{"id":2626,"date":"2012-09-21T13:56:29","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T19:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2626"},"modified":"2012-09-21T14:00:37","modified_gmt":"2012-09-21T20:00:37","slug":"the-memoirs-mindhack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2626","title":{"rendered":"The Memoirs Mindhack."},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to take a break for a day or two. My subconscious is telling me it’s tired, in the usual way: It pouts and refuses to produce. Fatigue can cause similar symptoms, which is why I go to bed so early that my friends laugh at me. But I’ve been quite well-rested in the last week or ten days, and yet getting started has sometimes been a struggle.<\/p>\n

Writer’s block is serious business. So I decided to hack myself.<\/p>\n

Half of the struggle against writer’s block is just getting yourself to write something<\/em>. What you’re writing is less important than engaging the gears and backing off on the clutch. This is not news to me or anyone; I heard it from Ted Sturgeon himself, at the Clarion workshop in 1973. His suggestion went so far as to suggest typing a story out of the newspaper, just to be typing something. I’ve tried this a time or two, and it’s not especially effective. (I’ve sometimes wondered if what Ted Sturgeon called “writer’s block” was actually clinical depression.) During my recent months with Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em>, I’ve tried another mindhack against writer’s block, with terrific success: Work on your memoirs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Most people don’t understand what this means. A lot of badly written books about annoying people (culminating in that consummate literary fraud, A Million Little Pieces<\/em>) have turned the public off entirely to the idea of memoirs. Make no mistake: Memoirs don’t have to be published to be useful. They don’t even have to be finished. (I suspect my own may never be.) I’m writing my memoirs as an exercise in remembering, to get the facts and impressions about my life down in written form before the memories decay, as memories clearly do<\/a>. I don’t expect to publish them, though I may allow friends to read them. In a sense, I’m backing myself up to disk.<\/p>\n

What I’ve discovered, almost by accident, is this: After typing a few hundred words of my own story, my subconscious wakes up and stops pouting. I then open Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em> and I’m off at a trot. It works almost every time. It works better than absolutely everything else I’ve ever tried, and having been writing for almost fifty years, I’ve tried a lot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

I have some theories:<\/p>\n