Tim Madigan

There was a time in my career, a very long time actually, when the simple act of writing a story, any story, felt like a referendum on my very being. Now that’s pressure. A three-paragraph cop brief or a three-part series, it didn’t seem to matter. It was life and death. As such, the first sentence needed to be perfect before I could move on to the second. The first paragraph needed to be perfect, and so on. Perfection, as you might have heard, is hard to come by. Ergo writer’s block.

All those years I sat at my newspaper desk utterly tortured, waiting for that elusive perfect sentence to spill forth. Twenty-five years ago, a cigarette (or two or three) was always burning in the ashtray next to my computer. (I wasn’t the only one in those days. You couldn’t see from one end of the newsroom to the other for the deadly fog.) After I gave up smoking, caffeine replaced nicotine, with the commensurate hourly trips to the urinal. I also made at least fifteen daily trips to check my mail. (The Star-Telegram mail was delivered once a day.)

Typically, close to deadline, a passable sentence would be written, which would lead to another, and a story would be completed with not a moment to spare, some of them quite good. But the psychic and physical toll was always enormous, and I wonder now why I didn’t abandon writing and try to find more pleasurable work, say, cleaning sewers.

But I know today that even while cleaning sewers I would have found a way to be tortured and neurotic, because it turns out that writer’s block really has nothing to do with writing, per se. It concerns instead what most people secretly feel about themselves, to one degree or another—that we are in some way defective, not quite up to the stuff of life, unworthy of love. We suffering humans then try to camouflage those feelings or compensate for them with cars, money, huge houses, fancy titles, drugs, alcohol, sex or bigger breasts. I never really went in for those other things (my boobs have always been perfect, so far as I can tell.)

My drug of choice was writing. There was nothing wrong with my insides that a bestselling novel or two couldn’t cure, or a Pulitzer Prize. A great book or a prestigious award would surely justify my existence on this planet, would prove to myself and others I was not fundamentally defective after all. Good luck with that. ***
No wonder I believe Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, is the best book on writing and one of the best about life ever written. The title refers to Lamott’s ten-year-old brother who had months to write a report on birds, but put it off until the night before the report was due.

“He was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father (a writer himself) sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

This is good advice to writers or anyone else, figuratively speaking. Also, how can you not love a book with a chapter titled, “Shitty First Drafts”?

“All good writers write them,” Lamott says in that chapter. “That’s how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts…I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we don’t like her very much.”

But the chapter in Bird by Bird that really spoke to me was the next one: “Perfectionism.” Duh.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,” Lamott writes. “It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life and is the main obstacle between you and shitty first drafts. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.”

She goes on to describe perfectionism as “cramping of our psychic muscles. They cramp around our old wounds—the pain from our childhoods, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never had a chance to heal. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way.”

She could have added, “They keep us checking the newspaper mailbox fifteen times a day.”

**

Lamott has some great suggestions for dealing with perfectionism. I strongly urge you to read her book. In the meantime, I will briefly describe how I began to come to terms with mine.

It happened in the mid-1990s, when pretty much everything I dreamt of, at least as a newspaper writer, came to pass. I won major journalism award after major journalism award. My stories were published in national magazines. For a while I felt like Steve Martin in The Jerk, who finds his name in the telephone book and screams, “I am somebody!” The euphoria was quite delicious, I must say, but also extremely temporary.

For the joy was soon followed by the old pain and darkness, which came back blacker than ever. The recognition I craved had turned out to be fool’s gold and guess who was the fool? I was a moderately successful, forty-year-old writer, whose insides were still a mess. And I was left with the question, “Now what?”

Here is what I did, to make a long story extremely short. I confronted, embraced and eventually healed (for the most part, anyway,) my psychic wounds, some of which were so old that I’m sure they came over on the boat from Limerick with my ancestors in the 1830s. I began to accept the fact that some people liked me okay even though I was screwed up. (I met and became good friends with Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers Neighborhood about this time. He was certainly a great help in this regard.) I developed a spiritual life, a relationship with the loving mystery at the heart of the universe, (Fred’s term) that was militantly my own.

Where writing was concerned I began to take the attitude that stories were never referendums on anything. They were just stories. Here today, mostly forgotten tomorrow. And little by little, I tried to revamp my motivation. Rather than making the work always about me, I tried see it as a form of service. Somehow, maybe, my stories would make people laugh or cry, allow them to feel a little more connected to their species, or give them information they otherwise might not have access to. This seemed to help. Now I tell high school students to find work they love, and do it in service of others. And they look at me like I’m crazy.

But a funny thing happened where writing was concerned. I learned that the old obsession was both completely unnecessary and wildly counterproductive. All the energy taken up by the self-loathing of writer’s block, the quest for the perfect sentence, could be put to much more creative use. After a few years of trying to do things a new way, I got a book contract, then another. The newspaper work went better and better, and over time I felt a real and deepening kinship with the people who read my stories. I’ve also finished a novel, and I think it’s great, but if it doesn’t land me a huge book deal, that would be okay. My family and friends would probably like me anyway. I’d still have the Stanley Cup playoffs. Maybe there would be a few more chances to watch the sun set over an ocean.

By the way: It’s been years since I’ve suffered from writer’s block. The shitty first drafts come spooling out now, one after another, with relatively little angst. And the boobs are still perfect, so far as I can tell. What else is there? Really?