Pep Talks for Writers Read online

  How do I show up for my own creative work?

  How can I genuinely congratulate others for their success and encourage them?

  I didn’t ask myself any of those questions while staring at Franzen’s photo, but I later realized something important: Franzen himself probably experiences similar nips of envy—yes, even after gracing the cover of a major magazine, selling millions of copies of his books, and going to snazzy literary events. Success doesn’t cure envy so much as it feeds it, because there’s always someone else who seems to get more respect; there’s always a party you didn’t get invited to or an award you didn’t get nominated for.

  We all have our own foibles and challenges, our own insecurities and immaturities, and fame and fortune do little to salve the anguish of it all. But do you know what does? Creating. Creating your story, your way. Feeling the rush of your imagination. Seeing worlds take shape on the page. Knowing that your words uncover old mysteries and evoke new ones. The best cure for envy is simply to get lost in your story.

  TRY THIS

  EXPLORE YOUR ENVY

  Reflect on a writer you envy and write down the reasons why. Then write about whether that envy has helped or hindered your writing. Does your envy lead you to new imaginative places? Does it empower you as a creator? If not, then practice celebrating others’ achievements.

  20

  PUT YOUR LIFE STRUGGLES IN PERSPECTIVE

  It’s easy to feel as if others have all the breaks, all the privileges, and that’s why they’re successful. And, indeed, some authors are born into a life that seems as if it’s been carefully manicured for them to become authors. Their life allows them to immerse themselves in their imaginations, read books in leisurely fashion, attend the best schools, converse with the literati at swanky parties, and then live in a glamorous city without having to worry about making rent, let alone pay for that eight-dollar latte with a Napoleonic crest crafted in the steamed milk. They get to go on adventures to foreign lands and wear nice wool turtlenecks on rainy days. Then, once they’re done with their novel, they can simply call up a family friend who is an agent, and voila, it’s published!

  If you’re not born into such circumstances, it’s easy to think that you can’t become a writer unless you’re one of these chosen ones. If you’re picking up an extra shift or an extra job to not only make rent, but to pay off a credit card bill, last year’s taxes, or devastating college loan debt, it’s easy to think of life as an “If only” affair.

  If only I made more money, I could . . .

  If only I had more time, I could . . .

  If only I had the right connections, I could . . .

  Here’s something to keep in mind: Good writing rarely comes from a pampered person; good writing is burnished in the kiln of struggle. Most writers have faced down significant obstacles to succeed. You should never let the circumstances of your life tell you what you can’t do. Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Rationalizations of why you don’t create are easy to find. They all seem true, whether you have challenges at work or home or both. Rationalizations are insidious. They quickly become a habit, a strange comfort, a lifestyle.

  To get perspective on your own life’s struggles, just take this little quiz and identify the author that corresponds with each item (answers follow).

  1. As a single mother, she wrote in cafes so she could escape her cold apartment. Poor, practically homeless, she was diagnosed with clinical depression and considered taking her own life. Her best-selling novel received 12 rejections before it was published, and her editor advised her to get a day job because she had little chance of making a living as a writer.

  2. He fled Saigon with his family in 1975 at the age of four and settled in a camp for Vietnamese refugees in Pennsylvania. Once there, he was sent to live with two different American families for 14 months before finally being reunited with his family. After his family moved to San Jose to open a Vietnamese grocery store, his parents were shot and injured in a store robbery, and he experienced much violence, both in the Vietnamese community and beyond.

  3. She was born the youngest of eight children in a poor rural county in Georgia. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother was a maid, but in spite of a landlord who expected their children to work the fields, they sent her to school. When she was eight, she was wounded in her eye by a shot from a BB gun, and because her family didn’t have a car to take her to the hospital, she became permanently blind in that eye. Before her senior year of college, a pregnancy and abortion caused her to sink into a deep depression.

  4. She grew up in a large family of six brothers, and her father often moved the family between Chicago and the southern United States, where she lived in “neighborhoods that appeared like France after World War II—empty lots and burned-out-buildings.” Because of her family’s frequent migrations, she grew up always feeling displaced, and not a part of where she lived.

  5. She faced such tragic circumstances in her childhood, including sexual abuse and racial discrimination, that she was mute for five years. She managed to graduate high school, but gave birth to her first child soon afterward. Unable to attend college and desperate for money, she worked as a prostitute.

  6. She was the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. When she was five, her mother married, but her stepfather began to abuse her sexually. She suffered mentally and physically, and then contracted gonorrhea from him that was not diagnosed until she was in her 20s. The untreated disease left her unable to have children. She was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. In her early years as a writer, she worked as a salad girl, a maid, a nanny, and a substitute teacher.

  Life rarely opens paths for us. We have to open them ourselves, no matter the good or bad fortune we’re born with. Instead of thinking If only . . . try to think Now, I’ll . . . You might have to work a little harder than some, or be just a little more cunning and scrappy, but writing your story is in your control.

  TRY THIS

  BATTLE AN OBSTACLE

  Write down every obstacle to your writing, whether it’s time, money, or something else. How much does it truly hinder your writing? Reflect on how you can overcome it.

  ANSWERS:

  1. J. K. Rowling

  2. Viet Than Nguyen

  3. Alice Walker

  4. Sandra Cisneros

  5. Maya Angelou

  6. Dorothy Allison

  21

  TREATING IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

  I often think of the famous Groucho Marx line: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” I love it for its piercing paradox: Marx wants to belong to the club, yet if they accept someone like him, the club automatically loses its luster—because what kind of club would accept a second-rate nobody like him?

  Marx is expressing a variation of impostor syndrome, a pernicious lack of self-worth that needles many people. You feel like a phony among those who are the “real somebodies.” You live in fear of being exposed as a fraud. You don’t believe you’re intelligent or creative, even if there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.

  “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out,’” said Maya Angelou, despite winning three Grammys, being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and reciting a poem at President Obama’s inauguration in 2008.

  Authors are especially susceptible to impostor syndrome because writing is such a vexing labyrinth of self-doubt. What does it take to feel like the real thing? Writing every day? Finishing a book? Finding an agent? Publishing a book? Getting reviewed in the New York Times? Appearing on the Tonight Show? Having writer friends? Famous writer friends? Per Maya Angelou, even all of that sometimes doesn’t suffice.

  Authors are especially susceptible to impostor syndrome because writing is such a vexing labyrinth of self-doubt.

  Impost
or syndrome arises from a variety of causes. Part of it stems from natural humility. Humility is good thing, one of my favorite traits in people, but it can easily tip toward self-negation. We’ve all been there, right? If asked what we do, we mumble, “I’m a writer,” doubling down on mumbling the word “writer,” as if we’re protecting ourselves from the ensuing laughter at our ridiculous and arrogant claim. Then if someone says they like a story or poem of ours, we put up a weird praise-deflecting shield and hide behind it until the compliments go away.

  Impostor syndrome also tends to afflict high achievers because high achievers, being the demanding creatures they are, gravitate toward what is lacking, what needs to improve. A high achiever will critique the negative parts of his or her performance rather than celebrate the things that went well. The powers of self-critique can be a mighty force in producing great work, but all of that questioning leaves a residue of doubt that even choruses of applause sometimes can’t wipe away.

  Also, some believe women tend to be more plagued by impostor syndrome than men, because they’re more likely to have been taught to be self-deprecating and to downplay achievements. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her TED Talk, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man.’” If you regularly practice shrinking, you’ll shrink your way into never feeling like you’re good enough.

  The worst thing about impostor syndrome is that it can hamper your creative drive and prevent you from putting your work into the world. You hear a voice that tells you you’re not a real writer, so why keep working so hard to finish this novel. You squelch the verve and moxie necessary to push creative boundaries by telling yourself you’re not good enough to be so daring. You shouldn’t risk failure; you shouldn’t experiment; you should play it safe.

  So what’s the solution? The flip side of impostor syndrome is an old saying, “Fake it until you make it.” Faking it isn’t negative in this case—it’s actually a fabulous technique for building self-confidence. It’s not about tricking other people, but tricking yourself into believing you’re the real thing so that you’ll approach situations with more confidence. It goes something like this: If you fake being a confident person, then you’ll actually start believing you’re a confident person, and as a result, people will start reacting to you as a confident person, which will then make you even more confident. Even though you were just faking it to begin with. But now you don’t have to fake it, because you are it. Do you understand?

  And it works. People who smile, even a forced smile, become happier as a result. Likewise, if you adopt a power stance—lift your head and chest, prop your arms on your hips—research shows a decrease in the stress hormone cortisol and an increase in testosterone, a hormone related to confidence. Simply squeezing your hand into a fist boosts your willpower. You can change your mind simply by changing your body.

  So forget you’re an impostor. We’re all impostors. All of those writers who look real are faking it more than you know. The next time you walk into a room of “real writers,” remind yourself of what fakers they all are, and join in on the fakery (no mumbling allowed).

  Remember, you have authority over your authordom. Whatever you tell yourself is the truth. So tell yourself you’re a writer.

  TRY THIS

  FAKE IT TO MAKE IT

  Think about areas of life where faking it has helped you—whether delivering a presentation at work or reading your stories to others. How can you celebrate that skill so that you’ll feel more credible even when you’re out of your comfort zone? How can you apply this to your life as a writer?

  22

  EMBRACE VULNERABILITY

  Any time you put your pen to paper, any time you put your work forth to an audience, you make yourself vulnerable. It’s a vulnerability that’s akin to performance anxiety, if not outright stage fright. It’s a vulnerability that takes courage, and perhaps even a daring spirit, to overcome.

  I’m certainly afflicted with all of the typical symptoms, especially when it comes to making my work public. I’ll worry about giving a speech or a reading for weeks beforehand. No matter how much I practice, I’m terrified that my mind will go blank on stage. I imagine telling a lighthearted joke that falls with a thud into the room. And I live in horror of looking out into a sea of malevolent glares in the audience.

  Since I have to give a fair number of speeches and readings, I decided one way to get over this anxiety was to study it to better understand it. It turns out that I’m in good company. Thomas Jefferson was so afraid of speaking in public that he only gave two speeches as president, at his inaugurations. Gandhi’s vision often fogged over when he spoke in public, and he’d go mute. Jay Z is actually so nervous that he regularly vomits before going on stage.

  At its heart, performance anxiety is about distrust. There’s the distrust of yourself—that you’ll forget what you have to say, or that you’re such a complete dolt you don’t have anything worthwhile to say. And then there’s the distrust—or fear—of others. When we’re afraid of things, we tend to project worst-case scenarios. The crowd becomes a cold and menacing beast in our minds. People don’t want to cheer you on; they want to crucify you.

  Performance anxiety applies to writing as well. Some writers fear to take the leap of writing because they think they don’t have anything to say, or they don’t believe they have the highfalutin literary words to tell their story. Or, they fear the world will hate their work. It’s a natural fear. After all, when we tell others we’re writers, people rarely give us a warm hug of approval and praise. They usually ask something like, “What are you going to do for a living?” or “Are you published?” Or, worse, they simply say, “Oh.”

  I’ve heard it all. For many years, I didn’t show anyone my stories. I had a master’s degree in creative writing, so I possessed all the hardened calluses that workshopping stories builds. Still, I wrote in a solitude protected with ever-thickening barricades. I suppose somewhere within myself I believed my stories weren’t good enough—or feared that others’ reactions would prove they weren’t good enough. Perhaps I worried about being exposed as a creative charlatan, a dilettante, a fool. One definition of shame is that we feel weak and inadequate in a realm where we think we’re supposed to be strong and competent.

  I sent stories to literary journals because only anonymous editors would read them—and their reactions didn’t matter as much to me. Even when a story of mine was published, I rarely gave it to friends and family, and I declined invitations to read in public. I like to write about the underbelly of life, the sordid moments and unspoken desires that lace through people’s consciousness, and I suppose I feared that people would make judgments of me based on such stories.

  It’s a common writer’s fear that one’s life will be confused with the text. Since I grew up in a small town, where lives were constantly under scrutiny, such a fear was embedded within me and had surely become magnified over the years.

  But then one day I randomly started sharing pieces with a friend at work. It was an enlivening experience to suddenly have a reader. The simple act of giving a story to another and hearing her reactions made me realize how the closures of solitude had made me into a stingy writer, and how the act of writing changed when I did so with the idea of touching the person who would read it. After all, the urge to be a writer is a generous act at its core: we want to share our story with others, to give them a world that will open doors to insights and flights of the imagination.

  The only way to achieve that is through an openness of spirit that can feel dangerous—or even be dangerous. A good story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability and genuinely opens his or her soul in search of truths that otherwise go untold. My favorite stories are the ones where I feel as if I’m in an intimate conversation with the author.

  A good
story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability.

  Telling such a story, however, is among the most challenging things a writer can do. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston who studies shame and vulnerability, said that one-third of the people she interviewed could recall a “creativity scar,” a specific incident when they were told they weren’t talented as artists, musicians, writers, or singers. I think that figure is low. My guess is that everyone has a creativity scar of some sort. And the way that most people heal their scar is to close up. A stoic show of invulnerability can feel stronger than the weakness of openness.

  To be vulnerable is not weakness, though. Quite the opposite. To tell your story in your way, to confront difficult truths and risk putting your story out there, takes courage. Such courage is challenging, of course. It requires overcoming the fear of shame—the feeling that we’re flawed, unworthy—and shame can be a noisy beast. It screams, “You’re not good enough!” in a myriad of ways to writers. Your story isn’t original. Your characters are cardboard cutouts. Your love scenes are laughable. Your dialogue is overly sentimental.

  I suppose such unspoken thoughts were why I didn’t share my stories for so many years. But I had to ask myself, why did I become a writer in the first place? I made a list. And here’s what I discovered was on it: I wanted to put words to the shadowy corners of people’s souls, to understand the desperate lunges people take to give life meaning. I wanted to explore the enigmatic paradoxes of being, how desire can conflict with belief, how yearning can lead to danger. Life is so mysterious, nuanced, ineffable—equally disturbing as it is beautiful—so I decided it was my duty as a writer to be brave enough to risk ridicule in order to bring my truths to light. Why write a sanitized version of life? I decided that what is most important to me must be spoken, no matter if I’m belittled for it, because only in such acts do we connect and understand each other.