When you stop caring about being a good writer
On inherited models, assessing one’s own work, and the importance of making your own map.
First, a disclaimer: I value good writing! Hopefully your first thought upon reading that sentence is, duh, I’ve read your newsletter, or something less pointed but just as affectionate.
But this essay isn’t about good writing. We can talk some other time about craft, or how a given text is functioning, or the quirky, intuitive dance of following The Rules of Writing until it becomes necessary to break them.
Instead, I want to talk about one of my favorite things to witness when I’m working 1:1 with other humans: The expansion of our creativity into something bigger than “good” or “bad.”
Recently, a client spoke to me about how the question, “is my writing any good,” was starting to make less and less sense to her. Don’t get me wrong: She. is. a. good. writer. Devoted, dedicated, and working on things that will one day change the world. I say this with ease and confidence, like I’m reading a thermometer and reporting on temperature. So it’s not that she doesn’t know a thing or two or twenty about good writing, but that the question itself isn’t persuading her like it used to, back when we first met.
These are the kinds of things I want to shout about from the rooftops!
The unlearning and the I don’t knows and the nonsense and the wait, what? that signals real creative growth. I want to celebrate all the necessary checkpoints of the journey where, à la Mary Ruefle, we trade knowing for learning, where confidence becomes less about mastery and more about curiosity. And where the constant assessment of our own selves and our work starts to feel like a slim, overdetermined way of engaging with something inherently expansive and multifaceted, i.e. your creative channel.
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“You simply cannot learn and know at the same time, and this is a frustration all artists must bear.”
~Mary Ruefle
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For many of us, I think our journey with writing begins with a single entry point. Here’s what it looks like to be a writer, we are taught, and even in the most nurturing educational spaces there can be a rigidity to the model. Yet we want to be writers, so we pick it up, digest it, and work to become this specific, beloved thing.
There’s a natural point along the way, then, where this model, which at first may have guided us toward realizing something we wanted to be, stops fitting. It’s an outfit our bodies outgrow. It’s a plant threatening to become rootbound if we don’t move it into a bigger pot.
Ah, but when our sense of worth has been so inextricably tied up with the quality of what we produce, creative or otherwise, this very good growth can feel SUPER scary! A part of your brain will try to read it as backtracking, or as a loss of value, or as weird and topsy-turvy and why would I do that? If I stop focusing all my attention on being a good writer, won’t I stop being a good writer?
I am here to tell you that you will not stop being a good writer just by allowing yourself to think and dream and work outside the boundaries of quality.
But I need my writing to be good so that I know I am good! If I’m not hypervigilant of my goodness, what will happen to me?!
With love: I hear you, I hear you, I hear you.
If you and I were talking about this together in real time, I might nudge us toward exploring your definition of what counts as “good writing.” I might ask you how you know, in your body, when you’ve read something good, and I might ask you about the value of goodness. I might ask you questions that seem very easy and obvious and then, after a few moments of sitting with their obviousness in a kind space, come to seem startling. We would let our mutual curiosity lead us in the direction of even better questions. We would reach a point, slowly and depthfully, where “good” begins to feel smaller than what you’re really after in this life.
I use a lot of different metaphors when I talk about creativity, but my favorite one is to view it as a place, an ecosystem unto itself. It’s a space inside my body, but it’s also a landscape I can go visit. My metaphors aren’t compliant! It doesn’t matter. What matters is that my habitat would be smaller if I woke up tomorrow creativity-less, and this I know for certain.
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“Not knowing where we are can sometimes feel like not knowing who we are. If I am a writer, but I cannot locate myself on the Map of Writing that I’ve inherited, what even am I?”
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When I was very young, and then when I was a little bit older, and then when I was a full-grown adult, I used to carry around a map of Creativity that showed one lonely place. Let’s call it, “Traditional Publishing Success and Acclaim.” (The locals called it, Good Writing.) This place stretched out in all four cardinal directions, reaching every edge of the map I carried, which meant it looked like the only place I could go. Which meant that whenever I was not explicitly there, I felt deeply, painfully scared, and I did not know where I was.
Not knowing where we are can sometimes feel like not knowing who we are. If I am a writer, but I cannot locate myself on the Map of Writing that I’ve inherited, what even am I?
When my client said that this question of good writing was making less and less sense to her, I reflected back this wild accomplishment, and we celebrated. I gave her homework: keep celebrating! I knew her map had gotten bigger—not the landscape itself, which was always already huge (the vastness of her creativity), but her way of relating to it.
How many of us remain stuck walking around with these rinky-dink maps that trick us into restricting our creative movement, believing there’s only one or two places worth going?
The journey of reclaiming our creativity on our own terms is the journey of making a more accurate map. It’s about recognizing that there are multiple access points to our creativity and to the page. Sure, one of those points might be creating a New York Times Best Selling product. But what else will you use your creativity for, dear? And where will you live in the meantime?
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If we think writing is supposed to look a certain way, we will not do it when it looks any other way.
I’m going to say that again, with a few tiny adjustments:
If we think writing is supposed to feel a certain way, we will not do it when it feels any other way.
If we think being a writer is supposed to look a certain way, we will not feel like a writer when it looks any other way.
I invite you to look for the other versions of that sentence, and to jot them down in your notebook or to share them with me sometime.
Do you see the gravity of all this? Whether you’re a writer or a doodler or a private journaler or just someone who knows there’s a creative spark in you that you’d like to bring to the surface of your days: It is vital that we practice knowing that our creativity can look many different ways, can take us to many different places, and can result in many different outcomes. That we look, truthfully, at this wide landscape around us. That we give ourselves permission to know, and to really care about, exactly where we’re at.
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