How I Took My Own Advice as a Writing Coach & Escaped the Abyss
Recently, I fell into the abyss.
Not a literal one, thankfully, but it's still pretty dark and cold down there. It's a place my writer friends and I often discuss.
"The abyss is real. It sounds made up, but it’s a real place," one writer pal texted me the other day. Another once said, "Ooo...I think we call that place the Abyss of Terror."
As a writer, it's not always apparent you've fallen into the abyss. You have to learn to pay attention to the symptoms, which might include:
Crippling self doubt.
Certainty that if you by some miracle remember how to write, you must do so perfectly.
Fear of what you don't know—which is most of everything you're about to write.
A sudden need to impress your imagined future readers.
Irrational but copious tears.
The abyss, for me, is a place where uncertainty becomes so scary that it’s conflated with the belief of inevitable failure. Anxiety reigns supreme, and there's little space for creativity. Every effort only seems to confirm my fears; it's a crazy spiral.
The abyss is not specific to professional writers—students experience it, too, often getting stuck before they’ve even started a writing assignment. (I often see this with high school and college application essay writing in particular, when the stakes feel high.)
Half my job as a writing coach of middle and high school kids is to gauge when students experience some version of these fears and uncertainty, and do for them what I was struggling, with this new novel, to do for myself:
I normalize and encourage.
I keep the stakes low.
I use short bursts of time and miniature, manageable assignments.
I ask them about images, and begin with concrete details.
I have them use handwriting to jot down ideas, or bullet points.
I talk through their ideas with them before having them jot them down.
After several days in my own abyss, terrified of any step forward in my new novel, I asked myself what I would tell students if they were feeling so despairing about their abilities—and then I took my own advice.
I picked up an old-fashioned pen and paper, went to a coffeeshop so I’d have the support of other humans around me, and began to write—or scribbled, really. I started with the details, noting images that came to mind, even if I couldn't say why. I let myself go out of order, skipping from idea to idea. The writing was barely legible, but that didn't matter.
I was embracing what I teach students, the key to both creativity and progress: a messy first draft.
Scribbling my way into a new novel that day, I remembered something else I teach students: that not even a bot can create the magic that is full, human, messy self-expression.
Write Well Brooklyn’s 1-1 coaching programs teach students a model of writing that allows them to get unstuck and find their voice. Click the button to explore programs for application essay writing, high school prep, and more.