On Getting Stuck
Recently I was watching an old interview with Paul Simon; he was talking about writing the song, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, and how at a certain point, he got stuck. The interviewer asked him what he meant by stuck, and Paul Simon replied, "Everywhere I went [with the song] took me to somewhere I didn't want to be—therefore I was stuck."
I have always loved that definition of being stuck. Usually when people think stuck, they think it's like hitting a wall, and the words just won't come. Sometimes it happens that way. But just as often it's not that you can't write. You write and write and write... and erase and erase and erase.
What's going on when that happens? Is it a real flaw in the work or just a crisis of confidence? And how do you tell the difference? I started thinking about this when I got a letter from a fellow writer. I thought I would post our correspondence here in the "On Writing" column for anyone else out there who might be struggling with this.
Dear Kate,
I am stuck at the 75% stage. I need the last 25% to finish. I have five unfinished manuscripts. I am stuck rewriting. Each time I get to this place I decide the book isn't good enough and start a new one. I see the pattern now and want to go back and finish the others. I am filled with doubt as to whether or not I'm good enough, smart enough. It's eating me up. I am a published author with a book on its second printing. Will I ever be able to do it again?
Sincerely,
Diane
Dear Diane,
You are not the first writer this has happened to. I think one of the hardest things about writing (other than getting yourself to sit down and do it) is figuring out how to evaluate your own work. It's like trying to make out a pointillist picture—the one that's made up of all the dots—without being able to step back and take a look from far away.
I find that for me it comes down to a sort of intuition I've developed over the years. But what about the times you can't trust your intuition? There are days (and sometimes weeks) that I read over my stuff and I think it's awful. But when that happens I have learned to do a little experiment; I pull a couple of books off my shelf and open them at random and start reading. If I find that all the books seem to read badly, then I know it's not my writing that's suddenly gotten worse. It's something different going on. I find that sometimes no matter what I eat, nothing tastes good—and basically it's the literary equivalent of that.
There are also times when I hit a big snag in the course of writing a book. I've written four now, and I have found that there seems to be a pattern. I have trouble with the beginning, then again at a little more than half way through. That's why it takes me so long to write the very beginning of a book and why I often stop writing in the middle—— sometimes for a month or more—— to figure out where the book is going. Most times writing for me is like running on sand (tough and exhausting) but when I hit a snag, it feels like I'm running through water. I've learned that I just need to press on and eventually I get through it.
If you had written one book and gotten stuck at the 75% stage, it might be hard to tell if it was just one of those snags or a real problem with the book. After two, I would start to suspect it was a snag. After five, I would say you can be sure of it. But at this point you seemed to have reached that conclusion yourself. And as for being filled with doubt and wondering if you're good enough, or smart enough—I would be surprised if 99% of the writers out there haven't felt exactly that way at one point in their careers. And I would venture to say that most of them feel that way at some point during every book. Some feel it all the way through.
So the question is, what do you do about that? My solution is to go write it anyway. In my mind, I decide that what I'm working on might be awful and unpublishable and the worst thing that anyone's ever done, but I write it anyway. In some way I try to detach myself from the quality of the work—sort of put my blinders on and run through the fire. Actually a lot of writers have talked about this process of detaching your critical faculties when you're writing. I think it's Annie Lamott who says that she has to battle the little editor who sits on her shoulder and says, "Now that isn't any good." Stephen King describes it as a two step process. When he writes the first draft, he writes with the (metaphorical) door closed. When he goes back and rewrites, he does it with the door open. With that door, I think he's referring not only to the world, but also to the critical part of his own mind.
I don't know if any of this helps—but in the same situation I would say to myself, "So what if it's not good enough. Who cares." And if you do that, I suspect that it will turn out better than you thought possible.
But I have a question for you. Are these all books that you have written after selling your first? Just a possible explanation as to why you might be getting stuck. Writing a book when you never really expect anyone to read it is a very different experience than writing something that an editor may be waiting for—or at least you think has a good chance of getting published. It's that much harder to shut—up that little editor who sits on your shoulder. So take heart, and let me know how it goes.
—kate