Lecture: Self-Determined Effort Processing (1) (1951)

I figured out all these various things, and I was sitting there in the chair and I said to myself,  “I’d certainly like to be able—with the enthusiasm that I had when I was about sixteen—to go in and sit down to that typewriter and make that keyboard jump and the paper fly and have blood and sand and nostalgia and everything all over the place here in just no time. Boy, that would really be terrific. I sure got a bang out of it once.”

And then I thought of this terrific and awful task of going back and processing out all of these enforced communication lines. There were hundreds and hundreds of times when I had to write—didn’t want to and didn’t care to, but had to. And I thought, “Gee, that’s really tough. It’s certainly going to take me just hundreds of hours of processing to get all that stuff.”

Then I thought to myself, “Wait a minute! There’s something here that doesn’t meet the eye. Did you ever consent to this?”

“No, I’d never consent to anything like this.”

“Did you ever consent to be hag ridden on the subject of writing?”

I suddenly remembered living on a farm. My first wife was a dear girl from Warrenton, Virginia.¹ She was a socialite and she — loved horses. And we maintained a very nice farm with white horse-fences (and a debit in my bank account continually).

I would be working till about three o’clock in the morning just like a dog and I would come down about noon after working all night. (If I got up in the morning everybody would be yammering and quarreling.) And the farmer and hired hands, sitting down around the kitchen, would say, “Well, good afternoon.”

And I would sort of growl back.²

Another one would say, “You know, I’ve been up since five o’clock.”

One morning I was up at five o’clock and I looked out to see what these men did. The farmer was up at five o’clock all right but at five-thirty, after having had a cup of coffee, he was sitting out on the back fence chewing a straw—and he was still sitting there at nine. But he had sure been up early.

Nobody would believe that I was working. Nobody believed I worked hard. Another thing that they started to do to me was say, “Well, you don’t do much work. Why can’t you take a little run down to Poolsville, Bellsville, Warrenton, Richmond? There’s a nice cocktail party going over at the Hunt Club tonight. Don’t see why we can’t go over,” and that sort of thing.³

And I would say, “I have to work.” I didn’t want to do this.

Ten minutes later I ran this concatenation of the times I had consented to believe, by telling somebody else, how hard-worked I was on the subject of writing. I didn’t really, until afterwards, connect these two acts—I was too engrossed, ten minutes afterwards, in the fact that I had to get out “Black Dianetics.”²

I got up out of the chair and I went in the other room and threw the typewriter cover off and put some paper in, and I sat down and wrote four thousand words on the subject of Black Dianetics, tracing the use of phenomena for the enslavement of mankind forward from early Chaldea. I read this stuff and it was real drama. I haven’t written anything like it for years!⁴

Notes