Writer's block, an owner's guide: Back. And forward!

My hiatus is over. Really it was over days ago but when I tried to tell you about it, in some of my best ever prose, like many other Movable Type users I lost it all to a mysterious supposedly-temporary bug (which I still have tonight, so let’s talk fast).

My hiatus is over. In twenty days - which I claim as a possible record - I passed both of the California MFT exams and I can finally call myself a marriage and family therapist. These exams are notoriously difficult; the questions are odd and arbitrary in a way that seems designed to test your therapist instinct more than your technical knowledge. Actually, the questions just seem stupid but, now that I’m one of the people who’ve survived the ordeal, my mind keeps making up reasons why we earned recognition as talented therapists.

So that’s where I’ve been in recent weeks. As I said before, writing in the weblog would have been a form of procrastination, which is exactly what we are all here to fight against.

Well, now, moving on, and into life as a psychotherapist. My new writing project is to prepare the marketing materials for my tender fledgling practice in Sherman Oaks.

Part of that is to update my main web site which looks like what it is - a site that I stopped looking after a year ago, just when Today I Write got going and began to attract growing numbers of readers, and attracted me too with its ability to make me keep on writing. The main site needs to become a clear, professional guide to what I do as a therapist and who I can do it for.

The other piece of marketing writing I need to do is to totally rewrite my self-description for the online Therapy Directory. This is a growing young service owned by Psychology Today that is already tied in with Google, Yahoo and major mental health sites and seems to be superseding all the other directories I might have joined. But goodness me - writing a blurb for them is like taking the California license exams over again. They ask for three essays on three set topics. There is no room to write good answers; each essay has a limit of 50 or 100 words. By the time I trimmed my prose down to those lengths, I had lost sight of what I was trying to tell the reader in the first place.

And that’s just the start of the game. When you finally click to submit your answers on the three topics, they are not published as three essays. They are simply published as a single run-on article, without any subject headings. Once you realize that, you realize there was no point answering the questions at all. You could use the three boxes to type anything you actually thought was worth saying.

I guess that this system was designed by journalists at Psychology Today to help timid non-writers declare their own best qualities. That’s a worthy goal. But the result, for me, is that at a time of high excitement in my life I am not able to make the best of what’s certainly an important marketing opportunity. I need to take a few days to think about it, and then go back and rewrite the whole darn thing so that it says something interesting and useful.

Which will be fun!

It’s all fun right now. I know how self-employment can become a grind if you’re not careful; but now that I’ve learned about reversal theory I won’t make that mistake again. No, no, I’ll make fresh exciting new mistakes.

Published on July 8, 2005 at 9:02 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/back-and-forward.html

Today I Write