My writing mentor is the brilliant biographer Penelope Niven (Carl Sandburg: A Biography). Over the years, she has shared many pearls of wisdom with me, but one that always comes to mind readily is something her daughter Jennifer Niven, herself a wildly successful author (Velva Jean Learns to Fly) said to her when she was just a little girl. As Penny relates in her memoir Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, when she was forty-four years old, her then fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer taught her how to swim. "There's this mysterious power in the water," Jennifer said. "If you fight it, you sink every time. But if you relax and give in to it, it will support you. You have to trust the power of the water, Mom."
My writer friend Karen McBryde recently turned me onto a great little book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. In it, he lists all the ways we resist pursuing the goals that matter most to us. "Resistance," he writes, "is the most toxic force on the planet... To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be." "Hitler," he goes on to say, "wanted to be an artist... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him... [I]t was easier for him to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."
How can we combat such a powerful force? Master our fears. Learn to trust the mysterious properties of the water that will support us if we will only relax and let them.
Or as Anne Lamott advises in Bird by Bird, turn off "radio KFKD," that station that plays in your head twenty-four hours a day telling you in one speaker how gifted and special you are and in the other what a giant disappointment you've turned out (or will soon turn out) to be.
I often think I have a weird and unique gift for cultivating resistance. At times, I take a perverse kind of pride in it practically, joking with friends that I am destined to pen a book about it, something like Mastering Writer's Block for Dummies: 401 Ways to Sabotage Even Your Most Attainable Dreams. The feeling that everyone is watching me, waiting on me, expecting something magnificent from me shuts me down completely. It's grandiose to think anyone cares what a nobody like me is up to, but there it is staring back at me like an eight-hundred pound gorilla. I don't understand why everyone around me is so cavalier about it. Just do it, they seem to be saying. Plant your butt in the chair and stop your complaining and just get on with it already. Writing is fun, they say. A joy. Something they can't wait to get back to every day. It's the way they reward themselves, blah, blah, blah. The more chipper they sound, the more curmudgeonly and self-deprecating and self-loathing I become until I work myself into a truly dangerous funk. Whatever little confidence I had before that has made the stakes seem so high is now a distant memory.
I agree with Steven Pressfield: resistance is evil. When I'm fearful, I'm mean and I hurt people. Like a scared swimmer, I'll take down even those trying to save me. Lots of functioning fearful writers get by for a time, treading water, but no good ever comes from fear (or its aliases: pride, greed, and jealousy).
But as the wise young Jennifer Niven reminds us, if we take a deep breath and fill our lungs with air, we're unsinkable. If we relax, the water will carry us along a course that flows freely. Trust the power of the water.
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