Post-reinforcement Pause, Writer Version

After completing seven drafts, cutting twenty words, adding ten on each pass, and reshaping most sentences, I post my blog on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday I try and fail to do any writing at all. You’d think I’d learn: the day after I complete a piece, my creativity has tantrums like a toddler. No! It screams, slamming onto the floor. The day after publishing, I should go see a movie. Advice for pre-pandemic times, but there’s always streaming. Instead, I sit in front of the laptop, trying to wring moisture from a dry sponge.

Spring runoff

My cellist friend Kitty told me about a therapy session she had when she played in the DaVinci String Quartet. One of the quartet’s issues was how difficult it was to work after a performance. The therapist said, “ah yes, post-reinforcement pause.” A rat in a maze, being trained to find and push a handle to get some kibble, has no interest in immediately doing that again, said the shrink. “I worked for this snack, dude, I’m good,” said I, personifying the rat.

The quartet’s reinforcement was audience response, good reviews, even a paycheck. Mine is reading comments from faithful blog followers, checking the chart to watch the number of views spike on the day I post and noting that this is essay number 235. Gratifying.

My own borrowed name for the phenomenon is postpartum blues. You give birth in creating a work of words. Birthing involves labor. (See Paragraph 1 above.) Of course, “postpartum blues” doesn’t include the sense of reinforcement/reward, unless you count the baby. A woman in labor screams, “I’m never doing this again,” but once the baby’s in her arms she may forget that promise. Once the baby’s in her arms, she may also get the blues.

In the case of art production, is the work its own reward? Perhaps, but don’t we all crave a little munchie too? Look what I made, but could I also have a chocolate bar? Isn’t post-partum depression the result of having emptied yourself of that which you created? When you release the words, the art, the child into the world, they are no longer yours, not the way they were in progress. When someone looked over his shoulder as he hunched over the keyboard, a writer whose name I don’t recall pleaded, “don’t steal it from me yet.” Until we let it go, it is completely and only ours.

Neighborhood walk, before or after writing

The inability to write after publishing my blog lasts for a day or two, then I shake it off and get back at it. It was worse after each of my books. I sank into those blues and didn’t write again for months. It’s a paradox: can’t write after the “reinforcement” and can’t be happy unless I’m writing. If you’re an artist, your life is only worth living if you’re working.

I dawdle through FB and email, read this and that, play games…why do I even get on the computer? I wallow in a state of hebetude, a word that appears with its definition on my screensaver as I’m staring pointlessly, having played eleven games of removing Mahjong tiles and failed to improve my score. This happens all the time. You’d think I could remember it. You’d think I could alter my behavior. It’s so human of me: making the same mistakes over and over again, expecting a different outcome. We all know what that behavior defines.

It has been three days since I posted that last bit of writing. I was quite pleased with it, look for new comments on day three, but Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame has expired, the number of views dribbling to nothing. Out, out brief candle. Damn, I thought that piece would have been the one to go viral. But today an idea has been trying to take shape in the back of my mind while I’ve been playing solitaire games.

I once visited a sculptor’s studio as he was circling a chunk of stone, running his hands over it. “I’m trying to find out what it wants to be,” he said. Just so, the amorphous thing in my head while I scroll through Facebook memes. I don’t know what it is exactly, this idea taking shape, won’t know until I open a new doc, blank and waiting to be filled; won’t know until I’ve finished a first draft and found it muddy; won’t know until along about draft four when meaning starts to clarify like simmered butter.

All I know is that today I will be able to write. Maybe today I’ll write something worthwhile. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe today will be the day the words coalesce into art.