Are You an Anxious Writer? Understanding the Interruption Between Mobilization of Energy and Action

Fritz Perls understood anxiety—the teeth chattering and heart thumping agony—is a good thing: evidence of your vital life force. The excitation of the nervous system is evidence that a whole bunch of energy is available to be tapped. But if there is a blockage between this energy and the action to which the energy is oriented, then you get all the troubling downsides of anxiety. 

With anxiety, the body is preparing to move quickly and forcefully, but there is no clear direction or purpose. You just buzz with energy that has nowhere to go. The energy is trapped and will eventually find an outlet, even if the outlet is nothing more than spinning your physiological systems fruitlessly.

 

If you are a writer who is experiencing this blockage, then following might happen: You have a deadline with a book publisher to deliver your first draft by December 1. If it’s still February, you feel like there is plenty of time, and so you work on the manuscript at a leisurely pace. As the deadline approaches, however, you begin to panic. You worry whether you will finish in time. You worry what the publisher will say or what the reviewers will think. All of this energy that goes into fruitless panicking is energy unused for writing. Instead of writing for two hours in the morning, you write for 15 minutes and spend the other 1:45 chewing on your fingernails. Or what is probably more likely, you sweep the house, wipe down baseboards, change air filters, mow the lawn, and so on. 

 

Zinker notes that educated persons—like people who are reading this about unleashing scholarly productivity—are most likely to get stuck right here. This is because we spend a lot of time planning, reflecting, troubleshooting, second-guessing, and otherwise thinking through a range of possible consequences before we act. In some cases, we never reach action: we spend all of our time and energy in the planning and second-guessing stages.

 

The hypothetical example I gave of a manuscript deadline way off in the distance actually came from my late friend Scott, only his deadline was a year and ten months away. It was a timeline during which I could have written four book-length manuscripts, but Scott never finished the one. He got a one-year extension and was considering asking for another when he finally decided to give up. Scott spent his time wondering what would happen if he made an embarrassing mistake that got caught by a reviewer. He wondered if the book would be enough to earn a promotion in his department. And he worried, given his difficulty finishing the book, if he was cut out for life in academe. 

 

In my own writing, I have oscillated between carelessness and paralyzing carefulness. I wrote a master’s thesis that my committee called “fast and loose,” for example. I’ve also made some embarrassing errors in articles and books I’ve published, such as referring to Hans Georg Gadamer as German and French in different chapters of the same book. In retrospect, however, I prefer these mistakes to the books and articles I never finished because of anxiety or worry. In other words, I think carelessness is better than paralyzing carefulness.

 

I forget who said it, but the following applies for writers who find themselves preoccupied with anxiety and worry and unable to write: “Instead of holding yourself to your highest level of acceptable writing, hold yourself to the lowest.” Be able to say to yourself, “Okay, this is barely acceptable.” That’s it. That’s your new bar. Now, don’t run out and try to get it published. You’ll have to clean it up, but that can come later with the revision process—a process that is much easier to start than as looking at a blank page. Ratcheting up the standards can come after you’ve got 80,000 words for a book or 10,000 words for an article.

 

There is another reason why it might be helpful to get started writing first, and only later worrying about writing well. Novelist Terry Pratchett has said that he doesn’t know what his next book will be about until he’s written 10,000 words. In my experience, I don’t know what my next book will be about until it’s finished. Only then can I see my most important point or where I spend most of my time. That’s when I can organize it better, plan helpful examples, and understand who my audience is.

 

If you’re still having trouble, then consider taking a page from Stephen King’s writing book. King had a process where he always wrote his first drafts in private—with the door closed. He wouldn’t “open the door” until he was done and satisfied with it himself. Writing behind a closed allowed him to work out any problems with his stories without getting confused by others’ opinions. Closing the door can give a scholar the safety of escaping criticism and avoiding worry because there’s no exposure—not yet, at least.