I think very often when people refer to being stuck, or this is certainly my own experience
and I've talked about it enough with friends, some of whom are writers, some of whom are
other kinds of artists, some of them do other things with your life, often times when people
refer to being stuck they don't mean like creatively blocked, they don't mean that they
don't have any good ideas, they mean that they don't have any ideas that they care about;
that nothing they're making feels important to them.
When you don't care about something you just don't do a good job with it.
Maybe you can for a while.
It's possible to fake it for a bit or it's possible to have incentives to do things like
I have a deadline or my boss is going to be looking over my shoulder if I don't, but for
most of us we do our best work when we care about it.
So when I teach if a student will say something to me like I really love this but I know it's
not going to be a good book or I actually have a friend who also teaches who was telling
me about an experience he had were a student came up to him and said, "I wrote all these
notes for this book I want to write but I find that I never write the book, I just really
love working on the notes for the book."
And my friend's advice was, "Well, probably the notes are your book.
If that's what you love and that's what you're drawn to and you're imagination wants to go
there then just let it go there.
The worst that can happen is it's a book that will be for nobody but you, but that is actually
a much better fate than writing a book that lots of people like that isn't for you."
So when something draws my attention, when something feels important or even just pleasurable
to me, I work on it even if it's off the track, even if I'm already 60 percent of the way
into what I thought was the book I was going to write if I suddenly find that one of the
little voices in it is appealing to me more than it ought to, this person I thought was
a side character suddenly like elbowing into the middle of the room and just wants to stay
there and wants to be the center of attention, I will make that character the center of attention
despite it being a very efficient way to work because I know that I have become unsuccessful,
I've become stuck, I've become unhappy when I'm working on something that I know isn't
really what I care about.
The most successful students I've had, the ones who have published books are the ones
who have actually had to change midway through long projects.
Students who came to class with 300 pages and we had a discussion not about how those
300 pages could be the best form of themselves but rather why are you writing these 300 pages?
Are these the 300 pages that best express the thing that makes you a singular writer?
You are a writer in this way.
Here's the thing about you that is different than other people.
Here are the things about your experience or your voice or your imagination your fluency,
whatever it is.
I think each writer has something that makes him or her singular and I try to guide of
the feedback toward like repeated examinations of the question what makes you singular not
how can I make this sentence as good as it could possibly be.
With the case of these very successful students we had difficult classes where the answer
was maybe it's not.
Maybe there's something else that will better express your singular quality.
And sometimes those are very, very difficult classes because it can feel one can get sort
of swept up in the what is lost like in the moment.
Like I've been working for six months on this, I've been working for nine months on this
sort of forgetting that one need only write one really good book to have an amazing career
as a writer.
How many writers have written two great books?
Not very many.
Three great books you'd be hard pressed to name more than a couple so there's plenty
of time.
One disadvantage of a writing program is that it creates this kind of like pre-professional
attitude.
Like you go to a writing program so that you can get an agent, so that you can get a publisher,
so you can be a published writer so da, da, da, da, da, da as if there's this long string
of cause and effects that you want to be on as quickly as possible.
As opposed to like this extremely long process, which is going to be inefficient and arduous
and challenging in any number of ways, but that the goal at the end is not to make any
one piece of writing as good as it can be but to make yourself the writer who doesn't
stop.