Dealing with the Dark Places: Writing and Self-Doubt

This post is a culmination of several things that have happened in the last couple of days. First, I read an amazing post by my friend Eric Robertson over at The Indie Handbook about his battle for his identity. Then Larry put me onto a thought-provoking piece by Jeanette Winterson on how creative people take the wounded substance of their souls and try and remake it into something alive. Finally, yesterday Sabina England, whom many of you will remember from my interview with her, removed her coruscating masterpiece Brown Trash from Authonomy again. All that, and I've just uploaded the first two portions of SKIN BOOK, a piece of writing that's left me almost hollow.

A year or so ago I made a comment on a writing forum that every author at some point, if not all the time, believes, deep down, their work is worthless. I was told by a writer I still respect a huge amount not to be so ridiculous. No real writers thought like that. This post is about why he's both utterly wrong, yet somehow right. It's about the dark places. It's about Self-doubt with a capital "S", the kind of dount that penetrates us in the night, latches itself to every part of our soul we ever values, and sucks the colour and the worth from us until all that's left is the dank, grey nothing of shame - shame that we could ever have considered ourselves anything but worthless; shame that we could have imagined someone would have wanted to read our work; shame that we stuck our head so stupidly above the parapet; shame, and embarrassment, and fear at hat the world will say when the darkness recedes and dawn brings into sight the chorus of laughing, mocking faces that surround our bed.

Being bipolar, I am aware I have a strange relationship with doubt. Some of the time, in my hypomanic highs, I am convinced within a week I will be feted the world over. Some of the time, in the black dog lows, I know the whole world sees my worthlessness.

It's that second feeling that stays with me in the "well" phases, when the rest of my life is balanced. Like many in the arts, I am great at hiding it, even from myself. I guess I could teach others to do the same, call it NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and charge a fortune for the privilege.

But I don't want to. When I'm blogging, and when I'm mingling, or networking or whatever you want to call it, that kind of learned self-deception is actually rather useful. But when I'm writing - even when I'm speaking, or reading, things I genuinely love doing, it's not. Winterson made a wonderful point, about the way art doesn't come from the surface. It wells up out of our wounds (her phrase), it's a pressure that bursts through our fragile surface like magma (mine).

And that's the point with writing. It HAS to come from the dark places of doubt. It has to come from hurt and pain and unconfidence. Because writing for readers is like being with a wild animal - if you act it, they'll sniff you out and kill you.

[A philosophical aside - why am I equating pain, hurt, and self-doubt? Because, at a fundamental level, they are the same. Existential pain is the consequence of recognising that one is not self-sufficient. It's about coming face to face with your brokenness - and THAT means acknowledging how far short of perfection we fall. And how can we meet that recognition with anything but the most crippling self-doubt?]

So, all real writers experience self-doubt in a base, tautological sense (because if they don't their writing is of little value). I tend to think they also FEEL it, much of the time. And it is, like I said, crippling. Literally.

The key moment comes when we realise that our imperfection is the result of nothing other than being human. It is our common bond with every other person. And what's more, it is our acknowledgement of that imperfection - it is the fact of self-doubt - that means we, more than the 90% of "I'm all right Jack"s out there, have the possibility, however remote, of creating something of value.

IT IS THE SELF-DOUBT WE EXPERIENCE AS CRIPLPING US WITH SHAME AND FEAR THAT ACTUALLY, WHEN WE ACKNOWLEDGE IT, IS THE IMPETUS THAT DRIVES FORWARD OUR CREATIVITY. And if we can bring ourselves to make that result public, then we MAY, just, create art.

So my good friend the well-respected writer was, in a way, correct. Real writers don't - at a level deeper than the existential - at the level, Heidegger would say, of being itself - have doubt. But only because real writers know that it is only their doubt that gives their writing value.

Rita Hayworth famously said that she could always failed at relationships because they went to bed with Gilda, and woke up with Rita Hayworth. What she failed to realise, of course, was that it was only Rita Hayworth who made Gilda Gilda. And failing to realise it destroyed her.

And that's the trouble with being an artist or a writer or a musician, or anyone in the arts. The very thing that has the potential to set your work above the mass is something that could, literally, kill you. It did for Rita Hayworth; it did for Kurt Cobain; it has the potential to do for any of us who take that step and admit we want to be more than average. Because the one thing that keeps 90% of people safe is that practised self-deception. And when you're an artist, you make a pact to practice that as little as possible. It's why many creative people with mental health problems refuse to take medication to take the edge off their lows. It's a pact with the devil.

But the devil has the best tunes. And the best books. That's why.

You Make You Own Luck. If You Want it Badly Enough You'll Succeed...

...and other posionous lies the books will tell you

As an author, I'm always looking for tips on how to "make it". Writing's no different from most walks of life like that. And in writing as in regular life, these are two things I come across all the time. Almost as much as I hear it on sports commentary ("she won because she wanted it more").

Of course it's baloney. I won't say why here, because I've promised that post to How Publishing Really Works' Bad Science series (suffice to say it's to do with a basic misunderstanding of causation and correlation).

What I want to say here is something more serious. This kind of motivational mumbo-jumbo is plain dangerous. It ruins lives, and if I hear or read you pddling it, I WILL call you out on it.

OK, so why? Surely we all need a good kick up the backside. We all need to be inspired! Well, yessirree of course we do. When I read about Einstein beavering away in his patent office on relativity, Catherine O'Flynn sitting typing away in the shopping mall and coming up with What Was Lost, I get inspired, and I think, well yes, there's hope for me yet.

There is nothing - repeat, nothing - so inspiring as a role-model. Someone like us. A nobody who shares our uncertainties and our frailties, and overcomes them to triumph. They can push us to persevere just that little bit longer, to work just that little bit harder.

But suppose we don't make it after all the work and the perseverance. What happened? Why did we fail? Well, the answer's simple if you believe the self-helpers. If those who want it enough succeed, then if we don't succeed it's because we didn't want it. If you make your own luck, then if you get unlucky it's your fault.

Nice, eh?

I'm sure it's all well-meaning. "Yeah, but I didn't mean it like that," is an answer I often get from the well-meaners when I pick them up. But if you don't mean the sucky flipsdide, then the fluffy upside's worth precisely zero.

One of the hardest lessons we can ever learn, is the importance of drawing a line and saying "I will NEVER succeed at this." I'm never going to beat Usain Bolt in a sprint. No matter how hard I try and how much I want it. My legs are just too short. And it's the same with writing. Millions of people want to be writers. but not everyone has got what it takes to make it. Ever. Whcih doesn't mean they should stop writing - just like my inability to outbolt Bolt doesn't mean I should stop jogging. It DOES mean it's just plain cruel for friends, family, and so-called help books to carry on telling them "of course you'll make it, just try a little bit harder". So they try and they try and devote their whole life to it and one day they wake up and they're 80 and disappointed, and they realise that actually if they'd tried to make it as a cross-stitcher instead they might have done it. Only they were too busy being encouraged to flog a dead horse.

So now it's my turn to play guru. Before you decide you want to make it as a writer, do the following:

1. Decide what you mean by "make it"
2. Give yourself a timeframe in which to achieve this. Make it realistic. It WILL take time. If you want to have something published it may take a year or so of hard work; if you want to give up your day job it's more likely to take 5-10.
3. Set milestones for yourself so you can see if you're on track.
4. Get going, and be a human sponge (more on this next week)

So what do you do if you're not meeting those milestones? Well, it might be that you're not working hard enough - of course it might - but when you set the milestones you should work out how much time you realistically have and set them accordingly. Nonetheless, experience might mean you have to tinker. Carry on, workl hard, and find you're still struggling? OK, maybe the answer is you're not doing it smart enough. Maybe you've got a great blog but no one's reading it. Or you're writing amazing books on a subject no one wants to read about. Experiment, change your approach, try and be smarter.

Get to the end of your 5 years of hard, smart work, and still nothing? You know what? Keep writing, keep loving your writing, but DRAW THE LINE and see if there isn't something else you CAN make a go of.

Put it like this. If you saw someone who's five foot nothing slogging themselves to death in the park for 6 hours every day; pushing themselves to tears every time you see them; and someone standing there telling them to damn well try harder, what would you do? Ball them out or call the police? So why, when roomfuls of struggling writers undergo the same treatment, resulting in the same tears, is it called self-help?

A Chip Off the Old Block

This post was written in response to a request from one of my tweeps who was suffering from a bad case of writers' block

There’s nothing more frustrating for a writer than reading a piece of “advice” that concludes “it’s all down to the individual” (in mitigation I would point out the most frustrating thing of all is to read such “advice” in something you’ve paid for, and this blog is free). And there’s nothing more irritating than an expert taking their personal experience and trying to universalise it (something writers – “ooh, you know, ignore the submission guidelines and just give ‘em what you think they should have,” “I just sent off the first 100 pages, straight to the publisher, why don’t you” – are particularly bad at).

Block really is one of those areas where, even as I type now, I can’t quite see how to avoid one of the prongs of this dilemma. I can tell you what works for me – and then either say “but you need to find what works for YOU” or “and this will work for everyone.”

And I don’t want to do either, so as a means of stalling, I’m going to give what I think is some very important advice. We all have different approaches to the way we work, rooted in our personalities. Understanding some of our basic traits can be a very good way of understanding why some things will never really work for us.

The most famous diagnostic tool for personality types is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It takes four areas of human personality and divides them into opposites, helping you to see in each case which of the pair of possibilities applies to you. It’s highly questionable in many ways, but it’s more than just a bit of hippy naval-gazing. For example, the Introvert-Extravert pair can explain a lot about our approach to writing. I certainly helped me to see why writers seem to be split in two on the issue of feedback. Introverts – on the MBTI definition – draw their energy form within themselves (they like to think about things before declaring their hand, to work things through in their head); extraverts draw their energy from the outside world (they like to bounce ideas off people, they think better interactively).

In terms of block, the MBTI Judging-Perceiving (J-P) pair seems to me to offer some hope for understanding why certain things suit certain people. J personality types will prefer to approach a task by working steadily towards the final goal. A graph of their output would look pretty much like a smooth line from start to finish. P personality types function best on the adrenalin rush of a tight deadline. After an initial burst of energy, they will find it very hard to get the motivation to do anything else until he deadline looms, when they will get a buzz off working flat-out to get the project finished. Importantly, both J and P types will get the project done on time; and both will get it done to the same high (or low) standard. But the way they do it will differ.

You can see where this is going already, I’m sure. J types suit long, sustained projects like novel-writing; P types suit a series of tight deadlines – they are made for journalism. Unfortunately the world just ain’t that simple. Self-awareness is great, but knowing our strengths and weaknesses doesn’t mean we long to play to them (although it DOES mean that we can be aware of the risks if we decide to play against them). I am as extreme a P personality type as it’s possible to get (how I ended up as an administrator/project manager for my day job I don’t know! Fortunately I’m also an E and an “F” (a touchy feely people-first type) so I find it fairly easy to get people to think I’m doing a good job!), but I want to write novels.

What an awareness of the mismatch between my MBTI type and my dream has given me is the opportunity to try and restructure my approach to fulfilling that dream. There’s a fundamental point about block that I’ll come to at the end, but what awareness of my P personality type has done is enabled me to structure what’s essentially a vast, long project in the form of lots of little ones. I’m writing The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes “live” (I post chapters as I write them) on the web, and seeking interaction form readers as I go. Of course, this suits my extravert personality type. But it also creates a series of mini-deadlines (the problem with saying “I must write 1000 words a day” is that if you don’t there’s no sanction – a P type needs the deadline to be real). If I don’t have two chapters a week, the project will fall to pieces. I haven’t had serious block once.

I’m sure a large amount of block is actually the result of a P personality type not realising they are a P, and trying to write in a way that suits the J type.

Which brings me to two general points about block. The first is that one major cause of block is perfectionism. We get frightened of writing the first thing that comes into our head in case it’s rubbish. Perfectionism can be crippling, and is too big an issue for me to deal with here in full (it can also be a clinical condition, and I don’t want to trivialise it by undercooking my answers). What I will say is that writing in public has been a fantastic way of getting over perfectionism for me. It is, at first, very hard. I’ve got over that by making a joke out of the fact I’m making my first drafts public. That certainly won’t work for everyone. You might want to join a critiquing group like www.youwriteon.com or www.authonomy.com and post your first drafts there. The main thing – and this is the main theme of this blog, the path between universalising personal experience and giving in to relativism, is self-awareness. Once you realise it’s perfectionism holding you back, you’ll be further on the road to solving the problem.

My final point is about how we choose to prepare for writing a novel. I’m not going to generalise here, and it’s certainly true that the most detailed advance synopsis can get derailed by a character who suddenly decides not to play ball. But if your problem isn’t a fear of writing rubbish, or a difficulty with motivation, the chances are it’s a problem with “what next?” What next can mean all sorts of things, but in general it means “my character won’t do what I want her/him to do.”

There are whole books written about dealing with this, and I have a couple of paragraphs. I’m not going to advocate detailed advanced planning to avoid block. That’s a red herring as far as I’m concerned (but again, the awareness that you may have a problem because you haven’t thought this bit of the story through may be a great kicking off point for an answer. it can be really fruitful – do you need this bit of the story at all? Could you do something really exciting with it?).

I plan a story by producing a graphic synopsis – I literally draw the story arcs. It works for me because I think very visually. I can see the book’s structure. I know where it’s going in general. I also do a fair bit of character sketching (words, this time – I think visually and I can do a nice diagram, but I can’t “draw” for toffee). I write out quite detailed “plans” for chapters five chapters at a time (I write short chapters, 1000-2000 words), so I always know the general structure of the story, where I am in that structure, and what’s coming next. It works for me – I write pretty much at the speed I can type because I’ve got the mechanics there already. Doing these mini chapter plans is also great for cutting out deadwood – if a plan reads “information about” or “we learn that” I ditch it. Each chapter has a focal character, and the plan tells me how that character changes in the chapter. I do think “static” chapters are another cause of block – if you know where you’re starting and where you’re going the rest is the fun bit. If you don’t have that A and B you may THINK you’re fishing for words – chances are you’re actually fishing for the “B”.

I hope I’ve steered a kind of middle course. I’ve told you what I do, but by telling you WHY I do it, and not pretending it’s a universal truth, I hope that even if I haven’t given answers to meet everyone’s needs, I have at least given you a set of questions to help you find the answers that work for you.