Hold up... this is only my third Useful Writing Junk? Yikes. What kinda seat-of-the-pants blog am I running here? Don't answer that. My ego can't handle the truth.
So much in writing (and any creative endeavor) revolves around the ego. It takes a degree of narcissism to say to yourself, "I have a story to tell, and by gum, people are gonna want to hear it." And yet, contradiction of contradictions, creators of all kinds can have such fragile self-esteems. It's what chokes us back and stops us from sharing all the things we want to share. Once we do put our work out there, it's what keeps us clinging to every Amazon review, every fluctuation in website traffic, every offhand comment from a family friend.
Creators need constant reassurance about their work, even when they feel in their souls that their creations are valuable and good. Or, they feel that way just enough of the time to justify making their work public. Need a source on that? Talk to my poor, long-suffering wife about all the times I've snuggled up against her in bed at O dark thirty and demanded to know if she thinks I'm a good writer.
There's a reason for this dichotomy, and Ira Glass sums it up pretty terrifically in a 2009 interview. Check out his words in motion in Daniel Sax's short film (and click here for a transcript and some additional info):
In summary: creators enter the game because they have good taste, but it takes practice and practice and practice for their work to live up to their own standards.
I have this friend. She is intelligent and observant and creative and has incredible taste. I know her taste is great because of the interesting podcasts she's introduced to me, and the diverse array of books on her shelves, and her strangely intimidating streak of perfectionism while recreating a Bob Ross landscape.
Why, would you look at that. Source
She's considering writing a story, because she has a number of stories floating around in her inner world, and is ready to bring them out. However, that involves exposing some ego. Like I said, the girl is hecka smart, and knows what she's getting into. She knows that the content she's starting out with will not meet her high expectations. It's frustrating enough to shut down everyone but the most tenacious (and/or most foolish).
Her brain does to her what mine does to me, and it's what tons of artist brains do. We write a little bit, recoil in horror when it isn't the perfect thing our egos believe it should be, and have to talk ourselves back from the ledge. Giving up on our writing starts to look really appetizing and really safe. It feels better to say, "I'm a crappy writer and I'll never be able to do this" than to say "I need to keep working and working and failing in front of everyone until I like my writing enough not to puke on it."
But like Radio God Ira Glass says, we just need time to catch up. We need to build up a mountain of work, and hopefully within that mountain a diamond will form.
I had lunch with another friend this weekend, and she mentioned that she and her mother read my first (and currently only) novel, Necessaries. I duck-taped my ego to the back of my mind and asked what they honestly thought. She said it was funny, comparing it to the witty writings of Douglas Adams, which was nearly enough for my ego to bust through the duck-tape forcefield and scream in triumph. But she also admitted that she and her mother could tell it was a first novel.
And it's true. Necessaries is an open wound of a book, in some ways. When I published it, I knew I wasn't completely satisfied (but let's be real: I'm never going to be satisfied with my own work). However, I wanted to toss it into the world, as if it were an anchor and the world were the sea, and the anchor line was wrapped around my leg, and... OK, so, the metaphor is that I forced myself into the deep end, knowing I might crush my pride in the process.
But now it's out there. It's the first lump of a foothill on the road to my eventual mountain of work. There are things I love about it. There are many more things that I know I can improve with enough repetition.
The takeaway on this weird third edition of UWJ (oooge?) is that sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing is to keep doing it and ignore the protests of your ego. Given enough practice and quantity, you'll start to close the gap between your creations and your taste.
I'll leave you with this excerpt from David Bayles and Ted Orland's Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking:
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
Thanks for reading my pounds of writing, and I hope you go forth and produce pounds of writing yourself.