Tell Your Freeze Factor to F Right Off

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 When all you know is fight or flight, red flags and butterflies all feel the same. 
- Cindy Cherie
 
When you are in freeze mode, even the reddest flags and most beautiful butterflies seem unoriginal, trite, meh.
-Oona Cava
 

 
I hear writers complain all the time that they are bored by their own writing. Some version of, “I don’t think it’s worth revising,” or, “I feel like none of my ideas are going anywhere,” are the most common but there are many other ways to say that you find your own output boring.
 
On the spectrum of blocked creativity, this one is nowhere near as severe as not being able to write. We ARE writing, we aren’t taking much pleasure in it, or it seemed okay while we were doing it but reading it back, it feels ‘meh.’
 
Sometimes we turn to books on writing, hoping to find a new approach that will shake things up, get us past the boredom. Other times (maybe most of the time) we abandon the project and start something new. Hence the drawer full of half-written-in notebooks, or the unfinished stories filed away on our desktops, often tagged with something like, “Ideas,” “Someday/Maybe,” etc. So we tuck that draft away and start something that holds more promise, trying not to think about how many drafts started in the same promising way. This is the serial monogamy of writing.
 
What is happening here and how do we break out of the boring cycle? I have a theory. Humans have retained their ancient response to unknown threats, in spite of the lack of actual immediate danger in our modern world. We experience a stress response to things that are new, even when they are neutral or even good opportunities. If this sounds familiar, yes, I’m talking about the Fight/Flight/Freeze response. There is a great treatise/book/pamphlet thingy called The Flinch written by Julian Smith that links this response (which he calls the flinch) to anything that we find unique. Instead of approaching new things logically, our ancient response is to get stressed about them. Knowing this, you can develop a new approach to anything that makes you flinch, building resilience.
 
How does this relate to being bored by your writing? Well, I suspect that boredom is the creative equivalent to the Freeze component of Fight/Flight/Freeze. The Fight response might be getting incredibly defensive when receiving feedback; Flight would be the classic case of writer’s block, where all your ideas seem to vanish and there is nothing to write and Freeze would be the in-between: you aren’t running away and you aren’t attacking. Instead, you are just…meh.
 
Some examples of Freeze behaviors include feeling like you’re writing the same story over and over again, lacking fresh ideas, working your way veeeeerrrrrry slowly, stopping to research everything, re-outlining, spending more time on your spreadsheets than you do on drafting, justifying not going back to your work in progress because life is busy, or hard, or your head is not in it now, but you are sure it soon will be…and wow, a whole summer has gone by but when NaNoWriMo rolls around it will be the perfect time to restart….
 
Now for the good news: if you have experienced any of these, welcome to the club! I’m a world-class Freeze writer myself. It’s my go-to stress response. If you are too, here is what to do:
 
1.Recognize that you are in Freeze-Factor mode.

2.Commit (or re-commit) to your quantifiable goal. You will write through the boredom until you hit your word count, your page count, or until that timer goes off. You are not committing to quality here, not to amazing feats of storytelling. You are committing to finishing what you’ve started, no ifs, ands, or buts.

3.Turn to your . Put at least one item from your personal Id List into every writing session, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense while you are doing it. Now is not the time for making sense. Now is the time to escape the Freeze. There is plenty of time to fix things later when you edit.

4.If this is a project that will take multiple writing sessions to complete, borrow from Hemingway and always leave off for the day knowing how you will start the next session. Stop mid-sentence. Leave yourself a list of three next things you will write. Make these small, clear, easy & above all, not too general or ambitious. For example, don’t leave yourself a note saying, Tomorrow: write a scene that shows how amazing Liza is, do world-building for the planet, and build suspense about the murder. These are projects, not tasks, to borrow from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Instead, do this: Write scene where Liza shares her oxygen supply with Patrick, even though he broke her heart; name the planet where they will land (something evoking water – look up Latin names of marine life in Southeast Asia for ideas), and have Patrick discover an empty oxygen tank stowed in the ship’s recycler unit.

5.To borrow from Tim Gunn of Project Runway fame, Make It Work! I read Gunn’s story about the genesis of his catch-phrase whenever I am tempted to discard unfinished projects:

     “I found quickly that there is an inclination to abandon a project that's not going well," he explained to The Commonwealth Club of California. Gunn would encourage students to start over ... until he came to a realization. "I then thought I'm doing my students a disservice," he said. "This 'abandoning of a problem at hand' is not good for them. If they sit with it, offer up a diagnosis of what's going wrong, and then figure out a prescription for how to make it work, they have a whole new set of resources to go into their problem-solving arsenal. (From https://www.thelist.com/203955/the-untold-truth-of-tim-gunn/)

6. Do not edit or re-read your work until you have finished the project. Even if this means there will be holes, promise yourself that you will find and fix them later. There will always be holes. That is what editing is for.
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7. Give yourself full credit for completing your commitment rather than the quality of the results. Over time, you will use compartmentalizing to your advantage. To put it another way, you are never going to silence your Monkey Mind, but you can get really good at putting it in time-out while you get on with your work.
 
I can’t promise you that this process will make you feel any better about your writing. I won’t promise that following my advice will make the process feel more magical, or even more enjoyable. The thing is, if you are writing for the hit, start something new every day, don’t worry about finishing, don’t worry about anything. Just chase the hit. But if you are writing to create a body of work, to get raw content down so that you can shape it into something wonderful, you will need to find a way to deal with your Freeze response.
 
And one last thing--and this one might be a pretty big letdown: You can’t get rid of your F-Factors. They are physiologic responses to what you perceive as unknown. You can’t change this any more than you can make exercise not hurt. But you CAN build up your tolerance, change the volume of that voice urging you to walk away, to pick up a shiny new penny. The more you ignore the voice instead of silencing it, the easier it is to get your work done. The Freeze Factor will try and trick you with new excuses that seem perfectly reasonable, but with every project you finish, you get better at recognizing it in all of its disguises, and, well, making it work.