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Writing: Communication or Competition?

     I sometimes lapse into unwilling envy, and even going into a bookstore is hard for me. I see all the books exploding from the shelves and wonder, is there any room left? And I think of my book at home, on my computer.
     I feel even less comforted when I consider that the books on store shelves represent only the tiniest fraction of books that are written; they are only the topmost points of the “slush pile” peaks that fill publishing houses.
      In a world where many manuscripts, conceived in great hopes, are treated as annoying trash, is a new book – regardless of quality – wanted? I am already torturing myself, so I go a step further: “All of the writers of all these books that are weighing down the shelves; are they my competition?”
      As a child I would have never had this thought. I never thought about writers competing, and if someone had told me they did, it would have made no sense. When I was twelve, I had an idealized view of writers. They were the people who let me read their minds; I imagined that they were endowed with a special sensitivity or preternatural empathy, and that if I met them, they would be my friends.
      They were the ones who were honest with me when everyone I knew seemed too guarded for honesty. The idea that these enlightened beings called writers would have to fight each other to express their ideas, or that they got jealous of each other, or that they would have to “know the right people” would have been shocking.
      Of course I knew writers entered contests. I had entered a few myself. But I never saw the winners of those elementary school competitions as a threat to my own dream of writing. Others could be good, but I could be good, too.
      I became more competitive in high school. I understood that making an A meant doing better than other students, especially in classes where teachers graded on a curb, and it was easier for me to accept the idea that one writer could “out-write” another.
      But with that acceptance, something valuable was lost. The writers I loved as a child, whom I had idolized, who understood me; suddenly they were my competition. Or I thought they were.
      I had met them on the common ground of emotion, but now they seemed remote. I felt as if my success, and by extension, my happiness, depended on my out-writing them. Plus, I saw them as being part of an elite circle as I hovered on the outer edges, looking in.
      And getting “in,” I learned, was no small undertaking. Although in high school and college, I always got high praise from teachers for my writing, when I sent my articles to editors, they all bounced back to me with a surfeit of form rejection letters. After almost a hundred of these, I finally got an article published in a Canadian feminist magazine.
      Though exultant, I was exhausted. I stopped sending out my articles. It seemed like too much work for too little reward. I wrote my first novel instead. At the time print-on-demand publishing was a new thing, and it appealed to me.
      The memories of all the rejection letters I got just to publish one piece for practically no pay was still fresh in my memory. The idea of self-publishing my novel gave me a wonderful feeling of control, so I published it with iUniverse without ever sending it to a publishing house.
      However, I had no clue how to market a self-published book. Although it was reviewed well on Amazon, the novel did not sell many copies. Plus, when I tried to get a book signing outside of my hometown, there were no takers.
      Reading mainstream novels, the sort I once loved, began to depress me.
      I could still enjoy reading, sometimes, but a bond I had once felt with the authors was gone and was replaced by a guarded feeling; published writers seemed to represent a faraway dream; they had achieved something I desperately wanted.
      The publishing world had been kind to them, had bound their dreams in slick covers, had edited their thoughts to tight perfection, and stamped them with an official seal of authenticity.
      The margins were perfectly even, and the sentences marched along like good soldiers. Whenever I read, I was no longer immersing myself in a novel. Instead, I was searching for the magic that had allowed the writers in, the secret charm that garnered approval from the editorial gods.
      Was it the leanness of the sentences? The clarity of their thoughts? The social acceptability of their themes? The aptness of their metaphors?
      Reading hurt, and so did writing, because I was always making comparisons between published writers and myself.
      Trying to rediscover what I had once loved about writing, I went back to where it had begun: childhood. As a child, when I wrote, I wanted to write well, but not to compete with anyone. I wrote because I thought it would be fun to tell a story, and I wanted to do everything I could to tell it in the most compelling and entertaining way.
      And it was remembering how writing had felt during my childhood that brought me back to my senses.
      I did not want to compare myself to other writers. I wanted to focus only on my own work, the way I did as a child: how to better express an idea; how to write a better sentence or create a more interesting image.
      Though I think competition in writing has advantages, there has always been something strange to me about it. For example, if two students are each writing a heartfelt essay about how their fathers died, does it make sense to pick a winner?
      What are the judges comparing? The best rendering of painful emotions? The authenticity of the emotions themselves?
      The need to be the best adds stress to the already risky effort at honest expression. Labels such as “sentimental” or “mawkish” can shame what may be a sincere attempt to communicate.
      And if the goal is to be understood, it seems unrelated to, and even at odds with, the drive to win. Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, may have been thinking the same when she instructed her creative writing students to refrain from either praising or criticizing the stories the other student authors read aloud. The focus, instead, was on merely understanding what the writer was trying to say.
      She said that the students hated this method, and that it caused a lot of anxiety. But I can see the value of simply trying to understand what someone is trying to say without sticking a value label on it. However, in the real world, comparisons are constantly being made, and few will deny that as a business, writing is competitive.
      But it is too stressful, not to mention absurd, to view the millions of writers from all genres, both living and dead, from the dawn of recorded history, as being “competition.”
      As an art, writing is not about “winning.” Each piece has a purpose unique to it. The object is the draw on every skill, tool, or insight in order to achieve whatever that purpose is.
      In general terms, it might be to express a vision; to create a new world; or to share an unusual point of view.
      Other writers are no threat to anyone being able to do their best to solve a writing problem uniquely her own. The problem is unique because the writer is unique; only she can faithfully translate her personal experience and point of view into words; no other writer, no matter how skilled she is, can do that for another writer.
      At the same time, writers need other writers; art inspires other art; varied perspectives challenge, teach and inspire; by understanding the experiences of others, I can more fully understand my own.
      Besides, no single writer, no matter how “good” she is can pit herself against every other writer in the world. Or even against all the writers in a bookstore.
      But I can enjoy how it feels to perfectly capture an image in words, to transmit an experience the way it actually was, or to create something that did not exist before.
      And although I would love to write a mega-bestselling hit, when I sit down with a notebook and a pen, the fantasies of fame and the pressure to please fade. Time stands still and I am twelve again; words are my friend and so are all the authors who made me want to be a writer.
And the world, dislodged and teetering, sighs back on its axis and resumes spinning.
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