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Monday, January 12, 2004Flaherty believes ''there are perhaps only two types of writer's block, high energy and low energy.'' The low-energy type may be a symptom of treatable depression, which ''afflicts writers at a rate 8 to 10 times higher than the general population.'' High-energy block comes from an excess of anxiety, thereby demonstrating something called the Yerkes-Dodson law, which Flaherty describes as ''venerable,'' although it was a small revelation to me. In a 1908 study, Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, who were doing research in comparative psychology at Harvard, found that ''both very low and very high levels of arousal interfere with performance.'' In other words, too much motivation, as well as too little, can trigger writer's block, and this explains why ''the bigger the project, the bigger the block.'' Coleridge may be the most famous example of this syndrome; he produced pages of essays, correspondence and journalism -- to the point of hypergraphia, in fact -- but when it came to the form that mattered most to him, poetry, he had a tendency to choke The author suggests imagining another project that's even more important than whatever it is you're currently working on to overcome a block. That way, you can use your real work to procrastinate from doing the imagined work. Or you could write a book about procrastinating. One like Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books . posted by Sydney on 1/12/2004 07:42:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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