September 2008 Newsletter

Is it any good?

There can be a strong desire, especially for the novice writer, to want to have someone validate what he has written as soon as possible, even to tell him if he is, in fact, a writer.  (I have been asked this so many times, with looks of pleading desperation).  What an enormous amount of power to assign to someone else!  Sometimes we don’t even want to finish writing our story.  We want to give it to someone, as if we somehow need permission to complete what began (if you’ll remember), as a thrilling and joyous endeavor.

I have a friend who is a very successful Century City lawyer.  I’ll call him Arthur.  In the seventies Arthur was not only a successful young lawyer, he was also an up and coming novelist.  Time Magazine had just named him one of the ten brightest new stars in fiction.  He had published three novels in fairly quick succession to some acclaim.

On a flight home, he scribbled down twenty pages of what was to be the beginning of his fourth novel.  He got home, thrilled at what he had written and showed it to his wife.  Her response was not particularly positive.  I can’t remember exactly what he told me her response was, but what he told me next made me shiver.

He told me that has not written since.

The artist’s path is littered with the towering potential of unfinished manuscripts.  We all are fragile and insecure at times, (it is our sensitivity that makes us artists), and sometimes, in an attempt to steel ourselves from our demons of resistance, we can objectify the act of creation, we can measure our work against other’s work, as we search for reasons to stop writing in an attempt to protect ourselves from future disappointment.  Of course, this is a set up, another manifestation of the myriad ways in which our inner critic wants us to stay stuck.  It tells us the lie that only a rare few are born artists.  It’s a good one, because it can prevent us from even bothering to get started.  We are too busy wondering which camp we fall into, and our deepest fear is that we are the ‘fools’, that we will be mocked, that our lives will be wasted in the pursuit of an endeavor that will reap little result.

At some point we must stop measuring our passion, and surrender to our purpose.  I believe that when we direct our focus to simply telling the story, great things begin to happen.  As the thrill of creation becomes its own reward, a new realm is revealed to us.  We begin to see possibilities as we gain a professional distance from our ego.

Here are a couple of rules I have to protect myself.

1) Don’t show it until you’re done.

Which means, until I have made it as good as I can make it.  Only then do I ask for notes.  (I find it offensive when someone asks me if what they’ve written is any good.  With this question is the implicit message that they have not really finished it, but rather are handing it off half-baked and looking for validation.)  Only after I have explored the story fully, do I dare ask someone to take up their precious time reading it.

2) Don’t share your ideas until you write them.

People with the best of intentions can shit on a great idea, or damn it with faint praise.  A nascent idea is like a seedling.  It can be trampled easily.

I write the story because it excites me.  (I happen to believe that all writing is nothing more than a byproduct of individual growth).  Why would I subcontract that decision to someone else?

3) Remember that every response to my work is merely opinion.

That does not mean I don’t value opinion, and when I hear a consensus, I pay attention.  But frankly, I don’t think most people know how to separate their own personal issues with what they are critiquing, and if I am not able to distinguish the difference, I am at the mercy of a million random opinions.

4) You are not your work.

Sounds obvious perhaps, but this is a tough one.  Expecting too much too soon can be very hard on an individual attempting to create.  It is for this reason that we must develop a self-validating mechanism.  You see, I don’t think my friend Arthur ever decided to quit writing.  I don’t think it works like that.  Perhaps he began to doubt his story.  Perhaps this doubt led to distraction, (I happen to know it did – last year we spoke briefly and he told me that he had recently split from his fifth wife), and then finally to procrastination.  I wonder sometimes if Arthur will ever finish his fourth book.  I doubt it, though I have no doubt that Arthur is, and always will be a writer.  Anything can happen if we are open.  The truth, I believe, is that Arthur just hasn’t been writing lately.