SloMo WriNo: Check Your Ego at the Door
Let’s talk about writer ego.
You might say you don’t need to. That you have no ego about your work. You already know it’s terrible!
Okay. Great. So why aren’t you finishing it?
Go ahead! Finish it!
Why aren’t you doing it? —What’s that?
Because it's not good enough? And you can't finish something bad?
Why does that matter?
Oh wait— Now you're saying it has to be great to be worth finishing?
Hello! Now we've met your writer ego.
While taking pride in your work and wanting to do your best is a good thing, if it’s stopping you from actually making progress, then it’s not a good thing anymore. It’s an out of control writer ego.
If that doesn't make sense to you, let me tell you a little story.
I have a friend that I’ve been teaching to knit. She’s not a natural, but she’s learning. Or she was.
Unfortunately her progress is stalled by a problem she's having. She can’t seem to finish anything. Why? Because she can’t let a single error go, and thus everything she starts gets pulled undone sooner or later.
She frequently complains that her work is not ‘good like yours.’
Like mine? The work of someone who learned to knit at five years old. The work of someone who has a natural gift for fine motor control, and has spent most of her life building skills related to that? That person’s work?
Her joy in learning is ruined by her ego, which is forcing constant comparison to a master of the craft.
She doesn’t think her knitting is good enough to finish and in fact ends up hating it and ripping it apart because it’s not ‘good’ like my work is.
Would you say that’s a healthy way to think? Or a good way to learn?
When I say it like that it sounds silly, right? Why would someone working on their first project expect it to be as well executed as something made by someone who is a master of the craft?
Any reasonable person would tell my friend that in order to gain that higher level of craftsmanship and skill that she desires, she needs to learn to live with work that seems objectively bad. She needs to stop pulling her work undone and instead persist with the imperfect project and finish it. And then do it again for a different project.
Again and again while she learns and her skills grow.
We all know this is how you get good at things. It’s how humans learn. You have to be bad at something initially, to be able to gradually get good at it.
But somehow many people don’t think this applies to writing.
So many people believe that ‘pulling their work undone again and again,’ (endless editing) is the best way to make a good story. But not only are you mostly learning to hate yourself and your own work, the fibers that make up the story are getting worn and frayed and tired, and eventually will have to be discarded, never having reached the final state of becoming a usable item (a finished story or novel.)
Does that sound familiar?
So now that you've realized what you're doing, how do you move forward? Because, it's all very well to say 'let go of your shame and ego and write freely!' It's another thing to actually do it.
Here's a few suggestions. (And, I'll probably be digging into this more in future posts.)
Focus on Humility. I'm not talking about reducing an inflated ego. But remember what we discussed at the beginning? About the writer ego that won't allow you to produce something 'bad'? Accepting that your writing is never going to be perfect is incredibly important. What you're writing might even be kinda average. Knowing that it's not groundbreaking or award winning, and then going ahead and finishing it anyway does take humility. Putting something out into the world that's less than perfect takes humility. But it's also incredibly freeing. So try lowering your expectations for yourself and remembering that you're a flawed human who cannot do everything perfectly.
Stop Borrowing Trouble from the Future. A lot of the fears that stall writers are fears about the future. What if my friends think it's cliche and dumb? What if no editor wants to publish it? What if the haters on the internet tear it apart? These are all legitimate fears, and could potentially happen, but they are not happening now, and (besides the editor thing,) are fairly unlikely. Do your best to leave future problems in the future, and tell your story right now. You can worry about all that stuff after you've finished your manuscript.
It's All Practice. So, you write it. It's not as good as you wanted. And? What then? Then you've learned something. You've experimented. You've seen the possibilities and decided that this one in particular doesn't work for you. All of that has value. And you're still miles ahead of where you are now, with nothing written or completed, and the story all piled up in your head and heart. Working on looking at your novel as simply one step in your writing path, instead of the final destination can really take the pressure off. The less significant it feels, the easier it will be to write it.
When I was writing my first novel I used to tell myself: some day I'll look back and think that, out of my many novels, this is the worst one I've ever written.
Because no matter how imperfect and flawed your novel is, there will never be a second novel, or a third, and so on, unless you finish the first one.
So check your ego and just keep writing.
