Stop Treating Resistance as Prophecy

“Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s letter to other women of color who write, reprinted in This Bridge Called My Back (1981), has entries dated 21, 24, and 26 May 1980. It is partly a record of not wanting to write it. In the first entry she asks why writing feels so unnatural to her and admits, “I’ll do anything to postpone it.” A recurring voice asks who she thinks she is to write. She also says the piece began as a poem and that when she tried to turn it into an essay the result was “wooden, cold.” In the second she lists her evasions, including a trip out for an apple danish, though she had been off sugar for three years, and says they come when she is nearly at a dark place where something may jump out. In the third she says it makes perfect sense to her now how she resisted: writing is dangerous because of what it reveals.

She treated none of it as a ruling on the letter. She links the voice to her situation, asking whether class, culture, and the white man have not told women like her that writing is not for them. She took the wooden essay as a problem with the form she had tried, and the piece that exists calls itself a letter.

Reading resistance as prophecy comes in two forms that point opposite ways. The pessimistic one says that because this is so hard and I dread it so much, it is not working, or I am not suited to this. The reverse is Steven Pressfield’s, in The War of Art, where he treats fear as a compass: the more a work or calling frightens us, the surer we can be that it is ours to do. Pressfield deserves credit for treating resistance as universal and impersonal, an internal force that does not care who you are. His rule of thumb still turns a feeling into a verdict, in the encouraging direction, and so takes the intensity of an emotion as information about the Work’s worth.

The maxim treats resistance as information about the situation, which includes more than the Work. Fear, boredom, perfectionism, uncertainty, and avoidance are plausibly different things with different causes, and lumping them together makes each harder to treat. Anzaldúa’s entries suggest a mechanism, offered here as the authors’ own reading. In a first draft the most is undecided, every sentence affects those before and after it, and the page shows how far the draft is from what the writer hoped. When the material is also dangerous to its author, exposure rises further. High uncertainty and high exposure are likely to feel aversive, and the aversion tracks where the writer stands and what the passage risks, not whether the Work is good. A strong project and a failing one may both feel awful at the same stage.

Resistance can still carry real information, especially when its pattern changes, so the question is what the feeling is about before what it means. Boredom that outlasts a change of scene and a change of task may mean the purpose has shifted; Chapter 2 treats a changed purpose as something to name. Dread that attaches to a particular passage may mean the passage asks for something the writer is unwilling to do, such as writing about real people (see Practice 79).

Some writers find resistance a reliable signal, and are not wrong to. If your own record shows that fear has accompanied your best work, that is evidence; the error is to generalize from one writer’s record, or from a single bad morning, to a law. Anzaldúa ends her list of reasons for writing with being “scared of writing” but more scared of not writing, a report of her own motives that settles nothing for anyone else.

Practice. Name the precise consequence you fear if the Work becomes real. Set a timer for ten minutes and finish this sentence as many ways as you can: If this is finished, then ___ will happen to ___. Sort each item on your list as about the page (it will be bad), about people (someone will be hurt or will judge), about the self (I will have to be a person who did this), or about time (it will take years). Choose the item that surprised you. Then design one small test of that specific fear at a scale you can afford, and run it within a week: show one paragraph to one person, or write the hard scene in a file nobody else will see. You end with a named fear and one piece of evidence about it, which is more than a mood gives you.