Welcome to Psychology for Writers

I'll help you move from dreaming about writing, to actually writing

I am not nearly this pretty. But this shall be my avatar (Image by author, via MidJourney)

Psychology for Writers

At root, writing is the simple act of thinking aloud on paper. Trouble writing, then, is a form of mental pathology.

I'm going to walk that claim back a little bit because I don't want to give you the impression that I think writer's block is an actual clinical pathology like severe social anxiety, or major depression.

But bear with me for a minute, because I think an illustration will be helpful in showing what I mean.

Imagine for a second that every time you try to talk to somebody your brain locks up and you can't think of anything to say. Imagine that this goes on for years and, unsurprisingly, mucks up your life. It steals away promotions and lovers and friends from you, one at a time—and worst of all, while it’s happening, you can’t really feel the loss because this impairment isn’t stealing the things that you have but instead steals all of the things that you could have had.

It’s maddening, but you can’t stop it, and every time you try to ask your boss for a raise or flirt with a cute barista you stumble at the very first sentence and make a fool of yourself. So eventually you stop trying and just stay silent.

Would you agree that the petrified speech example is, perhaps, a little bit pathological? I've known people who were in therapy for precisely that problem— though it wasn’t to the level I described, their shyness and stammering and inability to engage in casual talk on demand caused ripples that spread through their whole life. So, it seems pretty clear to me that when we can’t speak, we treat it as a pathology. Why? Well, most people can talk. And it’s damaging to be unable to.

Is writing really so different just because it happens on paper, or on a screen? We tend to ignore problems with writing, according them a lesser degree of severity because they’re private enough that people can simply hide them. Trouble speaking and trouble writing differ as a matter of degree, of course: the inability to write an essay on demand may affect you in college in the form of severe procrastination, but it won't cripple every aspect of your waking day the way that stopped speech would.

But while it's different in degree, it's not different in kind, and that’s why I decided to start up this newsletter. So, back to our beginning: An inability to write is a minor mental pathology, or rather, the result of an entire host of small pathologies. You might be familiar with some of them:

• There’s the “I tried to start my essay a week early but I just stared at the screen and squeaked for an hour before giving up and playing Sudoku” pathology.

• There’s the “Every time I try to focus on my essay I get distracted by Substack doomscrolling” pathology.

• There’s the “I want to write regularly but can’t keep the habit going for more than a week at a time” pathology.

And of course there are a dozen others. A hundred others. A thousand others—and you, personally, have to deal with your own idiosyncratic combination of five to seven of them which intertwine with each other to form an impossible knot—the type that you can chew at for years without loosening a single strand.

I’ve dealt with this knot too. I managed to disentangle it. I think you probably can too.

---

I Can’t Help You Succeed

So, there’s a line that I have always been uncomfortable with crossing when it comes to writing advice. Online I see hundreds of grifters who are happy to tell you that they have the secrets to succeeding as a writer, and they can teach them to you in exchange for money.

Before we go any further I would like to deal with that, because it’s the only way I can proceed with a newsletter like this while still being able to look at myself in the mirror. So, here it is:

I can’t help you become a successful writer.

There are several reasons for this but the first and most obvious one is that writing is a superstar economy. Many people aspire to be successful writers, but only a few make it. I know people on Substack and Medium who have been dedicated and devoted writers for years who have never gotten the traction that they need in order to succeed financially at writing online. I have been lucky to achieve some minor success, but not much—a couple hundred bucks per month here and there, with gaps in between where I’m lucky to pull in coffee money.

The truth is that nobody is quite sure how to succeed and even those who have a promising path forward are subject to the tyranny of chance. But you know that already, and you are here anyway, dreaming of finding a space in the writer’s world. Maybe it’s because you’ve got something you urgently need to say, or maybe it’s because you really are attracted to the idea of writing as a paying career. I support you; I just won’t make any promises. Your success is yours to make, not mine to promise you.

So, what can I do? Well, if you’re a dreamer it’s very likely that you’re reading this blog because you haven’t yet jumped the first big hurdle. That is, you haven’t taken the decisive step—from dreaming, to writing.

After all, before you can succeed at writing, you need to write, right?

But those pathologies I talked about earlier get in the way, for many people. So, here’s my offer: I assume that you’re here because you’re pretty convinced you could make it, if only you could just write the things you want to write, when you want to write them.

That’s where I come in. I can’t guarantee you success. But…

• I am pretty sure that I can help you build a fulfilling writing habit—the type that will enrich your life and might even lead to material success, assuming that you can find and jump the other hurdles on your own.

• I am pretty sure that I can help you write better. If you’re worried that your writing is generic, or boring, or that it isn’t connecting with people, I can offer you some guidance on how to address those problems.

• I am pretty sure that I can help you to understand the ecology of the writing world. One of the reasons that so few people succeed at writing is that they have a very narrow definition of success. Aspiring writers dream of monetized blogs, or Substack newsletters, or bestselling books making the rounds on Amazon (or, dare we dream, in Barnes & Noble). But there are other ways you can monetize writing. I happen to know of a few and can talk about them. And, lesser known, but still true—the ability to write, and to write well, is a great supplement to many existing careers, and can supercharge your success in indirect ways. I make no promises regarding your success. You’ll have to figure that out on your own. But I can certainly share what I know about the landscape.

---

Why This Newsletter?

All of the previous begs an obvious question: Why do I even feel qualified to talk with you about this in the first place?

Really, the answer to that is pretty simple: I solved the problem for myself.

One of the problems with many online writing gurus is that they never actually struggled with writing. Writing prolifically, for them, is largely a matter of willpower, and that’s because the underlying machinery of their will is fully operational. There is no barrier that exists, inside their brain, between wanting to do something and doing it—a little bit of strain, a little bit of discipline, and they can get their career up and running.

Their advice on productivity reflects their struggle, and as such, you usually wind up seeing them offer generic exhortations to discipline, or advice on how to keep energy levels up each day, how to stay motivated and inspired, etc...

Personally I find this hard to believe, but the reason many people offer this type of advice online is because it actually seems to have worked for them, and so they feel that it’s the best advice to offer their audiences.

I belong to a second class of person whose ability to self-regulate is (was) profoundly broken. There… may be a time and a place, some day, to go into my story? I’m sure it will come out in bits and pieces as I write. It’s really nothing special—milquetoast ADHD-type stuff. But like a lot of ADHD people I found that discipline largely eluded me. Instead of being governed by choice I was governed by consequences. Over time I learned to differentiate between two kinds of achievements, which I referred to broadly as what happened to me and what I made for myself. I prized the second, but most of my life was the first. Even some of my favorite skills, like my ability to play the piano, were produced more by impulse than choice.

At around the time I started graduate school I began to take a keen interest in writing but I lacked the discipline to do anything concrete with it. Instead I wound up collecting fountain pens and notebooks, purchasing them whenever graduate school made me feel insecure in my abilities, which was often. Over the course of my master’s program I accumulated a large pile of notebooks, and continued to accumulate them well into my doctoral program. By that time I was over 30 years old.

One day I had a moment of reckoning—I looked at the pile of expensive notebooks I had accumulated and realized that it reached my chest. Belatedly it occurred to me that I had so much paper that I could write in those notebooks every day for the rest of my life and I probably would not be able to finish them all. At that point, I realized that I had to answer an important question for myself:

I had bought the notebooks because, every time I did, it allowed me to briefly imagine a life as a writer. It was a small source of joy which helped me self-medicate as I worked through the drudgery of graduate school. And now, suddenly, I found that I had to answer the question of whether I was serious about being a writer. Were the notebooks just there so I could dream? Or was I actually going to fill them out?

I either had to get real or get writing. I picked the second. It is unlikely that I will get through the whole pile of notebooks by the time I am dead, especially since I have an irritating tendency to acquire a new one every four months or so. But I’ve made it through quite a few of them. I’ve written well over a million words since I started in 2019—many (if not most) with a fountain pen—and at the rate I’m going, I’ll have several million more finished before life stops me (or before me stops life).

There is an entire story to be told here about how I turned from a person who dreamed about writing into a person who actually writes productively, happily, and daily. Again, I’ll be unpacking it as I go. But for now? You should know that I understand, at least, what it is like to be undisciplined, paralyzed, and blocked. I spent years working to undo those problems, and as such, my advice is different than the advice of people who never quite had to struggle with writing. When you are putting the pieces of a broken engine back together you learn a lot about the parts that keep it going. I think I’ve learned quite a bit about the art and process of writing—certainly enough that we have something to talk about.

I don’t care much for vague exhortations. When I talk about writing—whether it is about motivation, or building skill, or finding something to say, or finding a place to contribute—you will find that I talk about it mechanically. I talk about writing problems (and solutions) from a diagnostic perspective. I talk pathology. I talk mechanics. I talk practices and solutions and reasons. And hopefully my talk will offer you something to grab hold of as you write.

So, I can’t promise you that I’ll help you win the race. But I can help you get on the track. And then you can show us what you’re made of.

Welcome to Psychology for Writers. I plan to keep this going regularly for a good long while, until I’ve said everything I have to say about writing, which is quite a bit. And then? I’ll probably try compiling it into a book. But I’ll jump that hurdle later.

For now? Keep in touch; I hope you’ll find this newsletter useful.

James Horton