Getting Started

Last week, in my Monday evening Craft Class, one of my writers was sharing that she is surprised at how well her writing group is responding to the material she is creating for her current project because as she’s writing it, she keeps thinking it is just terrible. I got all excited. “That’s that voice!” I said. “It comes up when we write. It doesn’t actually mean what it says, about how bad we are. It means, you are writing.”

It’s as if a grinding alarm sounded every time you tried to fall asleep. You would, naturally, think that this meant that you were doing something wrong, that you should not, in fact, fall asleep at all. But there is nothing wrong, and so you must train yourself to think of that horrible sound as merely the starting gun for your next adventure (to sleep, perchance to dream, to write . . .).

I mention this exchange because only a few days later, I began my current marathon of 2000 words/ day on this draft of the novel I’ve been hard at work plotting and planning for the past couple of months. Oh how I longed for that planning to mean that I did not have to write a discovery draft. How I wanted the discovery phase (exciting and fruitful as it has been) to be over. Now came the manifesting-the-perfect-vision phase, right?

How is it possible to fool myself so many times? This must be my area of greatest creativity and imagination—my continual invention of what the writing process will look like.

So down I sat to write my 2000 words, and lo and behold, a voice came to me clearly and spake: “This is really terrible. I mean, just so bad. Do you really have to be a writer? Maybe you have a different calling? Or could just get started on the dishes? You teach this and yet everything you are writing, every single word, is exhaustively boring, mundane. What of all that action and conflict you preach? What of image, event? Please, lady, give it up already.”

I looked out at the café. Could I give up writing? I spent some of my precious writing time considering my other options in a life deeply invested in this particular pursuit. And then I remembered—it’s that voice! It’s not accurate.

Oh, but it’s good. It’s more convincing that Robert DeNiro or Meryl Streep. It’s won more Anti-Muse-Oscars than they have won Oscars, too. (The Anti-Muse-Oscar is given to critical internal voices that effectively shut down marvelous, creative energy with seedy lies about perfection.)

There’s a whole giving birth metaphor here, too, but I don’t think I should launch into it right now. In sum: pain is usually a sign something is going wrong, but not in birth. And not in writing, either. If you can experience the intense sensation of pain without associating it with the trauma of fear, it’s really a whole different experience and gets the job done (baby born, words written) a lot faster.

A few days in, I am calmer. The critical voice, the pain, still arises, but I remember that this is not a sign that something is going terribly wrong. It is a sign of tremendous opening, of creation, of characters coming to life.

What arises when you get started writing? How do you keep yourself going? How have you learned to befriend or ignore the drama and trauma of the critical voice?