as small as a world and as large as alone, Hey there. I was recently introduced to Young...

7:44pm June 8, 2014

pyrkinas asked: Hey there. I was recently introduced to Young Wizards by my girlfriend. I'm working my way through, and loving it. I saw your recent writing advice, and was hoping you could give me some. My writing has been heavily lauded by those who have seen it, yet I'm always disgusted by my own work. It's never good enough for me. I never finish anything because of it. Have you ever been your own worst critic? Do you have advice for learning to love one's own art? Thank you for your time.

dduane:

This isn’t a simple issue, so let me take a quick run at what the most likely source of the trouble could be. (Not that there aren’t as many other possible causes as there are writers: but this is one I’ve seen come up repeatedly while teaching workshops.) And then we’ll look at a possible remedy.

Expectations about one’s own writing are inevitable. Ideally (forgive me the generalities here) you want to write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and then once it’s finished you want to get it out to its prospective audience — private or public, whatever — and you want them to like it.

Now for the moment let’s consider how the writer’s expectations can go wrong. The “never good enough for me” thing is in itself likely to be diagnostic, as face it, everybody’s writing is less than disgusting at least sometimes. So if your stuff is never good enough for you, this suggests that you’re for some reason intent on stopping yourself from ever getting the work done.

The most common reason I’ve seen for this has been fear of having the final result rejected. If you never finish anything, you don’t have to fear seeing it rejected. A perfect solution. (And completely understandable. Writers decades along in well-established careers can find themselves smarting just as hard at a given rejection as any younger and less hardened writer: especially since in this business you may never find out the real reasons why the material was rejected. TV is way worse for this than prose, but it still happens with books and short stories.)

Or, coming at the problem from the other end: if you’re presently having sufficient story-structuring trouble that you can’t figure out how to push a piece of work through to its end — and this does happen: there are very gifted writers who can produce gorgeously atmospheric and moving work but have more trouble with structure and plot than anything — then that alone is more than enough to inspire loathing at the very sight of a piece of work which is steadfastly refusing to become what it’s theoretically destined to be, a completed work of fiction. And it sits there sneering at you from your desktop (or the back of your brain) and being stubbornly unfinished to the point where you don’t even want to think about it any more.

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