How to Get Unstuck: Study

Learn something new, just because.

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When is the last time you approached a task with the unclouded, pure and open mind of an eager child? If you’re like me, you probably can’t recall. In fact, you may have actually been a child the last time you really let yourself jump into something new. And if you were an anxious, shy kid — as I was — this joyful leap may have taken place in the years before your memories began to settle.

You may, in short, have no memory of a time before you were afraid to not be good enough. As adults, getting stuck on a project is certainly not in line with the generally accepted definition of “good enough.” But sometimes it’s quite necessary, and rather than persevere, we must temporarily set it aside in order to do something else.

We get stuck in our work for many reasons, but it’s not usually because we suck at it. In fact, when stuckness arrives, we are generally engaged in an activity at which we are quite adept. The stuckness, then, comes not from lack of talent or skill, but from something else — fatigue, or fear, or fixation on some imagined idea of perfection. We’ve done this before, so we must do it better this time around.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve written five books, four of which have actually been published. I’ve written a handful of scripts for film and television, a few of which have actually garnered me a paycheck. I’ve written a lot of essays and articles, some for free, most for small to moderate sums, a few for pretty good money. I have taught writing in various genres to children, teens, and adults. I am a member of the Writers Guild of America. I am, in short, a writer, and this passion, addiction, and profession is part of my identity.

But identity is a tricky thing, and building one’s persona around what one does can be especially risky for one’s mental health. After all, there may come a time when I cannot type, scribble, or speak my stories into the world. Who am I if not a writer? Who are you if not — well, you’ll fill in the blank for yourself.

I’ve been working on and off for a few years on a pilot script for television. It’s not for money, at least not yet. TV writers sometimes write pilots on spec and then attempt to sell them as shows, or to use them as samples for staffing on other people’s shows.

It’s an hourlong genre concept I like very much: a waitress at a Greek diner in New Jersey discovers she’s inherited terrible powers from a previously unknown ancestor who just happens to be the original Medusa. But cracking it has been, in lofty literary terms, a pain in the fucking ass.

It doesn’t help that I started on the project in earnest in late 2019, right before the pandemic upended all our usual processes and practices when it came to work. Still, I can’t blame the stuckness of it all on the pandemic alone. Plenty of people have written plenty of wonderful things during this time, people with far more and far less experience than I.

It’s also the first pilot I’ve tried to write since I got sober a few years ago. I’ve revised a pilot sober, but revision is a different beast than generating original ideas. I’ve been in a writers room since I got sober, but that show was heavy on jokes and sketches, not on the three-act or five-act or however-you-are-exploding-the-traditional-format structure.

I was trying to write this pilot the way I used to write pilots, and for different reasons — the pandemic, the sobriety, and more — the old way wasn’t working anymore.

So here’s what I did: I beat myself up about it. I complained about it. I prayed about it. I did some weird spells I found on the Internet. I visualized. I meditated. I set deadlines for myself, and asked other people to check on me, and then I didn’t meet the deadlines.

I was stuck.

I felt shitty about it. I put the script aside for awhile.

Then came the thing that actually helped. Without intending to, I enrolled myself in a self-designed art history class. That’s an elaborate way to say that I started listening to audiobooks about visual artists.

I don't draw, or paint, or sculpt, or direct. I have trouble holding pictures in my mind, I can’t read maps, and it’s hard for me to retain the memory of faces unless I see them over and over and over again. For someone with prosopagnosia, the idea of painting objects or faces from memory is truly wild. And yet, some people do it! And they’re good at it! What the fuck?

So last year, I started listening to stories about artists — not because I wanted to become an artist of the painting/sculpting/drawing sort, but because it felt like a nice vacation from trying to build worlds out of stupid fucking words, as if anybody else would ever fucking care. And, entirely by accident, I ended up actually learning about some different artists, their styles, their tools, their fucked up love lives, and the artistic movements of which they were a part.

So many of these people were astonishingly gifted, and deeply weird, and their work habits were idiosyncractic. Learning about them over the course of a year, I started to feel less lonely in my stuckness on something I really cared about. Most of them went through fallow periods, and then resumed painting or sculpting or cutting tiny pieces of paper into tinier pieces of paper and glueing it all together in some sort of collage that ended up changing the world, according to their often-overenthusiastic biographers.

I can’t tell you exactly when or how or why the stories about artists helped reinvigorate my own approach to this pilot, but it did. And I’ve finally knocked out almost an entire first draft. It’s just a first draft, but like I said, revision is a different beast, and one I vastly prefer to the stress of the original creation.

This is all to say that you should pick a subject that feels outside the scope of whatever has you stuck. If you’re upset over a sales pitch you can’t seem to finish, go listen to every episode of a limited podcast series that investigates the cutthroat world of Danish figure skating. If you’re trying to design the perfect jumpsuit for casual parties and it’s got you all fucked up, read a book about the humble chickpea and how it is the reason behind the five most important things that have ever happened in this modern world (this is a popular type of history book that dads in particular seem to enjoy).

Go outside your area of expertise, with gentle hope that it’ll help you somehow and no real expectation that it actually will. See what happens. If nothing else, you’ll learn some weird stories to share with friends instead of just talking about work stress all the damn time.

Of course, you might get so caught up in chickpea studies that you bring every conversation back to hummus, but that’s better than obsessing over that troublesome project, right? Go learn something new, and keep your mind open. Sometimes it’s fun to let other people be good at stuff.

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This essay is part of the How to Get Unstuck series.

The first essay, “How to Get Unstuck: 10 Good Things” can be found here.

The second essay, “How to Get Unstuck: Chore Time!” can be found here.

The third essay, “How to Get Unstuck: Come Back” can be found here.

The fourth essay, “How to Get Unstuck: Your Other Life” can be found here.

The fifth essay, “How to Get Unstuck: Move” can be found here.

The sixth essay, “How to Get Unstuck: Write to You” can be found here.

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