Fixing the plumbing

How is a fiction writer different from a plumber? It sounds like the setup to a joke, but it’s a serious question. The reason I ask is related to the question of writer’s block.

Professional writers are often asked how they deal with writer’s block, and a commonly repeated answer is to drag the professional plumber out onto the stage and say, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Here is a professional plumber, and they don’t get to say they have plumber’s block. Therefore a professional writer doesn’t get to have writer’s block.”

That would make sense if a plumber were anything like a writer. So, how is a plumber different from a writer of fiction?

For one thing, if you call a professional plumber they won’t deny you have a block. If you tell them that water is coming out of your faucet in a trickle, they will willingly admit that you might have a blockage in your pipes and they will try to fix it.

On the other hand, if you tell a professional author that the words are coming out in a trickle, many will deny your experience. Those writers will tell you to sit your bum in the chair and eventually the so-called block will work itself out. And the reason they say this is because they have no idea how writing works and they certainly don’t know how to fix writer’s block.

They’re fiction writers after all. They’re going to tell you a story. They make things up for a living.

The main difference between a plumber and a writer is that the plumber’s work is mostly physical and they use discrete knowledge to solve a well-known problem. The writer, on the other hand, does most of their work in their own head, and a lot of their work requires basic mental skills and capabilities that are not well understood.

If you take someone who doesn’t know anything about plumbing and put them in an unfinished bathroom and leave them with pipes, epoxy, the tools to cut and bend pipes, and a blueprint, they will experience plumber’s block. They won’t know what to do, they’ll feel anxious, and probably won’t ever start. It’s a stupid way to train a plumber. But that’s how we expect fiction writers to learn.

Last year I wrote about writer’s block on Medium and I may be dipping into the same well, but since I’m experiencing some problems myself, it seems like a good time to engage with that content again.

1. How do I get my bum in the chair to write on a regular schedule?

I need to work around my daily commitments and break automatic habits that are monopolizing my attention so I can shift my attention toward building a writing schedule. This may require me to, for example, stop watching YouTube and get to sleep at a decent hour.

2. How do I make writing a positive experience that I’ll want to keep coming back to?

If the writing I produce still disappoints me I have to find ways to induce positive affect and turn down the intensity of negative emotions. I need to be okay with disappointing outcomes when they happen. I have to know when to back off, and learn to accept, nay, expect setbacks.

3. How do I reflect on the well-being of my writing process?

I can use writing itself as a tool for thinking about my writing process. If I miss a scheduled writing session, I need to write about that miss during my next session. I need to create a working model of the writing experience based on scientific research, the professional expertise of teachers, and the experience of myself and other writers who are paying attention.

4. How do I stop interfering with the drafting process?

I learned some bad writing habits in school. For example, I learned to spend far too much time developing ideas before starting the drafting process and thus never recognized writing as a way to generate ideas. I also learned to write with a doubting mindset which led me to edit while I wrote. Editing disrupts the drafting process at every level.

5. How do I generate material?

I need to improve mental imagery and also compensate for poor mental imagery. Some fiction authors can hear characters chatting or see scenes vividly in their mind’s eye. I can’t. But, I can work to improve mental imagery through practice, or supplement it with references and research. For example, Joanna Penn often visits settings she writes about in order to experience the specific sensory world she will write about.

6. How do I cut and fit material into a story?

I need to study the episodic patterns that make up a story at the level of individual passage and pages. I can study life events and stories in order to collect narrative patterns. I can create a language to describe those patterns and consider the strategic choices authors make. This helps me fill my writer’s tool box with patterns I can use over and over again by inserting unique semantic information.