Pep Talks for Writers Read online

  To overcome is to write your story, to believe in it.

  That was the only time in my writing life when I felt truly defeated. It was the only time in my life when I was utterly unable to pick up a pen to write anything. I’d been critiqued in many a writing workshop before—relatively severely even—so I wasn’t a naive innocent. But I’d never experienced such slashing and damning comments. I’d always been resilient and determined in the face of such negativity, but this time I lay on the couch watching TV for several days afterward, my brain looping through her scissoring comments again and again.

  I hope you haven’t experienced anything like this, but, unfortunately, almost every writer I’ve talked to has a similar story. When something you’ve created—something that glows so brightly with the beauty of your spirit—meets with such an ill fate, it can create the type of wound that never truly closes. You can stitch it closed, but the swelling puss within it can still break the stitches back open. It’s always vulnerable to infections, resistant to salves. Time heals . . . a little, but not necessarily entirely.

  The question is how to begin again, how to recover the very meaning and joy that we found in our first stories—to recover the reason we write. It’s difficult. I still see that “No shit!” in the margin and sometimes wonder if I have anything worthwhile to impart, or if the quality of my prose allows me to impart my stories and ideas in an interesting and engaging way. I’ve wondered this even after getting a story or essay published. I wonder if somehow the editor didn’t realize what an imposter I am. I wonder this even now, as I write this book on the subject of writing of all things, a book that has a publisher, a book that has been guided by a fine editor, a book that is sold in stores. Wounds can open when least expected, and from them self-doubt riles with a snarl.

  This pep talk is titled “Overcoming Creativity Wounds,” which is quite different than healing them. To overcome means to prevail. To overcome means not succumbing to the wound, but to bandage it and move on. To overcome means that you have to tell yourself that you’re creative, that the only significant thing you’ll accomplish in this life will come from that singular imaginative force that is you—that you deserve to frolic with words, to explore worlds, to dance with the characters in your stories (or follow them down dark alleys and go to war with them). To overcome means to say no to the naysayers and yes to your indomitable will. (Trust me, you do have an indomitable will, even if you’re thinking about putting this book down and turning on the TV.) To overcome is to write your story, to believe in it.

  There’s no one recipe to overcome a creativity wound, but putting a pen between your fingers and then resting it on a piece of paper is a pretty good start to finding one. Start writing. Keep writing. And the wound will fade and even fuel your work, even if it might not truly go away.

  TRY THIS

  A RANDOM ACT OF ENCOURAGEMENT

  Sometimes the best way to heal yourself is by healing others. Make it a practice to encourage others in their creative endeavors. Write an email to someone today asking how their novel is going. Post an appreciation of a writing buddy on Facebook. If you’ve had a teacher who was especially good, tell him or her how they helped you. Encouragement is infectious, and spreading that positive energy into the world will help your wounds heal.

  17

  MAKE YOUR INNER EDITOR WORK FOR YOU

  We all have an Inner Editor. It tends to be a bossy, demanding figure who appears and tells you you’re doing it all wrong. It’s mean and condescending, and doesn’t offer any constructive advice. It quotes your favorite authors’ prose and shows you how they did it, but with the purpose of belittling you. It’s basically a collection of all of your fears and insecurities as a writer.

  One of the primary lessons of NaNoWriMo is that one’s Inner Editor can roar, snarl, spit, and bludgeon the burgeoning creative momentum of any first draft. We’ve all been there, right? You stare at a sentence and think, No one wants to read this . . . What audacity to think that I’m a writer . . . This entire novel is derivative, completely unoriginal.

  Or some such nonsense.

  Your Inner Editor wants every word to be resplendent, every sentence to be a prose masterpiece, and such standards can stifle the crucial thing you need to finish your novel: the unfettered, galloping oomph of your imagination that propels your story forward.

  I sometimes think of my Inner Editor as a demanding choreographer. It yells at me to perform an exquisitely graceful pirouette—to remain balanced with every turn, expand the plié, broaden the back and shoulder blades—except my limbs are heavy and awkward, and my joints lack even the semblance of limberness. Because my critic is yelling, and because I’m so far away from doing anything that resembles that elegant pirouette, I give up. I quit dancing. Forgetting that I like to dance. Forgetting that the only way to do that pirouette is to practice it again and again.

  There’s a lot of advice about how to control, kill, stifle, smother, and banish your Inner Editor, but that Inner Editor is a resilient and stubborn creature—it keeps coming back, undaunted, and as loud and bossy as ever. Why? Because your Inner Editor is an important part of your creative process, and it just won’t be denied. Sure, perfectionism can be an oppressive, cramping force, but a sense of perfectionism, a striving for an ambitious standard of excellence can also be liberating and expansive. Only those mountain climbers with a perfectionist drive reach the top of the mountain to take in the full view of the world.

  Your Inner Editor is an important part of your creative process, and it just won’t be denied.

  Your Inner Editor knows that without its guidance and perfectionist tendencies the rubbish of your first draft will stay rubbish (and start to smell a bit). Your Inner Editor knows that without its demanding style, you’ll start to give yourself breaks, take the easy way out, decide that everything you write is brilliant just because you wrote it. Your Inner Editor is actually a sensitive and caring creature, highly attuned to your desire to gracefully connect all of the pieces of your story, to find that beautiful cadence of a sentence, the mot juste, and that’s what motivates it.

  The challenge is how to find the degree of perfectionism that makes you better versus the kind of perfectionism that destroys you (and sometimes those around you).

  The researcher Brené Brown makes a distinction between perfectionism and what she calls “healthy striving.” She views perfectionism as an emotion spawned by fear and self-doubt, and that type of perfectionism sets standards that are beyond reach and creates a sense of unworthiness when mistakes are made. Healthy striving, on the other hand, provides a demanding but not stifling framework: you set standards that are challenging, but within reach, enjoy the process of reaching for them, see mistakes as opportunities for growth, and react positively to feedback.

  Brown says, “Healthy striving is self-focused: ‘How can I improve?’ Perfectionism is other-focused: ‘What will they think?’”

  So maybe it’s a matter of reflecting on the nature of your Inner Editor. Is your Inner Editor motivating you to improve for the sake of improvement, or to improve because of the fear of what others will think? How can you be mindful of these different drives—and stay on the healthy side?

  Ultimately, you must find a way to make your inner critic your friend. Yes, perhaps a friend who sometimes speaks a harsh truth without invitation, but still a friend. So you have to sit down and decide on a strategy with your Inner Editor. You have to figure out when it has to leave, when it’s appropriate to return, and the proper tone of voice to use (Inner Editors often speak like a blunt teenager). Your Inner Editor needs to understand that one part of creativity is about chasing wild ideas over the hills and dales of your imagination, so sometimes tweaking and fixing and polishing—or cutting and thrashing and burning—has to wait. Your Inner Editor needs to know that it’s often worth doing something badly—just to do it. Your Inner Editor needs to be focused on making your story better for your story’s sake, not for the judging eyes of
others.

  Otherwise, it’s easy for your Inner Editor to draw you into an OCD loop of maddening self-critique, and for its comments to become so hostile and aggressive that you stop writing and forget the wonder and awe of it all. Ideally, you can shift your relationship with your Inner Editor so that it’s not a demanding naysayer but a coach who motivates you to practice harder than you thought possible to bring out unknown talents. The best coaches, editors, and teachers know that encouragement is a critical driver of success. You want your sense of perfectionism or healthy striving to motivate you to always reach for the highest standard and to do the endless polishing that a good novel requires. Your Inner Editor bears gifts, but it just has a difficult time offering them in friendly language sometimes.

  In the end, when a sentence or a paragraph or a chap-ter—or, heck, an entire novel—reaches a glowing completion, your Inner Editor, if it’s a good friend, can join the party and give a rousing, heartfelt toast.

  TRY THIS

  GOOD INNER EDITOR VERSUS BAD INNER EDITOR

  Make a list of five ways your Good Inner Editor helps you and another list of five ways your Bad Inner Editor hinders you. Use this list to call on your Inner Editor for help when need be, but to banish your Bad Inner Editor if it’s holding you back.

  18

  ACCEPT THE MESS

  Things veer toward a tangled mess when I plunge into the depths of my writing. Yesterday’s dishes get stacked on top of the previous day’s dishes. The mail lies scrambled on a table top. A heap of magazines teeters on my night stand. And then my desk might be characterized as a kooky museum, full of odd totems that reside amidst a coffee-crusted mug, a medley of notebooks, and a leaning chimney of books.

  I suppose I could beat myself up for allowing such a mess to accumulate, and truth be told, I often do. We’re raised in a culture that celebrates the mantra cleanliness is next to godliness, after all. Kids probably hear, “Go clean your room,” more than any other thing from their parents (sadly, instead of, “Go write a novel”). The homes we see in magazines are so manicured and polished in comparison to ours that we can’t help feeling bad about our untidy spaces. We want to please people by presenting ourselves as well-groomed, well-organized, well-behaved people to the world at large.

  Guess what, though? Messes aren’t necessarily the result of a character flaw—they’re actually seedbeds of creativity. In fact, a psychological study by Kathleen Vohs, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, demonstrated that tidy rooms tended to foster conventional thoughts whereas messy room inspired a sense of novelty and creativity.

  “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,” Vohs observed. “Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.”

  It’s no surprise that many great thinkers reside in states of clutter. Einstein was famous for the discombobulated mounds of papers strewn on his desk. When criticized for his jumbled desk, he asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

  The creative process just isn’t neat, no matter how you approach it.

  Einstein knew that prioritizing orderliness would limit the wanderings of his mind into the otherworldly spaces of the galaxy (a relatively messy place of creativity itself, with asteroids spinning through space, stars combusting, and black holes swallowing things up). Our ideas, our creations, require periods of immersion, even obsession, and the time and energy necessary to maintain pristine living quarters can undercut our imaginative bounds.

  Our imagination isn’t a neat place, after all. My stories tend to sprawl into tangents and subplots, and then spiral into front flips and mad dashes. They can resemble a canvas that a gaggle of preschoolers have finger painted on together, except while the teacher isn’t looking, the ornery little devils find a box of feathers, glitter, Cheerios, pasta shells, and they toss it all into the mix.

  How can I maintain a house (or a life) that lives up to Victorian standards with such rascality going on in my imagination? The creative process just isn’t neat, no matter how you approach it. Just as writers tend to write amidst stacks of paper and books, artists tend to create with speckles of paint on their clothes and the floor. Francis Bacon’s studio rivaled the mess of Einstein’s desk. The walls were smeared with paint, and the floor was a ruckus of books, brushes, papers, and other detritus. Without chaos, there is no creation. Just look at a kitchen after a feast.

  So give yourself a break and accept the mess—because you are immersed in a deep act of creation. When you decided to write—when you bought this very book—your goal was to realize your creative dreams, not scrub surfaces clean. (The books on how to maintain clean, spartan homes are in an entirely different section of the bookstore, near the books on taxes and auto repair.)

  Do you know how many people have called out on their deathbed and yelled, “I wish I’d cleaned the house more!” Zero. Do you know how many yell, “I wish I would have finished my novel!” Millions.

  Don’t be one of those millions. Accept the mess and clean up later. After you’re done writing.

  TRY THIS

  GET MESSY. SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

  Make the decision to write instead of cleaning the house. Did your world fall apart? How much writing did you get done? Did you do the dishes later? (I bet you did, and I bet they were none the worse for it.)

  19

  PULL YOURSELF OUT OF THE COMPARISON TRAP

  “Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Or their success.

  By human nature we compare ourselves to others. We’re social creatures, and social creatures create a pecking order, so we tend to rank ourselves against others’ achievements because our mind is wired to figure out where we fit into the scheme of things. Unfortunately, we usually find someone who is doing better than us, which isn’t hard to do because there is always someone doing better than us. Another’s good fortune can quickly become one of the most powerful and dangerous magnetic forces in the universe.

  I remember one disturbingly piquant moment in 2010 when I stepped into an airport newsstand to get a magazine for my flight and spotted a photo of an erudite, authorial Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time magazine along with the headline “Great American Novelist.” He was roughly my age, also from the Midwest, and I’d been tracking his ascent as a novelist for years. I’d read his writing, and I liked it well enough, admired it on certain levels, but I didn’t love it. Still, because he garnered such gushing attention, I measured the arc of my career (or the lack of an arc, rather) against his, and I came up short. I had only published a smattering of short stories in small literary journals, and here he was with a great American novel or two in hand.

  The baser side of myself—my ego, my vanity, my deluded sense of self—cried out. As I looked at the cover, Franzen’s wizened eyes stared at me in a condemning way. I didn’t have what it took. I didn’t have the talent. I didn’t have the work ethic. I didn’t have the connections. I didn’t have the luck. All of the meaning and joy of creativity whooshed out of me in a frightful gust.

  One of the worst things you can do to mangle the exquisite beauty of your creative spirit is to compare yourself to another. Yet in this era of social media, it’s hard not to immerse yourself in the nettlesome practice of ranking your life against friends and even strangers on a daily basis. Our social media streams can be a damning showcase of others’ good fortune. I watch as friends go on writing retreats or to conferences. I read news of published stories, book reviews, and awards dinners. I’m generally happy for such success, but sometimes . . . sometimes, I feel a treacherous pang of envy, especially if my own writing isn’t going so well.

  One of the worst things you can do to mangle the exquisite beauty of your creative spirit is to compare yourself to another.

  One hazard of being a writer is that we have a notion of possible su
ccess, and maybe even a bit of fame, and most of us are seduced by that to some degree, so we unwittingly create competitions over who’s gotten published, who’s gotten the best reviews—or who is even writing when we’re not. A daily dose or two of envy easily becomes part of our lifestyle, but envy is never good for one’s creativity. “Envy is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die,” as the saying goes.

  And here’s the thing we forget to remind ourselves: No one is keeping score. As I stared at the magazine cover of Jonathan Franzen, I realized that he didn’t even know who I was. There was no scoreboard that said “Jonathan Franzen: 100 . . . Grant Faulkner: 2.” I’d projected the entire scenario, and for what?

  Like most people, I was focused on what I didn’t have, and not on all the good in my life. I didn’t think how lucky I was to go to college. I didn’t think how fortunate I was to be part of a lively creative community. I didn’t think how blessed I was to be able to simply write instead of worrying about starvation or living under a totalitarian regime or the ravages of war. We tend to compare ourselves with someone who we perceive as having more or doing more, so the scorecard we keep serves one end: to make us feel bad about ourselves.

  We’re asking the wrong questions. Instead of measuring ourselves against another’s achievements, we need to evaluate our achievements within the context of our lives. When I feel a prick of envy, I try to ask these three questions:

  When I wrote my first story, why did I write it? Was I competing with anyone, did I want to be a famous writer, or did I just have an urge to create something enlivening, interesting, and fun?