No Other Way

 

...if I bring my awareness that people will read my writing to the forefront of my consciousness, I paralyze myself.  My perfectionism and my inner critical voice have a field day.  I want to be read, but sometimes I can't imagine who would read me or why what I have to say is worthy of reading.

I thought I would take some the comments from the previous entry and comment on them.  The comment above is from Cynthia, who keeps a beautiful journal called Sorting the Pieces.  I'm sure many of us share Cynthia's dilemma.  I certainly have felt this way.

Everyone's journey is different; everyone finds the right path in a different place, a different way.  Yet Cynthia has described her dilemma so well that I think I may be able to say something that will be of help.

After I finished my MFA (Master in Fine Arts degree), I didn't write for five years because I had lost all my confidence.  Every time I started to write, I would only hear my inner dragon telling me that I was no good, that I couldn't write, that no one would be interested in anything I had to say. 

One of the things that kept writing at the forefront of my goals was that I had invested so much time and effort into it.  I had moved from NC to Ohio just to study writing, and my family had made many sacrifices so I could do so.  So I was trapped between my feelings of inadequacy and my need to show my family that their faith in me had not been in vain. 

One day--how well I remember it--I found I was so sickened by my inability to write that I did a serious reassessment of my goals and myself.  I took out a notebook and told myself that I was going to start a novel, right there, right then. 

What I discovered  was this:  The only way to slay the dragon of doubt is to write.  In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, I found that I still struggled daily with feelings of inadequacy, but the more I wrote, the more often I found nuggets of truth in what I was saying.  I began focusing on the little bubbles of truth that rose to the surface of the sea of words.

Brenda Ueland says that "to have things [your art] alive and interesting it must be personal, it must come from the 'I':  what I know and feel.  From that is the only great and interesting thing.  That is the only truth you  know, that nobody else does."

So I began to focus on that.  As I wrote, I would ask myself, What, as a result of my struggles, my studies, my life,  do I know that others don't know?  What can I show them that might help them out of their own labyrinth of doubt?

I can see how questions like this might put pressure on a writer.  But what must happen, I think, is the writer has to separate what Ueland calls the human ego from the divine ego.  The human ego needs to be "the best" or "famous" or to write "the great American novel."  It needs to be thought of as "important," or "scholarly," or "talented."  The human ego needs praise.  It needs to be constantly fed, and enough is never enough; hence, all those stories and paintings of dragons sitting on huge piles of treasure and guarding virgins, neither of which he can ever use!

The human ego is beset by the dragon, because the dragon tells us we can never be or do these things.

So the dragon is slayed if you set aside the human ego and work from the divine ego--that part of you that sees and knows what your "truth" is.

The human ego leads you to write in what Ueland called a "bogus" way, in a way that is a "put on, " a "bore."  The human ego is a static state, says Ueland; whereas when you work from the divine ego you never rest, you are always "working and striving."  She says the divine ego is "modest and open to what is new and better."  She says it is "humble all the time before what is greater than itself."

Now, being humble doesn't mean being meek.  As Ueland says, when you write, you can't hold back--you must write like a lion.  You write your truth without censoring it.  When you do that, people will be interested in what you read.  Will everyone like what you write?  No.  You won't please everybody. 

John Gardner tells us in On Moral Fiction that one writes for people like oneself.  So if you tell your truth, others who are like you will love what you write!

But you can't just up and decide one day this is how it's going to be, and start writing, and everything will be fine.  It takes hours and days and sometimes years for some people to break through and find their "truth."  Their "truth" is hidden under so many layers of repressed thoughts, fears, denials, and all the rest that it can be hard to find. 

The only way to break through is to write.  There is no other way.