How to Get Creatively Unstuck: A Lesson from Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer | Big Think

I think very often when people refer to being stuck, or this is certainly my own experience and I've talked about it enough with friends, some of whom are writers, some of whom are other kinds of artists, some of them do other things with your life.

Often times when people refer to being stuck, they don't mean like creatively blocked; they don't mean that they don't have any good ideas. They mean that they don't have any ideas that they care about; that nothing they're making feels important to them. When you don't care about something, you just don't do a good job with it. Maybe you can for a while. It's possible to fake it for a bit or it's possible to have incentives to do things like I have a deadline or my boss is going to be looking over my shoulder if I don't.

But for most of us, we do our best work when we care about it. So when I teach, if a student will say something to me like, "I really love this but I know it's not going to be a good book," or I actually have a friend who also teaches who was telling me about an experience he had where a student came up to him and said, "I wrote all these notes for this book I want to write, but I find that I never write the book. I just really love working on the notes for the book."

And my friend's advice was, "Well, probably the notes are your book. If that's what you love, and that's what you're drawn to, and your imagination wants to go there, then just let it go there. The worst that can happen is it's a book that will be for nobody but you, but that is actually a much better fate than writing a book that lots of people like that isn't for you."

So when something draws my attention, when something feels important or even just pleasurable to me, I work on it even if it's off the track. Even if I'm already 60 percent of the way into what I thought was the book I was going to write, if I suddenly find that one of the little voices in it is appealing to me more than it ought to, like this person I thought was a side character suddenly elbowing into the middle of the room and just wants to stay there and wants to be the center of attention, I will make that character the center of attention.

Despite it being a very efficient way to work, because I know that I have become unsuccessful, I've become stuck, I've become unhappy when I'm working on something that I know isn't really what I care about. The most successful students I've had, the ones who have published books, are the ones who have actually had to change midway through long projects.

Students who came to class with 300 pages, and we had a discussion not about how those 300 pages could be the best form of themselves, but rather, why are you writing these 300 pages? Are these the 300 pages that best express the thing that makes you a singular writer? You are a writer in this way.

Here's the thing about you that is different than other people. Here are the things about your experience or your voice or your imagination, your fluency, whatever it is. I think each writer has something that makes him or her singular, and I try to guide the feedback toward repeated examinations of the question, what makes you singular, not how can I make this sentence as good as it could possibly be.

With the case of these very successful students, we had difficult classes where the answer was, maybe it's not. Maybe there's something else that will better express your singular quality. And sometimes those are very, very difficult classes because it can feel, one can get sort of swept up in the what is lost like in the moment.

Like, I've been working for six months on this; I've been working for nine months on this, sort of forgetting that one need only write one really good book to have an amazing career as a writer. How many writers have written two great books? Not very many. Three great books, you'd be hard pressed to name more than a couple, so there's plenty of time.

One disadvantage of a writing program is that it creates this kind of like pre-professional attitude. Like, you go to a writing program so that you can get an agent, so that you can get a publisher, so you can be a published writer, so da, da, da, da, da, da, as if there's this long string of cause and effects that you want to be on as quickly as possible.

As opposed to like this extremely long process, which is going to be inefficient and arduous and challenging in any number of ways, but that the goal at the end is not to make any one piece of writing as good as it can be but to make yourself the writer who doesn't stop.