The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, “So, what do you do?”
The thing I’ve noticed, over the years, is just how many people react to my declaration that I’m a writer with a rather wistful statement that boils down to “I’ve always wanted to write, but I don’t have any imagination.”
It took me a long time to decide that maybe they were right…but not for the reasons they think. Their problem is indeed a failure of imagination, but it comes a whole lot earlier than the point at which they try to think up a story. They simply can’t imagine themselves – or people like them – being writers, and so they never really try to become one.
Occasionally, I run across someone for whom it’s not so much that they can’t imagine themselves being a writer as that they’ve never seen stories of the sort they want to write, and thus they assume either that a) nobody will buy the kind of stories they want to write, or b) there is something wrong about the stories they want to write – they’re not good because they don’t follow the patterns and tropes of the fiction they’ve read or seen on TV and movies.
What these folks are doing is telling themselves a story: that because they have never seen X before – whether X is someone like them who writes or whether X is a murder mystery with magic set in historically accurate Han Dynasty China – they can’t or shouldn’t try to do it themselves.
Sometimes, folks like this can be inspired by suddenly finding out that someone like them – a homebody, a lawyer, a high school dropout, a person of color, an eighty-year-old ex-wrestler – has successfully written (or written the kind of story they’re dying to write). More often, though, I meet them again two or six or ten years later and discover that they still are convinced they can’t do it, despite whatever counter-examples I’ve provided (and I have quite a collection of them).
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our dreams are enormously powerful – far more powerful than the stories that come from outside. And the longer we’ve been telling them, the more powerful they become. I know people who persevered through decades of outside discouragement and apparent failure because they told themselves the story that they were writers; because they had a powerful vision of themselves as someone-who-writes; because they told themselves that there were other people out there wanting to read the stories they wanted to write, the ones they couldn’t find on the current bookshelves or on TV.
Not all of them have been successful, even by their own definitions (which do not always include publication or making a living writing as measures of “success”). A lot of them have, though, and the jury’s still out on the rest of them. The ones who don’t try at all are guaranteed never to make it (whatever “making it” means to them).
You don’t have to believe you will be a success in order to write. You don’t even have to believe that you could be. You just have to believe that you, or someone like you, can sit down with a notebook or at a computer and make up stuff that somebody else might want to read; that you, or someone like you, can learn the craft part of writing and rewriting so as to make your stories more effective at doing whatever it is you want them to do until you’re satisfied with them; that even if there are only three other people in the entire world who will like the particular, peculiar fiction you have to tell, it’s worth your time and effort to put them down in pixels for them and for you; and that all this is something you want to put time and effort into doing.
The so-called “writer’s imagination” starts by imagining oneself as a writer.
This hits home for me: my stories are always quirkily, weirdly my own and I don’t know of anyone who writes the way that I write. (I expect that quirkily is not a word, but it’s still the right word for what I mean.)
But I had to overcome the “I’m not a writer because I don’t write the way other people do” syndrome by agreeing with myself and telling myself that I’m not a writer, I’m a storyteller. When I was trying to be a writer, I got all bogged down in the words needing to be perfect. When I switched my mental framework to being a storyteller, I stopped needing the words to be exactly the right words: they only needed to be good enough to carry an entertaining story. It made writing much more fun, and story-telling (okay, through the written word) something worth the effort and time of doing.
I think there’s a niche out there for every kind of writer – while the market often bows to what is popular, that doesn’t mean that the quirky “little guys” of the writer’s world can’t make it too. I agree that we all to often get in our own way – I don’t think I really believed I could write an entire book until I did it one day. Then I wrote another, and another and each one was easier because I knew I had done it before.
For me, the discouragement of thinking I’ll never “make it” comes because I read books that are so amazing, and then compare them to whatever first draft I”m working on at the moment. Yeah, that feels great … (I tend to forget the fact that my first draft is often word vomit while published novels on the bookshelves have gone through multiple revisions).
It could be worse. When I was a kid a classmate’s mother once asked me what my parents did for a living. When I told her they were musicians, she said, “Yes, of course, dear, but what do they do for a LIVING?” *facepalm*
Over a year ago, I stumbled upon your blog. I am NOT a writer. I don’t have the talent, or more importantly, the energy/drive to be one. That doesn’t stop me from buying and reading a lot of books. I also enjoy reading about the process of writing. It makes me appreciate the time/energy/drive that it takes to do the writing so that someone like me and mine can read the result. To you, Pat, and to all the other writers out there, keep on doing what you are doing.
Thank you all for many hours of enjoyable entertainment and have a happy New Year.
But what if your hopeful imagination is contradicted by past memories of painful brick walls? Having a dream die painfully is hard enough – but several dreams? How do you find the courage to look for yet another life?
This isn’t just true of writing, but everything else that isn’t perfectly conventional and that “everyone else” isn’t doing…
What a pleasure finiding your blog since I love everything you write. And I keep your books so I can re read them.
I find it hard to keep believing people wnat to read what I write, but I’m still writing. And I have three E/POD picture book out there from Guardian Angel Publishing and last year, I signed a contract with Beach Lane Books, Allyn Johnston;s imprint at Simon and Schuster for my great American Novel (word count is 64 words)
But will anyone read my adult novel? Well, I’ll keep sending it out and I will remember to belive that if you write a story you want to read, then you’ve done a good thing.
Happy New Year’s
We made resolutions
http://thepenandinkblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/pen-and-ink-official-new-years.html
I honestly didn’t see myself as successful until I read your previous blog post which detailed a type of historical fantasy in which one looks through history books and finds the gaps. In these gaps, you include your own events, your own fantastical motives, and cement it together with what IS known about the characters and time period. That’s what I’ve been doing reflexively, though I thought it had not been done before, and because of that I figured no one would want to read it. Thank you for setting me straight. Now, if I can just keep several years worth of research in my head to know where to take this series…