The surprising thing that may be holding back your writing.

(apart from all the other things, obvs)

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

Are you a writer? What I mean is, does your whole identity rest on being “a writer”?

I thought about this when I recently read a piece – one of quite a few similar articles I’ve read - by an author who believed that having her book published damaged her mental health. She believed that the lukewarm response to her first novel effectively rocked the foundations of who she was, or at least who she considered herself to be. It took her some time to recover. If her book was not a runaway success, by any critical or sales standard, was she still ‘a writer’?

I’m not sure I’ve ever considered myself a writer, even though by every conceivable yardstick that’s what I am. What I am, in my head, is a person who writes. In fact, I have to write; it’s how I process the world. I get a bit jittery and unbalanced when I’m not doing it. But I’ve never had an image of myself as ‘A Writer’ with whatever baggage that entails. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in Hackney in a world mostly devoid of them and had no idea what actually being one would look like. (I think I may have pictured a garret in Paris, maybe some heavy black spectacles and a polo-neck).

Or perhaps it’s because it took me so long before I had a novel published, and even bloody longer before I was properly successful at it. After all, in the years that I still had a “proper” job, I wrote three novels that weren’t published. Does that mean I wasn’t a writer for all that time? I’m not sure I even thought about it. It makes me think of those people who put ‘writer’ after their twitter handles, eg “@SamJonesWriter”. It always feels a little like a plea to the heavens, rather than a statement of fact.

For ten years I was a journalist, mostly on The Independent, when it existed in paper form. I definitely considered myself a journalist, so much so that when I left the newspaper in 2001, I didn’t know who I was without that title; the routine, the deadlines, the camaraderie, the bleak jokes, the overwhelmed liver. My whole self was tied up with my journalistic identity and, oddly untethered without it, I had to have therapy (this isn’t a joke) and reconsider myself.

Basically, I had to detach who I was gently from what I did.

The distinction hadn’t occurred to me until I spoke to Lisa Christie, an expert in overcoming creative blocks, who explained that overidentifying with the idea of ‘being a writer’ is a surprisingly common obstacle to literary creativity. Many writers – or wannabe writers - get stuck, because what they’re working on is not perfect. It’s not the version that they see in their head – the one that will make them feel like ‘a writer’. It’s not recognizably the one that is going to lead to literary success.

At first I couldn’t get my head around this at all, but then I spoke to a couple of unpublished writers who nodded furiously and confirmed that this was true for them. The identity of being a writer was so important to them that the risk of failing at it was unbearable – and made it so much harder for them to even try.

I have apparently evaded this because I see writing as a process rather than an identity. I accept that most of my first, and possibly second and third drafts will probably be pretty awful. Because I already know they are not going to be great, my sense of self is completely unaffected by it.

That’s not to say I don’t have bad writing days, or very grumpy writing days, or occasionally want to give up completely and go and run a donkey sanctuary. But deep down, I know that all these feelings are part of the business of creating. I see writing a book as a little like being a sculptor with a big block of stone, chipping away at it until it stops being an uninspiring ugly lump, and eventually starts to resemble the image I carry in my head. And it is probably going to be slow and laborious and incredibly frustrating trying to get there. And that’s okay.

It's important to consider whether your idea of yourself as a writer fits into this template, because failure inevitably exists along every bit of this path. Even when you are outwardly successful, you’re going to write sentences, paragraphs, chapters and characters that will fail, and make you feel like the least talented person ever. Your ideas won’t work. You’re going to have books that don’t do as well as others.

You’re going to have events where people don’t turn up, or audiences that are unreceptive to you. You’re going to have bad reviews (maybe stay off Goodreads, brrrr). You’re going to read other people’s stuff and want to scream to the heavens everyone else is so good why am I even trying??? And guess what, not one of these things is going to make you any less of a writer.

You just need to be a person who writes.  Take that weight off and embrace – perhaps even enjoy - the process. Because that’s as close to being a writer as any of us really gets.

NB. From now on the bulk of my how-to posts about creative writing are going to be for paid subscribers. But I will still be writing about other things for the free subscribers.