They came to the wrong person, but I could hardly blame them. How could they have possibly known?
Recently “they,” a company, emailed me about a contest they were holding. They wanted me to help them promote their science fiction writing contest on Twitter. Although I love writing and science fiction, something stubborn inside me balked.
It is not that I think writing contests are \”wrong,\” but they do not excite me. I dislike them the way I disliked canned rutabagas when I was a kid. The rutabagas were not abominable but not appetizing either, but in some mysterious way they were supposed to be “good for you.”
Not that I am a stranger to competition; I was super competitive in college, but my writing goes best when all thoughts of being an achiever have fallen away.
Contests assume I write to win. There was a time, long ago, when I did try writing to prove how “good” I was, but that approach always caused paralysis. Inspiration fled the second I thought, “I need to prove I can write better than others.”
If not to win, why, then, do I write? I write for a number of reasons. I write to feel the endorphin surge of creativity; to climb out of emotional sinkholes; to find humor in the humorless; to find a home for observations I have never seen mentioned. Sometimes I write because what I need to read does not exist.
When I was writing to win, I had a big problem with jealousy. Not that jealousy is “wrong,” any more than any emotion is wrong; however, it is unpleasant and I like to avoid it when I can. But I rarely get jealous the way I used to, because I adopted a new way of thinking about writing.
Struggling through a hellish case of depression-induced block brought about seismic changes in my approach to writing, including a determination to write what I loved, regardless of what anyone else said about it.
Instead of trying to please others, I focused on saying “I like this better than that.” For example: I like clear sentences better than muddy ones. I like imagery that the reader can almost take off the page and hold. I like sentences that create a musical rhythm and sets a mood. I like cats, Pad Thai, and lizards.
While discovering what I liked, I found my voice. I became too immersed in my own work to worry about what others were doing. Besides, no other writer in the world can write what I write the way I would write it, any more than I can write for any other writer.
Personal qualities cut a unique lens through which a writer views the world: knowledge, experiences, cultural backgrounds, emotional baggage, interests, and personality, to name only a few. The lens is one of a kind and in-duplicable.
If only I can write what I write, then other writers are not my competition, and I am not theirs, yet there is a prevalent myth that the point of any serious activity is to win against another, and that the will to defeat someone is as good for art just as it is for making a quality car.
But writing is not a car. Sometimes we write about losing people we love; personal tragedies of abuse; regrets; innermost longings; people we have known. The need to put a “good” or “bad” tag on personal expressions turns something poignantly organic and human into a mere product for categorization and consumption.
This might make sense from a commercial point of view, but it makes no sense from an artistic point of view. Even if money or prestigious titles are the motivation for writing initially, it is the intrinsic rewards that breathe life into art.
It is creating a world, exploring a theme, and building interesting characters that inspire and excite me. Writing just to write does not make me lazy; on the contrary, I will go to almost any length to make my writing work because I am writing for myself.
However, my stories, whatever their merits, represent barely a sliver of what the human experience can be. A point of view is just a point. Other voices are needed to shed light on life.
Therefore, I would rather encourage other writers to share their experiences than to view them as obstacles. The world needs more understanding, not less. Besides, what would my life have been like without other writers to share the stories that sparked my love for writing?
Despite my distaste for competition as the guiding thrust for art, I did feel a little guilty for shunning the contest. It is all well and good to talk abstractly about the disharmony of art to competition, but do contests not have practical value to a talented writer who is struggling?
Maybe so, and I have no doubt those sponsoring the contest meant well. I feel for them. Maybe they will find someone else to support their competition: ideally someone who has never compared contests to rutabagas; someone whose writing has never been hurt by the urge to win.
Someone who has not thought about the matter quite so much.
If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here.