I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t have an internal naysayer second-guessing all she does. The problem is so common, some psychologists advise giving your self-critic a name and an identity: mindfulness blogger Wendy de Jong refers to hers as “Perf,” and in a Psychology Today article on the same subject, an anonymous client calls hers a “hungry wolf.”
Perfectionism can be a good trait in a writer: it drives you to deliver work that is spell-checked, fact-checked, and free of glitchy formatting, while also including such essentials as nice sentences and plot. To this end, your editors will appreciate your perfectionism because it saves them time.
But perfectionism can hold you back. So many people are afraid of writing badly, when the truth is that bad writing is the only way you’re going to start writing well. “I’m unable to write that really shitty first draft,” says the writer Hallie Goodman, who admits to being stunted by her “perfectionist bullshit.” “I’m unable to suspend judgment, I line edit as I’m writing. For me, it’s a scarcity-of-time issue. I feel like nothing can be wasted. I’m afraid of wasting time.”
Hallie has been able to indulge this fear because she does lack time. In addition to writing and freelancing for magazines, she also runs a successful reading and workshop series called Volume, which keeps her in constant contact with authors and their publicists, students, and local commerce owners, troubleshooting and event managing to keep everything on track. But recently, Hallie was awarded a monthlong fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, and her excuses didn’t hold water anymore. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t tell myself I didn’t have time to write,” she says, “because time was all I had.”
One thing that comforted Hallie, and ultimately got her writing, was realizing that so many other writers had the exact same problem. She met people who had affirmations tacked up all over their studios, writers who forced themselves to write two thousand words a day without a single concern for quality—the idea was just to write.
“I had to do all these infantilizing tricks,” Hallie admits. “I put up notes like, ‘There is no bypass. You must write that shitty first draft.’ And god, I made myself a star chart,” she laughs, recounting how she walked to CVS to get herself some puffy glitter star stickers that she would put up when she allowed herself to write atrociously.
Perfectionism can negatively affect not just how you write, but what you write, as well. Author Amy Brill spent fifteen years working on her first novel about a female astronomer in 1845 Nantucket, and her perfectionist drive to incorporate all her research nearly derailed the book. “I was so sure I had to adhere to every minute fact, every turn of phrase, every one-hundred-sixty-year-old date,” Amy admits, “that I ended up with hundreds of pages of deadly boring epistolary junk. Its verisimilitude was admirable, but as a novel, not so much.”
When Amy lost an entire crop of research in a backpack she misplaced, what at first felt like a tragedy turned into a liberation. “The original questions—what would make a teenaged girl spend the entire night on her roof, in every season, searching for something in the night sky that would change her life—had been engulfed by thee and thou and other things that barely belong in a novel, much less on every page. I had to start over, and I did. The next version kept some of the facts about the inspiration for my character, but dispensed with most of them. If I wanted to tell the story of that girl on the roof, I had to make it up. That’s the book that became my first published novel, The Movement of Stars.”
If you’re into disassociation, hire your inner critic to be your copy editor. But do not let her write. And take heed if you’re paralyzed by the idea of a bad draft: a good book usually takes about seven shitty versions, not one.
Narrative voice is your literary aura, your essence, the thing that allows writers the world over to write about the same topics in thrillingly different ways. Even though it’s yours, your voice can take a long, long time to find.
Postcollege, I spent two years trying to write like Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver I am not. But I got it into my head that this is what serious writing sounded like: alcoholic, importantly mundane. It was depressing to try to write like this, but the shorter my sentences got, the more I felt like I was approaching publication somewhere really big. It took me hundreds of rejections to give myself permission to dance like no one was watching—clearly, no one was. I embraced my inner freak and incorporated humor into my writing. And I started getting published.
I think a lot of young writers make similar detours—they start out writing a certain way for a specific audience, before eventually coming to the realization that they don’t like this kind of writing—or these people!—very much. In a popular lecture the author Claire Vaye Watkins delivered at the Tin House Summer Workshop called “On Pandering,” she admitted that she herself spent much of her early career writing for old white men. “Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati,” Claire said in the lecture, which was published as an essay in issue 66 of the magazine. “Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire?”
Purists argue that once you’ve found your voice, you need to keep it isolated in order to protect it: don’t read work by any other writer while you’re working on a project; live inside your words. IMHO, these people are wrong (and also maybe need to be checked on? It sounds like they haven’t left their house in quite some time). If you want to be a writer, you need to engage with the writing world. You need to purchase, read, and celebrate the work of other writers, editors, and translators. There will come a time when you might need to protect the slant or tonality of a project by isolating yourself, aesthetically, but that point is not at the beginning of your career.
Much is said about the merits of reading other writers, but it’s important to go out and hear them, too. Something instructive happens at live readings. You will hear people who are merely reading from their writing, and you will also see people perform. You’ll see jokes land, and you will also watch them fall so flat that people have to step around them where they lie, cowering, on the floor.
Having a piece bomb at a live reading is a form of rejection, but rejections can be way finders. As your confidence builds, you’ll come to learn the difference between bad-faith rejections (rejections that come because the rejecter is prejudiced against you or what you stand for in some way) and useful rejections, which indicate whether you are close (hot!) to or far (cold!) from finding your own voice.
When you do find your voice, you’ll still encounter rejection, but it won’t sting as much: you have fuel now, you have water in the desert, you have found your core. So write. Submit. Get on stage and bomb. Get excited by your rejections. They are road maps toward the kind of work that you were born to write.
Making the most of your writing workshop
Writing workshops take many forms. They might be a compulsory part of your MFA program, they might take place during a summer conference you’ve signed up for, or you might be in a homegrown workshop comprising writers you have been working alongside for many years.
In case you’re not familiar with the workshop scenario: each participant gets to have a piece of writing “workshopped” by the other writers in the class. You’ll usually have about a half hour to hear what your fellow writers thought of your piece, starting with positive feedback, and working, gradually, as your heart rate rises, to the “constructive feedback” portion: i.e., what you’re doing wrong.
In my experience, workshops are an invaluable tool if you know what to do with the feedback you are given, some of which will be insightful and beneficial, some of which will be biased or dead wrong. Follow me for a moment on