MY BRAIN IS A JERK: a post about writing with (and in spite of) perfectionism

A post about writing! I don't know what I'm going to say yet, only that I want to respond to a reader's comment and see where it takes me. This post is for Tiffany Marie, and by extension, for all the other writers like us, to whom it does not come easily. 

Tiffany Marie said this in a blog comment (and I asked if she minded if I quote her here):

"I'm a writer at heart, it's what I've wanted to do since I was a child. It's just that when I sit down to write, more often than not, it feels as though I'm standing on the wasteland of a destroyed beach where a massive tide has washed ashore and brought with it kitchen sinks, rotting and eviscerated animal carcasses, the sun-bleached bones of giant sea creatures, unexploded World War II bombs, the remnants of an oil spill....

I wish I could just grab the edge of the waterline and flip it outwards, back to sea, like flipping a comforter, and let it take all the clutter, and fear and self-doubt with it. I just know there are villages and haunted wrecks and tunnels that lead to other worlds and points in time under all the junk.

Hopefully, one day."

Okay, so, first of all, I want to read that book. You know what? I want to read both of those books. (Yes I know that's not what she meant.) I want to read the bombs and sea creature bones one as much as I want to read the wrecks and tunnels to other worlds one. Obviously Tiffany Marie can write. Just from her blog comments, I can tell she has has the kind of imagination and skill with words that, to me, make for really exciting writing. So what's the problem? Why not just sit down and write a book? 

Well, I'm guessing here, but my guess is this: because for some of us, our brains are double agents. They are our allies and our enemies in one. On the one hand, they're Little Red Riding Hood toting this sweet basket of goodies, and on the other, they're the Wolf, ropes of saliva strung between hungry teeth, ready to rip us to shreds.

Or, wait. How about this? It's like your brain is holding out cake to you, and every time you reach out your fork, it bashes you with a hammer. OoOoOoh that cake looks so goOoOoOoOod ... OUCH! No, really. It's like it gives you a clear view of the thing you want, but actively prevents you from getting it. 

Look at this great idea! It's all yours and it's lovely, oooh betcha can't wait to write it, huh? Forget it, you'll never do it justice, you can't have it, I'm going to put a glass dome over it and preserve it in its uncorrupted form forever. Go wash the dishes!

It's so weird that the same marvelous instrument that brings us imagination and wordplay, narrative instinct, memory, detail, and other amazing things, is the same son of a bitch that whams us with indecision and doubt and self-loathing and creative paralysis every chance it gets. Brains can be jerks. Mine is.

MY BRAIN IS A GIANT JERK.

And I don't happen to believe that jerks can be reformed. Once a jerk, always a jerk. My brain will forever be a jerk. So here's what I've learned, in my years tussling with this brain. It's a life-long wrestling match, this is my condition, and at any given moment I have the choice to ...

a) fall victim to all the well-known pitfalls of perfectionism, as they manifest in my particular case. Maybe I'll spend all day revising a chapter, only to decide at the end of it all to revert to the previous draft anyway.

b) daydream of an alternate reality in which writing is easy and books practically spill out of my ears. Follow daydream to logical conclusion (wild success and wealth), naturally ending up browsing Italian luxury real estate.

c) begrudge other writers their seeming ease; feel woeful; comfort myself with chocolate or a nap.

d) read a good book, because hey, it's inspiration, it may just give me the oomph I need to figure out my plot or whatever!

e) be very, very strict with myself, like the mean nun in Catholic school stereotypes and make myself lay down word after miserable word, dammit, feeling defiant and spiteful the whole time, hating every second of it.

f) trick myself. Be endlessly resourceful, by knowing my particular jerk of a brain well enough to fool it into doing what I want it to, while maybe even enjoying itself a little bit!

So what do you think? Look, I do all of these things. I've been doing all of these things all my life, because that's how long I've wanted to be a writer. But it was only fairly recently -- last ten years or so -- that I broke through to option 'f'. Maybe you got to 'e' and you thought that was the right answer until you kept reading. And option 'e' might work for some people. I do have to be strict with myself, but let's talk about option 'e' for a while. 

We'll call this the "mean nun approach":

I think this one goes along with the conventional wisdom, the same "established fact" that would have you believe that The Way To Write a Book is to get through a shi**y first draft, come hell or high water, and then make it better. This is not a bad way. It works for many, many people. It does not work for me. I am unable to bond with a shi**y first draft. I can't care about it enough to keep at it, and if I force myself to do it anyway, I'll just hate it more and more until it's beyond all hope of redemption. What's worse, the misery of the process will make me hate and fear writing itself. I'm sure many of you have slammed into the brick wall of this process again and again and felt certain that there is something wrong with you. Maybe even that it means you are "not a writer."

I would say ... there is something wrong with you. With us. I mean, it still feels that way to me, even though I've "conquered" it to some degree. It very much feels that way to me right now, after a frustrating afternoon of doing option 'a' even though I so know better! (Damn. It.) What's wrong with me is that I have a really uptight brain, and that makes it very hard to do this thing that I want to do, and that sucks, but it doesn't mean we're not meant to do it. It just means it's hard. Whatever. Lots of things are hard. Every time I sit down to write I wish it were easier. 

To tell you the truth, right now I am writing this post instead of writing my book because it's just one disaster after another today, from 'a' to 'c' with a craving for 'd', because sometimes ...

IT JUST FEELS IMPOSSIBLE.

Right at this moment, ugh, it really does. My brain feels beyond my power. Why do I get so hung up on every scene? Every moment of every scene? Why can't I just move forward, knowing as I know that I can always come back? It's so dumb, so infuriating. How many times in my life have I spent all day on a page? On a paragraph? 

This is perfectionism. It's not funny. If this sounds like you, know that you are not alone. And know that there is hope. I'm telling myself this as much as I am telling you right now, because on a day like this I need the reminder too: if you don't give up, you will win. If you really freaking dig in your heels and swear to yourself that you are going to find a way, and you show up day after day and try, you will win. 

So, about "trying": How do you try? 

How do you try to write your book?

I guess this is "process" but it's bigger than that. It's not just about whether you use a computer or a notebook, or whether you outline or not, or work in the morning or at night, or in a cafe or at home, etc etc. It's about your brain, and getting it to do what you want, as often as you possibly can and for as long as you can, and this will be different for everyone. AND. It will be different for you from day to day.

Anecdote. I took an illustration class my first semester of art school, and the teacher, Barron Storey, was kind of a wild-man of mixed media, a sort of unconstrained id of artistic freedom. I, by contrast, had only taken watercolor classes up to then, and watercolor is a medium of control and planning. There is a fluidity to it, yes, but there is also its insidious "unfixableness." With oils or acrylics, you paint right over a mistake, but a ruined watercolor is a ruined watercolor, period. And "purists" don't even use white paint. In a "true watercolor painting," you have to know in advance anything on the paper that you want to leave white, and to make sure not to get paint on it. It's called "saved whites" and it's the persnicketiest of things. Well, this was kind of all I knew of painting, going in, and I think that the single most important thing I took away from art school (after Jim, that is, who I met in that very class :-) came from Barron Storey, who said this:

PURITY SUCKS.

That's it. Best creative advice I ever got. Purity sucks. There is a clan of people in the world to whom "saved whites" are important, and one can decide to join that clan and paint that kind of painting. Or one can TRY EVERYTHING ELSE. Rip up their painting then collage it back down with matte medium, draw on it with India ink then attack it with oil paints. Finger paint, transfer on a photograph, haze it all out with white acrylic and newspaper. TRY THINGS. 

What does this have to do with writing?

I think this anecdote needs a little bit of context. See, the whole reason I went to art school in the first place was to avoid writing. I had already graduated from college with an English degree and the plan was to be a writer. But ulp! how does one just do that? I didn't know! I wasn't ready! I didn't know what to write, how to write, how to make myself write. None of it! And it seemed to me suddenly urgently clear that I was in fact meant to be not a writer at all but an illustrator! Duh! Which meant starting at the beginning, and learning all of that stuff. So I didn't write, and didn't worry about not writing, for years, because I was "an illustrator" now. Ha! This is all very silly, of course, and very obvious avoidance in retrospect, but it's also very lucky, because art school had this unexpected effect of making my creative issues clear to me, and forcing me to deal with them in a way I had been able to avoid with writing. I think that an MFA program would probably have done the same thing, now that I think about it. Maybe accountability was what was important, and having to produce work. I had to develop actual tricks to get around my hangups, and I did!

So skip ahead to when I started dabbling with writing again, I had this new attitude, the anti-saved-whites attitude of "purity sucks." Basically: roll up your sleeves and do what you have to do. It's not how you get there that matters, it's where you get. And with this attitude came fortitude, resourcefulness, determination, and an ability to enjoy the journey even when it wasn't going perfectly. 

This is still vague, so let me try to make it clear what this meant in my actual writing life. It comes down to the question from above: how do you try to write your book?

Once upon a time, this was how I tried to write books: I started at the top of a page and wrote some words. Maybe under the heading "Chapter One." I looked at the words for a while, then crossed out or deleted them, then wrote more. Crossed out or deleted those. Started a fresh page. This could go on for hours. Days. Sometimes I'd break through to an entire paragraph, sometime an entire page. Very rarely, an entire chapter. I never got any farther than that. Instead, I'd revise the chapter, or start something new, or daydream about being a successful writer. That's it. I was utterly resourceless! Feeble! Committed to failure, practically engaged to it! 

I would say that that approach is the soulmate of "saved whites." It's conservative, no funny business, start at the beginning, just sit down and write, dammit. It's how one imagines a book is written, if one is not being imaginative. Like, how non-illustrators imagine that illustrators just sit down and draw, and that magical, complex compositions and realistic renderings simply flow out of them without recourse to resources like reference or sketches? Non-writers, I'm guessing, imagine writers sit down, type out "Chapter One," and proceed to write the book. (And some writers do. *cat hiss*)

Agatha Christie, working

If your brain is ill-suited to this process, as mine is, you can either keep failing, or try something different. You can TRY EVERYTHING ELSE. TRY THINGS. Journal about the tone of your story, what you want it to feel like, or challenge yourself to freewrite the scene twice from two different points of view. (Or five.) Think about the reaction you are trying to elicit in readers--how do you get it? Make yourself think up ten ways to start the scene that are more dynamic that what you have now, or get into the character's head and ask what they would really do in a given situation. Be them. Consider major changes to your idea, audition them, and be open to the possibilities of increased awesome. There is always the possibility of increased awesome! Just ... try everything. 

In "NOT FOR ROBOTS" (a series of writing essays I posted in ... 2006 maybe?) I talk about "writing with a machete strapped to your thigh," and writing "exploratory drafts" instead of "first drafts." That's all attitude (which is everything!). I talk about brainstorming and freewriting, which are techniques I use now that are much more aggressive than my old lazy methods. You can read more about this there, and please feel free to ask questions in comments (here), I will really try to respond (Tiffany Marie, I'd love to know if this strikes a chord at all, or if it doesn't really sound like your own struggles.)

The bottom line is: my brain hasn't gotten easier over the years, but I've learned how to work harder and better, and I've learned that it works, and knowing that is a big part of the battle. I've done it before, I can do it again. I know what I have to do, and I know that if I keep doing it, a book will be the result. And that, because of the way I work, allowing myself to be deeply invested in every moment and to spend more time with it than is probably healthy, and to rework everything as I go until it feels right, I am able to love it, and be sure of it, which is something that I accept that I and my brain need. 

So I had a sucky day today. Well, that happens to me sometimes. Sometimes the suckiest days are motivating, as they can be so miserable as to serve a "never again" purpose, and make me buckle down the next day and produce, dammit. And I truly believe that sometimes the only path to the "right way" is through a dozen wrong ways. Hopefully not more than a dozen! Sometimes I even get it right the first time or second, and that's wonderful, but if I don't, I keep at it. Because I really want to be a writer!

Do you?