For months - nay, years - even with academic and professional commitments to writing, I wrote only a fraction of what I intended to. The best-laid plans were cast aside in the face of my incomprehensible resistance. It was hard to determine whether I was just lazy, or had genuine "writer's block," but what did it really matter? I wasn't writing, and I wasn't happy about it.
"Around the Writer's Block" makes sense of your resistance, whatever form it takes. In fact, even if you do happen to be a prolific writer, I think this book will be useful for identifying what might be keeping you from writing even more, being satisfied with your work, and getting it out into the world. Bane introduces a series of habits: first, process, which is any kind of creative outlet from freewriting to improvised dance to knitting. While you may be tempted to skip this step, give it a try. It engages your brain to create without expectation, an incredibly freeing sensation that takes creativity from its scary position on a pedestal to an accessible level you can dive into at any time. The second habit is product time: commit to writing for just fifteen minutes a day, however many days a week you need to. Eventually, you'll build up to a "target time," leaving a hole after your scheduled fifteen minutes just in case you feel like continuing. But your actual commitment stays small and un-scary. All along, Bane explains how your brain works and how the fight-or-flight response can kick in when you tell yourself to write. Committing to a small chunk of time is one of the best ways to get around this. Personally, I've found this one tidbit incredibly helpful. Rather than leaving all my writing to do on one day (and spending less than an hour anyway), I spread it out all week, get excited, and build momentum.
The other thing about product time is that it encompasses all aspects of the writing process, which can include rest, procrastination, all kinds of research, brainstorming, and other activities in addition to actually writing. So while it may seem that you're writing less, you're actually building a more solid foundation and building in rest periods that keep you from getting burned out. Product Time is the book's key, but it's meant to work in tandem with everything else. Self-care is the third habit, and it includes sleep, exercise, focus, meditation, and play. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded if the book had been extended to give each of these its own chapter, but three habits seem less daunting than eight, so I can understand. This is where you might want to draw on additional research (Bane lists all of her sources) and branch out to do additional reading on your own. For instance, I'm working through
The Power of Rest to address the sleep portion of self-care, and that book also gets into exercise, play, and other aspects of self-care. Still, Bane provides enough to get you started, and these habits take time to implement. While I didn't find the forms provided in the book particularly useful, you can take that idea and find your own way of making and tracking your commitments to each habit. I use a habit-tracking site called HealthMonth, and some paper tracking as well.
Once the habits are established, you move on to the third section of the book, which begins with establishing writing rituals. I haven't begun experimenting with this yet, but there are some potentially powerful tools here. There's also a chapter on rewards, but Bane does caution you here to maintain autonomy: rewarding yourself is probably much better than someone else rewarding you. Another useful book for habit-changing and rewards is
The Four-Day Win, which has a health/diet focus. That might help you come up with rewards that work for you, which Bane doesn't spend much time on. Then there's more about resistance; Bane delves further into the forms that resistance can take, why it's so hard to beat, and presents more techniques for getting past it. Once you have the habits in place, these chapters are what you come back to for motivation and help when you still find yourself getting stuck. By adding all of these layers, Bane has pretty much set up a foolproof arsenal for dealing with everything that could pop up. There's even an appendix about building a writer's group specifically focused on beating resistance, if you find you need extra support.
Nothing has changed my life the way this book has (and still is). I wish I'd had it years ago, but hey, I'm still young, and so are you. You could be writing for the rest of your life. So pick up this book, and get to it.
