Welcome to Shelf Life, where I, your friend Catherine, encourages you to pursue your writing dreams and never give up. Today’s Shelf Life is about how you can use the act of giving up on something temporarily and shoving it into the back of your mind for a while can help you pursue your writing dreams and achieve all your goals.
I want to first disclaim that I am a brain doctor, nor in fact a doctor of any kind. Nor a person with any particular knowledge of the brain. I’m not always sure I have a brain. I’m just a person—with or without a brain, it’s unimportant—who personally uses this strategy and it works for me so I’m sharing it.
In life, people are going to tell you that the only way out is through and the only way to deal with your problems is to face them head on. This is not always true. Sometimes you can ignore your problems and they will go away. Like one time I got a jury duty notice in the mail and I threw it in the trash and that problem went away. I was assured by family and friends that throwing a jury duty notice in the trash would not excuse me from jury duty nor make my problem go away, but six weeks later I got a letter in the mail saying “you’re excused from jury duty” and it’s been 23 years since I threw away that notice and the problem has never resurfaced.
Ignoring your problems won’t always make them go away, this strategy won’t always work, but nothing always works. Tackling your problems head on doesn’t always work, either. Sometimes turning tail and running is the answer.
As ever, this Shelf Life is specifically geared toward writing (or not writing, as the case may be) and other creative endeavors but may have applications for other parts of life; your mileage may vary. Do not tell your boss Catherine said you shouldn’t go to work if you don’t feel like it. I do believe you shouldn’t do things you don’t want to do, but within reason. For instance, sometimes I don’t want to go to work but I do want to have a roof over my head and food to eat more than I don’t want to go to work.
When it comes to creative endeavors like writing, sometimes you’re embroiled in something and it’s going nowhere. Or maybe it’s going somewhere bad; like, somewhere you don’t want it to go. Or it’s going where you want it to go, just in a bad way. For whatever reason, it’s just not coming out how you want. When this happens to me, I’ll sometimes abandon the draft and start another one, and another, and another—from different approaches, using different narrators, different points of view, starting in a different place, or time—trying to find the right one. That is an example of me tackling this issue head on.
And sometimes I abandon the story altogether and stick it in a virtual drawer and just go do something else.
When I was a kid, like an elementary-school-age kid, I’d take a quiz or a test and hand it in when I was done and inevitably a teacher would ask me:
“Wouldn’t you like to review your answers till time is up in case you got any of them wrong?”
And my answer was, no, if I knew the right answer I would have written it down the first time? Nothing is going to happen between now and twenty minutes from now that will change my understanding of the material so that I might want to give a different answer. I knew it, or I didn’t, when I wrote my answer down the first time. Nothing has changed in the five minutes since then.
The reason nothing changed or would change between when I finished the test and when time was up was because I was not allowed to go anywhere, do anything, read anything, or talk to anyone until time was up. We were usually told to put our heads down on our desks and be quiet if we finished tests early. That is a situation in which no new information can enter my mind from an outside source to shed new light on the knowledge I already have.
Today, when I put away a story idea or a manuscript or a blouse I’m making with a really freaking complicated collar or whatever, I move on to something different. I don’t sit in quiet mental isolation until I’m ready to pick it back up again. I go do something else. When I do that, multiple things happen:
I continue to learn, grow, and hone the skills I have on some other problem while I ignore the one I couldn’t solve.
A subconscious part of my mind has time to work on the problem.
Then, when I come back to it after days, weeks, months—however long I was ignoring whatever it is—I find the obstacle that was insurmountable before is no longer an obstacle at all. Most of the time I can easily solve it.
The term back burner comes from your stove. It probably has some burners in the front and some burners in the back. When you’re cooking a complicated meal, sometimes you move a pot or pan to the back burner so it can keep cooking while you pay little to no mind to it and turn your attention to something more pressing on the front burner. Like maybe you give the pot on the back burner a stir now and then but you’re not actively working on it. It’s still cooking, though. It’s not just on hold while you’re doing something else. If that were the case it would not be on any burner. It would be in the fridge, or possibly in th trash can, depending on how bad you messed it up.
In this exercise, you’re not putting your work in the fridge and certainly not in the trash can. You just move it to another burner where you will pay very little attention to it, while you devote the lion’s share of your creative energy to something else.
What else? Well, what matters most is it’s something else and it matters less what. That said, after giving this topic a lot of consideration, if you can deduce the reason why you’re having trouble with your problem project, that might give you a clue to what else you might work on. For instance:
If you’re having trouble focusing on your project because you’re bored, attack something really challenging instead. A simple, easy project might be exactly what you want to focus on when you finish working on the more complicated or challenging thing.
If you’re stuck in the middle of something long, take a break from it and write something short. Completing a project—even a simple, small one—provides confidence and momentum.
If you’re having trouble moving forward on a manuscript that’s too complicated or feels intimidating, conversely, try working on something simpler. If you’re exhausted from trying to juggle three intertwining plotlines, put it on the back burner and write a personal essay, memoir-style.
You might be surprised what a new project can shake loose.
Another strategy I have found is to try something completely else that works a different part of your brain. So, like, if I’m having trouble with writing, which is an entirely self-guided activity that requires me to conjure text from nothing, I might go work on sewing something. When I sew, I’m still doing a creative project but instead of having to make everything up, I have to closely follow instructions and devote a lot of attention to measurement and precision. That gives the creative-word-generating part of my brain a break to work on the writing problem. Sewing frustrating me? Maybe I’ll go paint my nails. That requires a completely different type of attention and precision. Maybe I’ll go do the dishes. Maybe I’ll go take a nap. Your brain works on problems while you sleep. It’s called dreaming.
When you do something creative, you build your creating skills and you build confidence in your ability to create things. When you’ve created one thing, it can feel easier to create another thing of the same type again—you know you can create one, because you’ve successfully done it before.
Actively working on writing is not the only way to improve at writing. You can passively work on your writing skills while your own writing is on the back burner by:
Writing a different type of content.
Reading (or otherwise absorbing narrative content like TV or a movie).
Practicing another creative skill.
Talking about craft with other people.
Most of us can’t maintain the same priorities in life day in and day out, forever. Yes, we all need to eat, sleep, bathe, and be around our loved ones but sometimes creative production will be a priority and sometimes it will be less of a priority behind work, or sometimes you have to focus on your health, or whatever. That’s normal and also fine. Don’t sweat it. Just put your creative work on the back burner so it can keep cooking while you do other stuff.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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