Even if you fall off the edge.) It can’t be skipped. You can’t make a blender sauce, no matter how much you push buttons, if it is not plugged into the electrical flow. And then it STILL must churn before it becomes a recognizable sauce. Avoid plugging it in and you are left with unadorned insipid tangled limp noodles, dying on the plate, with that telltale disgusted look on your face. (meaning ‘you quit too soon’, and I am currently eating cold spaghetti.)

   I realize this is a horrible mix-murder of metaphors. But since I have been up for 32 hours, and finally sat down to write, we get to see some random sludge-thought in ACTION! lol. But you know what the kicker is? I am beginning to believe I can tackle any genre/form, because I finally believe the secret to overcoming the ~eeayuhh~ is just to start writing, and keep at it long enough until the coherent thoughts start emerging and the form is less ghostly. Then, don’t stop! Keep going! (and then edit.) And the coolest discovery is, the sparklies ALWAYS come.
   However tonight, I am so tired that the editing will have to wait, as bad rewriting when you are falling asleep is another subject… lol!

   Comment by jen — February 16, 2012 @ 3:57 am

5. 

   Ah, yes. Writer’s block is uncomfortably familiar. Writing something, anything, does seem to be the only way to get through it. It’s reassuring to know that the great writers experience the same struggles as the rest of us. Thanks for sharing.
   Sometimes I have to get of my own way, similar to the cognophobia you describe. I have to place my effort and ego aside and just let the muse work.

   Comment by Jeanne — February 16, 2012 @ 4:15 am

6. 

   I’m a big fan of Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Her strategy is the only way I can get through a first draft. I sit down and tell myself to ‘just get the words down and don’t worry about it.’ I happen to love revising. I can’t wait to turn my sh&%#@ first draft into the story I really wanted to write, and that keeps me going to the end of the draft. I forgive myself the bad writing, celebrate the bits that really work well, and enjoy the rewrites.

   Comment by Heather Wright — February 16, 2012 @ 7:45 am

7. 

   I have to add, to be honest, that I’m a big delayer in actually starting the first draft. The blank screen/page is still a challenge for me, but once I get going …

   Comment by Heather Wright — February 16, 2012 @ 7:48 am

8. 

   I’ve been struggling with a story because I want the words to be perfect as soon as they come out of my head. This post has been most helpful. Thanks!

   Comment by Lisa — February 17, 2012 @ 8:46 am

9. 

   You had me at the title, Kristi.

   It seems to me that your advice to separate the creative and judging functions is spot on.

   I’ve never written fiction (so take this with a grain or two of salt), but I’m really taken with the notion that almost any creative work is best built through successive rounds of hat switching.

   You start with your creative hat on, and spend time discovering what the pieces of the puzzle are. You just throw ideas and snippets of solutions down on the paper.

   Then you try out some ways of framing and organizing the pieces to get an approximation solution (or draft, or version of an outline).

   Then you put on the critical hat and write down all the problems you see with your current solution.

   Then you put back on the creative hat and try to spin some solutions to the problems, first just spitting out snippets and puzzle pieces, and then trying to arrange them into an approximate solution.

   Repeat this alternation of creative hat and critical hat work until it’s “good enough”.

   It seems possible that this process is what we all do anyway, whether writing, creating other artistic works, engineering, or developing software.

   Might as well embrace it and do it consciously.

   Comment by Jim Stone — February 18, 2012 @ 12:17 pm

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