A Guest Post With Lawrence M. Schoen

I'd like to welcome Lawrence M. Schoen to the blog. His latest novel, Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard, is coming out this week from Tor. From Amazon and Barnes & Noble: The Sixth Sense meets Planet of the Apes in a moving science fiction novel set so far in the future, humanity is gone and forgotten.

Lawrence is a psychologist, an authority on the Klingon language, and a hypnotherapist. I asked him to write up a little something about how hypnotherapy can help authors. When I was pregnant with my son, I used self-hypnosis to cope with anxiety and with pain during labor. One of the interesting side benefits was how, while I was pregnant, my writing productivity suddenly increased. I realized it was due to my practicing hypnosis every time I sat down to write. It helped me focus, and it helped that pesky internal editor take a hike. But don't take my word for it. Here's Lawrence, discussing how hypnosis works and what it can do for writers:

Hypnosis and Writing

Okay, so the first thing you need to know is that if you're like 99% of the world, everything you think you know about hypnosis is flat out wrong. It's not exotic. It's not mind control. It's not difficult to do. It's involves a perfectly natural phenomenon that occurs to each of us in one form or another nearly every single day. And yes, everyone can be hypnotized.

Hypnosis involves easing someone into a particular altered state of consciousness, commonly know as a “trance.” A trance is simply a dissociation of your conscious awareness from your immediate environment. Every time you’ve been immersed in a good book, or lost track of the movie theatre around you when caught up watching a film, you’ve been in a state of trance. It happens when you’re waiting for the elevator door to open and when you’re driving that familiar route home from work at the end of the day. Your conscious awareness goes somewhere else. That’s trance.

When I’m working as a hypnotist (and most of that work is with authors), I’m using trance to mediate between a client’s conscious and unconscious minds, facilitating communication between the two parts, getting them on the same side so they’re not working at cross purposes and can move together to produce more satisfying life results.

With authors this typically means exploring why they’re experiencing writer’s block, or helping them to turn off the internal editor, or creating a habit of putting in time every day (or on whatever schedule they want), or overcoming performance anxiety associated with reading in public, or getting them past thoughts of imposter syndrome, fear of failure, and/or fear of success. 

The thing to remember is that the unconscious mind is the repository for a lifetime of emotionally charged memories and behavioral patterns that may have been brilliant choices at some time in the past but have long since lost some or all of their utility. It doesn’t operate by the same rules as your conscious awareness, which is part of why it’s distinct from it.

But it’s also incredibly powerful, and with a little coaxing you can have your unconscious do all kinds of back-breaking work in the background of your mind or while you’re asleep. Most people have had the experience of going to bed with a problem on their mind and waking up to discover the solution in front of them. With hypnosis, you can have this as a regular tool in your toolbox. Imagine laying out the questions you need to resolve in order to make a plot point work or a character’s motivations make sense, and then yawning, stretching, turning out the light, and falling asleep, secure in the knowledge that an answer will “magically” present itself in the morning when you sit down to write.

The style of hypnosis that I employ — both for myself and my clients — is often referred to as Conversational Hypnosis, or even as “Covert” Hypnosis, and is usually credited to Milton H. Erickson, the father of American Hypnotherapy (which is why it’s also sometimes called Ericksonian  Hypnosis). When I began my study of this type of hypnosis I discovered it was essentially a blend of storytelling techniques and cognitive psychology. I already had my doctorate in cognitive psych, and I’d been writing and selling fiction for more than twenty years, so for me it all felt as easy as breathing. I’d already acquired all the pieces and mostly just had to assemble them in new ways.

Generally that takes the form of having a simple conversation with my clients. I especially like working with authors because they are, by definition, creative people. They’re already experienced in employing their imaginations, and a lot of facilitating change involves positing new possibilities.

It’s incredibly satisfying to help other writers “get out of their own ways.” Indeed, time and time again we find the obstacles that are keeping us from what we want are things we’ve created ourselves. At first glance, that can seem very frustrating, even hopeless, but one of Erickson’s major lessons was that each of us possesses all the resources we need to resolve any of our problems. And again, when you realize that we’re the source of them this only makes sense. This applies not just to authors, but to all of us, butcher, baker and that guy at the mall who makes candles

But part of why I especially like helping other writers to achieve their goals is because their resulting stories will go on to inspire so many others. It takes “paying it forward” to a whole new level.

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Lawrence M. Schoen holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, has been nominated for the Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula awards, is a world authority on the Klingon language, operates the small press Paper Golem, and is a practicing hypnotherapist specializing in authors’ issues.

His previous science fiction includes many light and humorous adventures of a space-faring stage hypnotist and his alien animal companion. His most recent book, Barsk, takes a very different tone, exploring issues of prophecy, intolerance, friendship, conspiracy, and loyalty, and redefines the continua between life and death. He lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife and their dog

Cluck Like a Chicken, Bark Like a Dog

A few months ago I had the privilege of taking an online writing course taught by Bruce Holland Rogers. He's a fantastic instructor, by the way, so if you ever have the opportunity to pick his brain or take one of his classes, do it. After the course was over, I found myself wanting more, so I picked up a copy of Word Work. I think it's geared more towards the beginning writer rather than towards someone who's been at it for a while, but I found some gems in the book, and it certainly got me thinking.

Anyhow, one of the chapters is on rituals. What do you do to ease yourself into writing for the day? Most of us lead busy lives and have a finite time for writing. I, for example, write during my son's naps and sometimes at night (but only if my brain isn't fried or if I have a deadline and have no choice), so I don't have the luxury of taking an hour-long walk or surfing the Internet or any number of other things to ease slowly into that mindset. I need to sit at the desk and GO. And I accidentally discovered how to make that nearly instantaneous switch while I was pregnant.

My husband and I took a hypnosis birthing class. When I mention hypnosis, some people instantly think of stage tricks or that scene in Office Space where the main character is hypnotized and then remains in that state when the hypnotist has a heart attack in the middle of the session. Hypnosis is not like that, by the way. Anyway, I'm an anxious person, and I wanted--and needed--something non-medicinal to help me keep calm during pregnancy and the birth. As part of the homework for the class, I had to practice my hypnosis trigger at least three times a day. One of those times happened to be just before I sat down to write. I'd spend maybe three to five minutes in a hypnotic state, then come out of it and start writing, and after a while, I discovered that instead of needing fifteen or thirty or so minutes to get into the groove (which used to be the norm for me), I was slipping right into the mental place I needed to be. My productivity went way up, which was great, because I was trying to finish a novel before my son was born. Talk about a deadline!

At this point I sometimes still practice hypnosis before writing, but it's not necessary anymore. I did it so often that I suppose I trained myself to be ready to write the moment I open the laptop.

I'd love to hear about the rituals that others have, whether it's a pre-writing ritual or another kind.