Writer's block, an owner's guide: Achievement motivation

Today and, hey look, a little earlier than I’d planned, we’re getting back to the psychology of procrastination and maybe even to the psychology of writer’s block.

I spotted this in a Psychology Today article by Carlin Flora:

“Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, has found that people’s beliefs about their abilities greatly influence their performance. When she praised children’s intelligence after they succeeded at a nonverbal IQ test, they subsequently didn’t want to take on a new challenge - they preferred to keep looking smart. When they were forced to complete a more difficult exercise, their performance plummeted. In contrast, some children were praised for “how” they did a task - for undergoing the process successfully. Most of the children in this group wanted to take on a tougher assignment afterward. Their performance improved for the most part, and when it didn’t, they still enjoyed the experience.”

I looked a little deeper into this and basically, Carol Dweck has come up with a theory of internal causality which is reminiscent of Teresa Amabile’s ideas on intrinsic motivation.

This fits beautifully with so much of what I’ve been trying to say here over the months. We were trained, most of us, to work towards a test, pass it and focus on the next test (often in some utterly different subject area). We weren’t trained to work through the tests, to treat them as enjoyable parts of our path towards mastery. And so we didn’t master anything. I wasted two entire university degree programs that way before coming, in my 40s, to psychology - which had been an interest since I was about 13 but, luckily, not one that had been polluted by any mention of it whatever in any school I’d attended.

Anyway, enough about me (joke) and let’s get back to Dweck. Yes, it all fits. This is second novel syndrome again. You write something great; people tell you you’re great; they say that the next product of such a genius will surely be even better - and now you’re paralyzed.

So let’s see, let’s pause to think, because I’m typing ahead of my thoughts again. How (I wonder) would Dweck recommend us to treat successful first novelists? “You wrote really well”? I’m not too sure how different that is.

What I was expecting to do, when I got around to writing this and to figuring it all out at the keyboard, was to connect Dweck to Reversal Theory (reversal alert: there’s a whole lot about RT coming down this pike, probably October) and to self-determination.

I was expecting to hear myself say something like… let’s see if I can say it. Children who were praised for their personal qualities and potentials were put into the telic state (doing a job of work for external rewards such as grade points) and had to be “forced” to complete a more difficult exercise. Children who were praised for their achievements went into the paratelic state (doing the task for its own sake) and were eager to tackle the next level.

This doesn’t entirely make sense. Or it’s a discovery.

Assuming it didn’t make sense, then we could try not talking about telic and paratelic and we could suggest the first group were in an alloic state (trying to please other people) and the second in an autic state (working for themselves). Does that make sense? Yes, it does to me. So a possible conclusion (still using reversal theory as our mental framework, which I realize is just my arbitrary choice) is that I’ve been thinking the wrong way about this stuff all along and that a leading cause of failure-to-perform is our feelings about other people.

Now that would make sense. Thinking about writer’s block, for example; many of the people who become writers are - I suggest, having met quite a few of us - avoidant people. One of the symptoms of pathological avoidance (diagnosis code 301.82) is an excessive concern with what others think of you. So it would be easy to sit in one’s garret writing something ground-breaking for personal pleasure, not really believing it would ever be published, and not worrying about how it would be received. It would be agony to write in the knowledge that the work was going to be scrutinized. One would become careful, cautious, no longer revealing the flair and uniqueness which are, paradoxically, just what the scrutineers hope for. Or if one did try to give them flair and uniqueness, that might turn into self-caricature.

Yes; I believe I’ll try thinking about writer’s block on the autic / alloic spectrum and see how that works for me.

Enough for one day.

By the way, I am now offering psychotherapy not only in my offices in the San Fernando Valley, but also online [link suspended because I'm not offering this currently], both in email and in live chat. Writers, procrastinators in general, and regular adults are all welcome.

Published on August 22, 2005 at 5:55 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/achievement-motivation.html

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