Comfort zones

There’s a phrase I use a lot when I’m talking to people who want to be writers: “If what you are doing isn’t working, try something else!”

Recently it has been borne in on me that a lot of those folks have nodded enthusiastically… and then they go off and work even harder at whatever they’ve been doing that hasn’t been working.

So let’s try this again. “Something else” does not mean more of whatever isn’t working. It means a thing that is different from whatever isn’t working. “Different” means “not the same.”

From the conversations I’ve had, I suspect that part of the problem is that these folks mis-identify the “what isn’t working” part. They’re trying to write 1,000 words a day, every day, without pre-planning, and it isn’t working. So they cut back to 500 words a day and it still doesn’t work. Then they’re behind schedule, so they decide to pull a NaNoWriMo in March and write 1,667 words a day. Which still doesn’t work. And when I tell them they need to try something different, they say they have. They’ve changed their required word count, haven’t they?

Yes, I tell them, you did. But that’s only going to work if the problem is that your word count is pushing you too hard, or not hard enough. Since that doesn’t seem to be the case, why don’t you try something completely different? Stop and do some planning, maybe, or try working by the seat of your pants if you’re already a planner. Or block out a whole Saturday and write 4,000 words in a day, and then don’t write anything at all for two weeks. Or write a scene that you know will absolutely, positively not go in this story because it happens 20 years earlier and involves stuff that’s irrelevant to current events. Or write a possible climax scene and work your way backward for a bit.

Invariably, the would-be writer starts squirming at this point. They hate planning ahead. They don’t have the stamina to write for a whole day (or they can’t block off that large a chunk of time). They have to surprise themselves or they can’t write. They have to have a rigid words-per-day goal, or they can’t write. They can’t afford to waste precious writing time on a scene that won’t go in the story. They need to know how the characters get there before they can write the climax.

And they totally ignore the fact that right now, they’re not planning, and they have a rigid words-per-day-goal, they know what the characters are doing next (or they’re surprising themselves), and they are still not writing.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that people get comfortable with whatever they are used to doing, and when they’re comfortable with the way things are, they don’t really want to work at changing them, even if they’re not getting the results they want. Changing what they’re doing might be unpleasant. It might be hard work.  It will almost certainly be less comfortable than whatever they’re currently doing, at least for a while, and it still might not give them the results they want. Also, trying radically new things is a little scary. Sometimes a lot scary.

Frequently, self-image is also involved. Writer A has always seen herself as a plodder. She spends months drawing up detailed plans and background info and character sheets, and still can’t make 50 words a day on a regular basis, let alone 500. But the mere suggestion that she might be a pantser or a burst writer is terrifying; persuading her to actually try sitting down for an hour and just writing, or working without that carefully thought-out inspiration-killing plan is simply not going to happen.

Then there’s Writer B, who has spent years as a journalist. They have a whole system for writing newspaper articles – lots of notes, interviews, research, and pre-planning, followed by days of regularly scheduled work sessions. They’ve never bothered to apply this system to their fiction because a) everybody says fiction is different from nonfiction, and b) they don’t have a deadline for the fiction, so they don’t need to work the same way. Even though not working isn’t working.

Writer C has kids and a day job and a hugely busy life, and sees himself as a free, creative spirit. He occasionally carves out a Saturday morning, or even a whole day, to sit and write. He actually got three pages of a mystery novel done once, but it’s never gone anywhere because he couldn’t think of what happened next and by the time the next “writing Saturday” rolled around, it felt horribly stale, so he started something else. He absolutely rejects the idea of writing for 15 minutes every single morning (I know his schedule, and he could do that easily; if he really tried, he could probably make half an hour or more – not that he’s ever actually tried it). It’s too much like a real job.

Well, I say, if you want to be a professional writer, it is a real job. Real jobs don’t care what you think they ought to be like, or how you think they ought to work. Real jobs mean you do what it takes to get stuff done. If what works is pantsing, you pants, even if you hate it. If what works is a planned, systematic approach, you work systematically and to a plan. And the only way I know to find out what works is to keep trying different things until something does. Actually trying them out, not thinking “I’m going to hate this” and then sitting down and staring at a page for ten minutes before getting up to go get coffee and then saying “See, I knew planning/pantsing/working backwards wouldn’t work. I didn’t get anything written at all!”

When I say this, people squirm some more, and then back away slowly. And mostly don’t come around asking for advice any more. Because somewhere deep inside, they know that figuring out what works for them is going to mean moving out of their current comfort zone and actually changing how they work, instead of just making a few small adjustments, and they really don’t want to do that.