My therapist has been talking about “learning history” recently. Your learning history is just what experience has taught you, how it has shaped your subconscious beliefs. This includes emotions that habitually come up in certain situations. If your learning history with writing is I always fail and it’s always painful, your brain will expect pain so confidently that it will produce that pain in advance. You’ll have barely started writing before you’re like “this is horrible and I never want to do it again.” You have learned to feel bad every time you write - maybe even every time you think about writing. Writing literally triggers you.
To unlearn that learning history, you need new experiences that don’t tell the same story as the old ones. If you feel the same crippling pain every time you write, stop doing it the way you’re doing it. Following the same pattern just reinforces your habitual thoughts and feelings around writing and makes it hurt more.
It would be banal of me to say you’ve got to “make writing fun again.” If you knew how, you would. What I recommend, for writers in rehab, is to make it not matter quite so much. Remove the high stakes.
Usually, the stakes we place on writing aren’t realistic anyway. You will not solve all your problems and become a better, happier person by writing well. If you were more “talented,” you would not be any less lonely or depressed. Getting better at writing (or finishing a novel or whatever your goal is) will not transform your life. (Those were my unacknowledged beliefs about writing, anyway. I don’t know what yours are.)
So let go of all that. Everything we write is just marks in the sand.
One of my secret beliefs about writing, for a long time, was that it required a lot of thinking. I would think so hard about a story before putting down a single word that I could literally feel my head twist inside. Through this repeated experience, I taught myself that good writing (at least for me, a person with no “natural talent”) required incredible mental strain.
This just isn’t true. Sure, writing requires thinking, but it needn’t be strained thought. One is always thinking, and if one turns on the spigot and lets those thoughts run out onto the page, one will get something interesting sooner or later.
But regardless of the goal - whether I was looking for something “interesting” or not - I had to give myself the experience of not thinking while I wrote, to unprogram my learning history that said “writing always means tying your brain in knots.”
If writing hurts, think about your current writing regime. What do you do first? Whatever that is, do the opposite.
Do you open an empty document and stare at it for a while? Well, your job now is to write anything, literally anything, that comes to mind. You will grab whatever words are floating on the surface of your awareness and put them down.
This isn’t your new rule for writing forever. You’re simply giving yourself new experiences that don’t repeat the same messages of the old ones. You are reshaping your emotional response to the situation of writing.
(Also, it will warm you up and relax you and clear the pipes, which is a good way to start any writing session.)
Do you start stories by planning them out like a military campaign and then never actually write them? Your job is to write something - anything - with no plan. Take, I dunno, five minutes to come up with a premise for a scene, and then jump in. Just babble like a six-year-old making up a story.
Again, you don’t have to do this forever. You just need to experience writing differently for a while.
Some people have the opposite issue - they write in a rush of ideas and excitement, then reread the story, see a mess that would take a herculean effort to revise, and abandon it. Now, I actually think this is good - you don’t need to alter your approach to drafting, but to revising.
Here’s your job: reread your draft, but don’t look for what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed. Instead, look for bits and pieces - phrases, ideas, moments of characterization - that you like. Collect them in a document and put the rest of the story away. Now take a step back and draw up a rough plan for a story that could include these bits and pieces. In other words, use your rushed-out story as a petrie dish to grow ideas for a new, more carefully constructed story. (This is a tried-and-true method of drafting for many well-known writers, by the way.)
The main thing is: identify what you always do. The next time, do something different. Anything. Give yourself a different experience.
