Agree or disagree: honesty is overrated?
I’m not going to waste your time or mine on pithy excuses.
What matters is, I need to face the real reason why I haven’t been writing.
I’m squirming in my seat, embarrassed to admit this puerile-sounding fact so publicly.
I’m jealous of Violet; specifically, jealous of her amazing writing abilities.
My feelings aren’t exacerbated by anything she’s done. Violet is consistently encouraging, supportive, and patient. Unfortunately, this verdant intransigence is entirely my fault, and my problem.
For years, my identity and my art were deeply entangled. I was the writer. Writing helped propel me through my tumultuous adolescence. Dreams of weaving stories that shaped lives and moved hearts gave me the strength to endure high school.
In college, writing was still my saving grace. I intuitively understood how to bend words into compelling shapes to suit my rhetorical whims. When my friends needed help proofreading their papers, I was the first one they called. I still dreamed of publishing a novel, but I was beginning to understand that hard work and talent alone weren’t enough to realize my fantasy.
Occasionally, I made other things. I hooked yarn and splattered paint. I doodled in pen and ink. I captured moments, feeling, intent with a lens and a few pixels. These creative pursuits were fun, but they felt too playful to rightfully be called art.
Then I fell in love with someone who was also the writer. She had a writing degree and an ubershiny blog. She was asked to write for Punkass! Her fiction accrued more praise than my own ever had.
Instead of rejoicing in our shared passion, I felt threatened, inferior. I shut down. I wondered why I should bother to write at all, when Violet’s prose was more robust, more elegant, more supple than my own.
My feelings were, and still are, completely irrational. Why can’t we both be writers? Just because someone else I care about has talent, why should that diminish my own joy in the creative process? If I truly feel that Violet is a better writer, why can’t I shove aside my ego and learn from her?
I am still attempting to prop up my self-esteem with praise about my writing. Although I may have needed an ego crutch to survive in the past, that crutch has become dead weight. I need to let it go.
It would be nice to publish a book. Nice, but unnecessary. Money has a way of sucking the fun out of anything it gets involved in. I don’t want to have to hawk my wares to everyone I meet in order to make a living. Capitalism makes us all into whores, and I’d rather whore my ability to nod sympathetically and make spreadsheets than whore something that really matters to me. Therefore, I need to stop feeling like other artists are a threat, and their successes equate my own failure. Art is not a race, dammit.
Although I still feebly cling to my childhood dream of becoming an authoress, I can feel my emotional attachment to that fantasy transforming into something more rife with possibilities. Scarcity of talent is a fallacy: by surrounding myself with poetesses, painters, photographers, lovers, dreamers, and hookers, I am enriching, not eroding, my artistic self.
03/12/2009 at 4:47 am Permalink
stumbled across your blog while following an internet bunny trail today. serendipitous. you’ve put a lot of thoughts that have been flitting around in my cranium lately into coherent phrases. thank you.
07/12/2009 at 1:04 am Permalink
Your writing has political implications I am sure you grasp; stories where women are fully human influenced your dreams of authoressing I am sure. One of the biggest lies consistently told in history is that there are these dynamic popular mega leaders who got all kinds of people behind them, instead of the other way around. People writing, making art, organizing, creating a culture made the movements that leaders moved in to represent. What you do is really important.
Integrating your personality and value into an external source of validation like being ‘the writer’ is an experience a lot of people can relate to. I see a theme here of you writing for other people, to touch other peoples lives, and you compare yourself to others as well. I wonder what kind of writing would make you happy, regardless of other people? Making any kind of art doesn’t work without confidence. You will end up revising forever if you don’t believe in what you are doing. The fear of being the peggy hill of your art is a real scary thing, and its compounded by showing off a piece of something personal to you. You never know how far you can go without trying though, and you have a lot more talent to begin with than the vast majority of people. Your post made me think of this video from alan moore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGq-9X3ho7U&feature=PlayList&p=7473F621E625C87D&index=7
I don’t know if it would cause problems or not, but I bet you two could collaborate and make something good together. A fictional correspondence or something. You are both so great at writing. Again I don’t know if it would help or hurt, but its something to think about. I am sure you would both learn something from each other by working together.
15/12/2009 at 10:21 pm Permalink
I empathize SO much with this piece.
One of the major themes for me this season has been facing up to my incredible professional/artistic inferiority complex - including some of its specifically gendered aspects, the debilitating jealousy it induces in me towards the people I perceive as ‘real writers’, and the way that holds me back both from writing and from building mutually supportive professional and personal relationships with other writers.
Mostly, I’ve been thinking about this in regards to some of the other writers I know down here. (After all, I tell myself, not only are they Realier Real Writers Who Can Really Write, but they ALSO have the Antarctica Card - which I normally believe is the only saving grace I have going for my amateurish ass.
)
Still, let me say this: As a writer, Violet intimidates the everliving fuck out of me. Like, sometimes, when I want to get shit done, I actually *avoid* reading her work because I’m know it’s going to throw me into a tizzy of despairing self-doubt. But the fact that she wants to collaborate with me - that she actually has enough respect for my work to be willing to put her name next to mine (and sometimes, I even manage to convince myself that’s the reason - rather than just because she likes me and is trying to be nice to me
) - has done huge things for my confidence. And having confidence in my writing makes it easier to write. And it makes me a better writer.
In other words: I get the seeking-outside-validation for your work thing. But I don’t necessarily think it’s a crutch. There are two sides to that coin. It’s important to have internal motivation to create; sure. But you know you have that. I know you have that. We all have it, or we wouldn’t *be* artists in the first place - because art is hard, and ultimately, we don’t do it for fun. (Even though, sometimes, it IS really fun.) As the notorious Mr. Gaiman once said (roughly), “You don’t become a writer because you want to. You become a writer because you CAN’T DO anything else.” Even if nobody was ever going to see my writing, I would still write because deep down, I know that if I don’t write, I’ll die.
But nobody creates in isolation. I know that sometimes I write things and post them in places where I know I have fans, in hopes that people will gush all over me about how great my writing is - and when they do, I get annoyed because I think what I wrote was crap and thus these people must be imbeciles who don’t know what they’re talking about! Which makes me not want to write, since clearly my work is so bad it’s only appreciated by dumb strangers. In reality, I don’t know these strangers; I don’t know if they’re dumb; I don’t know how their literary tastes run; they could be twelve year olds, they could be writers themselves, they could be reviewers for the New York Times, I don’t know. They’re just anonymous names on blogs. But I convince myself they must not have any taste because obviously, if they like MY writing, how could they? It’s a bit of a Groucho Marx complex. “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.” It’s totally a massive tangled ego thing.
Still, there are some people whose personal and literary opinions I value so highly that when they tell me they like my work, I can’t ignore it. Even my nasty-ass mobius strip of an inferiority complex (or, to steal from Buffy, my superiority complex and the inferiority complex I have about it) can’t write these people’s opinions off. When Violet, or Phoenix, or Whitney, or Josh Alvizu, or my brother, or *you* tell me you want to read more of my writing…it inspires me to write more. I don’t think it’s self-serving or egoistic to write to that audience. I think struggling to impress people whose work and opinions I respect forces me to become a better, more authentic and more honest artist.
I have occasionally thought of making a list of said folks called “THESE PEOPLE LIKE MY WRITING” and posting it over my desk… But, uh, I haven’t because there are like a million people in my room all the time and that would be really embarassing. I keep a little list in my head though and sometimes, when I’m really struggling, I pull it out of my brain and look at it - and it reminds me that, even if I’m blocked right now or everything I’m coming up with seems like crap, that there are people who think I’m a writer - not because I dress like a writer, or call myself a writer, or *want* to be a writer - but because I write things, and they want to read them.
Then, sometimes, I still don’t write anything for WEEKS - but that little kernel of inspiration helps fend off the feeling of desperation that says, “I’m not writing right now because I can’t write” and reminds me that “I’m not writing right now because struggling to write is part of real writing - if it wasn’t, then writing wouldn’t be work, it would just be a hobby.”
And I can’t believe I just articulated all of that - because it’s been bouncing around in my head for months, but I haven’t been able to put it into words. I needed a spark of inspiration.
Which I got from you.
Thank you, A.
I like your writing.