As a kid I longed to draw things the way they really looked.
I was especially fascinated with eyes. But whenever I tried to draw them, penciling in realistic highlights, they never had the natural warmth I wanted to capture. They always had a malicious glare that made them look evil.
I could have continued to study eyes and draw them until I got them right. Instead, the eyes scared me and I stopped trying.
Even then, I understood that the problem was my lack of skill, not my inner scariness bleeding onto the page. However, in writing it was different, especially when I tried to capture something I felt deeply.
Writing was a mirror of me, I thought, and not always a flattering one. I connected myself so strongly to the words I wrote that flaws with them seemed like flaws with me.
In a previous post I summed up this feeling, which culminated during a severe depression: “I could hardly write a sentence without thinking it was bad, and not only bad, but a grotesque and repellent reflection of my innermost self.” (From “How I Lost My Guilt and Became Addicted to Writing.\”)
Some readers said that they identified with this feeling, which goes far beyond remorse over incorrect grammar. For that reason, I want to explore why this problem exists and how I learned to deal with it.
In my own case, whenever I tried to capture a painful or meaningful experience on paper, a couple of things could happen. One of them is that the words on the page captured nothing of what I felt or wanted to say. The aching gulf between my feelings and my attempt to express them was unbearable.
The other thing that could happen, often at the same time, is that unwanted emotional qualities would appear in my writing. Writing about an injustice became a bitter diatribe or rant. When I wrote about someone I loved, an appearance of gushing sentimentality arose. Grief or sadness that felt justified morphed into self-pity on the page.
It was awful.
Not only did I have to deal with the failure of my words to convey my feelings. Moral labels attacked me as well: whiny, gushy, self-indulgent, arrogant, or grandiose.
Since writing is an expression of human traits, it is common for critics, teachers, or writing authorities to apply these kinds of moral labels to it. It is true that writing, coming from within, can say a lot about who we are.
However, it is not as simple as saying, “My writing is me,” which pretends that there is a seamless connection between the symbolic scratches on a page and what we mean to say, or who we are.
Often, what appears on the page is like a scary human eye, drawn by a shaky unskilled hand. Real love can appear sentimental on the page, but not because the writer is feeling a fake or silly emotion, any more than scary, badly-drawn eyes mean that their artist failed to see the warmth or humor in real ones.
We use language so much that it is easy to forget how incredible it is to transfer an experience to another person by the use of vocalized syllables or scratches on paper. Some ideas are easy to get across, but in the world of feelings, communication becomes far more complex and challenging.
When I finally recognized that writing inadequacies do not automatically equal character flaws, I gained some much-needed detachment, which allowed me to write without being turned away by emotional turmoil and self-abuse.
I still have to remind myself, especially when writing a rough draft, that my writing is not me, and that qualities which seem like moral failings are often due to solvable technical problems.
Not that I have no flaws which might become evident in my writing. However, language is tricky just like drawing realistic eyes. In writing, there are a multitude of elements that can skew the intended meaning. Sentence rhythm, voice, connotation, and imagery can do things the writer never intended for them to do.
A personal story about the pitfalls of connotation, which is the implied meaning of a word, will illustrate. In an art history class I was asked to describe a painting, using written words as a medium rather than paint. To describe a triangle with the point cut off, I used the phrase, proudly chosen for succinctness, “topless triangles.”
The teacher wrote a comment on my paper suggesting that next time I should use an expression that did not slander my triangles by making them sound like pole strippers.
It happens all the time, and it can happen easily: language balks like a stubborn cowlick and “tries” to do its own wayward thing. Mastery means pushing words toward their intended meaning even when they push back; it means finding the right word instead of the almost right word, modulating sentence rhythm to match the content, or changing word choices to create a more natural voice.
When deeply felt love descends into doggerel, when imagined moral courage becomes a self-righteous rant, when a legitimately sad story whines instead of grieves, the aborted attempt at sincere expression can be terribly painful for a writer to reread.
In the past, whenever this happened to me, I would stop writing the way I stopped trying to draw eyes when I was a kid. Memories pressed in. Shame swallowed me. The emotional confusion was too much to bear.
I started with great hopes and then I turned away. The eyes were too scary.
As a result, for many years I was unable to reach a point where I could write freely and where the writing itself could teach me how to write.
The moral labels such as “preachy” or “self-indulgent” that prevented me from doing this appeared a lot in critical reviews, which is why I make a point to never read reviews of anything before I write.
Instead, I have gotten into the habit of analyzing my writing in the detached way that I would solve a fun puzzle. I want to stress that I never do this during the rough draft stage where anything goes and where any analysis can inhibit honest flow and spontaneity.
But afterward, if something seems wrong, I type out my problem and turn writing into a puzzle solving exercise: What makes my writing appear sentimental? Is it the overuse of abstract terms such as “love?” Is it a falsely dramatic sentence rhythm? Is it the use of trite expressions? What makes justified anger seem bitter or whiny? Is it sophomoric name-calling? Unsubstantiated accusations?
If I can break the language down and discover that there is nothing technically wrong with my writing, and something still feels off, then I have to admit that something may be wrong with my ideas; I have to ask whether I have hidden prejudices or self-deceptions that I need to re-evaluate.
As a result, my writing sometimes surprises and changes me. It may seem that I have come full circle since the writing problem can still reflect a flaw in my thinking. But by the time I become aware of that, I am in a puzzle solving mode. Instead of beating myself up, I focus on solving the problem.
When dealing with emotions that are raw, it is particular important to be gentle with yourself. It is hard enough to confront emotions like grief, jealousy, or unrequited love even without shooting yourself down.
This is why at the end of each writing session, I find something to praise about the work I did, even if I am largely dissatisfied with it. I write the praise down on a separate page and it keeps me from losing perspective.
Once I finally ended the cycle of self-blame and gave myself the permission to be human and credit for what had done right, I was free to learn from the best writing teacher: writing. I was able to discover through writing practice where the “highlights” really go, so that over time the scary eyes became less scary and the icy stare fell away to reveal, beneath it, something warm, inviting, and alive.