This is a topic that’s dear to my heart. People are likely to look at me (on paper) and think there’s no way I could be experiencing impostor syndrome about my writing. I’m over 450 manuscript pages into a novel. I finished and submitted a 300-page dissertation in 2019 and was granted the degree of PhD. I have taught lots of kids and adults how to write. I have friends who ask me to help them brainstorm and revise their business correspondence–mainly cover-letters, but occasionally other things–despite the fact that my experience with their business is likely negligible, and my experience with business in general is limited to teaching and tutoring.
So I must be pretty confident in my ability to write, yeah? Or at least I must have pretty snappy answers to the shoulder-demon whispering in my ear that I’m a terrible writer, a terrible teacher, etc. The answer is much closer to the second than the first. The shoulder-demon is like any negative emotion–fear, grief, pain. It doesn’t necessarily shrink; you grow. Even if I hadn’t found a couple of articles that say fear leads to pain as much as, or more than, actual bodily harm, my own experience would confirm it. Especially in matters of the heart–and writing is definitely a matter of the heart.
Writing as Practice
I’d like to illustrate with an example that I’ve recoursed to a few times in my writings: playing piano. Early on in the pandemic, I started playing piano almost every day. And relatively early on (May or June of 2020) I started practicing Chopin’s Ballade in g minor, despite
-never having played a piece of that level of difficulty before
-never having played a piece even close to that level of difficulty before
-not having had a piano teacher since 2004
-having tender wrists because of an injury sustained in July 2011 that was caused by… wait for it… playing piano too vigorously. Yes that’s real. Ok fine. I’d previously injured my wrists by helping a friend move and then doing pull-ups the next day, but the piano thing caused me to re-injure the area.
The point is that I had absolutely no reason to play this piece and several reasons not to. But I… wanted to. So I started. And then, having started, I kept going. Every day, or at least every week, my shoulder-demon would whisper: You’re terrible at this. This sounds terrible. Play something easier. Take a break from this piece. And what did I tell myself every day that I was playing?
It’s worth it just to try
You’re doing fine. You’re improving. That’s what matters.
Think about how much you’re learning.
I would occasionally check in, too. I’d ask myself: Are you enjoying the process? To which I would answer: Yes. And so I would keep practicing. You may recognize those phrases as the same thing you utter when you engage in [insert difficult activity here]. I said the same things, for example, when I was rolling out pie-crusts for Thanksgiving. I say the same thing when I’m doing fewer pushups than you’d expect for a person of my size, age, and gender. And I say the same thing when I’m trying to write manuscript-page 471 of my novel.
Mind you, sometimes I don’t need to say these things. Sometimes the work just flies by. I practice piano for an hour or write a dozen pages, and at the end of it I feel invigorated. So what if I waited until I knew I was going to have a really great session before writing? Well, first of all, you don’t always know. I might sit down full of joyful energy and just gutter out like a candle-stub. Or I might sit down from a sense of obligation and have something shift or click and suddenly the pages are coming out of me almost as fast as the words usually do.
Part of why I’m bringing the piano-practice into a conversation about writing is that it more clearly illustrates the point. If I were to stop practicing piano for a month, would you expect it would be just as good when I started up again? You know better. I’d be rusty. That’s an obvious point to make, because piano is an embodied skill. The skill resides in the body. So the body has to exercise in order to retain that skill, just like running or dancing or boxing. Writing produces a trail, so it’s easier to imagine that you just need to sit down and add to the trail–another word, another sentence, another punctuation mark. Also, it’s easier to imagine that writing resides in the mind, or rather, that it resides only in the mind. Just sitting and thinking about one’s writing is often as important a part of the process as sitting down to the notebook or word-processor. So why is it not enough that I think about my novel every day? Why do I actually have to sit down and write? Because contemplating my writing and actually writing are two different skills.
Writing as an Embodied Skill
Using the metaphor of playing music makes it easier to see that thinking about writing is not that different from thinking about music. It’s an unbelievably important part of learning a piece of music; but it doesn’t replace sitting down and practicing. Suddenly you’re remembering you have to go chop wood or pay a birthday-call to that third-cousin you’re still friends with on Facebook, despite only meeting at weddings and funerals. And as you try to set down a thought, there’s a voice in your head saying That won’t work. That won’t either. And suddenly two characters whose conversational dynamic has already been established have lost their chemistry. The ability to keep going despite all of that noise, and more, to plan but not too much, to micromanage but not too much, is not that different from the ability to recover and regain the proper headspace after making a mistake during a musical performance.
It turns out writing is also an embodied skill. I think all skills are. Your muscles need to remember how to write. Your brain needs to remember how to get through a piece of writing, which is not the same as thinking about a piece of writing. And for all of that, you need practice. So if you imagine you will do it when you feel inspired and set it aside when you don’t, two things will happen. First, the days will drag into weeks and you’ll find excuses to put it off. Second, when you finally do sit down, you’ll be out of practice and getting your thoughts onto the page will be like herding cats.
Conclusion
Wait a minute. You just said that if I sit down now and start to write I’ll be terrible. I’ll be out of practice and sluggish and I’ll get in my own way. It’ll just be me and my thoughts telling me how inadequate I am.
Yes, at first. But something wonderful will happen. You’ll start to love the process. Success as a writer is promised to none of us. I left academia because I didn’t love the process. I stand by that decision. But I am still writing because, as terrible as my writing sometimes sounds in my ears, the fact that I keep writing; the fact that I’ve cultivated these relationships–with the page, with the reader, and perhaps most importantly with my own body–remains a source of joy for me.
And if one day they no longer do, I’ll set down my pen.
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