Writing outside your comfort zone in order to actually be good
It’s Sunday night and I just made what feels like a horrifying social blunder, with another writer no less. Online of course. Where all the worst social blunders happen.
I will preface this with a description of “the process” when you’re writing a novel seriously (it may happen with other things too, but my primary experience of it is with novels, which are long and complicated and take weeks or months or years and numerous drafts to finish .)
The process is what happens after you write something and while you’re working on it, making revisions, and especially when you look back at it or show it to anyone. You’ll initially feel some way about it, shortly followed by the opposite feeling. So if you feel bad about it, you will soon feel really good about it. Depending on how serious you are and how important this book is to you, you’ll likely repeat this process over and over.
So an author on Twitter said she’d read the chapter she’d just finished writing and it wasn’t too bad. To which I said, in front of God and everyone, “Ah, that stage of the process.” Sigh. Why do I do this? Is it because I watch too many sitcoms featuring teenagers who are always making social blunders or is it because I’m a big loser who can’t think past a tweet? Anyway…
Remember a couple of weeks ago I said I thought I was losing my mind twice during the writing of this novel? Well, it was because of an extreme experience of “the process” combined with the fact that my protagonist has weird experiences that she feels mean she’s losing her mind.
The thing is, on Friday night when I couldn’t sleep, I realized that it was because of this process and allowing myself to face the vertigo-inducing ups and downs that at last I was able to not only finish a novel, but to write something potentially really good.
In around 2008, I was in a car with Molly Gloss, who was my advisor at graduate school and she told me it was normal for writers to feel alternately really good about their writing, like “this is the best thing that has every been written in the history of the world.” And then about the same piece of writing, “this is the worst, my deplorable flaming dumpster in the universe.” Fifteen years later, and I’m just now getting that this is not optional. It’s “the process.” It’s what happens if you know what you’re doing. Novels are not just 100K words pasted together in space. They’re (or at least they have the potential to be) the Sagrada Familia of writing. If you say you don’t think the architect and builders of that thing had momentary freak outs, you have got to be kidding me.
Novels don’t just have to make sense. They have to induce a trance in the reader. You’re writing an elaborate set of words that will crack the code of the human psyche, inducing visions of characters, places, and events that never happened. Have you seen that they can now take pictures of brain images using fMRI scans? So if you do this right, science would be able to take photos of the images your book conjured inside readers’ brains. Okay, this hasn’t been studied, but hypothetically, it could happen.
I will preface this with a description of “the process” when you’re writing a novel seriously (it may happen with other things too, but my primary experience of it is with novels, which are long and complicated and take weeks or months or years and numerous drafts to finish .)
The process is what happens after you write something and while you’re working on it, making revisions, and especially when you look back at it or show it to anyone. You’ll initially feel some way about it, shortly followed by the opposite feeling. So if you feel bad about it, you will soon feel really good about it. Depending on how serious you are and how important this book is to you, you’ll likely repeat this process over and over.
So an author on Twitter said she’d read the chapter she’d just finished writing and it wasn’t too bad. To which I said, in front of God and everyone, “Ah, that stage of the process.” Sigh. Why do I do this? Is it because I watch too many sitcoms featuring teenagers who are always making social blunders or is it because I’m a big loser who can’t think past a tweet? Anyway…
Remember a couple of weeks ago I said I thought I was losing my mind twice during the writing of this novel? Well, it was because of an extreme experience of “the process” combined with the fact that my protagonist has weird experiences that she feels mean she’s losing her mind.
The thing is, on Friday night when I couldn’t sleep, I realized that it was because of this process and allowing myself to face the vertigo-inducing ups and downs that at last I was able to not only finish a novel, but to write something potentially really good.
In around 2008, I was in a car with Molly Gloss, who was my advisor at graduate school and she told me it was normal for writers to feel alternately really good about their writing, like “this is the best thing that has every been written in the history of the world.” And then about the same piece of writing, “this is the worst, my deplorable flaming dumpster in the universe.” Fifteen years later, and I’m just now getting that this is not optional. It’s “the process.” It’s what happens if you know what you’re doing. Novels are not just 100K words pasted together in space. They’re (or at least they have the potential to be) the Sagrada Familia of writing. If you say you don’t think the architect and builders of that thing had momentary freak outs, you have got to be kidding me.
Novels don’t just have to make sense. They have to induce a trance in the reader. You’re writing an elaborate set of words that will crack the code of the human psyche, inducing visions of characters, places, and events that never happened. Have you seen that they can now take pictures of brain images using fMRI scans? So if you do this right, science would be able to take photos of the images your book conjured inside readers’ brains. Okay, this hasn’t been studied, but hypothetically, it could happen.
I don’t think people know about the required interplay of conscious and subconscious minds when they start writing. They think it’s just putting words on a screen, then they learn about various craft elements and if they get serious, they do a lot of reading and try to figure out how various books work. Well, that’s what I did, anyway. But lately, I’ve realized why it took me so long to actually do the thing I’d been helping other people to do for years. I avoided the doubt, keeping to the parts of writing I felt great about. That dark place, full of doubt, is terrifying to me. And not just to me. the thing is, it doesn’t seem to be optional. Writers have to court self doubt. It’s no wonder certain novel series never get finished. The better and more addictive and imaginative a novel is, the more the writer will be required to endure these ups and downs. At least for me that’s how it is. And from what I’ve seen, it happens to most writers. I can’t speak for all writers, but those I know who’ve succeeded, well…
I have to wonder if it wouldn’t help us all to know that this is the process, this is how our minds figure out the complex underlying aspects of longform fiction that hold them together as Story and as the code for a mental movie. It’s magic. It’s not easy. But no one tells you when you start (and even if they do, you probably won’t fully understand) that there’s a cost to this particular magic. The better you are at it, the more you’ll dig into the inner workings of the mind — your reader’s mind, yes, but first of all your own mind.
Maybe an analogous explanation would be learning to jump out of an airplane. Here’s what you do, the mechanics of putting on and securing and double-checking your parachute, the measures to keep you from flying into the plane’s engines, etc. I’ve never done it, but I feel like if you ask how to deal with the very real fear that happens when you meet the reality of falling thousands of feet, they’ll give you advice about how to keep it together. But no one does that with writers (that I know of). No one says, “You’re going to be scared and feel a lot of self-doubt when you actually get close. And here are some ways to deal with it. It might feel as if you’re losing your mind. It won’t just be pressure from outside. Your own subconscious is going to try to derail you. Just know that this is the process. Trust the process. If you feel horrific doubt and lie awake at night terrified of what you’ve done with your words, you’re probably a fiction writer.”
Rule one: When another writer is in the up phase, never remind them it’s just a stage. The up stage is how we get through the down stage. Cling to it like a parachute.
To the author I made the mistake of doing exactly that to, I’m very sorry. I was just surprised to see that even someone who I recently saw named as one of our greatest authors is having these ups and downs. But yeah, of course you do. It’s the nature of the thing, isn’t it?
I have to wonder if it wouldn’t help us all to know that this is the process, this is how our minds figure out the complex underlying aspects of longform fiction that hold them together as Story and as the code for a mental movie. It’s magic. It’s not easy. But no one tells you when you start (and even if they do, you probably won’t fully understand) that there’s a cost to this particular magic. The better you are at it, the more you’ll dig into the inner workings of the mind — your reader’s mind, yes, but first of all your own mind.
Maybe an analogous explanation would be learning to jump out of an airplane. Here’s what you do, the mechanics of putting on and securing and double-checking your parachute, the measures to keep you from flying into the plane’s engines, etc. I’ve never done it, but I feel like if you ask how to deal with the very real fear that happens when you meet the reality of falling thousands of feet, they’ll give you advice about how to keep it together. But no one does that with writers (that I know of). No one says, “You’re going to be scared and feel a lot of self-doubt when you actually get close. And here are some ways to deal with it. It might feel as if you’re losing your mind. It won’t just be pressure from outside. Your own subconscious is going to try to derail you. Just know that this is the process. Trust the process. If you feel horrific doubt and lie awake at night terrified of what you’ve done with your words, you’re probably a fiction writer.”
Rule one: When another writer is in the up phase, never remind them it’s just a stage. The up stage is how we get through the down stage. Cling to it like a parachute.
To the author I made the mistake of doing exactly that to, I’m very sorry. I was just surprised to see that even someone who I recently saw named as one of our greatest authors is having these ups and downs. But yeah, of course you do. It’s the nature of the thing, isn’t it?
Image: close up from the interior of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain
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