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After years of teaching creative writing and going through many creative ups and downs of my own, I’ve developed a very simple philosophy to guide what I do: don’t think about it; just put it out there and move on to the next thing. Or, as a professor of mine once liked to say, be quiet and take your lumps. If you develop a regular writing habit, I believe this is what you absolutely have to do—that is, if you intend to stay sane.
Consider that any amount of time a reader spends on your work is a compliment and a gesture of implicit encouragement. Got a bad review? That’s a lot more than the 10,000 other writers standing behind you got waiting for theirs. Got a magazine rejection telling you not to quit your day job? Do you realize how many submitters just got the form rejection or nothing at all? Many. Got panned on Twitter by a journalist with a chip on her shoulder? Great. You wrote something compelling or irritating. That’s very good. She’s helping you out, amplifying your message.
You broke out of the silent apoplexy that turns most writers to stone. You made someone feel something for a change. That’s the point. No matter how hostile or kind, excited or blasé readers act, the end result is the same: they spent their precious time considering what you wrote when they could have been doing something else. The more you think about that, the more it will seem like a remarkable gift. The only real failure, in that sense, is to misunderstand what you’ve been given.
Many writers misunderstand. They’re so busy flogging their platforms, soothing their fragile egos, and vehemently promoting themselves that they start to act entitled, even if they don’t truly feel that way deep down. It gives them a brittle exterior. They risk being crushed by a bad review or even an apathetic response from their audience, which is a shame. When they started writing, it wasn’t for applause. It was to find creative satisfaction. But over the years, they forgot about that. Now they’re like a raw nerve.
So it can be helpful to remember that indulging in self-entitlement is a very bad idea. While talk is cheap, words happen to be your business. You have to be a word factory, constantly producing, constantly submitting and posting. And if you can do that, you will realize yourself through that consistency, not by appealing to the fickle vagaries of taste. But this also means sometimes you will take a public beating. This is the meaning of take your lumps.
Of course, you don’t have to submit everything you write. Conventional wisdom tells us to sit on a draft until we get some distance and objectivity. I did it that way until a few stories I thought would never get published got taken right away and a novella I’d slaved over and considered and re-drafted and polished remained in submission turnaround for several years. It taught me a valuable, counterintuitive lesson. I realized I’m the worst judge of my own work and so is everyone else.
We never know if we’re any good and no one else knows, either. We know what we like. We know what our aesthetic values tell us is and isn’t quality work. But those values are arbitrary to culture and conditioning. They’re not immutable Platonic forms. There is no universal objective standard for quality in the creative arts. There’s only what I’m seeing from where I’m standing and how I got there.
Maybe I’m a library or an archive or the Pulitzer committee or an English department. And so I have a certain amount of status and gatekeeping authority conferred on me by said culture and conditioning. But that doesn’t change anything. It means some writers will have their scrolls preserved in the basement of Cheops and others will see their words crumble on the wind. The “test of time” is no test of quality. There is only what is being spoken, written, and read in this moment by these eyes. The rest is a dream of something written in that past or a vision of something to be written in the future.
What an upsetting idea! If that’s true, why do we even have English studies? The answer to that is what the legendary Dr. Richard Kroll gave me in his office at UC Irvine when, as a naïve undergraduate, I asked a version of that question: we study English to be able to read and write with clarity and intelligence. The rest is work for archaeologists, curators, and antiquarians—good work, valuable work, but not the work of words themselves. Writing exists in the reader right now or it doesn’t at all.
For people who write stories, poems, essays, and plays, this has radical implications. One is that critical feedback, while sometimes interesting and useful, is more like a eulogy than a prescription. The work has been read. The moment has passed. And whatever rhetorical effects have been created, whatever ideational structures rose up in the mind of the reader, either accomplished their work or didn’t.
Another implication is that taste—especially publishing taste and the marketing that oozes from it—is a creature of recent history, not really of the moment. By the time you finish taking that class in commercial screenplay writing that guarantees you’ll be producing blockbuster scripts by the end, the gaze of the industry has already shifted. Writers constantly producing derivative work in the service of whatever is supposed to be commercial are always playing catch-up.
The answer to this can be a bit scary: don’t worry about it. Flying blind is the only real way to fly. It means taking a horrendous risk with your time, emotions, and energy every time you sit down at the desk. But you wanted to be a creative artist, not a scholar of other people’s past art, right? Then shut your mouth and take your lumps. There will be lumps, many and various, if you’re doing it right.
On the other hand, it’s a reason to be joyful. If you’re committed to the idea that you cannot objectively judge your own work and neither can anyone else, you reach a point where it’s not about them. It’s about you finding your subject matter and your voice. It’s about pursuing the development of those things as a way to realize yourself. This is incredibly freeing.
My mom, who was a brilliant painter and sculptor, put it like this: once you finish a work of art, it doesn’t belong to you. It’s not your baby. It’s separate from you. Whether or not you formally submit it to others makes no difference. In an existential sense, it has entered the world. It’s now a syllable in the dialogue of creation, for better or worse. So get over it. Once the ritual is complete, the magic has been sent forth to cause change. And it will.
Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters
When I began teaching as a graduate student, publishing in magazines, and generally moving my life forward in visible ways, I learned a difficult lesson that accompanies progress: people don’t like it when you succeed.
They don’t want to see it. They don’t want to know about it. And if they become aware that you are bettering yourself, they will do whatever they can, exert whatever influence they have, to change that. They really would prefer that you sink back into a swamp of stuckness and frustration. And they find it highly offensive if you don’t accommodate them in this.
Somehow you moving forward makes them more aware of their own sense of inadequacy and stasis. And they will not stop trying to convince you, themselves, and anyone willing to listen that you’re really not so special. Your achievements, however modest, can cause friends, family, colleagues, and sometimes people you don’t even know, to behave defensively towards you as they attempt to safeguard their fragile egos. This is especially true if you’re doing something that they wish they could do.
Granted, nobody likes to feel bad about themselves. But it can be shocking when you notice who your detractors are. Uncle Bob? You heard he got drunk at the reunion and offered up a loud unkind opinion about your novel, citing various incidents from your childhood and early adolescence to prove you “aren’t such hot shit.” What did you ever do to him? Juniper, that girl in accounting who wears the big sweaters? You talked to her, what, twice? Why is she spreading rumors about you? You might expect it from a direct competitor (even if there is a modicum of professional courtesy that can dial it down in most cases), but Millie from high school, talking trash about you on Facebook? You haven’t interacted with her since at least 1990. Has she been ruminating about you for 30 years? Maybe so. Or maybe she just looked you up yesterday.
There’s a word for this sort of person: hater, and the first thing you need to know is that haters can be anyone, given that the hate is not really about you. It’s about them. You’re just a convenient projection screen for the hater’s unflattering (and probably distorted) self-image. Unfortunately, the more visible you are, the more you seem to be getting your life together and doing what you want to do, the higher resolution those lousy images will have in the hater’s mind. And it’s far easier to tear someone else down than it is to engage in determined self-work. Some people are born with the efficiency and drive of the domestic land slug.
As much as I agree with Tim Teeman—that “haters gonna hate” is a fundamentally stupid expression “born of our social media addiction, especially Twitter, where brouhahas and firestorms burst into existence, and everyone eventually leaves the arena feeling unfairly targeted and victimized”—there’s a reason it became a viral catchphrase, functioning as an updated version of the old “dog will hunt.” It’s simple. A thing behaves in accordance with its nature. And envy is ubiquitous.
Perform successfully—even in something as minuscule and transitory as getting your creative work published—and someone, somewhere, is bound to suffer as they compare themselves to you. That suffering breeds resentment. And, though it is inherently unwise, resentment often demands a soapbox. Publicly trashing someone can provide a moment of relief, a brief pause in the constant fecal downpour underway in the hater’s inner world. Who wouldn’t seek shelter from that storm, from a grinding sense of inferiority that never lets up?
Still, if you put yourself in front of the public in any way, you’d better be ready for this. Since at least 1880, with the rise of vaudeville, the cheap seats were situated in the top rear sections of theaters. If people up there didn’t like the performance, they heckled the actors and threw peanuts at the stage. It’s where we get the term, “peanut gallery.” And peanut throwing still takes place, only the gallery has now become synonymous with the broad scope of social media. So try not to take one in the eye if you can.
And because flying peanuts are inevitable, perhaps contemplate the enduring wisdom of Father Baltasar Gracián y Morales, Friedrich Nietzsche’s favorite Jesuit social philosopher: The envious man dies not only once but as many times as the person he envies lives to hear the voice of praise; the eternity of the latter’s fame is the measure of the former’s punishment: the one is immortal in his glory, the latter in his misery.
There are many different paths to greatness, not just the ones most commonly identified by conformist culture. As long as your basic needs are met, where you put your energy—how you pursue excellence—is completely your business. Realizing this can be difficult and gradual.
It seems true, even if we admit that discourses (value systems) will always compete with each other for dominance. And one of the most ruthless and rapacious, at least in the West, is that of “meritocracy.” A meritocracy is inherently based on an assumed set of cultural values. But you need to realize that you are free to opt out of those assumed values. What the masses consider to be good doesn’t have to define your life.
If you don’t accept meritocratic cultural values, merit-based judgments by those who do are irrelevant. In other words, it is a mistake to impose the rules of a game on someone who refuses to play; though, because discourses will compete with each other, people will usually try to impose their personal values-discourse on you. Often, they will do so because they’re not aware of alternatives. They may not even remember the moment they chose to buy in. And they may not understand that imposing values on someone else is an act of violence.
Remove the question of merit (and its various implications) and the locus of meaning in life shifts (possibly returns) from an external authority to the individual. One arrives squarely within Viktor Frankl’s “Will to Meaning“—not seeking meaning / value relative to others, but exploring what is already resonant / resident in the self. “Thy Will be Done” becomes “My Will be Done,” with all the freedoms and responsibilities arising from that shift.
It makes no difference if your private world is idiosyncratic to the point at which it would seem very strange to more common sensibilities. As long as you’re not behaving like a hypocrite by harming or otherwise curtailing the autonomy of others, your interiority (including the way you choose to perceive the world outside your self) is completely yours. And it doesn’t seem outrageous to conclude that this is how it should be. If you don’t own your thoughts, can you ever own anything else? In fact, it seems that the more you personalize your unique way of seeing and acting in the world, the stronger and more persuasive that uniqueness becomes.
Because discourse is grounded in conflict and competition, this self-originating, self-describing narrative you are spinning can have a destabilizing effect on others, who may accuse you of being a delusional, a dreamer, someone out of touch with (what the dominant culture considers) reality. But if it works for you, isn’t it the right thing? Isn’t that choosing inner freedom instead of pledging fealty to ideas and to a lifestyle that was designed (or emerged) without you particularly in mind?
Walking away from a meritocracy takes a lot of courage and effort. Because you are a social being, it can involve a certain amount of suffering, alienation, and lonesomeness. You risk being called a deviant, being labeled as a disaffected undesirable. Even if you don’t agree with those judgments, they will still hurt. Hopefully, your growing curiosity about your own sui generis greatness and freedom will mitigate that pain.
You might call this the “inward path,” the “artist’s way,” or “the path beyond the campfire” which leads into dark unmapped places, where all new things wait to be discovered.