This is something I’ve noticed: that aspiring writers are generally introverted and very self conscious–to the point even of being fragile. It’s hard for them to feel confident and very easy for them to feel depressed because they think that their writing is all bad.
I’ve been in the same boat–and now that my latest attempt at a novel is starting to really become something, I’m starting to feel the same way again. In fact, I spent an entire year during high school vaguely depressed because I became frustrated and discouraged with my writing (there were other factors, of course, but my own feeling of failure about my writing was what really triggered it).
I was chatting with Aneeka via gmail the other day, and I asked her “why are writers so self conscious?” The conversation went like this:
Me: why is it that writers are almost always so self conscious?
Aneeka: because writing is a talent that is so subjective.
Me: what does subjective talent have to do with it?
Aneeka: subjective talent means if you think you do well and a few other people do too, you can be devastated when someone else says it’s awful and you realize that that’s completely right for them.
I think Aneeka was saying that it’s so easy to be self conscious because people can both lift you up with the highest praise and tear you down into the dirt with criticism, and both views can be right at the same time. The idea is that since writing is so subjective, different readers can say different, even contradictory things about your writing, and be right about it. Because of this, it’s very hard to hit a point where everyone can say “this is good writing,” and so long as someone can rightfully say that it’s bad, it hurts.
However, to my mind, this doesn’t exactly answer the question. It points out how the self-consciousness comes about, but it doesn’t address the root cause itself–the question “why.” At least, it doesn’t seem to to me.
In my opinion, there are at least a couple of reasons why writers are so self-conscious. The first reason has to do with the amount of effort and emotional commitment that goes into the act of writing and telling a story. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a piece of good fiction–not just physical or mental work, but emotional work as well. It’s only natural that a significant piece of your identity becomes invested in such a tremendous undertaking. Because you spend so much effort on the story, you feel that you yourself will succeed or fail according to how the story succeeds or fails. And, as Aneeka said, because stories are so subjective, it’s very easy for someone to write off your story as crap. Thus, consciousness about your story’s quality is transformed into self-consciousness.
The second idea is related, but slightly different. It has to do with the way that we, as a society, build boundaries around our lives.
The degree to which our lives are ruled by social norms is incredible. Most of these norms we don’t even notice even as we obey them. When we communicate with each other, we do so through a set of filters–not just on the receiving end, but on the transmitting end as well. When I’m talking with a girl that I think is cute, I will express my thoughts in a completely different way than I’ll express them when I’m around my roommates. Indeed, there are many thoughts that I’ll completely filter out, depending on the situation. It’s not just because society expects me to do it. It’s because I myself want to run things through this filter–that I feel a need to put on a mask. It might be a small mask, or a mostly transparent mask, but the mask is still there.
However, in order to be a good writer, you have to break down these personally-enforced filters and take off these masks to express your most personal and embarrassing thoughts and ideas. This comes from the idea that you can’t really write anything that you haven’t experienced (which, I’m learning from my Phil 202 class, was argued by Hume). The characters that you write are going to have different bits and pieces of you in them–otherwise, you just wouldn’t understand them. It’s possible for you to imagine the setting or the storyline or any other part of the story, because you can piece it together from things that you’ve actually experienced. The emotions that your story draws upon and (hopefully) invokes are emotions that you yourself have experienced.
In order to make sure that the characters are real, the setting and plot are believable, and that there is real emotional depth to the story, you have to take your mask off. You have to expose your real self to the paper, without filtering it for the girl that you’re trying to impress, or the roommates that you’re trying to get to accept you, or any of the other people that you interact with. As soon as you start filtering, you hold yourself back from really using that part of you, or of your experience, to generate that really interesting character, or that really amazing world, or that really powerful emotional depth. Your story will suffer.
According to this take on the question, learning to write well is learning to stop filtering yourself and completely expose yourself, in a hundred different ways, to an audience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. No wonder, then, that it’s so easy to be self-conscious! The more you work on your story, the more you take down your filters in order for your story to be good, and the more exposed and vulnerable you make yourself.
I could keep on running with this thought, and wonder how this relates to what seems to be a correlation between self-consciousness and introvertedness among writers–whether one causes the other, vice versa, or a third variable is causing both–but I figure that this post is long enough as it is, without my rambling on. Maybe that’s a subject for later.
