Shut Up, Norbert! (slaying the dragons that tell you you suck)

This is Norbert.

I honestly don’t remember where I acquired him, but he has been with me for a long time. The name was proposed by a former co-worker and it stuck. His deeper identity remained shrouded in secrecy to the more nuanced layers of my mind, as was no doubt his intention, until I heard the amazing Sue Campbell of Pages and Platforms speak to a group of writers about the resistance writers (and others) often experience in our work, as discussed by Stephen Pressfield and his book The War of Art: the phenomenon of the “lizard brain.”

The lizard brain, for those who neither already knew nor hit Google the second you saw the phrase, is a popular psychology term for the amygdala, the limbic cortex, the brain stem—essentially the most basic primitive part of the brain. It is the part that has enabled survival of all kinds of creatures for millennia due to its instinctive avoidance of anything that could potentially be dangerous. It is entirely emotional, bypassing cognition entirely, and its job is to keep us safe from predation.

(Complete non-sequitur: it somehow delights me that auto-correct saw me type the word “limbic” and immediately corrected to “lambic,” as though it already knew Jennifer would be more likely to be thinking of a good Belgian ale than the deeper functioning of human neurology. It’s not wrong. But I digress.)

Sue and her writer mindset trainings focus on helping writers move past the “lizard brain” impulses that hold us back from taking the necessary risks of putting ourselves and our art and our words into the world, and I need that training. A lot.

I also need Norbert. 

Norbert sits by my desk now, along with my various Doctor Who paraphernalia (and a lot of dust); he is the tangible representation of my writers’ lizard brain impulses. Not just because he’s a representation of a dragon—the fiercest of all mythical lizards from Beowulf’s wyrm to Smaug and beyond—but also because he is a skeleton.

Here’s the thing about lizard brain-type resistance and fear: it is one thing, it is essentially always the same basic shape, but we rarely get to see its fundamental inner workings. It drapes new costumes over its basic architecture; it covers its bones with muscle and sinew and fur and feathers and spikes and fills its sockets with different colored eyes. Some of its glances may make you freeze in terror; others will be disapproving and disappointed, telling you how colossally unimpressive you are. 

But the skeleton underneath doesn’t really change. The skeleton that says, “don’t do this thing, or you could put yourself at risk.”

(Yes, I am aware that I am mixing metaphors here, “lizard brain” vs. actual if mythical lizards and skeletal anatomy, but please roll with me anyhow.)

Norbert is a skeleton. A tiny skeleton. A fake plastic tiny skeleton. He can’t breathe fire (no lungs or whatever dragons use to breathe fire), he can’t eat me (no digestive system), he can’t even give me disapproving looks (no eyes but those I project onto him). I appreciate my primal brain’s important evolutionary function in keeping me alive thus far and hope it continues to do so, but this is an area of my life where it can please gently shut it.

Last weekend I attended the annual Killer Nashville crime writer’s conference—my book made the finals of my category, and while I had no thought of actually winning (I didn’t, it’s cool), I thought, well hell, it would be fun to go, to step into this world and hang out with “real” writers (shut up, Norbert!) and see what it’s all about. And it was fun—it was fantastic. I met people, I met with an agent who wants me to send her more of my story, I went to sessions that helped me figure out how to hone my book and marketing materials down even tighter, I took five pages of notes on blood splatter at crime scenes, I tasted bourbon pecan pie for the first time (and managed to not swipe a second piece from an unoccupied place at my table, something I now regret, because it was amazing and would have been worth the calories)—it was a wonderful experience all around.

On the plane coming back from the conference, a thought came into my mind: maybe I should just toss this book and start from scratch with a whole new novel. Chalk this one up to a “learning experience” and go back to the beginning with what I know now. I have lots of ideas, I know now better how it’s done…wouldn’t it be better to just let this one go and start fresh?

And in that moment, it did not seem like a terrible idea. I found my brain beginning to plot and think about what this new story could be, who would be in it, how it might be shaped, who the murder victim is and why they were killed and who might have—

The alarms started blaring right about then, bright red blinking lights and klaxons and sirens. SHUT UP NORBERT SHUT UP NORBERT SHUT UP NORBERT SHUT UP NORBERT they went until I found the off button and quieted them down. And I thought, well, isn’t that curious?

I wrote a book. I rewrote the book, I edited, I shaped and tightened. During the process of the above, I studied, I read, I learned about craft and art and history, and I worked with my writer group on individual scenes and larger swaths of text. I wrote a synopsis, a log line, a blurb, a query letter. I built a website and learned how to work with ConvertKit (and then forgot most of what I learned because at the time I was more focused on finishing the book) and did all the right things. I entered exactly two contests and made the finals in one of them—for a big enough organization that they needed 400 volunteer readers to even get through all the submissions. I met an agent who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about my story. I met a professional who helps writers with synopses and log lines, who told me my log line was actually too short but that the second half was excellent. I met, in short, people who told me I’m on the right track, doing the right things, and that I should keep going.

And my reaction was to consider whether throwing the whole damn thing out and starting from scratch might be a good idea.

Shut up, Norbert.

I mean, what the hell? Why does my brain do this?

In any case, today I am back at my desk, at my computer, with Norbert up on the shelf looking down at me. For the moment, he’s keeping fairly quiet.

So–if anyone resonates with this post at all, I would love to hear from you: How do you deal with your resistance-focused lizard brain? Any creative ideas? What works for you? What does the skeleton under your resistance (not just writers—musicians, artists of any kind, fellow social anxiety sufferers, etc…) look like for you?