I have a love/hate relationship with my own writing. I’m a morning person, so I love everything I write in the morning, then by evening I’ve decided it is garbage. By the next morning I’ve fallen in love with it again. These are the same words, mind you, in the same order. This phenomenon can be so soul crushing that I often forbid myself from reading my own work after three in the afternoon.
I have read that this is not unique to me — apparently many writers waffle over their own writing like I do. And I’ve been led to believe that this doesn’t necessarily get better the longer you write. Jerry Jenkins claims that he still worries that he’s not a good enough writer each and every time he sits down to write a book, even though he’s written over a hundred of them.
The good news — I know that I have gotten better at storytelling. I remember some of my early attempts, filled with too much pointless description, meandering stories that went nowhere, and characters that were wildly unbelievable or just plain dull. I still feel like a child working with broken crayons whenever I read a favourite author like Stephen King or Ted Chiang (Ted makes me feel particularly inept), but I’m not just chasing my tail. This improvement, however, is slow and tedious, and I’ve been wondering how to improve a little faster.
An example of slow progress: I feel that by now I should have discovered my voice as a writer, but I’m not sure I have. Perhaps I am writing in a unique voice, but I don’t recognize it because it’s mine, and I’m blinded by familiarity. And I think therein lies some nugget of truth. I think I am often too close to my own process to even recognize it as such, let alone fix it. I’ve heard writers describe the fear of facing the empty page. For me, that fear consists not of feeling I don’t have the right tools for the job, but that maybe the tools are laid out on the table and I don’t even see them for what they are.
I had an epiphany the other night. It was well past three, so I was forbidden from opening my work on OneDrive and languishing over it, but that has never stopped me from obsessing about writing; in fact, doing so has kept me awake many a night. I was considering the nature of my fear that my writing is garbage. I am, after all, still an amateur at this writing thing. I’ve never published a book. Why shouldn’t my work be a little rough, and why should I be ashamed of that? If you want an eye-opener, take a look at the earliest Garfield cartoons by Jim Davis. Davis is a celebrated cartoonist today, one of the best in the world, but the early Garfield cartoons are terribly crude, not at all suggestive of the clean style of Davis’s later work. I consider my current writing to still be in its early, pre-successful Garfield stage.
My epiphany was that the engine of my fear is ego. It is a fear of failure, which simply cannot exist without the ego. This thought led to the next — perhaps I’m being too subjective about my writing, and it’s stopping me from constructing an effective story.
My passion for writing sprouted, as I’m sure it did for most, from an early love of reading. I still remember the first novel that fully captured my young imagination; it was the first of the Tripods series by John Christopher, about a society controlled by giant metal monsters and some kids who try to break free of their oppressors. I realize now that a big part of the draw of that story was that I was roughly the same age as the protagonists. The experience was magical — I would start reading, and hours would melt away as I was fully immersed in a world where I was being chased by giant machines. I remember rushing through dinner and chores with the express purpose of getting back to that book.
It was with this subjective exuberance that I began writing. My goal was to capture the same hypnotic effect I’d experienced as a reader. I have found this elusive, like translating my words to a foreign language, which I think is ironic given that all of the books I’ve enjoyed may have been crafted by others, but their worlds were my worlds, woven right between my own ears. If I can create worlds when I read why can’t I translate them onto the page?
The answer, I think, is that writing is no more like reading than building a Ferrari is like driving one down a winding mountain road. The latter is a tactile, subjective experience of speed and adrenaline, while the former is objective, technical, and thoughtful. My reader’s ego tells me that I own the images in my head when I read, but this blinds me to the fact that I’m being craftily manipulated by the author.
When I’m disappointed by my own writing, it’s because I’m looking at it as a reader, and, just like a magician cannot be thrilled by his own magic tricks in the same way his audience is, I am incapable of experiencing my own writing like the reader can, because I know the messy state of affairs behind the curtain.
And that’s okay. It has to be. The writer’s reward is not in the writing, but in the readers becoming so engrossed in his book that they don’t notice the shadow of scaffolding and gaffer’s tape in the background.
Happy writing.
