Writer's block, an owner's guide: Major post: a new look at writer’s block

I’ve been quiet on this page for a while because - well, lots of reasons but they include that I’ve been working on that research project I told you about in October.

The results are surprising and intriguing. So much so that I am nervous about telling you before I get a book written on the subject. But here it is.

My main research results are straightforward. They clearly support something not too far from the hypothesis I started with. They show the positive effect on writers of regular contact with a researcher. If you’ve studied management, you’ll recognize this as the Hawthorne Effect, but this is a sighting of it in a quite different environment: with people who are working voluntarily, not factory hands. So that’s quite interesting.

But it’s not the exciting part.

I’d also asked all my research participants to take a test based on that old Today I Write favorite, Reversal Theory. Now, that was never a key aspect of the project. I only did it as a distraction, so the control group wouldn’t notice they had nothing else to do (sorry guys). But the test results were startling.

Look: it’s well established by research that the creative personality tends to be more impulsive / playful, more non-conformist (rebellious?), and more self-centered than the average person. And my data confirm that. Ho hum.

But in my group, the writers who had those characteristics most strongly were the ones who ended up writing less than other people. Huh?

Also, last year when I was testing people every day, I found that on the most productive days writers were less likely to be in those four states.

What does this mean? Writing is some sort of rebellion or denial of our everyday personalities? On a good writing day, do we say to ourselves, “today, for a change, I’ll work and ignore tempting diversions; today, for a change, I’ll keep the agreement I made with myself at the outset; today, for a change, I’ll focus on communicating my ideas to other people”?

If a writing day is a day of deliberately doing what’s totally opposite to your everyday nature, no wonder it’s so puzzlingly difficult. No wonder we need the idea of block to explain why it’s sometimes “impossible” for an educated, highly motivated adult to do something a five year old can do.

I have a lot to say about this.

Published on January 19, 2007 at 10:00 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/major-post-a-new-look-at-writers-block.html