Post updated Dec. 12, 2023

If you’re like me, when you sit down to write you have a devilish voice in your head.

The voice says you’re a failure, your writing will never be good or excellent, and why bother? Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance among other books, has a name for the voice. He calls it Resistance, an impersonal force that is the enemy of creativity in art or business. As he writes on his blog,

Resistance is an impartial force of nature, like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. Resistance is clever. It knows if it personalizes its manifestations, it can deceive us and slip past our defenses. It’s like the software that enables direct-mail marketers to send us letters and e-mails addressed, “Dear Susie.” It’s bullshit. Resistance doesn’t know who we are and it doesn’t care.

I encountered Resistance many times in my 20s and 30s and like the angel who wrestled Jacob, I was overcome. After I sat down to write, I stared at my screen for 10 to 20 minutes hoping against hope an inspiration would come to me. Oh, sure, I put words on paper, but nothing coherent emerged until hours later.

As Mr. Pressfield writes, writers never conquer Resistance entirely. They must slay the dragon every day. While I still struggle with self-doubts and procrastination, I have found a weird trick to disarm them, to keep them at bay for a while.

I listen to the soundtrack to “All the President’s Men.”

Like I said, the trick is strange. It’s practically a secret because you readers are the only people I have mentioned it to. Yet what can I say? The trick works. If I feel discouraged or need a pick-me-up, I play the soundtrack for ten to twelve minutes. My mood shifts.

I am no longer down. I am energized and motivated.

I am caught up in the mystery of the Nixon administration’s war against the counterculture and Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation. I am transported back to when I was four or five years old in Burlingame, California, and heard all about Watergate but knew virtually nothing about it.

The soundtrack is particularly effective for my project on Congressman Ryan and Jim Jones. It captures the feeling that doing the right thing results in quiet spiritual peace and contentment rather than floats and ticker-tape parades.

I can’t do this trick indefinitely, though. I stop after twelve to fifteen minutes because I lose my concentration otherwise. Once my mood has shifted from self-doubt to motivation, I turn off the soundtrack. I need to focus.

While a few writers can concentrate while listening to music, not the least among them Stephen King, most people can’t do so effectively. The neuroscience strikes me as conclusive on this point. Don’t serve two masters!

In other words, the trick is effective only intermittently. It can only disarm killer doubts; it can’t dismantle them.

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P.S. Before Dan and I started working on the Jonestown book project in 2016, I listened to the soundtrack to the excellent 1990s NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” The music is not only mysterious but also pulsating, a rare combo. Make of that what you will.