Truer words were never written

[elfs]

I’ve been reading Keith Johnstone’s brilliant little book, Impro: Improvisation and the Theater, which as you can probably guess is about acting.  But it’s about much more: it’s about creativity, and teaching, and anthropology, and psychoanalysis, and writing dialogue, all in about 150 pages.

Somewhere in the middle of the book he drops this gem:

Writer’s block is never because you cannot come up with an idea.  Writer’s block is when the story that wants to come out is blocked by the part of you anxious that it will be too personal and will reveal the truth: that you, like everyone else, are not quite so sane and secure as you pretend.

Put that on a post-it note and keep it next to your writing desk.  The next time you have writer’s block, feel a little shame that you’re not quite courageous enough to tell the truth.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Yup.

One of the anthologies Satyr & I have planned is going to be a collection of those stories--the ones that are peel-your-skin-off personal and really scary to write.

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

.... Ohhhh, good, because there's nothing wrong with writer's block that a little shame and guilt and anxiety won't fix ....

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yes, well, one should aim for shame at the right things. A writer ought not to be ashamed of writing that he really wanted to bang his buddy Bobby back in ninth grade; rather, he ought to be ashamed of wanting to avoid writing it down.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

I believe the point, my dear, is that if you are already feeling anxiety about revealing personal parts of yourself to the public, turning around and heaping shame on top of yourself for an inability to do so because you are a coward will not help you overcome your anxiety. It will only in fact give you an excuse for why you should not be revealing those parts...because you now have a real focus for that anxiety.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

It's a great book, all the more endearing to me because my son recommended it (forcefully, over many months, until I finally had the free mindspace to read it).

Have you gotten to the maskwork chapter? While the focus was acting-ish, I ended up reading it with an eye on hypnosis (which was a subject-of-persevaration for me from about when I was 10 through somewhere in my late teens) and the therapeutic uses of such work.

Then on Monday I came across this quote, on Twitter: @jurgenwolff: from today's Keith Johnstone workshop: "I sometimes think consciousness is a mild form of stage fright."

Which rather explains how it is that drugs of various kinds, which reduce direct consciousness remove inhibitions.