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In the spirit of beginning with hope, the first series on my blog is "Things Worth Remembering" from the year that must not be named.
Last week "harsh writing advice" started trending on Twitter. The genuinely harsh advice was quickly drowned out by a flood of practical and positive messages, which took the brief more or less seriously.
Emily Nussbaum's tweet makes a step that a lot of the anti-#harshwritingadvice was responding to, connecting writing and self-worth. Take gentle writing advice, she urges, because your writing doesn't care, you do.
Literary theorists tried to kill the author last century in an effort to disconnect analysis of a literary text from the biography and opinions of its writer, and to a certain extent they had a point: once a book is in the world it says what it says and its author recedes into the crowd of readers and interpreters. We're still arguing about what this looks like, especially in the world of narrative universes and sequels! The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a great episode on "retcons," rewrites of fantasy worlds including Star Wars, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Star Trek. And it's true that the cord between author and text has been severed once writing is out there in the world . . .
From the author's point of view, that text is always part of who they are, for better or for worse. It's not just about authorial control over an intellectual property. Does it matter to Jane Eyre which of the Brontë sisters wrote the novel? But it matters to Charlotte Brontë. Human beings are creators in the mold of our divine Creator, and just like him glimpses of our character and loves can be seen in the things we create. (I'm leaning on J.R.R. Tolkien's concept of "sub-creation.") Authors continue to be defined by their work, even after they're dead. This week I'm lecturing on The Two Noble Kinsmen, a Shakespeare play based on The Canterbury Tales, where the Prologue imagines Chaucer turning in his grave if the play falls flat. That's just a ploy. It's really the actors who need the applause, and the playwright who needs the honour.
I've always found it difficult to write because writing is what I sound like when I'm trying. It's a lot of pressure, if you think about it too much. Words spill out of my mouth when I'm talking, jumbling over each other, correcting each other, a soup that'll come out right in the end if I leave it to boil with a dash of good humour. It takes a special gift to talk in paragraphs, organizing the nouns and verbs before they come out, shaping meaning on the fly. Writing, though, is a take-home exam. What's your excuse not to sound good?
Writing a sentence is a way of withdrawing intelligence for free from this syntactical cashpoint that never runs empty . . . Making even one good sentence may be hard, but it is worth it -- just to edit our thoughts into fluent intelligence, to build a ladder of words up to our better selves. (First You Write a Sentence. 31)
It takes time, effort, and more time to climb that ladder, and its rungs are iterations of our dissatisfactory selves. Very few writers need that harsh advice about our sentences. (Such writers do exist, but their editors diagnose them carefully and provide a highly specialized course of treatment.) We need encouragement to look at a page of writing, knowing it's the best we could do then but also it's not good enough yet, and take the next heavy step up the ladder. Making even one good sentence is one part vocabulary, two parts syntax, and three parts mental fortitude to write instead of not-writing.
2020 is the year I started talking to a professional giver of gentle advice.
There were plenty of reasons in 2020 to start investing in mental health, including some ways that the year was difficult for our family in particular, but talking to a therapist has helped me think through the stress of professional writing and recognize the pressure for perfection that I've felt for a long time. I've resolved to let my writing be writing instead of a better version of my self. (That's what my best friend is for, after all.) I still want to be "a good writer," but I suspect that it's one of those things in life, like happiness, whose purest forms are byproducts rather than goals. I'm trying to hydrate better, too.
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