WRITING WHILE INHIBITED - or DITCHING THE SERIOUS WRITER
Where I answer an excellent question from our Office Hours
This Substack is the only thing that keeps my writing going. Do you have any advice on writing second chapters? I find that I'm alright at first chapters, introducing the characters, their wants, the overall tone of the story. But when I start the second chapter, I'm completely lost. I write it, then decide it's not as great as the first chapter, even though I have a rough outline of the plot. And then I think that maybe I have to redo the whole story, and spiral from there. And forget about chapters 3 and beyond. I can't even wrap my mind around that yet.
Allen—
That cannot be easy. I am certain this matter is deeply complex, but given what I have to go on — your question — this sounds to me like a classic case of inhibition. It’s like the old Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon. The Coyote chases the Roadrunner off a cliff into open air, and only when he registers the fact that he is, in fact, walking on air, does he fall.
I might be wrong, but I wonder if for you first chapters function like the Coyote’s first twenty or thirty steps. In your mind these starts are not really writing. You’re just messing around, playing. But something about the second chapter, however, signals the end of play and the beginning of seriousness.
As a serious person will, you take stock, you take your bearings, you look down, and the next thing you know you’re falling.
Not an uncommon problem, something I see in my students all the time: one writes freely when it’s not serious; one writes poorly (or not at all) when it is.
If this is, in fact, the case, Allen — I sympathize. I struggle with a similar type of art-destroying-inhibition.
It didn’t start out that way. When I began writing it was a way to escape many difficult things: my family’s horrific punitive scrutiny; my penniless immigrant circumstances; the country that seemed to despise me without limit and criminalize me without cause; my own depressive ruminations.
In the real world I owned two pairs of pants, wasn’t always fed, lived next to an active landfill, was called every slur you could imagine, often contemplated killing myself, but in my writing …
It might be a cliché but it was also true: in the real world I was chained and detested, but in my writing world I was utterly beautifully free.