"I think I'll just hold this gun to your head till you finish." It is hard for you to see that you ruined your whole weekend needlessly. You could have gotten the job done in half the time, in fact you could have gotten it done at work before the weekend even started. You think your weekend was ruined by your difficulty in writing but what ruined it was your difficulty in dealing with compulsory tasks. You were so busy complaining about how bad a writer you are, you didn't remember the times when writing went much better. You may not have had many good writing experiences-but then you may not often write without a gun at your head. Or perhaps you aren't so stoical. You get so furious that you fume and stamp your feet and bang your fist all weekend. And yet you may not realize how much that impedes your writing. That blankness in your mind when you try to think of ideas, that difficulty you have in just letting yourself write down sentences at all, that pressure in your head when you try to organize what little you have to say: you tend to experience these as lack of intelligence or lack of skill in writing when really they come from your inability to deal with compulsory tasks. I don't mean to imply that this analysis makes things easy. Solving the problem of your reactions to compulsory tasks is probably harder than learning how to write well. But at least there is hope of progress if you can tell which one is holding you back -- if you can feel the difference between trying to saw through a thick plank with an imperfect saw and trying to saw through that plank when your own efforts are binding the saw. If you persist in thinking your only problem is a writing problem, you block progress on both fronts. If you have to do a piece of compulsory writing it helps to face the central issue squarely: are you going to consent or refuse? To consent is not necessarily to cave in. You don't have to like the task ,or the taskmaster, you don't have to grovel, but if you want the writing to go well, you have to invest yourself in the job wholeheartedly. If this is hard for you, it is probably because it feels like groveling or caving in. You may not be able to put your full strength into the job -- to consent -- unless you feel you could refuse. And this is a matter of power. It feels as though "they" have all the power. It is true that they have authority and therefore they probably have sanctions. They can fire you or flunk you. Or hate you. But the final power is yours. You are in charge of whether you consent or refuse. What feels compulsory is not compulsory. Even people "compelled" with actual guns have sometimes insisted on their power to refuse. I am thinking of the successful nonviolerit resistance by Norwegian school teachers during World War II.

^* Does it help, you may well ask, to portray your harrassed supervisor or your bumbling teacher as a sadistic TV Nazi pointing a gun at your head, when what you are trying to learn is to consent (when appropriate) to, compulsory tasks? But if you can feel, underneath your alleged difficulty in writing, your older feelings left over from the many times "they" twisted your ear or somehow compelled you to give in, you will have much better luck in stepping beyond those past feelings and getting this present job done quickly. (Those TV movies with Nazis wouldn't have such appeal if they weren't really about the universal childhood experience of being helpless before superior power.)But you may not believe in your power to refuse unless you really use it -- openly and with full responsibility (instead of fooling yourself into being sick or having an emergency or "trying as hard as you can" and somehow not succeeding). Perhaps refusing is not the ideal solution, but it's better than that familiar worst-of-bothworlds compromise: you don't get the fun of saying No or the satisfaction of doing the job quickly with investment. All you get is a ruined weekend and a sense of powerlessness.

Summary and Advice