The Irony of Writing Well

When do you know you “write well?” Please understand, I am talking about creative writing.

Real answer: You don’t. Not for a while. The same as a diligent music student may become maniacally proficient at playing music, but not necessarily “feel” the rightness or wrongness of how he is delivering a piece of music. The “feeling” part comes years later. Trust me, I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, if you’re reading this blog post, but since when can you bake a cake in five minutes? That is after the time you’ve already spent rounding up the ingredients.

“Writing well” follows the cake rule. You aren’t “good” at writing just because your writing teacher said so. Neither are you good at writing simply because you know and can apply the rules. Nor, as in my case, do you magically start “writing well” when you’re a low budget writer who is limited to all the how-to-write books she can discover along the way. (Then you’re doomed to never knowing if you’re writing well!! Lol.) Yet too many of my rejection letters told me (to my utter confusion) that I wrote well. So, hey, if I write well why the hell are you rejecting me?! 

Regardless, I continued to write and rewrite my story, not in any quest to write well, but because the act of writing kept me from having to face that I was a fifty-year-old failure.

Furthermore, I was slowly realizing how processing my own story was helping me pull the lid off a lifetime of suppressed emotions.

Meanwhile, whenever I got a hold of some new (for me) used writing book that I considered good, I would stop writing altogether and read that book at least four times. Then I’d go make a cheat-sheet of the book. By the way, not that I am OCD or anything (!) my cheat-sheet on a phenomenal book by Gary Provost, Make Your Words Work, is 149 pages long. Those of you who know the band, Queen, will recognize their guitarist, Brian May. May says, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” I belong to that same school of thought.

Somewhere in there, I became obsessed, not with “writing well,” but with how to tell my story to best effect.

And after every one of my “digest this book” read + make-a-cheat-sheet sessions, I would go back and edit absolutely every page I had ever written.

In the midst of all this, one day my older kid, who was sometimes kind enough to review some part of what I was writing, said to me: “Ma, what can’t you understand about the fact that writing is about emotions? Unless you can make your reader feel what you felt when you lived through all this, you’ll never write a good book.”

Right.

I looked at her flummoxed. You see, after living the better part of my life on “auto control,” I had no idea as to what I had felt when I had lived through some very traumatic situations. Hell, I was too busy getting through the darn situation to feel anything.

Back to the drawing board.

I went to rewriting every word I had written so far—this time desperate to figure out what anyone in that situation might have felt. Then trying to fathom what I had felt based on who I was, how I thought, and above all, how I had responded to that particular circumstance.

On the way, a driven and strictly goal oriented Indian that I am, I paid three self-proclaimed “editors” $18,000 of my hard earned money, saved a dollar at a time doing my miserable jobs…and still I only received more rejection letters.

It took me eight years to actually “feel” writing. How easy it is to write that sentence, and how painfully difficult those years were to live. It took me even longer to feel confident enough to accept that I had reached a place of writing fairly well. Yet, something also told me my story wasn’t ready. Something was wrong with it—I just didn’t know what though.

Two more years went by.

Then, courtesy of my younger kid, I read two books by Lisa Cron: Wired for Story, and Story Genius.

How do I tell you how it feels to discover twelve long years after writing and rewriting and rewriting, spending thousands of dollars you can’t afford, and too many rejection letters…that what you have written isn’t even a story? It’s just a bunch of things that happened to somebody—in this case, me.

For under $24, Lisa Cron made me realize that “Story,” is not a bunch of events that happened to somebody. Story is how that person feels about what happened, and how it changes him or her as a consequence.

No wonder everyone and their mother had rejected me. Draw your own conclusions about how I felt regarding my very expensive editors? Clearly none of them had read Lisa Cron. Nor did they know how to break down writing or storytelling. But that was water under the bridge. No one was offering me any refunds.

Cron further explained that “writing well” didn’t make a book or sell it. What sold a book was a story. And I didn’t know how to tell a story. Just because I had lived it, didn’t mean I knew how to tell it. Worse news: real life didn’t necessarily translate to a story—real life was random, sprawling, messy, many times pointless. Just like years of a music practice schedule didn’t add up to a concert, the sum total events of someone’s real life didn’t miraculously result in a bestselling book. Like a musical piece, a story was a tight, well designed composition that had to have an opening, a build up, a climax, and a finale.

So, what was I going to do now? I was approaching sixty. Was I ready to give it up? Or would I rise to the challenge, take my “writing fairly well” skill, and see if I could use some of the events of my life to chart a story?

The battle was entirely mine. Around me nobody cared. My work colleagues lived mostly comatose “work and watch T.V., go on yearly vacation lives.” My friends still loved me. My children had their own lives. Was I ready to say I had failed? Or would I still keep at it? What was preventing me from trying, other than my own crucifying insecurity?

Do you have any similar challenge you don’t want to face?