Must Try Harder
I’m writing this the day before the deadline. In all likelihood I won’t have it finished until the day of the deadline. I had originally planned to structure this like a school report. I teach English and last night was Parents’ Evening. In the run up to the half-term holiday I wrote subject reports for my students and set them individual learning targets. I told myself this was such a good framing device for this month’s theme post and I could wait until now to write it. Because then it would be flawless. Then it would be great writing.
It wasn’t. I couldn’t write more than one paragraph before I ground to a halt, unable to write anything. I couldn’t make my ideas fit the structure. I didn’t have any ideas to fit that structure—or any other.
It isn’t the structure. It’s not even the ideas. I can run over my strengths and weaknesses in my mind, but committing them to the page is something different. In the run up to this month I was privy to comments from the other contributors: how hard this month’s theme post was; how they struggled with it. I had no sympathy. I was glad. This was precisely the level of discomfort I wanted everyone to experience this year to grow and develop as writers.
And then I tried it myself. And now I’m feeling sympathy for my fellow scribes.
Some people find it difficult to blow their own trumpet, and prefer to deflect the attention away from their flaws and towards imagined flaws. But far more difficult to confront, honestly and totally, our own actual weaknesses.
And so this is me as writer, laid bare for the world to see.
I’m scared. I’m scared to fail and so I will often not try. I do precisely the thing I berate my own students for doing. I would rather not try something, and so “not fail”, than take the risk, because I dread the humiliation of failing more than I would enjoy the reward of succeeding.
I watch with marvel at writers I know who can sit down and hammer out the words day in, day out, and I say “I can’t do that, I have too much to do in my life, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the ability.” Yet these writers I admire are busier than I am. They find the time because they make the time. I’m not always prepared to do that. Scratch that. I’m rarely prepared to do that.
When I am not fearful I am in turns lazy and complacent. I don’t like to talk about being a writer in person, I don’t like being talked about as a writer, because I know I don’t put in the time, and I’m scared of the reaction of others. I’m scared to sit in public with a pad and pen and write, in case people stare. That’s something that happens when I draw or paint in public, another talent I know I have which I’m scared to put to use because of the fear of being seen to do it, and possibly being seen to fail.
Compound fear and complacency with a massive sense of guilt and you have a recipe for complete paralysis which blights me as a writer. And that is the honest truth about me as a writer.
I can see the effect it has on others around me. I have friends, fellow writers and a business partner absolutely champing at the bit for me to get on and finish The Long Watch. I have a wife who is completely supportive and completely desperate for me to not just finish that, but all the stories I have told her about, the ones I have hinted at, and the ones I don’t even know I want to tell. It upsets me, and I feel guilty about letting people down, which feeds further into the cycle and—well, you know how it all goes.
But what else is there? This is a skills audit after all. And I would be lying if I said I had no skills.
I can write. I have more than the average share of that talent, whether it comes from natural ability or a learned skill, I have it. What does it mean to have it? I have an extensive vocabulary, an active imagination, and the ability to observe and invent people, places and situations. I can take a wordless emotional state and translate it to words on the page and make the reader experience that same state. I’m sufficiently comfortable with the rules of grammar to know when to break them for effect, and when to keep to them for clarity. I seem to have an affinity with the darker genres of fiction, and despite having never been exposed to noir or horror during my formative years, I drift towards them now. I know which genres I am weak in, and I know what those weaknesses are, should I wish to correct them. I hold my hands up to lapses in spelling (whether there is a double “l” in a word, and the damned grocers’ apostrophe are my main weaknesses) and to an annoying affinity towards the passive voice, which I blame entirely on my legal training. Yet I recognise these as weaknesses, which is in itself a strength.
Success came easily to me at school. My report card always a glowing testimony to my achievements. And so there was a phrase I never saw written in it, which I saw in many others. Success came easily, because I was never stretched by the work I was doing. Now I am. Writing is a challenge, one I struggle with and allow myself to give up on too easily.
Paul is a very capable author, with a natural talent for writing, but he lets himself down through an unwillingness to push beyond what is comfortable for him and to put in the hard groundwork needed to enjoy the success he deserves. He must, must try harder.
Thank you Paul, for writing what I’m feeling.
I’ve come to accept that in defining oneself as a writer, one has to set aside the notion that achieving a certain wordcount/period is what separates writers from non-writers.
We all have what we define as both good and bad days/weeks/months/years when it comes to writing.
Readers come second, the writer as a person comes first. Its you who is writing the thoughts of your mind on a piece of paper.So, as long as you love it, you’ll do it. And even if you fail, you’ll do it again, because it is love that will whisper try one more time. Dont let the love for writing die away and you’ll make your way through.