The Writer Behind the Writer's Life
Psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo gets
on the couch.
by Richard Stayton,
from the Dec/Jan 2001 issue of "Written
By"
Writers seek out Dennis Palumbo.
Extravagantly successful writers. Down-and-out writers. Wanna-bes. All
economic levels and ages and genders hajj to his Sherman Oaks office. They
come for many reasons--writer's block, overnight fame and fortune, anonymity,
deadline dread--but ultimately they're seeking the same objective: to release
the writer within.
That's why Palumbo's new book is
titled Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks
to Release the Writer Within (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; $15.95). Partially
a collection of his Written By "The Writer's Life" columns and partially
new material, this is not a how-to guidebook offering insider tips on "making
it." It's a view from the trenches, yes, but its point-of-view is
about empowering you. The person who writes. Who must write. No wonder
Palumbo concludes his book, "You. And your writing. That's all there is.
That's all there needs to be. So go. Write."
Palumbo should know. Before becoming a licensed
psychotherapist, he cowrote the screenplay for My Favorite Year, authored
the novel City Wars, and scripted numerous television shows. He talks as
well as he writes.
Richard Stayton: Why did you make a career
change from writing full-time to primarily being a therapist?
Dennis Palumbo: It mostly came out of my
own experience in therapy as a client and enjoying the process. I started
volunteering at a psych clinic. I'd always been interested in psychology
and philosophy, and I was going through some personal issues of my own.
I spent more and more time doing this volunteer work. And I was working
on a film for Redford's company about a mountain-climber. As a result of
the research, I ended up climbing mountains and traveling all around the
world and living in Nepal for three months. And I really had a little bit
of a Razor's Edge experience where I wanted to change my life. But I still
wasn't clear I wanted to do it. I was taking classes. I was earning credits.
This was like 1984, '85. But still I was writing pilots, rewriting movies,
taking meetings.
RS: And selling?
DP: Oh, yes, making a living. One thing
about a freelance writer, once you get your price to a certain level, there's
enough
room to have a whole other career. And one day I was having lunch with
a producer at Le Dome. He was talking about a movie that he wanted me to
do, and I kept looking at my watch because I was gonna be late to this
psychiatric hospital where I was leading a group of schizophrenics doing
psychodrama. After, as I was racing out, I realized I was bored with the
meeting and couldn't wait to get to the hospital. That was my "Road to
Damascus" kind of moment where I realized I wanted to change my life and
focus on being a therapist.
Also, I was reawakening my interest in prose writing,
having less interest in where American movies were going. I'd been alone
in a room for 15 years, and I liked the idea of working with other people.
And now I have the best of both worlds. My writing's gone back to being
something that I love, like it was when I was in college. My day gig is
being a therapist. The icing on the cake is when I write something. If
people like it, great; if they don't, bummer. But there are no meetings.
Nobody else touches it. It's totally mine: the column, articles. I'm writing
a novel. I'm halfway through it, and I'm back to a kind of authorship without
the filters that I used to have in all those meetings.
RS: What do you mean by filters?
DP: Producers, executives, directors who
want rewrites or whatever. But both writing and therapy are using two different
parts of myself, one of which will not get used if I'm just doing the other
one. I need both. I need the interaction with others that I get from being
a therapist. And I need access to my private creative voice that I get
from being a writer. My own psychological terrain is interesting to me.
And talking with people about what they're concerned about and how they
struggle with it makes me feel part of the human condition in a way that's
very gratifying to me.
RS: When writers come to you, what are usually
the reasons?
DP: The number one reason is either procrastination
or writer's block. Invariably, a person's creative struggles, whether it's
procrastination or fear of rejection or whatever, are so inexorably entwined
with their personal life that the work ends up taking a two-pronged effect.
We end up doing both. If a person is struggling with writer's block, and
we learn a little about his family of origin and how his relationships
are going now, we learn what function the writer's block is serving in
his life. And so I use the therapy to get under those issues, to illuminate
them and explore them and then shed light on why they might be blocked
as a result of these kinds of issues. That helps writers move away from
the meaning they tend to give it, which is, "I'm blocked because I'm not
any good. I'm blocked because I don't have enough willpower. I procrastinate
because I'm afraid." The negative self-talk that accompanies writer's block
and procrastination. What's so striking about most of the blocks we have
is that they tend to have a psychologically protective function. If you
experienced enormous pressure as a child to succeed at a high level, your
procrastination might be a way your organism protects you from a fear of
shameful exposure when you finally put the stuff in the hands of a reader.
Meanwhile you're angry at it. You think it's an adversary, but that "adversarial"
part of you thinks, But I'm watching out for you. And so understanding
that conflict helps depathologize your writing struggles. Because every
writer struggles with blocks and fears of rejection. I think it only means
that you're a writer. What a lot of people don't understand is that these
struggles don't say anything about you.
RS: No value judgments allowed.
DP: Right, most of the time we have the
painful responses that everyone has. If you're writing a story, you're
gonna get stuck sometimes. If you submit a piece of material, you're gonna
get rejected. The painful feelings that you get when you get rejected are
normal; the meaning you give to that rejection is what needs to be looked
at. "If it's rejected, my dad was right about me all along. If it's rejected,
it means I must not be any good." And human beings experience things like
rejection very personally. There's no other way to experience them. But
we have to challenge the meaning we give to them. And those meanings tend
to be developed over our life based on how we were attuned to our experiences
of rejection and pain when we were young. And the meanings our family gave
to it.
RS: So in therapy you go back with writers
to their childhood?
DP: Often. Now, the thing about writers
is that they're so therapized. They've been in therapy for years, and they'll
lay out a lot of their family dynamics for me. But as I always say, "Insight's
the booby-prize of therapy." That means change doesn't come from insight.
You need insight and awareness to understand what's going on. But change
comes from courage, the risk of challenging those meanings everyday. If
you're someone who believes, for example, that if you get angry you're
a bad person, then you could have all the insight in the world as to where
that comes from when you were a child. But every day you're going to have
to risk showing a little anger and seeing that people around you don't
fall over dead. And until you challenge that as an adult and go, "Wow,
I got angry, and my loved ones still love me. Nobody thinks I'm a killer,
and it doesn't mean I'm a terrible person." Until you challenge that in
the here and now, you're not gonna change.
RS: Some believe therapy is bad for a writer.
What is your answer to that?
DP: The traditional stereotypical view is,
"Oh, my neuroses cause my writing, so if I cure my neuroses, I won't write
anymore." But my experience is: There is no cure. It's a mistake to think
that there is some perfectible you in the future freed of conflict and
problems. And if that happens, you won't write anymore. The conflicts and
sensitivities that drive a person to write are with us forever. They're
what make us who we are, and they're what make us writers. What therapy
can do is help us have access to that with fewer roadblocks. Many successful
writers have been in therapy and what the therapy has helped them do is
stay more on track with their writing. But they're still writing about
the same painful crap they always did; they just get more pages down. It's
a mistake to think the raw materials of my life, which are the source of
my writing, will be transformed in some kind of way, that the painful experiences
of my life will no longer be experienced by me as painful. Yes, they will.
It's just that you'll be able to write about them with fewer roadblocks,
with less procrastination, with less shame.
RS: The writers get past procrastination
and writer's block. Then do they stay with you or do they move on?
DP: I have patients I've seen for five and
six years, and some two or three months. Some I've developed a therapeutic
relationship with, and every time they have a big project, they call me
and come in and get support for three or four months while they're doing
that project, and then move on. Traditionally, we work through what the
presenting problem is in their work as a writer, and we move on to issues
in their life: anxiety, depression, their relationships. The thing about
writers and all creative people is their job is so inexorably wound up
in who they are and not as easy to separate. A creative person struggles,
and the vehicle that they think is the way out is their creative work.
It's so intertwined.
RS: Do writers come to you with basic business
problems?
DP: Not for business advice, but they might
come to me with, "I'm frozen in the writer's room. I'm afraid to open my
mouth." A lot of writers come to me needing help dealing with performance
anxiety on pitching either in the room with other writers or going to pitch
in a network or at a studio. Oftentimes we'll do role-play. What in that
scenario is the danger? Usually there's some danger of shameful self-exposure.
When someone has performance anxiety around pitching, usually shame's in
there somewhere, or high expectations.
RS: And do you play the role of the exec?
DP: Sometimes that's the way we do it. Sometimes
I might ask the person to have a conversation with themselves, play both
parts, as to what he's afraid of. One of the things that usually happens--not
always, but usually--is we find out that the writer is projecting one or
another of the parent figures onto that executive. Same with agents. It's
so important for writers to realize their agent is not their parent. Hollywood
is the worst place in the world to find an approving parent. And people
come from all over the country here just for that fact. They want validation.
It's a horrible place to come. For 20 years everybody has made fun of Sally
Field for getting her Oscar and saying, "You like me! You really like me!"
I thought it was the only truthful statement a creative person has ever
made at an awards presentation. It was the absolute naked truth. And that's
the validation. Of course, the response in the business is massive denial.
Someone asked Clint Eastwood, "What will you say if you get an Oscar for
Unforgiven?" And he said, "Well, I'm not gonna stand up there and go, 'You
like me! You really like me!'" I thought to myself, "Ladies and gentlemen,
Denial 101." Because that's exactly what he felt. And there's nothing wrong
with feeling that way.
RS: Are there different seasons of problems
for writers?
DP: Yes. Staffing season is a really tough
time. And the last couple of TV staffing seasons have been brutal, just
brutal. It's been a real affront to more-experienced writers. One of the
traditional complaints in my practice is that just when a writer gets really
good at what he or she knows how to do, ageism starts to creep in. And
it's very powerful dealing with that. As a mature person myself--I'm going
to turn 50 in March--it's just so shortsighted on the part of the industry.
I do a couple things on the ageism problem. Number one, I support and commiserate
with them. Number two, I challenge the idea that it's a defect in themselves.
And number three, I try to get them to see that in the long run, only a
benign relationship with themselves and their writing talent is the source
of any satisfaction they're going to have. In other words, they do have
to keep giving them "you," until "you" is what they want. You can't make
yourself 10 years younger. You can only reinvent yourself to a certain
extent. There may be other places you need to go with your talent, whether
it's playwriting or novel writing, but you can't sabotage your talent by
trying to write something that is younger than you are. You have to acknowledge
where you are with your age.
RS: Do you have writers coming to you from
their 20s? What's the reverse of ageism?
DP: They're all terrified. I have a number
of showrunners. I have a couple of young writer-directors, like the new
hot guys. And they're terrified. They're aware of their youth. They cover
it in public and in their workplace with a kind of persona that is very
confident, very aggressive and assertive, but in the privacy of the consulting
room, they're terrified by their youth, the work that has gone before,
the expectation. They know about all the other young wonders. Very few
of the young wonders have maintained a 25-year career like Steven Spielberg.
Very few people have done that. "What's gonna happen? I fooled them. I'm
fraudulent. This is a hat trick."
RS: What do you tell them?
DP: It's not so much what I tell them. It's
how we explore together how they deal with that fear. There's no magic
pill to vanish fear, but there are tools to coexist with our fears. To
realize that fears are understandable, that growth and craft is the best
way to coexist with those fears, to develop a benign and supportive relationship
with the practice of the art. Not to buy into the idea that you have to
be a big superstar, but that you're going to be in this for the long haul.
The key to that is to be good at your job and to get better at your craft.
And that results from consistency and mining your own personal experience
and following your authentic voice, which means sometimes you'll be in
favor and sometimes you'll be out of favor. So in the long run you can't
know what people are going to think of you. Your job, in a funny kind of
way, is to not pay attention to your life.
>> Back
Copyright 2001, Written By. Reprinted with permission.
Contact: dennis@dennispalumbo.com
