Invite Your Writing Demons in for Tea
Four writing myths bedeviling your writing progress, and one strategy to dispel them
“Writing myths manifest as muffled feelings we can’t quite overcome. We ignore them, hide from them, and try to bully them into leaving us alone. But as long as the myths that feed our feelings remain etched in stone, we stay stuck.”
— Joli Jensen, in Write No Matter What
In the Tibetan tradition, there is a Buddhist story about a great cave-dwelling monk named Milarepa that illustrates how we must first engage with the inner forces bedeviling us before we can confront the challenges we face in life.
When Milarepa returns to his cave after a day of gathering firewood, he soon discovers his cave is infested with demons. He’s trapped with them. At first, he tries to force them out with sheer willpower, but to no avail. The demons continue swirling about, wreaking havoc in the cave. He quickly realizes the more he chases them around to get them out, the more they appear to dig in.
Next, Milarepa attempts to teach them the dharma. But this fails too. The demons have no interest in his scholarly teachings.
Finally, at his wit's end, Milarepa decides to let go of his resistance and open his mind and heart to curiosity: what do these demons want from me anyway? Could it be they have something to teach me? With this new mindset of compassionate curiosity, he offers an official invitation to the demons to come sit with him to discuss their grievances over a cup of tea. But as soon as he offers the invitation, they vanish.
Four Bedeviling Writing Myths
There are lessons from this ancient story of Milarepa and the demons we might apply to many aspects of our lives. But when it comes to writing, the point is this: rather than trying to resist the psychological demons that bedevil our writing projects, if we find the curiosity to communicate with them ––and learn from them–– their power over us will diminish and maybe even vanish.
Through much of grad school, I struggled with writing, especially in the final years of writing my doctoral thesis. One of the main reasons for this struggle, I later discovered, is that I was holding on to several unhelpful beliefs about the writing process, and what made a successful writer.
These beliefs about successful writing and writers weren’t just peculiar to me, I learned in conversations about writing with my colleagues. They seem to be so deeply held among most writers, so taken for granted, that they have risen to the level of ‘writing myths’: the widespread persistence of mistaken beliefs about writing and their transmission from writer to writer.
In one of my favorite books about the academic writing process, Write no Matter What: Advice for Academics, author Joli Jensen describes four of these myths. Like Milarepa’s demons, these four myths persistently haunt writer’s psyches around the world:
- The Magnum Opus Myth: “My writing project has to be an influential masterpiece, or else I’m a failure”
- The Hostile Reader Myth: This myth goes two ways — unrealistic hopes people will swoon over my writing and unrealistic fears they will attack and criticize it.
- The Imposter Myth: “So far, I’ve somehow fooled everyone into thinking I can write. But this is the writing project that will reveal to everyone I’m really unqualified.”
- The Compared-to-X Myth: When our writing becomes tangled up with constantly measuring ourselves against the amazing finished products of a few select others we admire.
Taken together, these four bedeviling myths set loose a horde of psychological demons determined to frustrate us and make us feel worthless as a writer.
Many writers, unfortunately, allow these demons to run amok in their minds to the detriment of their writing practice and overall well-being. The effect is debilitating yet predictable: stalled progress, which in turn induces overwhelming dread about engaging with one’s writing project, accompanied by feelings of self-hate.
Most writers I know confront these myths in one of two ways (but often both). On the one hand, we might self-impose ourselves under a strict regime of forced writing: “I just need to lock myself in my office/room, force myself to sit at my desk, and write.” On the other hand, we view our lack of progress as a sign that we’re just not up to the task: “I’m not good enough.” “I’m too lazy.” “I’m so undisciplined.” Taken together, for many academics I know, writing projects come to feel like albatrosses, involving a mixture of punitive measures to force oneself to write, sprinkled with harsh self-judgment for good measure.
Invite your writing demons in for tea
Instead of resorting to self-critical pep-talks, try this: when progress on a writing project you are deeply invested in comes to a halt, invite your demons in for tea.
In other words, listen to what you’re telling yourself in those moments: try to identify the myths informing the negative self-talk about your lack of progress. Don’t be judgemental of the beliefs you discover. Simply notice their presence. As Joli Jensen suggests, ask yourself what beliefs about your writing you are taking for granted:
“Is that belief really true? If it is, and it is painful, then what can you do to support yourself? If it is not, what is more accurate, and therefore more reasonable, to believe?”
The story of Milarepa is really a story of self-discovery involving several stages of inner transformation: first, we attempt to chase our demons out through hostile confrontation. Then we attempt to get rid of them by reasoning with them. But this stage is still infused with “a subtle fix-it energy,” writes psychologist and Buddhist teacher Aura Glaser: “The indirect manipulation looks like a greater acceptance and accommodation, but it is still rooted in the rejection of experience. We are still bent on avoiding and getting rid of what we don’t like.”
If we don’t properly identify the writing myths bedeviling us, we can end up making quite a bit room for self-deception and harsh self-judgment. At the same time, if we try to resist these myths, we risk wasting enormous amounts of energy trying to escape from unwelcome thoughts and emotions that ultimately originate in the unexamined writing myths we adhere to.
In my own experience, these early stages can be extremely self-critical and debilitating. In resisting these writing demons, I discover that they’re pretty good at resisting me too: resistance mobilizes resistance. Instead, by ‘inviting your demons in for tea,’ the aim is to give them a good hearing, and see what they might have to teach you.
Create a ‘Ventilation File’
To avoid this spiral of self-doubt and resistance, and get on with our writing projects in a healthy and productive way, I propose a more proactive than reactive approach to dealing with your writing demons.
There are many ways to ‘invite your demons in for tea,’ as Joli Jensen shows in her book, but one I’ve found useful is what she calls a ‘ventilation file,’ a demon-inviting strategy she’s taken from David Sternberg’s classic, How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation. As Jensen writes,
The great thing about the ventilation file is that it acknowledges and incorporates my resistance to writing into the project itself. Rather than trying to hide from or ignore or overcome my writing issues, I can engage them directly via the ventilation file. For my fifteen minutes of project-writing a day, I get to explore why I don’t want to be doing it at all.
I get to write about how boring and wrongheaded and pointless the project is, or I feel, or my life seems. After fifteen minutes of free, unexpurgated expression of whatever is coming up, I can get on with my day. I’ve “done my time” and am off the hook. I will revisit the project box tomorrow, and maybe I will feel a little better then.
The main point of using a strategy like the ventilation file is to lower the stakes of your writing project, in order to give you frequent, low-stress, and enjoyable contact with your writing project.
In this way, writing strategies to invite your demons in for tea, like the ventilation file, are meant to serve you like a rope serves a climber: allowing you to continually stay in contact with the immense, steep rock face of your writing project while making steady, low-stakes progress up and up.
“Without that rope of connection,” Aura Glaser says, “we can free-fall into self-blame and self-hatred and actually intensify the existing wound.”
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