The Scriptorium Newsletter: Email #3
Writing — like life — isn’t fair.
The writing germ doesn’t grow in all soils. It isn’t possible to live a certain way without writing a certain way, too.
You cannot write like a Hemingway without living like a Hemingway.
And even if you reproduce some of his style, you still won’t be writing like Hemingway. You will be writing like someone trying to write like Hemingway, which, on an existential level, is a total difference in kind.
Beneath the surface textures of writing lies the source of your writing — the wellspring of ideas, images, thoughts, and feelings — and this source can never be faked. Ever.
But given our culture’s overriding emphasis on kindness, community, equality, inclusivity to the exclusion of all else, such a lesson seems too harsh to be true.
The problem must be a social problem — with a social solution.
And so, writing today is a social activity. Our writing culture is defined by an ethos (a pathos?) of emotional support and positive encouragement. Writing ‘communities’ emphasize companionship, solidarity, acceptance, and mutual caretaking.
Have you written something sloppy? It’s totally okay — you can always redraft, resubmit, revise ad infinitum.
Is your writing too personalistic, too revealing? A navel-gazing diary entry with relevance to no one? Actually, this is brave.
Does your writing lack structure, form, finesse? It’s experimental.
Do you find yourself critiquing your own writing relentlessly? Relax. That is the one thing we don’t do here: we don’t judge.
Meanwhile, as this kind of group cheerleading and pep-talk positivity plays out in writing circles, something much less saccharine takes place under the surface.
There is a secret undercurrent of hidden power games and hurt egos, a repressed shadowy side of judgmentalism and vindictiveness, a minotaur’s maze of secret gatekeepers and covert contracts.
The censoriousness runs so deep, it never needs to be explicit: certain subjects and themes are banned not from writing but pre-emptively, from thought, as outside the domain of possibility altogether.
Anything openly judgmental or critical of mainline culture, anything truly dangerous and divisive, anything challenging and competitive, anything aggressive, anything with an edge — anything exclusive — is excluded by the very principle of non-exclusion.
The censors are not the inquisitorial types anymore. They are the smiling, beaming, friendly persons, and you’d feel so bad ruining the good vibes.
The thought police are not gruff, brutish, short, and straight, but oh-so-fun and flexible and supportive of your work.
They tend not to be crusty old men locked up in their writing cabins but young, fresh-faced ladies with LinkedIn profiles and all the sociability of a friendly neighborhood watch.
(This point in particular may be touchy for some of you, but take a look at how the demographics of literary agents and publishing houses have changed — I make the observation, nothing more).
It can be difficult to see this dark side of the positivity-preaching, because it is all caught up in the atmosphere of fun, in the intoxication of infinite possibilities, in the promise of never-ending pubescence.
And who could say no to immortality?
Yet all this unfailing supportive positivity comes with a price: an agreement not to broach that one possibility that is off-limits.
That there is good writing, and there is bad writing.
And good writers and bad writers.
And good people and bad people.
And good and bad. And evil.
I submit to you this: your conscience is the real muse in your writing.
Your sense of guilt. Your sense of insufficiency. Your sense of lack. The sense of your own evil.
It is this void surrounding you that taunts you, that doesn’t let you rest, that draws you out into the vulnerable and honest open, that finally enrages you and makes you say enough!
I will be better.
I will meet your demands, just to spite you.
I will do whatever it takes to put you to rest.
It is what people dismiss so pejoratively as ‘their inner critic.’ Or worse, ‘imposter syndrome.’
But your ‘inner critic’ is your inner genius.
Your ‘inner critic’ is the arbiter of excellence, and your only hope to ever become exceptional.
Your ‘inner critic’ is the opening to your next big breakthrough — through the eye of the needle that is your own private pain.
Your ‘inner critic’ is trying to tell you something: a signal you just might hear through all your groaning and gnashing if — and only if — you can raise your tolerance for tension and inner turmoil.
Your inner critic, in short, is the whole reason you started writing in the first place.
And if you can accept its message that yes, you are that miserable wretch that you know, more miserable even than you can know, a lowlife scum of the earth with a million things going wrong for it …
What next?
What do you do with that knowledge, once you accept it as a knowledge and stop repressing it with the puritanical desire for positivity at all costs?
What happens when “self-acceptance” means accepting, actually accepting and not repressing, your own self-hatred and guilt?
You know what to do next. You know what to do against all these impossible odds stacked against you.
You throw yourself in a life-death struggle against them.
And if you fail, if you suffer, so be it.
You fail and suffer as a martyr for a good cause: the cause of your own personal redemption.
Is that really so much worse than the low-level insecurity you carried with you everywhere you went, the ‘imposter syndrome’ that inflected all your anxious dealings with the world?
In reality, the imposter syndrome was right: you were an imposter in your own self.
Your anxiety was not a lie but the true symptom of a condition you had chosen long ago — chosen by forfeiting choice.
You propped yourself up with false positivity, with ‘affirmations’ and positive self-talk, knowing all the while in your heart of hearts that someone who was truly as you affirm would have no need for all the talk.
Now, accepting you are a miserable wretch, you have one redeeming trait.
You know you can be honest.
And that is a certainty that no uncertain circumstance can take away from you.
A strength that all the slings and arrows of the world can only sharpen.
Your only bulwark against an ocean of doubt is to doubt yourself more than the world does, knowing that whatever survives will be sturdier than the world itself.
The test of integrity, in fact, is how much stress you can withstand.
How harsh can you be with yourself, without caving in?
How else would you know that what you believe is true, or simply comforting?
How else would you know if your writing is real, or an escape?
Harsh, yes.
Diamonds under pressure, though.
Remember: you are in the lowly business of being a “writer.”
As you read this, there are people who are being ground up by grueling, back-breaking work.
Their days are a relentless regimen of pains and discomforts you and I can barely fathom, sustained by nothing by the sublimity of their cause, by their closeness to a God they believe in, and by the knowledge — the mere hope! — that some small good might eke out of their existence.
There are people who, with loves and dreams as desperate and deep as your own, walk into certain agony and death and disappear, dismembered, unremembered — because they had to, and because no one else would.
You — you are nothing but a “writer”.
Have some humility and some respect for real human struggles.
It is then, only then, that you’ll actually have something worth writing about.
It is why a writer must be humble. Must be self-critical. Must not fall prey to the cult of positivity and self-esteem. Not if you want to keep your edge. Not if you want your words to matter.
It is a lonely road, my friends. A lonely road.
But think, just think, of the good company you keep, with all those solitary souls who gave themselves up to something greater, who suffered in their own solitude, too — who though they are buried in the dirt were, are, somehow alive in us.
Be nourished by this rich soil.
And be well.
