There are mornings when I wake up and realize that I don’t trust myself any further than I can pee.
These are the mornings when nothing I write makes sense, when I’m dead certain everything I put down sounds juvenile, predictable, and unnecessary. I rewrite everything a second after I’ve put it on paper, revise sentences one after the other before I even finish a paragraph, endlessly and unproductively circling back and forth on myself over and over again. Rather than composing anything new, since I don’t trust a word I have to say, I move modifiers around instead, swapping them between sentences, reordering clauses, moving some callouts back and forth, and agonizing over whether the button at the top of the webpage should say “Learn More” or “More Info”. On these days, a headless chicken could pound out something that would make David Ogilvy proud, compared to what I can do.
These are the days when the Big Choke comes to town. The Big Choke is not Writer’s Block, though there’s a common misperception that they’re the same thing. In fact, the Big Choke is to Writer’s Block what an epileptic fit is to a full-out catatonic trance. When you have Writer’s Block, you stare blankly at the blinking cursor, with genuinely no idea how you’re going to make pharmaceutical sales in Japan sound seductive, and a paralyzing conviction that you never will have one. When you experience the Big Choke, on the other hand, you compulsively scribble 5 pages about Japanese pharma sales by repeating and reordering the same three thoughts in different syntax and fonts, only to get to the end and panic when you realize you’ve used 5000 words to produce 127 characters of useful information. The Choke comes in when you realize that after all that effort trying to gag down your own bullshit, the only remedy is the Copy Heimlich: ctrl-A-backspace.
After you’ve experienced the Big Choke a few times, Writer’s Block can start to sound pretty appealing. After all, if you never write anything, you’ll never puke out anything timid, repetitive, and asinine. The Universe can never disappoint your aspiration to write crystalline prose when you don’t put down a single word that could ever be judged as insufficient – secure in your conviction that in your head, where your Muse is safe from ACDs, over-helpful friends, constructive criticism of any kind, and objective reality in general, you’re actually Fitzgerald reincarnated.
So, hell with that, who wouldn’t retreat into Writer’s Block? Paralysis, if you think about it, can be kind of cozy. You don’t have to do anything; you just sit there, nice and still, maybe blinking once in a while. One spasmodic fit after another, however, bites immensely – especially when your paycheck rides on your ability to write your way through everything short of an artistic aneurism.
But that’s exactly what you have to do – after all, trusting your work has virtually nothing to do with belief and expectation, and ever so much to do with cussed perseverance. Once you’ve coughed out what you’re choking on, you try and get it down again; you get it down, you hate it, you fix it, you do it again, and then maybe you like it better. And once you like it, once you see it start to go to work on its own – even if no one else does – then you start to trust it.
Granted, there was A Guy once said that the worst writers are the ones with most trust in themselves. I tend to believe him. Hell, I know every morning I could wake up with a Big, Fat, Ugly Choke staring me in the face, and the only thing I can do is try to get it down anyway. And if I choke, so what?
I know which keys to hit.
No comments:
Post a Comment