Combatting the Formless Dread
The Formless Dread reminds me in form of The Dark by Robert Munsch. Like the Dark, the Formless Dread tumbles out of a cookie jar one day and progressively grows until your knees are buckling under its weight.
No, come back—this post is gonna be fun! It’s gonna be fun, I promise.
Last month I talked about the kind of writer’s block where, in the words of Joseph Fink, “the work is hard to do”—the way it can be in many jobs when we are stressed, sick, tired, grieving, or when we’re psychologically or intellectually stuck, or specifically in the case of writing when our skills aren’t quite where they need to be.
But then there is type of writer’s block that is like the Formless Dread, where the drive for creativity has died and there is a desert where it used to be. Something insidious is going on in our heads or in our lives. The Formless Dread might be interpreted as a cutesy name for mental illness or mental strain, or just plain burnout. It’s not just that the work is hard—it’s that, for one reason or another, we cannot do it. If The Work Is Hard writer’s block is that the car doesn’t want to start on a cold day, the Formless Dread is rather that the engine is missing.
(Live footage of someone trying to help you find your work ethic when the problem is that it died. cred. Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh)
To rephrase Formless Dread writer’s block in practical terms, it’s when the cost of doing this work is so high that it’s no longer smart to do it. My personal experience with The Formless Dread happened in what should have been the middle of my Masters degree. For a complex cocktail of reasons, my mental health abruptly dropped out, and over the course of a few weeks I became agoraphobic, developed a notable problem with emesis, and—among other neat cognitive problems—the pathways of my brain’s language centre were suddenly troubled.
To this day, I have no specific idea of what happened. I do know that, several years later, I am still doing periodic masonry to rebuild the collapsed structures of my brain. You know that thing where you’re searching for a word and you just can’t seem to find it? Suddenly that was happening to me once a sentence. It sucked. It was way worse with academics. Writing my thesis was borderline impossible. I would open my document, stare at it, and there would be an absolute blankness where “I know where this is going” used to be. I had no sense of how to build on what I had. What I did have seemed like it was written by a completely different person. I had to look up the definitions of some of the words I had already used. I fully forgot the contents of articles I had cited. I no longer had the mental ability to string the necessary academic syntax together. On the rare occasion I did get some words down, I would read it over much later and discover word substitutions that made no sense. On one memorable occasion, I confused the words ‘microwave’ and ‘hand.’
Long story short, what should have been a two-year degree took me five years. Every time I opened my thesis document, the Formless Dread draped itself over me so severely that it was a matter of health that I didn’t work on it. The Formless Dread convinces you—falsely—that thriving with this project is necessary to your existence, and then turns into guilt and weighs so heavy on you that your knees buckle. It’s not that it wants you to collapse, exactly, but it is creating the effect. Naturally it does this while completely abstaining itself from responsibility for your sorry state. The Formless Dread is a bastard, and it doesn’t know you, but it does level a convincing argument for giving up on this particular project.
Look—I hate to say it, but it is possible the Formless Dread has a point. If you are burned out, it is not correct to work through it. Sitting down and forcing yourself to work is the opposite of treatment for burnout. If possible, it is best to stop working on the project altogether and do anything you can to refresh yourself.
In the case of my thesis, I struck something of a middle ground. I rebuilt my language skills basically by writing and reading as much as possible—but it was all for fun. I didn’t have less of a broken brain while writing for fun; it just didn’t matter. I still struggled for words and spent a long time feeling foggy and lost, but the exercise of writing bullshit was available to me because there were no consequences at all to fucking up. I owed this work to no one. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. Coherence was not important. Practice was. The point was to make mastery of writing available to me again—to rebuild skills I had lost—and then figure my thesis out.
Whatever bullshit I spent those years spewing up eventually pulled enough weight that I passed my thesis with no typo revisions at all. That makes this edition of OUT OF CHARACTER brought to you by hundreds of thousands of words about falling in love in outer space. We do love a happy ending.
I’m not saying you should take five years to write your thesis. In fact—from the bottom of my heart—don’t. That happened to be how long it took me to finish the product to a degree I was satisfied with. Through that lens, considering nothing so pedestrian as “finances” and “professional prospects,” it took the right amount of time.
If you’re experiencing the Formless Dread—I am sorry. You have my complete sympathy. The two possible results are that you either finish this particular project, or you won’t. Please try to remember that, often, either outcome is value neutral.
For any number of reasons, you may strongly prefer to finish it. To help your odds of this:
Consider what kind of writer’s block you have.
Consider how externally important it is that this project is finished.
Become okay with letting go.
If this is the kind of project that must be finished, be incredibly patient with yourself and incredibly, if gently, persistent with the work.
1) WHAT KIND OF WRITER’S BLOCK DO YOU HAVE?
If your writer’s block goes away after you’ve stared at your project for thirty minutes, stare at it for thirty minutes. It might feel agonizing, but it may do less psychic damage than not making progress. Read this post on when The Work Is Hard and go forth.
If your mind is a desert—if your skills aren’t up to snuff, you’re out of ideas and inspiration, you’re burned out, or your brain is just broken—consider:
2) MUST YOU FINISH THIS PROJECT?
Do you have a book deadline? Do you have a thesis defense? Is someone at work expecting a deliverable? These are compelling reasons to force the issue. “I must finish it for some personal, arbitrary measure of my worth” is not a compelling reason to force the issue. You are cultivating the environment for the Formless Dread to thrive. As the Dark eats shadows, so the Formless Dread feeds off your decaying sense of self-worth. You owe it to yourself to do whatever is necessary to break this cycle.
If you are not able to come up with an external impetus to finishing your project, my advice to you is to take a break. If this project is worth finishing, time will help to foster positive feelings about it or provide you with the context needed to determine if this is the right project for you. You don’t have to hit your head against the wall—so don’t. Either you will be able to work on this again or the project will die, and either way you will survive.
But don’t completely forget about it, either. Keeping it in your mind, even just opening it to look at it now and again, may help you figure out your block with it over time.
3) LET GO
I do not believe there is any shame in sending a project to the graveyard. It may sometimes be healthy to do so. I recently abandoned a novel at the 40k mark because I was not yet ready to write some parts, and would never be ready to write others. I stared at the void and the void stared back and then started encroaching on my personal space, so I cut that shit out entirely. This freed me to write other, often better things.
If you need to grieve your project, that’s understandable. Part of me was in that book, and now it’s trapped forever in limbo. Take time off to feel your feelings. Write some weird shit, write something that has nothing to do with the floundering project, see how it feels. It may be you were only blocked on that one thing. Remembering how to have fun with craft is one thing that makes it a hell of a lot easier to sit down and slog through the parts that suck.
4) FINISH, IF APPLICABLE
If you’re blocked now, it’s not necessarily true that you’ll be blocked forever. The time you’re taking “off” from the project doesn’t mean you’re being idle. You may be building the skills necessary to come back and finish it. You may be working your brain differently, or gaining inspiration from other media, or developing your ideas.
If the cost of working on your project feels too high, treat it as burnout and take as much time off from it as you can. Treat yourself with absolute kindness. You are more than your work. It is possible to grow and progress your art and skills without working on that particular project right now. Read. Write weird, nonsense, inconsequential bullshit with no expectations on yourself. Watch any movie. Play any game. Read a book on story structure. Take a walk. Read up on birds’ linguistic intelligence. Take a nap. Write any words at all for ten minutes, even if the words are “fuck you let me write” over and over. Make something nice for dinner. Take up crochet. You’re doing fine.
My one piece of advice when it comes to eventually finishing is: keep checking in with it. Check in with no particular expectation. Just read over what you have and re-familiarize yourself with the details of what you have. If all you do is open the document and read it over even in part, this is enough to keep it alive.
You will likely have to carry the Formless Dread until it doesn’t weigh so heavily on you anymore. Acknowledging it’s there is the first step. Either you will finish your project, or you will not. This is value neutral. Every day is new. The Earth still turns; cats are soft; most food is delicious; there is probably something entertaining on TV. You are not alone. It is horrifically common among creatives to feel like you’re the King of Trash reporting from Garbage Mountain, and it may also suck to remember there are likely a hundred Kings of Trash in your area, but that does make it easier to find another King of Trash to commiserate with.
In summation, when grappling with the Formless Dread, remember that being stuck now does not reflect on your ability to write everything or for all time. Your project will still be there on a day it doesn’t tear you up to look at it. It in no way constitutes a personal fail state that you can’t work on it today. There are a million ways to build. It can only strengthen your skills to find a different one.
I would say at this juncture, as is customary, “Let’s put something on the page”—but maybe it’s better to take a day off and go for a walk. Have a popsicle. Read a cowboy romance. Read some Robert Munsch. You’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER; let’s try for a healthy relationship with what’s on the page.