The Whale Belly

Between more formal writing pieces (assuming I actually finish any), I plan on posting these “writer’s logs,” as a way of sharing my development as a writer, the problems I’m encountering, and the ideas I discover while reading. Hopefully doing this has some educational benefit or will begin a dialogue about writing. With that said, I’ll get into what I’ve been wrestling with the past week or so.

In short, I’m struggling with my own brand of writer’s block: instead of freezing at the blank page, I freeze at the filled page. If I was being logical about it, I would simply read over what I had written and make some notes on what needs to be revised, plan it out, and write a new draft. But I’m not suffering from a logical problem. I’m suffering from an emotional one. Logically I don’t expect my rough drafts to be perfect, but emotionally I see no hope in their improvement. The kicker is, I usually come to this conclusion without even reading what I’ve written. It’s just a thought that imposes itself in my skull: “This sucks,” “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” “No one will care about this,” “Let’s just watch YouTube instead.”

Luckily, there’s some good advice on YouTube. The psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, aka Dr. K., has a channel called Healthy Gamer GG where he gives lectures on the mind that blend neuroscience with Yogi and Buddhist philosophies. One of the central tenets of his teaching is that one must cultivate tranquility in the midst of discomfort to be autonomous. He says that because we’re typically driven by pleasure-seeking goals and fear of loss, we place our expectations on forces outside of our control, and thus feel powerless. Instead we have to find contentment within the present activity of the tasks we set for ourselves, like the writing process, and not expect anything from it. Otherwise, our lives become determined, since we’re either pursuing whatever pleasure, or fleeing whatever pain, that presents itself.

Unfortunately, reminding myself to enjoy the activity of writing doesn’t immediately silence the pain of the effort. As I’m writing this sentence, everything in my body and mind is urging me to give up, or trying to lure me away from my task. One voice says I don’t know what I’m talking about and need to go read more. Another is wondering loudly what kind of snacks we have in the pantry (even though I’ve already checked). A third is telling me to take a quick break and just see what’s people are talking about on Reddit. Apparently giving up expectations and finding contentment in an activity itself is not a matter of flipping a switch in the mind. But why not? Why does the mind and body resist what I’ve decided is a good pursuit?

Plato argued that the difficulty of willingly pursuing the good is the result of ignorance. All humans, he said, desire to attain pleasure and avoid pain. Unfortunately, truly great pleasure, in the form of “the Good,” is usually distant and requires that we endure pain until we attain it. Since we lack firsthand knowledge of the happiness that the Good will bring, choosing more immediate and typically hedonistic pleasures appears to be the wiser choice, especially when we convince ourselves that the Good is unattainable. And, indeed, this belief that the Good is unattainable is what makes everything inside me scream to give up writing and go root around in the kitchen. “This is a wasteful effort that won’t bring pleasure,” the mind says. “Why do this painful thing when we could eat cookies instead?” The paradoxical solution, according to Plato, is knowledge from experience. If we push through and eventually experience the deeper satisfaction of a distant, greater good, then we’re much more likely to accept pain in the future, and eventually that pain will not be so potent. But, initially, the only way to gain this experience is to will oneself through the painful gauntlet of uncertainty and doubt without any solid hope of success.

To make this easier, Plato said that people need to develop the art of measurement. By applying rationality to decision-making, we can begin to detach ourselves from emotional impulses. Even though I suffer emotionally, I know rationally that the only way I’ll overcome my malaise and learn to enjoy writing is by continuing onward. I can also look at analogous experiences I succeeded in, like adopting a healthy diet, establishing an exercise routine, and learning to play the guitar, as examples of successes that occurred because I was diligent despite emotional resistance, and I also know that the pain of resistance abated over time. I now enjoy these activities immensely.

But I’ve also realized that simply detaching and not worrying about external consequences doesn’t guarantee improvement in my writing. Regrettably, I spent years — years! — spinning my wheels in freewriting and morning journals, hoping I would improve through the mere act of putting words on paper for long amounts of time. Although I probably gained some endurance, at some point I realized I needed a method of bringing my writing into a form that would make my writing process meaningful to me and that I could share with others.

Fortunately, I recently found a good method in Ann E. Berthoff’s Forming/Thinking/Writing, which argues that a recursive practice of observing, defining, and thinking about thinking results in the emergence of an inevitable form, or, as she puts it “form finds form.” To illustrate this, she provides an example of student-writers who wrote journal entries about a single object over the course of a week — everyday objects like a cucumber, a stone, a seed pod. Over the course of the week, initial writings that were predictable descriptions gave way to unexpected relationships with other common objects and experimentations in form. Through the process of defining and “thinking about thinking,” the student writers moved from desultory perceptions to forming profound meaning about mundane objects.

But these writers only wrote single entries each day. To push this process even further, Berthoff recommended keeping a dialectical journal, something many people will remember being assigned in school, but probably not really understanding why. A dialectical journal is a way to hold a conversation with oneself about a topic or object. It’s made by drawing a vertical line down the page, with one third being devoted to marking down observations, quotes, facts, etc., and the other two thirds being used as a place to make commentary, reflection, ask questions, counterargue, etc. Over time, this back and forth nature starts to suggest a form. Contradictions and arguments develop, images and metaphors emerge, until the organizing and execution of a draft becomes inevitable. But to accomplish this, Berthoff urges, we must not run away from our thinking, but to engage it relentlessly.

What she doesn’t get across is how deeply uncomfortable such engagement is, nor how one develops tranquility in the face of it. For me this is what has always bothered me about process-oriented theories of writing. It often comes across as if my difficulties are signals that I’m not “processing” correctly. Instead, learning to accept and learning how to detach from discomfort ought to be part of a writer’s education. Unfortunately, in schools teachers threaten students into submitting to it, telling them sometimes quite literally that the world sucks and they have to get used to it. What if instead students learned that the ability to accept and detach from discomfort makes one free to create the sort of life that they want to live, free from the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

To write this essay/log I worked through intense discomfort. My mind constantly tried to convince me to click over to YouTube, to play a video game, to read a book for “research.” But I made the commitment to finish this piece today. With an emotional storm surging all around me, I put one word after the other, revised, and revised again until it was done. I worked until I put in the effort I was willing to make. Is it perfect? Of course not. Will people like it? I don’t know, and frankly it doesn’t concern me. What’s important is that I did the task I set out to do, and I feel good about it. Now I move on to the next piece.