We’ve been talking here and in the blog about overcoming challenges to a daily writing habit, and today we are going to talk about overcoming resistance, a challenge I’d venture to guess all of us face from time to time, and some of us face from moment to moment.
Resistance comes in many forms. Fear. Negative voices in our heads. New ideas about daily practice that come to us as we are about to trundle toward our habitual routine. Distractions. These are, in fact, the final items in my list of five challenges:
- Resistance.
- Fear and judgment in the face of creativity.
- Temptations that pull us from routine.
Do you see how all of these are resistance in various guises?
I had the experience today of dismissing the voice that said, as I wrote, this is stupid and terrible, badly written and too closely leans on someone you know who will not want to be portrayed this way. And you know what I said back? It doesn’t matter. This is a first draft. It is a discovery draft. All I need to do here is find out who and what is on my mind.
In casting about for my next project, I am always the most attached to the characters I’ve already written, even if just in a NaNoWriMo draft to which I’ve never returned. Thus I realized that writing a discovery draft is a crucial part of my process. This is how I get to know and care about my characters. Then I am willing—and have to be willing—to change their circumstances, desires, motivations, obstacles. All of the seams can be ripped out and rearranged and new scraps can be created, but something remains that inspires and guides me. Something remains that grounds me, attaches me to a world and a set of people I did not know before.
This is my process. The trick is not to imitate it so much as to lean heavily into yours, to learn more and more about yours. And the way to do that is . . . to write every day.
This is a bit of a vicious circle, perhaps—you must write every day in order to overcome the resistance to writing every day. But it is also perfectly logical. You must take the magic and make it ordinary. It will still be magic, but it will be ordinary magic. Who doesn’t want a life filled with ordinary magic? That is the writing life, at least for those of us in love with it. And it’s not a pretty, romantic love. It’s the dark kind, the deep kind, the involuntary, not-always-the-best-idea love. But if you can turn that kind of love into a working marriage, you will never be bored. Trust me.
I heard some folks interviewed about will power on KQED’s Forum the other week, and one of them mentioned that when you are sitting meditation and your mind is wildly distracted, unsettled and unstill . . . you are actually getting the most out of meditation. It is not nirvana that we are seeking, not the still peek of experience with no effort, but the willingness to get thrown away and bring ourselves back, over and over again. In writing, too. Expect resistance. Employ resistance. And thus . . . overcome resistance.
Five Ways to Overcome Resistance
- Count the instances of resistance. Mark them in a notebook. Then keep going.
- Reward yourself for facing down resistance and continuing on.
- Write from the voice of resistance.
- Throw as many obstacles at your characters as your critic throws at you when you write.
- Write in groups or set goals in groups. Gather your allies and storm the barracades.
Whatever you do, keep going. Despite the voices (this is so bad, this is not important), despite the alternatives (dishes, phone calls, social networking). Do it anyway.
How do you work with and overcome your own resistance? What works for you? Post your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to know.
I love the idea of calling the start of new project a discovery draft rather than a first draft. There’s something really liberating about thinking of it that way. I’ve been re-reading “Henry Miller on Writing” and found this little bit in his “Work Schedule Commandments” that seems like a good way to push through the resistance on those days when I feel like my writing is silly and uncreative: “When you can’t ‘create’ you can ‘work’.” It seems so obvious but sometimes I forget about applying that simple ‘work’ ethic to writing. You’re so right that it can’t be all about nirvana or nothing!
Yes, Jean, so true. The freewrite/discovery draft may be something or may not *in the future* but whether it feels subjectively in the moment as if it’s worth anything, I am learning more and more, has more to do with how I feel while I’m doing it–grumpy? physically uncomfortable? serene just after a good sleep and only the right amount of caffeine?–than anything inherent in it. “It” is not anything now, and doesn’t have to be, and neither do I. I have learned, too, from doing BWW craft exercises, that–as Lea says about being a parent–I am enough. I have enough whatever it is in this brain that makes writing that some people eventually want to read. I can stop obsessing on that one. Elizabeth, the idea of leaning in to the resistance does work for me, to some degree. And when I’ve been sitting and doing that, and feel too stuck, it helps me a lot to get up and move that resistance down into the body, on the yoga mat. It’s only ten feet away from my chair.
So many truths here, Susan! And that one of getting into your body–yoga, walking–is key. Writing is a physical activity, and imagination is connected to the body and to wandering . . .