On Worry

Friend or Foe?

I’m really loving the comments you all are posting. The honesty and positivity and generosity in there is, I feel, making this Story Club experience something unusual and special. THANK YOU.

One common theme I’ve noticed in the comments (and in my own mind) is that…writers worry. We worry about everything. We feel we’re imposters, that we’re not doing it right, that we’re doing it for the wrong reasons, with a tainted mindset. Noting that our worry is paralyzing us, we worry about that. We have trouble starting and, once we do get started, our faith falters and we are convinced that we have embarked on a flawed mission, with inadequate tools.

And (echoes of Morse) that worries us.

So, I thought I’d talk a little about worry today.

Let me start by saying that worry is not all bad. “Worry,” with a slight turn of the dial, becomes…"concern.” “Dedication.” “A wish to do the thing beautifully.” An artist who doesn’t worry is…well, I don’t love this word, but I’d say that’s one feature of being a hack: the hack has stopped worrying long ago and is now just very confidently phoning it in, always in the same old way. (The hack has become an expert, to his detriment.)

Worry, really, is evidence of love. We worry because we love writing and dream of being in the lineage of beloved writers, and this makes a pressure inside of us. What if we fail? What if we, you know, let the form down?

We worry because we care.

But worry, as we all know, can cause artistic paralysis. (We worry so much about if we’re going to do it right that we never get started.) Worry can undercut our energy.  (The thought “I am probably approaching this in the wrong way” can make us tentative and cause the resulting work to be less intense, indecisive.)

We worry in the middle of a story because…it’s not what we’d hoped. Or it doesn’t sound “like us.” Or we can feel that it is falling short of the stories we love.

Sometimes worry can be a procrastination tactic. (“I can’t start until I have determined that the method that I am going to use is valid and have had that method vetted by someone and am therefore sure that the result will be wonderful.”)

But…there’s literally no one who can vet our method. Only the reader, ultimately, and she vets it by agreeing to continue to read us.

So worry can be a form of over-controlling the process, which means we don’t trust the process. Seen this way, it’s a form of backseat driving. We don’t trust our intuition, so are always bossing it around with concepts and precepts.

In some cases, we’re so worried that we get stuck in the driveway, endlessly pre-instructing the subconscious. Or (this metaphor is getting overloaded, but) we let the subconscious pull out of the driveway but are giving it so much instruction that it actually, riven with self-awareness, becomes a less thrilling driver.

Here’s a trick I’ve found useful in my writing: when something is bothering me, I do my best to turn directly to it and admit it.

Say I’m feeling some unease about a story.  I imagine turning to it and saying. “Hey, it’s me, George.  Can you tell me what’s bothering us here?”  And usually, the story knows.  “My ending stinks,” it might say.  Or: that beat right there is fake as hell. And then there’s a feeling of relief – the relief that comes with honesty.

At least now I know what I have to work on.

And if I push a little further (just lightly turning my mind in that direction) the story will sometimes tell me a little more about what’s wrong with it - not in words, but in the form of a feeling in my gut.

Or sometimes, something even weirder happens.

I was working on a story called “Bohemians” and really liked what I had done so far, but then I got stuck. If you have a copy of In Persuasion Nation handy, I can tell you exactly where I got stuck: page 185, the fifth full paragraph (the one that begins, “So Mrs. H. told us again how she’d stood rapt in her yard…”) This would be the ninth paragraph in version linked to above, which ran in The New Yorker in 2004.

(Spoiler alert - I give some stuff about the story away below.)

Something about that paragraph bothered me every time I read it. So I’d cut it. But then the story would sort of unravel for me, and I’d have no idea what to do next.

Finally, I did what I describe above: I turned to the story and asked, very frankly, a bit desperately, what was wrong with it. It told me: “That paragraph is weird. It seems fake - like you tried to do Isaac Babel and dropped that bad imitation into the story. It’s out of tone with what came before it. Also, that incident seems unlikely, if not impossible.” To which I replied, “Yes, true: I sound, in that paragraph, full of shit.”

And then, literally in an instant, the light went on: I wasn’t full of shit. She was. Mrs. H. was full of shit. She was lying about having been in the Holocaust.

And the story pretty much wrote itself from that point, because suddenly it was running around out in the sunny, expansive yard of honesty, and of course it knew what to do out there (because it had been trying to do that all along).

Another case where the writer’s subconscious was smarter than the writer himself.

So, worry (if we will, as we used to say in the 1970s) “cop to it,” can guide us. When we “worry” we are often really just “being realistic about the prospects” or “admitting to the specific difficulties we are experiencing.”

Another example: before I started working on my novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, I had many worries, but the big one was having to write about Lincoln. We all know him so well. He’s in South Park, in car commercials - what could I say that hadn’t been said? I was worried about being corny. I was worried about being sentimental. I was worried that all of my readers who like my dark edginess would go, “Oh, wow, Saunders has gone soft.” And so on.

But then I remembered an exchange I’d once had with the legendary movie producer Stuart Cornfeld (may he rest in peace), who was working, at that time, with Ben Stiller’s company, Red Hour Films.

I was writing a script with, in it, a kitchen scene between a husband and a wife. And I was…worried. I said to Stuart, “Well, I have a draft written but I’m worried that if we shoot it the wrong way, it will be banal.”

There was a pause and then Stuart said, “Well, how about we don’t shoot it that way?”

This is a profound notion: if we turn to our fears with all our creative energy, there is less chance they will come true. That is: worry can be a form of esthetic preparation.  Say we’re about to cross the prairie in a wagon.  Someone says, “Jedidiah, I’m worried. About water.”  Well, right, exactly, good point, Slim – we should be worried about water. We’re about to cross the dang prairie. And once we’ve admitted this, the worry can get converted into action.  (We load in extra water, or pack a drilling rig, or change our route, or whatever).

So: we admit a fear (and that feels good, and honest) and then resolve to face that fear. Facing that fear is exactly equal to craft. And this then clears the way for some specific, technical work.  Our worry is no longer psychological or abstract – we have to figure out how not to run out of water (or fix the ending, or speed things up on page 9, or whatever).

And, as an added bonus, we no longer have that “I’m a fraud” feeling that comes with denial. Instead, we’re like…(the metaphors are just flying out of me today)…a guy with a flat tire in the Mojave. He might deny it for awhile (“Oh, this cannot be happening) but he can’t deny it forever. The minute he faces up to it (“And yet it is happening. O.k., fine,”) he starts to solve it.

So, re. Lincoln, I said to myself something like, “Look, all of those worries about messing up the writing of Lincoln are valid. The answer: take those concerns into account every time you sit down to write. Be continually aware of those dangers.” (“How about you don’t write it that (bad) way?”)

Somehow here I feel inclined to invoke the old joke:

A guy goes into his doctor.

“Doctor,” he says. “It hurts when I do this.”

“Don’t do that,” says the doctor.

In other words: worry can be a form of craft.  It tells us what not to do.

If you are worrying that your ending is bad, or your prose is too slow, accept that diagnosis and then…don’t do that. That is: don’t cling to that ending, or to the current pace of your prose, or...anything. Don’t cling to any of it.

If we know what’s wrong, we can (start to) fix it.

We can.

So we might do a form of this dialogue with ourselves:

“What’s worrying me about this story is {honestly blurt out your answer].”

(And we respond): “O.K., that’s valid, we accept that. What might we do about that? Anything simple, obvious?”

Is there anything, no matter how small, that occurs to you?

Already the solution is that much closer.

For me, the big problem with worry is that, embedded in it is (in my view) an incorrect notion about writing; namely, that the preferred method is to first decide what to write, then write it. (That is, the natural tendency to over-control the process.)

In writing, the most powerful antidote we have for worry is: revision.

Less of this…

…more of this.

Writer’s block happens, my pal David Foster Wallace used to say, as a result of the writer holding unrealistically high standards. Before we start, we see all that could go wrong. We feel that we have to get it right the first time or else (ouch, horrors!) we will have proven ourselves to be Not Good.

Who wouldn’t be nervous?

But if we become comfortable with revision - if we’ve become convinced, through repeated experience, that we can lead one of our own drafts down the road from “crappy” to “better”- then there will be less inclination to pre-worry things.

The mantra becomes, “We’ll figure it out, by trusting the process.” 

For me, revision is a simple process, on the surface: it involves pulling the text up in front of myself (always on paper) and marking it up, per however I am feeling about it in that moment, per my intuition, then putting those changes in and doing that again (rinse, lather, repeat) for as many times as I can bear it (that is, for as long as I feel crisp in my re-reading), usually three or four times a session.

And whenever I have a worry, I think, “You are not going to solve that by thinking about it.  You’re going to solve it by revising. So go live your life, until it’s time to revise.” (And part of this involves trusting that, while you’re cooking dinner or whatever, the subconscious is quietly working.) 

The point is, we are trying to shift our view of writing, from “Being in such an exalted state, and so brilliant, that what I write is wonderful, the very first time” (a real stress-fest, that) to: “I am going to trust that revising a text attentively over a period of time is a way to both lure out and solve all problems, and so what I am doing today while I revise is not load-bearing. I’ll do my best, of course, but this is just one step in a longer process, in which I trust.”

Once I started thinking about it this way, much of my anxiety about writing fell away. (Not all, but much. Well, some.)

If you accept (even partially) this idea that our real power as writers is located in the split-second decisions we make, and in the way these accumulate in a story over many passes through it, then you’ll see that the beauty of a piece of writing doesn’t depend on what we have decided about it in advance, but in the accumulating quality of those split-second decisions (i.e., how in touch we are with our good instincts) and our willingness to go through it again and again.

To me, this is a great relief.

A student once told me this story.

Robert Frost was giving a reading and a grad student stood up and asked a long, worry-laden, technical, academic question about the sonnet.

Frost thought about it a second, then said, “Young man: don’t worry; WORK!”

I love this. It encapsulates everything I’ve learned about writing. Because the revising part of me is smarter than the everyday-thinking part, I can feel, “All I have to do is show up every day and do what feels right. and, even if I am, in fact, messing the story up in that moment, that, too, is part of the long, heroic journey called ‘writing this story.’ Even if I am writing by exactly the wrong method, the process will eventually tell me this. All I have to do is: bring my energy to the process, every day.”

Then, one day after I’d given a talk, a Frost scholar came up - and corrected me.  What Frost had actually said (he said) was, “Young man: don’t work; WORRY!”

Well, there’s truth in this, too. Sometimes, maybe, worrying can be a form of off-the-page revision. That moment described above, when I “solved” my story “Bohemians,” happened when I wasn’t actively working. I was just…worrying. And in the process of worrying, I had a moment of real honesty about what was ailing my story.

This is what makes writing so perplexing and so fascinating. Any concept we have about it will get destroyed. It has to. Art doesn’t run on concepts. The thing is too big to be reduced or phoned-in; it hates the stink of AutoPilot.

So, here’s a thought: “craft” might just consist in cobbling together an approach that allows us efficient access to our sub-conscious mind, i.e., an approach that works for us, and therefore doesn’t need to be justified or defended. If we state one “truth” about writing (“Don’t worry, work”) and then state its opposite (“Don’t work, worry”) our approach is going to consist in some accommodation of those two truths — or, like, a mixing of those two approaches, a turning of the dial to find the right setting for us.

We might imagine someone giving a friend the good advice: “Drive cautiously.” That’s solid advice. But if someone is “driving cautiously” by doing 5 mph on a busy highway - they’re using that advice as a way of avoiding reality.

In the great uncertainty that is Art, we tend to cling to bits of advice and then make the mistake of following them absolutely, like a charm. But that is a way of switching off, of agreeing to be out of touch with our actual text.

So: when someone gives a bit of writing advice (“Don’t worry, WORK,” or “Show don’t tell,” or “Always be escalating”) we should think, “Yes, I’ll try this, to some extent, until it feels wrong. I will remember to always assess that advice per actual conditions, i.e., this particular story, and in light of my particular inclinations and talent.”

What could go wrong?