What is your deadline?
All too often, people do not ask for
help until too late, the day before (or of ) the deadline. Too
bad. I would’ve loved to help them. Question number two:
Do you have a reprint from a scholarly journal about this work?
If
so, start there and go through it sentence by sentence, para-
phrasing each unit of thought in your own words. If you
were sitting in my office, that’s what I’d make you do, the
idea being to find out precisely where your understanding
failed—and surprisingly often, that would be all the help
you needed.
Sometimes people decide that they cannot do something:
understand physics, let us say. Then, when they have to do it,
they can only sit there in agony looking at the pieces of
paper—agonizing but not progressing, because they have so
little hope that they never actually come to grips with the
material. They are deer in the headlights.
Paraphrasing for someone like me helps them learn that
they can figure it out, because I won’t let them off the hook
till they hazard a guess—which is right, mostly, or almost
right. If it’s almost right, we look up each unfamiliar word
until they can produce the paraphrase. Great! And on to the
next. And so we go. It may be only minutes before the penny
drops. “This isn’t so bad! I can do this!”
If you are afraid of your subject, is there someone who
could help you in that way? You may know more and under-
stand better than you think. Puzzled writers are often miss-
ing one or two key concepts, ideas so big that nothing makes
sense without them, but not many in number. Once you lo-
cate the gap in your knowledge, you are almost home.

use of the help.You must not take someone’s time and then
not write the article—you would feel like a jerk, and the
would-be helper might agree. If you will follow through,
however, do not hesitate to ask for help. Every single person
who has ever accomplished anything has had lots of help, es-
pecially in their early years.
Are you working too hard? Many of us learned in school
that writing was somehow special and difficult, requiring an
outline and a great many rules. The outlines used roman nu-
merals
I. for the main idea
II. for the secondary idea, then
III. A.B.C.s and
a. a.b.c., and at each level you had to have
...
was it three?
I no longer remember the details of Mrs. Richardson’s
nuisancy notions—though it’s obvious that program-
mers do, because beginning with that first I., my com-
puter kept providing a roman numeral every time I hit
Return.
b. And now it’s insisting on a.’s and b.’s, which might have
been handy fifty years ago, but now I need to get out
and back to regular text.
c. H-E-L-P!
d. Mrs. Richardson lives on, the soul of a new machine.
e. In Mrs. Richardson’s classroom, all paragraphs were to
begin with a topic sentence.
f. All sentences were to be complete, with both a subject
and a verb.

about the subject closest to your heart, “meaning material
that came to you as a revelation, a bolt of lightning that lit
up the entire internal landscape.” I argued that you were too
close to the material to manipulate it and would likely write
with the tone of some unfortunate person ranting on the
subway—as I did myself, when I tried to write about my
heartfelt topic.Wait, I said. Let it season in the basement of
your mind.With so many wonderful things to write about,
why zero in on the one that will be the very hardest? Or, if
you must write about it, why not wait till your skills are
fully developed?
If you could not bear to wait, however, so be it:Your best
hope is to come up front with your agenda and make an ally
of the reader, as Andrew Solomon did in The Noonday Demon, an
Atlas of Depression. Earning the National Book Award is not so
shabby, right?
Ideas
into
Words
142
Blazing emotional intensity cannot be hidden from read-
ers, because they are smart. They will smell the lie and dis-
trust what you say.Your only hope is not to hide it.
Is it possible you’ve not actually been working? Here I am
remembering the classic story that Bob Armbruster, an editor
friend, used to tell about a freelance writer. This writer had a
story long past deadline but was hopelessly blocked. He
could not write and could not write and could not write
until finally one morning his wife presented him with a
mug and a thermos of coffee. Lunch was on a tray, the an-

you must first get something written.You must begin.
When
You’re
Feeling
Stuck
143
At the other extreme, you can limit your writing time,
which is my present approach, since I no longer go to an of-
fice. I tell myself I am going to write for one hour and then
stop. I set an alarm, and when it rings, I STOP—but only in
theory, because I get engrossed. I don’t want to stop, which
is the intended effect. It works like those marriage coun-
selors who instruct a couple in various ways to stimulate
each other, which they are to practice but under no circum-
stances have sex. Of course, they come back the next week
with sheepish grins . . . It seems to be a fact of human nature:
Not having to do the deed makes it possible to start.
On occasions when the alarm rings and I’m not en-
grossed, I do quit, a welcome relief.Yet the single hour is
enough to keep the project cooking in the back of my mind,
so that in a way I am always writing, even when I might ap-
pear to be out in the yard pulling weeds.While one-hour
stints do not work for research, they do for writing.
On the conceptual level, try this idea: Writing is like base-
ball in that what matters is the batting average, not the indi-
vidual at-bat. Face it: Not everything you write will be great.
In fact, some will be terrible. So what? Forgettable stuff gets
forgotten. What people will remember is your good work.
If you are a baseball fan, you know that home-run slug-
gers have low batting averages. They mostly slice that mighty