SIX at 6: The Intellectual Dodge, BLOGDOC, From The Neck-Down, “In There,” A Game Of Tonnage, and Deceiving Yourself

Know Your Dodges

The screenwriter Meg LeFauve was once hired to help another writer punch-up a script based on his son with special needs. Executives felt that the script wasn’t reaching the story’s full emotional potential. They brought in LeFauve not just because she’s known for her resonant storytelling in movies like the Pixar hit Inside Out, but also, she too is the parent of a child with special needs. “Tell me about your son,” LeFauve said to the writer when the two first met. “Let’s forget about the script for right now. Just tell me about your son.” He told her about the therapy he receives, the specialists he sees, the schooling, the treatment plans, the routines—“it was all up in his intellect,” LeFauve said. “Because when we feel vulnerable, uncomfortable, scared, or ashamed—that’s where the survival instinct goes. It goes right into the intellect. The hesitation to jump in the cold water, you know?—it’s human, it’s a survival instinct.” In her consultant work, in her own day-to-day writerly struggles, in the storytelling workshops she organizes, in the interactions she has with listeners of her podcast—LeFauve says she sees this all the time: what she calls “the intellectual dodge.” When doing things that are a little scary, difficult, embarrassing, uncomfortable, unpleasant, intimidating, uncertain, overwhelming, frustrating, or tedious, the brain comes up with reasons to dodge. “There have been moments,” LeFauve said, “in writing everything I’ve ever written where I try to dodge with, ‘this is terrible, why even bother?’ Or I’ve even had people dodge by getting hurt—they twisted their ankle and now they can’t come to this or that. And I’m like, ‘Well, you could still come with a twisted ankle and we can talk about your story.’ So the brain will do a lot of things to try to dodge. And it’s important to know your dodges, how you dodge.”

The intellectual dodge—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6...

An Elaborate Dodge

This very newsletter was conceived to counteract one of my dodges. For almost two years, I thought about writing online but was hung up on the idea that I needed a clear niche, needed to know for certain what to write about. So in a Google Doc I called “BLOGDOC,” I was drafting articles and essays, waiting for patterns to emerge that would help determine what to write about. When I told Ryan Holiday about this complicated way in which I was privately writing stuff to determine what to write about publicly, he said, “Just start. You’re trying to map out the whole 9 innings. Just throw the first pitch. You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection.” Which helped me realize that “BLOGDOC” was sort of an elaborate dodge. Really, I was uncomfortable with and uncertain about the quality of my writing, and “I’m just waiting to know for certain what to write about” was an intellectual dodge. Rather than waiting for the certainty about what to write about, I was really waiting for the writing to get better. And the writing can always, endlessly, get better. So I called this newsletter SIX at [sometimes a little after!] 6 on Sunday to make it harder to dodge, to remove the option of my brain going, “It’s not ready yet, keep working on it and send it tomorrow,” and then tomorrow, it’s, “it still needs work, send it tomorrow,” and then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Look, I Just Need You From The Neck-Down

When the comedian Matt McCusker was coming up in comedy, he worked a number of manual labor jobs to pay the bills. In one of those jobs, his boss said to him one day, “Look, I just need you from the neck-down today. I don’t want to hear any ideas. I don’t want to hear some other way you think we should try.” “Because I was always like, ‘what if we tried it this way?’” McCusker said. Pointing from one spot to another, the boss would reply, “Just lift that box there and put it over there. There to there—that’s it.” It reminded me of something I once heard my Dad say, “it never ceases to amaze me how hard people work, how creative they get, to avoid doing their job.” They think of some other way to try doing this. They think of some way to dodge that. Instead of just writing, they come up with some complicated way to figure out what to write about. Instead of facing the blank page, they create a note taking system or a list of things to research or a writing course featuring behind-the-scenes access to them facing the blank page. Instead of doing some tedious task that would take thirty minutes, they spend days building some complicated AI contraption that might make it fractionally easier or faster. Anyways, I have a note card on my desk that says, “Neck-Down.” And whenever I’m looking for an intellectual dodge, I try to catch myself and say, “Look, I just need you from the neck-down.”

“In There”

The great writer Joan Didion said she never felt confident as she sat down to write every day. As she approached her office, she’d think, “Oh, I don’t want to go in there at all.” If not a confidence in her ability to produce quality words on the page every day, Didion asked, what did you have? “Blind faith,” Didion responded, “that if you go in there and work every day it will get better. Three days will go by and you will be in there and you will think every day is terrible...I keep saying ‘in there’ as if it’s some kind of chamber, a different atmosphere. It is, in a way. There’s almost a psychic wall.” An invisible psychological barrier, often disguised as the pressing need to run errands in town or to garden or to reply to a few emails first or to get in the right mood. But if you don’t try to dodge that psychic wall, Didion continued, “on the fourth day, if you do go in there, if you don’t go into town or out in the garden, something usually will break through.”

It’s A Game Of Tonnage

Back in the ‘80s, Jerry Seinfeld’s friend was teaching a comedy course at The Improv in Los Angeles. The friend asked Seinfeld if he’d be willing to visit the class and speak to the students. Seinfeld agreed. “I went in and there were maybe 20 people in the class,” he recalled. “I went up on stage, and I said, ‘The fact that you’ve signed up for this class is already a very bad sign for what you’re trying to do. The fact that you think anyone can teach you or that there’s something you need to learn, you’ve gone off on a bad track because nobody really knows anything about any of this.’” Seinfeld suspected that, for most of the students, having the idea to take a comedy class was an intellectual dodge—a way to side-step or shortcut the real, repetitive work of writing and performing comedy, day after day after day, while feeling productive, like they were making progress toward becoming great comedians. “You know,” Seinfeld said, “no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage—how many hours are you going to work? Per week? Per month? Per year?” If he could do it over, Seinfeld said, “what I really should have done is I should have had a giant flag behind me, and when I pulled a string, it would roll down, and on the flag, it would just say two words: Just work.”

The Obstacle Is Within

“Each one of us,” the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning novelist André Gide wrote, ”has his own way of deceiving himself.” In some 50-plus books across genres, Gide constantly returned to this timeless tendency to deceive and dodge ourselves. “The only drama that really interests me,” he wrote, “and that I should always be willing to depict anew, is the debate of the individual with whatever is opposed to his integrity. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental.” It’s important to know your obstacles, your dodges, your own ways of dodging, delaying, deceiving, and debating yourself.

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