Two Exercises to Help You Stay Hooked on Your Writing This Week
After fifteen books, I know all about falling out of love with my own writing. I recognize my own distractions, stall-outs, and mind tricks that keep me away from the page.
I've created a thousand exercises and ways to combat this, accept it, keep writing anyway.
This week I discovered an unusual exercise that appears to be complete procrastination--yet it’s not. It has worked so well, I wanted to share it with you.
Writing a book is more of a marriage than a date. You're in it for the long (er) haul. You need to stay hooked. Or else one of you--probably the book--will pull a Thelma and Louise.
Acedia--A New Take on Procrastination
As writers, we try different exploratory exercises designed to give the writer a new perspective on the book. Two weeks ago, I introduced an exercise called the River Chart, especially effective because it looks like procrastination at first glance. It works because it calms the Inner Critic, who is ever alert to risk on the page and keeping you safe.
The River Chart started with a word I learned many years ago from writer Kathleen Norris, author of Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and the Writer's Life.
Acedia is a state of boredom, melancholia, distance, and distraction, a "slothful, soul-weary indifference" that is different from depression. It means a lack of will. Not wanting, not caring, even.
I see it as a kind of creative exhaustion. Something well known by monastics, according to Norris. And for writers, it can happen when we give up hope or fall out of love with our beloved books. We stop bringing flowers or even calling. We let the dust accumulate and distract ourselves away from this all-important relationship.
Sometimes we think we are procrastinating, but maybe not. Maybe we have just fallen into a state of acedia.
And the remedies, as I discovered, are often different than just pushing ourselves to perform again. How can you push when the will is gone? Maybe it requires a deeper look at the problem.
Watering Dead Wood with Tears
Norris shares the story of an abba who gave a piece of dry wood to one of his followers and told him to water it until the wood bore fruit. Norris comments on how cruel this seemed to her, yet in nurturing parts of her own life over the years, she has often found herself "watering dead wood with tears, and with very little hope." She says, "I have also been astonished by how those tears have allowed life to emerge out of what has seemed dead."
I run into acedia when I have hit a new skill to practice, and suddenly I feel very inadequate. Or I realize a character in my novel is still not coming alive on the page, and I have no idea how to make it so.
Norris suggests we must water our "dead wood" of a story to allow it to grow again.
River (Chart) Full of Tears
To recap the steps I gave in my post two weeks ago, here’s how the River Chart exercise works.
I drew a snaking river.
I made a list of the important entries and exits in my story, any stages where the momentum of the story accelerates, for example.
Then I looked at the balance of placement of these key moments. Were they packed together, leaving gaps of nothing happening? Could the placement be changed?
Then I asked what I actually wanted from each part of the journey of the story, where I was now with writing it and what I imagined it would’ve become.
No surprise, I was deep in acedia. It all bored me. I wanted to stop the whole process and jettison the story.
At that time, I was also reading a book by Martha Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. Beck suggests an exercise about conscious metaphor: What images drew me (in the room where I sat) and what might they have to tell me about why I was out of love with my story?
Fairly radical idea. But I went with it. And the idea grew as I played with it.
Anything to get more spark, you know?
I listed some weird items. A fireplace poker, a woven stool, the yellow kitchen shelf. I let my intense focus drift away and I imagined what these items could represent, if they were images in my book journey. It was as if I learned a new language, in the process, and I came out with the reverse of what I expected.
My book wanted me to take more time, go slower. "But we're almost at the finish line!" I cried. "We need to get to know each other even more," it replied.
I thought back to all the good feedback I've gotten from readers I respect, all the techniques I've tried: switching to different viewpoints, adding new characters, changing the plot, enhancing the setting, altering pacing and theme. I've worked hard, harder than I imagined I could. Now the book wanted more getting-to-know-you time?
I had confused "blahs" with procrastination. As I worked deeper into the River Chart exercise, I learned how pushing hard can also be procrastination, if I am avoiding looking deeper into the book. Like a frenetic holiday when a good talk is what's really needed, activity isn't always the answer. Stepping back and pondering the big picture was an antidote. A spa weekend with my beloved.
Acedia had visited because, in my effort to polish sentences, I had distanced myself from the meaningful element in my novel. My dead wood was evident. The River Chart pointed to places that no longer meant anything to me, that had to be enlivened again or eliminated.
It would be great if editors and readers could help find the meaning of your book for you. Nobody but the writer can find the message in her or his manuscript. Why? Because the message has to come from the writer's deepest places, or it feels "tacked on" and artificial.
Writing this story and doing this exercise caused me to go to the far ends of my safety zone--and beyond. I wondered what would take me to this same kind of risk in my story about the missing pilot.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Are you experiencing acedia with your beloved book? Is there a kind of spiritual torpor or apathy, lack of care about your project and your creativity?
Take a rest break from it and chart its river—its journey. See where you wanted to end up and where you've changed direction without realizing it.
This week, look at what you are calling procrastination. See if it's actually a clue to falling back in love with your story?