Word Work: Surviving and Thriving As a Writer

by Bruce Holland Rogers

Combining sympathy with practical advice, this guide enables writers to overcome mental and spiritual battles to get words on a page. Anecdotes from established authors, psychological theory, and hands-on exercises help writers understand and move beyond writer’s block. Topics include preventing procrastination, generating inspiration, staying passionate, targeting long-term happiness, the role of relationships, and dealing with both rejection and success. This sound advice will give any writer, beginner or professional, a road map to greater productivity, confidence, and satisfaction.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

About the author

Sometimes credited as Hanovi Braddock

Bruce Holland Rogers has a home base in Eugene, Oregon, the tie-dye capital of the world, but until July of 2008 he is living in London, England. His fiction is all over the literary map. Some of it is SF, some is fantasy, some is literary. He has written mysteries, experimental fiction, and work that's hard to label.

For six years, Bruce wrote a column about the spiritual and psychological challenges of full-time fiction writing for Speculations magazine. Many of those columns have been collected in a new book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer (an alternate selection of the Writers Digest Book Club). He is a motivational speaker and trains workers and managers in creativity and practical problem solving.

He has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois. Bruce has also taught non-credit courses for the University of Colorado, Carroll College, the University of Wisconsin, and the private Flatiron Fiction Workshop. He makes frequent appearances at writer's conferences. He is currently a member of the permanent faculty at the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program, a low-residency program that stands alone and is not affiliated with a college or university. It is the first and so far only program of its kind.

Reviews

[Timons Esaias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back before the turn of the century, and in the early oughts, I learned a good deal from Bruce Holland Rogers. I attended readings and at least one workshop, and I was sometimes reading his column from which these chapters were drawn. I had a lot to learn, and I found some fine nuggets of information in his column.

When this book came out, I bought it but didn't feel compelled to read it cover-to-cover. I used it for reference, and spot advice. While occasionally I mentioned it to students along with other guides for writers, I think it was only once a strong, specific recommendation.

I've been looking for the writers' guides that were written in this century, as opposed to the stalwarts from the last century, and realized it was time to give this the full look-see. I was surprised to realize that I won't be touting this for most of my students and colleagues, even though there's good advice in here.

I've realized that when I was reading the articles back then, I was skipping a lot. Skimming and cherry-picking. The reason is that my approach to advice is rather different from Bruce's, even though we're often saying much the same thing. I like to give out simple, practical tools that are likely to be useful for most folks right now. These articles are much more like self-help, if not therapy. The subtext (which I'm sure he didn't intend) is that writing is too hard, too defeating, too complicated, and ridden with neuroses.

What I underlined as his basic thematic statement was, "There are whole phalanxes of forces out there conspiring to make us feel miserable when we write."

And there are sections, like Chapter 21, that seem to veer wildly off-topic. Which got me on the verge of giving this a three-star review. (There's even a grimace.)

And that would not at all have been fair. I learned a lot from my cherry-picking of this material back in ancient times, and I would have now if I hadn't already learned most of the bits I agree with. I will suggest not reading it through, but skimming it for juicy parts. That way what feels too molasses-like can be skipped.

I will quote a paragraph from the Introduction, which establishes his positive message:

Someone once asked Charlie Parker if he had religion. "Yes," he said. "I am a devout musician." As for me, I am a devout writer. Writing reminds me that I'm alive and must pay attention to living. The practice of making stories wakes me up to my own experience because wherever I'm stuck or having trouble, the next thing I see, the next person I talk to, the next book I read may contain the answer to my difficulty. Writing is as big as the world, and writing demands that I open wide to let that world in.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This warm, friendly, deeply encouraging book might just be the best book on writing I've ever read, even compared to justly well-regarded classics like Stephen King's On Writing, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write. To be fair, those books offer unique and profound gifts of their own, and are certainly must-reads for any aspiring writer. But as inspiring as they are, they're short on specifics for how to sustain motivation over time. In contrast, Word Work offers plenty of specific, practical advice for navigating the writing life. The result is a book with an authentic voice that is equal parts homespun honesty and elevated wisdom.

Writing books tend to fall in one of two categories: books on technical aspects of writing like plot, character, or sentence construction, and books on the personal aspects of writing like motivation and discipline. Word Work definitely falls into the latter category, though it is less fuzzy in its "inspiration" and more technical in its advice, making it an excellent guide to the writing life.

Just as writing books tend to fall into one of two general categories, so too do writer personalities: the pragmatic, goal-oriented "doers," who take a step-by-step approach and, in the world of fiction, are usually "plotters," and the romantic, intuitive "dreamers," who wait for the muse, look to signs and synchronicities for guidance, and, in the world of fiction, are usually "pantsers." Unusually, Bruce Holland Rogers seems to reside somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. He's equally at home wading into the mystic and wrangling the day-to-day.

For Bruce Holland Rogers, writing is a calling and a way of life. To take up the call to write is to go on a quest into the heart of life and self. This sense of writing being its own reward allows Rogers to remain remarkably neutral on subjects where most people take passionate sides. For example, he examines writing primarily for the sake of money versus writing primarily for the sake of art and acknowledges the advantages of either approach. He agrees that there are times that fast drafting and productivity are essential, while also agreeing that there are projects that need time to stew and mature. He neither tells his readers that they need to become obsessed with productivity and sacrifice everything to the altar of the word count nor tells them that they don't need to establish a regular writing routine.

In addition to many chapters on establishing a writing routine, Rogers dedicates many chapters to a topic at the center of any human life: relationships. While some writers might genuinely be recluses, and all of us need a certain amount of solitude, even if just to get the work done, most of us also need and seek companionship and connection. Rogers honors this by not treating relationships as a generic topic, instead, exploring in depth the role of different relationships in the writing life.

Rogers dedicates a chapter to "writers loving writers" and another chapter to "writers loving non-writers." In his usual manner, he offers this information impartially and without pushing either scenario as superior. His words helped me better appreciate and take advantage of being a "writer loving a writer." My partner and I have since had "writing dates" and have become more aware of how sharing our creative process can open channels that sometimes get blocked between us.

Rogers is so thorough, he made sure to include a chapter that covered material beyond his personal experience: how to write when parenting children. He accomplished this by interviewing some of his friends who were raising children while writing and presenting the chapter as a creatively edited transcript of their answers, thoughts, and strategies.

Rogers also goes into psychological depth on the toxic effects of living in a community that does not value writing or the arts. He points out that the general cultural stew you're in plays a significant role in your ability to persist as a writer; the "toxic golf" of living somewhere that treats what you do as unworthy can ultimately wither you. He makes what is surprisingly an oft-neglected point in books of advice to writers: while you don't need to move to New York, it's worth considering a move to a city with at least a bare minimum of supports for writers, if you're not already living in one.

Rogers also notes the pros and cons of the ways writers have traditionally thought of "community": meeting up for workshops and critiques. He describes with remarkable candor the complex internal reactions writers often have to criticism, and how to ride the roller coaster of ego at writing events with humor and resilience. He analyzes which types of criticism are worth considering and which are better ignored.

Even those of us who write as a means to "soul survival" and don't need great fame or fortune to validate what we're doing inevitably battle with the demons of grandiosity when it comes to writing. No one wants to believe they're writing crap, no matter how humble their dreams of recognition may be. Producing a concrete manifestation of dream-images, thoughts, and ideas, so that these can be more easily analyzed and critiqued, is nerve-wracking. You rise when you feel like you've nailed something, and sink when you feel you’ve hopelessly garbled it, or when some of your ideas fail when they're tested.

It's this harrowing of the ego that fells so many writers, some before they’ve written more than just a few pages. 

Rogers describes these peaks and valleys in unflinching, intimate detail, and provides numerous ways to address them and to maintain sanity and joy in the writing life. The theme is always that writing is its own gift, and the writer needs to live her life in such a way that she doesn't lose sight of that. Perhaps my favorite single piece of advice in this book is how to identify "heart-sufficient goals" to keep connected with your deepest reasons for writing when other markers of success aren't manifesting in your life.

Perhaps this book's greatest strength is the depth and breadth of material it offers on how to manage internal states. This pushes aside a veil from what was regarded with awe and mystery in times further past, when dysfunctional writers were romanticized as "mad geniuses" and "tortured artists" and fans of literature believed that great writing required an unkempt life made up of bad behavior, excess, and lack of control. We now recognize that whatever links there might actually be between mental illness and creativity, or between emotional disturbance and emotional expression in art, dealing with any underlying psychological or emotional issues not only does not keep a person from making great art, but might actually make it easier for them to do so.

Rogers notes that a hypomanic state, or something close to it, is desirable for a creative endeavor, but does not have to come from untreated mental illness, substance abuse, or reckless behavior. Instead, there are simple "life hacks" a writer can do to bring on a state of psychological arousal prior to the act of creating. Rogers encourages writers to develop simple rituals to help them enter into the receptive, but focused state of mind needed for writing; to use affirmations to shift their perspective; and to value their dreams--literally, by using dream journals to enhance dream recall and then to work with those dreams to harness the power of the subconscious. He offers several techniques for using dreams to answer questions and to help dissolve blocks that come up in the writing process.

More than anything, Rogers encourages writers to take a holistic, spiritual view of what it is to write. While this book offers a lot of concrete and step-by-step advice, my favorite chapters were more mythic in scope. These chapters, which include "The Foam-White Bull," "Death and the Day Job," and "Athena’s Wheel," use mythic symbolism to plunge into the depths of why any person sets out on the writing quest and explore how to keep that flame alive. While Rogers, unlike Julia Cameron, is not prescriptive about the spiritual elements of writing, he attends to them nonetheless as a very important part of the writer’s path.


In "The Foam-White Bull," Rogers’ most mythic and mysterious essay, he urges the writer to consider kingship as a metaphor for authorship. Like a king, the creative person is given great privilege and responsibility and is asked for certain sacrifices in return. Recognizing that you have been given a "gift from the gods" risks hubris, but is ultimately a call to modesty, to understand that, as with anything that comes from the gods, there is an expectation of what you must give in return. If you fail to use your gifts, you are responsible for that failure whether you asked for those gifts or not. This was a startling and effective line of consideration for me: you are lucky if you can discover your calling, but also marked. All choices are no longer equally valid for you.

A person with a calling is more deeply connected to the vital energy of life, which is a cause of envy for those who are not; however, that person also has less freedom of choice, less freedom to just bumble through life or take the path of least resistance and conclude that is enough. If you do not honor your calling, your gift of connection to the high holy mystery that is the creative force, you end your life in fiery judgement. The longer you go without honoring your gift, the more monsters you breed and the more blight you sow. Is it not possible that the "demons" we've associated with artists are what hunts them when they're not creating, not what arises from the act of creation itself?

Rogers writes: "You take on the ordeal of being an artist, and your reward is... you get to be an artist. That's all. That's all that you can be sure of. The only other guarantee is that if you accept your gifts halfheartedly, you'll suffer. When the king forgets the balance of receiving and giving back, the land is blighted. In some stories, everything dies when the king forgets his proper place."

"Death and the Day Job" offers a similarly existential exploration of the life of the writer. In it, Rogers turns on its head the usual examination of writing full-time versus writing "on the side" while working a day job. Instead of focusing on financial matters, he turns to spiritual ones. What do you want your life to be? What are you living for? This reminded me of the main thesis Philip McKernan explores in his talks and in his book, Rich on Paper, Poor on Life, which is that trying to save up money so you can do what you really want to do later in life is a recipe for failure. Life is short, and finding our authentic selves is hard enough; if we do find them, that is the gold. What do we want money for, anyway? Better to scrape along for a while until we figure out how to make a sustainable living doing what we really want to do, than try to save up in hopes we'll finally get around to it some day.

Rogers writes: "When should you quit your day job? Before you can answer the question in monetary terms, I think you need to examine it in terms of faith and death and courage. You need to know what you can endure, and what sustains you."

Unusually for Rogers, it's obvious what he thinks is the right answer: quit that inauthentic day job! However, my own inquiry led me to realize the opposite: I actually like having a day job, something that balances the solitary mysteries of the creative process with the camaraderie and concrete tasks of work. When I took a year off from work to focus on writing a novel, I found myself struggling with anxiety and lacking the momentum to sustain discipline very well. My tendency to ruminate and obsess went unchecked. I emerged from this realizing that my "best life" (as Oprah would put it) would balance dedicated writing days with work that gets me out in the world, connecting with other people and out of my own head for a while. While my ultimate desired ratio of time spent writing to time spent at a day job will take some time, effort, and success to realize, it's nice to know that I have a dream that is that much more attainable than having to depend solely on my writing for income. But while I might have come to a different conclusion than Rogers, I arrived at it using his same method--contemplating mortality--and I think there is no better approach to this matter than this existential one offered by Rogers.

In the end, Rogers notes that the most important thing is to do whatever keeps you writing. He notes that whether it is as an individual or as a member of a couple, sometimes your greatest artistic achievement ends up being how you lived your life:

"There are collaborative artistic lives that, like the marriage between poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, are themselves works of art. Hall had cancer twice. He and Kenyon both wrote powerfully moving poetry about the likelihood that he would die first, perhaps soon. Then Kenyon was diagnosed with advanced leukemia. She died. I recently heard Hall read his poems about her last days, and what struck me was the sense that at the end, both writers were intensely involved in being awake to what was happening, awake to each other, and awake to the poetry that they were weaving out of her dying.

I don't think that Hall and Kenyon did any overt collaboration, sharing a byline, but they borrowed from one another. Hall notes that his line about Kenyon's last breath is lifted from one of her poems. Their greater collaboration was the artists' life that they made, supported, and lived together."

No book of writing advice I've read makes as clear a case as this one for how a writing life is a richer life, how it might involve neurosis and struggle but requires neither, as writing can not only bring us more to life, but ground us in something that helps us weather all else that befalls us. This is why I write, and ultimately why I live: the encounter with what the I Ching calls "The Creative," that mysterious force that makes itself known in everything from the catharsis of shared grief to the joy of creative play. If you write for the same reasons, or are trying to look deeper for the reasons you write, you will find no better guide than this book.


[Traveller]

I'm adding this, because I've read an article by this author which I thoroughly agreed with.

[Melissa Yuan-Innes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and inspiring.

I love when a book makes me see the world differently. Two essays in particular, the ones about minotaurs and ADHD (hunters vs. farmers), blew my mind. For the first, I had never been particularly drawn to Greek mythology, but Bruce made me understand how minotaurs were first created because a queen mated with a bull, but the reason she was attracted to the bull in the first place was that her husband had refused to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon.

In other words, I was taught to blame the woman, although the man had set her up. So not only do I consider what minotaurs I've created in my own life, but I'm more open to Greek mythology because it may consider more subtleties of human nature. Thank you!

[Jennifer Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book! It has been on my shelf for many moons and I am constantly picking it up and reading it rereading a chapter. This time I went straight through from beginning to end.
It has a lot of little things that a writer can do not just to help them be a better writer but a better person. Rogers gives suggestions on dealing with stress, pushing yourself as a writer as well as practical advice on dealing with loved ones while you pursue you dreams of becoming a writer.
This is a book for the beginning writer right up to the old hand. There is something for everyone!

[Chris Evett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful and Constructive.

This is a very useful guide for writers that goes into some quite in-depth psychological analysis of what makes a writer tick and how to avoid some common pitfalls. Personally, I learnt a lot from it as it came from such a different angle to most books that concentrate on grammar, editing and the state of the industry etc.

The chapter on 'Death and the day job' is superb, profound even. It's fascinating reading through how different personality types deal with such big issues as death and authenticity and gets into the 'murk' of what motivates a person to write in the first place. As with all good books (and guides as well) it leaves you informed but also with more questions, albeit slightly more nuanced ones!

Not having had any success in writing myself, I almost skipped this section, but even that part was useful, especially at encouraging me to change my mindset about what I should positively expect from my own writing and not to limit myself due to negative associations to particular issues (success or a perceived lack, in this case). And this his how this book works; it takes established norms and practices about writing, splits them apart and then gets you to challenge how you see them and then how you see yourself. Deep stuff and written in clear English. Thoroughly recommended to anyone with an interest in writing.

[Tom Hooker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claiming to be "extraordinarily gifted with neuroses, even for a writer," Rogers is well-practiced in such writerly pursuits as procrastination, self-doubt, and rejection. Thus, he is perfectly able to write from experience. Rogers's tone is friendly, anecdotal, low-key. In each essay, he contemplates some aspect of the writing life, from writer's block (for which he recommends "atomizing" a writing project, by breaking it down into minute parts) to writing rituals; from quitting one's day job ("depends on how important writing is to you and how seriously you take your own death") to writing workshops.

[Harley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a series of writing columns put into a book. Some are maybe simplistic, go over old ground. But I got many good ideas from it. I like his point of view, which has a heavily Buddhist flavor, along with other ways of thinking about things that I've been familiar with over the years. You could scan through and find useful tidbits. One of my favorite was a way of thinking about gratitude. Say in a plaintive voice, "I wish I had" the things you already have, the things you have come to take for granted. It's rather shocking, really, to see how many dreams have come true.

[P.W. Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well crafted, extended essay on structuring one's life as a writer, with advice and tools for dealing with such elements as rejection, success, work planning, and coordinating with your life-partner. A book that was a pleasure to read through cover to cover, and to reread sections as a reference/inspiration.

[Jenny Kangasvuo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paras lukemani kirjoittajaopas Natalie Goldbergin Writing Down the Bonesin ohella. Ei opeta niinkään kirjoittamista kuin sitä, miten järjestää elämänsä kirjoittajana/kirjailijana. Miten voittaa prokrastinaatio, miten suunnitella työtään, miten päästää irti käsiksestä. Varmaan sopisi luettavaksi myös muiden kuin kirjallisten taiteenlajien ammattilaisille.

[Jackie Gamber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend this book to anyone who is or wishes to become a writer. Rogers' transparency and writing style has really helped me get ahold of my vision as a writer, and to rediscover an enthusiasm I'd lost along the way somewhere. An inspiration.

[Hunter Johnson]

Bruce Holland Rogers' Word Work gives advice on how to be a writer rather than on how to write. Conversational and motivating.

[Diogo Melo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the "bee's knees" in the writing world. It's full of valuable advice, reflections, stories that will stick with me throughout my entire life.

[Mark Lacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This "self-help" book for writers lived up to its description as "not your typical writing book." Lots of good advice.

[Zhanglihua · Rating 5 out of 5]

impressive