August 31, 2015 by Jimmy Butts

5 Things That Keep Me From Writing… (And 5 Things That Seem To Help)

For this week’s special issue of Rhetsy, I am writing up my own list of fives. And that’s good. It’s gotten me writing something.

I wanted to write up a list of things that get me into trouble writing. They show up, and rear their heads at me when I’m trying to get stuff done. So it goes.

1. Distractions: Okay. So this is a given. Yes. Of course. Distraction. The internet is full of them. So is my desk! Oh! A paperclip! Let’s unbend it for half an hour. Perhaps we should call these dalliances. These are our pet distractions. The ones we have trouble escaping. Oh! An article on Rhetsy that I haven’t read, and click link, and click link… and at dinner… “Did you write today?” My response, “Umm. Well… I tinkered around.” Beer can keep me from writing. A television binge. When what’s-his-face said, “Kill your darlings”… this is actually what he was talking about. Sometimes distractions can help us think… and so we can justify them a bit, but they never help us write.
2. Inconvenience: This is similar to distraction, but unwanted. This is picking up a different hook to hang this painting that’s been out in the garage for six months. Then, getting the wrong one, having to get the right one, after an appointment at the dentist. Oh! The dentist! What a cruel inconvenience. Thank goodness for their prying eyes, but a good dentist can kill an entire day of writing.
3. Whitespace: This is….                                                that. You know. When you’re trying to write something, but aren’t 100% sure what you want to jot down next. You have this wonderful seed of an idea, but… Then there’s that blamed cursor. Blinking at you. Waiting for genius to pour forth. Which brings us to…
4. Perfection: Either before or after I’ve written a work of genius (which has only really happened once, perhaps… in a dream, I think), the idea that it should be perfect becomes a hangup. If the haunting of perfection comes before I’ve started, it functions like a stifling paralysis, keeping me in the land of whitespace. If the fear of having to write something perfect comes after a draft (Oh! The joy of a completed draft!), then the burden of perfection works upon me as a merciless, endless editor–I would rewrite forever, never finishing, if I didn’t learn to vanquish the foe of perfection.
5. Love: This one. Yes. Love keeps me from writing. Coming home from work and deciding to take my daughter to the playground instead of finishing a work of genius, or reading a story to her later into the night than I’d planned because she can’t go to sleep and she wants me to, even though I’d planned to knock out some mind-blowing exposition of Aristotle. Well… this is the good kind of not writing, I suppose. Although, sometimes I write because I love too (See No. 5 in the next list).

So, there are some good things too. Things that help. Things that allow me to get writing done. So, I thought I’d add those here as well. Y’know. So, that I didn’t leave all of you all high and dry, and horribly depressed.

1. Weirdness: Sometimes the strangest little thread will get me writing. Most often, actually, a weird thing captures me, and beckons me to follow it down a long, windy, destined path toward a draft. (Go and look up the etymology of weird in wyrd and see if the uncanny things of the world do not lead us.) I will come upon it while driving or in the shower. Oh! It’s like a quirky inspiring, silly little thought, a thought that I must now think. I will get up and write it in the middle of the night, on a notecard that I keep in the drawer in my bedside table. I tell students to find their butterfly nets–their own ways of capturing the wonderous, strange little creatures that will become the seeds to their good writing. I find that I primarily write to stake out the strange things of the world.
2. Collaboration: I have just finished a summer where I collaborated on a handful of writing projects that I got done by embracing other people. Other people will slow you down, trip you up, question what you’re trying to say, but they’ll help keep you honest and make sure that you get writing done. But this doesn’t always mean sharing a byline. It might just mean having the right, much-needed conversation just before a class starts about some concept you’ve been playing with. That is collaboration too. Conferences are great places to glean the insights of your friends in the field. People getting together can help writing happen. We are always writing for other people (or at least our own other selves) after all, aren’t we?
3. Whitenoise: I keep a space heater in my office, and I run it in the summertime. I run it all the time, and I feel guilty about the energy costs. But I cannot write without the warmth and the whirring. I can’t write without the privacy of walls, even if I am in a coffee shop. I need the environment to be closed off, warm, welcoming, and clean. When what’s-his-face said that we need “a clean well lighted space” or when what’s-her-face talked about “a room of one’s own,” they weren’t kidding around. The environment for me is holy. And I’m picky and easily thrown off if the writing space isn’t right. I protect that at all costs. I use the right software, the right sounds (like the whitenoise from noisli.com or a Brian Eno album). The writing space has to be magical–make it so for yourself.
4. Boxes: This call, and every call for writing, is a box to put writing into. I like to think of it as a checkbox in particular. One with a deadline. This is one of the best ways to get me writing–to have a place, a goal, an object to write for. Boxes are important, they give an outline to our meandering thoughts. I love a good box. I need something to put all of my resounding gongs and clanging cymbals into. Throw in everything. And a wordcount! That keeps us in check with what should go in. And I need a date that it’s due by, even if I make it up. The days are precious ways that we humans are given to create boxes out of our lives in order to get things done.
5. Care: I think that I write because I care about certain things, concepts, and people. I care about you reading this. I wrote it for you. I care about this thing that I’ve just written, enough to have written it, albeit a little late in the evening, when I wish I was sleeping. But when I care enough about the thing at stake in the writing, I will write. Writing involves an ethic of care, to which all of us are committed in all of our own unique ways. And I care about my daughters, in some (mostly indirect) ways, I am always writing for them… because I teach writing; it’s how I make a living.

So, those are my things–the things that keep me from writing and the things that help. I wonder if these are generally true for most folks or if they’re peculiar to me. I’m sure there’s some overlap anyway. Hope you’ve run across a spark here, and that it hasn’t been pure distraction.