“I’ve no idea how to do this!” Do writers get the ‘yips’?

 

Moira Butterfield

Is it just me who sometimes gets a mild case of ‘writer’s yips’? I don’t want to inflict it on other people, but I honestly hope I’m not the only one.

To explain – I've just made up that term 'writer's yips', but it seems appropriate. The ‘yips’ is the name given to a weird condition suffered by experienced and successful sportspeople who suddenly find that their body is taken over by their mind and they cannot perform the simple basic skills they would normally do well. It was coined for a golfer in the 1920s, who, having won the US Open, went on to take a record 23 shots on one hole in his next competition. He found himself completely unable to hole a putt. Similar yips have happened to famous and not-so-famous golfers, cricketers, snooker players and darts kings. Even World Champion darts supremo Eric Bristow has admitted that, for a short time, he couldn’t let go of any dart he tried to throw! It seems that the condition is most likely to affect players taking part in sports where they have plenty of time to think before an action, giving room for a psychological wobbly.

So what does this have to do with writing? As I said, at the time of writing I seem to have come down with a (hopefully mild) case of writing yips. I have a couple of picture book stories in progress. I have publishers who are interested in seeing them. I’ve written picture books before and edited them, too. So why am I getting the feeling that I have no idea how to write? Instead I’m metaphorically running around, getting nowhere, doing my best impression of Clive Dunn in Dad’s Army: 

 

“Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”

I also write non-fiction, and it's normal for me to get a brief moment at the beginning of a project when I think: “Why did I say I could do this? I have no idea how to do this!” But the feeling never lasts, and I always plunge in, experience taking over.

It’s different with the picture books. I think it’s partly to do with my growing confusion about what a picture book should be. Should it rhyme or not rhyme? No, say publishers, because they want quick sales abroad. Yes, say the British public, stocking up on the rhyming stories of Julia Donaldson. Should the text follow a conventional story pattern? What if it doesn’t? What if it’s rubbish?

“Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring! Don’t panic!”

Pressure soon swirls around every word. No wonder my brain has frozen, and no wonder I ‘can’t throw the dart’.

Perhaps I can get some inspiration from current sporting hero Sir Bradley Wiggins, cyclist extraordinaire and winner of last year’s Tour De France. As I wrote this blog, he was on an impossibly-steep Italian mountainside competing in the Giro D’Italia, a punishing three-week road race he’d been targeting for a win. But Sir Brad suddenly seemed to develop an aversion to riding downhill fast in rain. It’s possible he began to feel nervous because he fell off early in the race and cut open his elbows, but this is his job and he’s done it before at the highest level, so knocks and bruises comes with the territory and nerves don't. He was obviously angry with himself for developing a confidence issue. He chucked his bike angrily in a hedge, and he got a bit shouty with the press. Hmm. perhaps I should chuck my keyboard out of the window and get grumpy with someone...

Now I don’t want to make out that I’m the Bradley Wiggins of picture books here! Far from it. But perhaps I may be able to take inspiration from him (though not with the keyboard-chucking). I suspect that what he’ll do to overcome his nerves is to train harder – knuckle down to the nitty-gritty basics of his art. He’ll talk to his sports psychologist, too, I guess, to get his negative feelings under control.

So…I must get away from that list of pressures I’ve created in my own mind, get away from all the picture book theories and the ‘should I do it this way or do it that way’ paralysis.

I think I need to metaphorically get back on the bike and just pedal.

 



Go on! Get on it and pedal!