Inspiration / Intimidation

Or, what if I'm never going to be as good as the greats?

Welcome to the first issue of Page Fright! If you’ve already subscribed, thank you. If you haven’t subscribed yet, here’s your chance!

With every issue, I’ll tackle one fear commonly held by writers in every genre and at every stage of experience. I’m hoping to get a bit of a writing community going here, so it would be great if you contributed to the comments section.

Let’s get started with the first fear to be explored, dissected, and rejected: “What if I’ll never be as good as the greats?”*

When Joan Didion died last December, writers and writing students and readers and Uber drivers all mourned her passing. It’s a rare enough writer who has keen, original observations that turn out to be prescient, or reflections grounded in a particular life and time while also achieving a haunting timelessness and universality. But to also express them in sentences so perfect, they take your breath away? This, to me, is her true legacy, and why I’m so inspired by her writing. Here’s one of my favorites from her classic essay, “Goodbye to All That”:

“Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good dealer older, and on a different street.”

If it’s possible to fall in love with a sentence, I think this one’s a worthy object of our affection.

After news of Didion’s passing had circled the globe, I heard from saddened former students who thanked me for introducing them to her work and, in the case of one student, for giving her my treasured signed copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I thought she needed it even more than I did. I posted on social media and texted articles about her back and forth with friends who also took Didion’s death personally, somehow, as we had with Nora Ephron and Carrie Fisher.

And then, a chilling thought entered my consciousness, unbid and unwanted and more than a little embarassing: I’ll never be as good a writer as Joan Didion. I mean, of course not – I already knew that! But one loss begets another, and the loss of Didion the person, the loss of any future gorgeous sentences from her, and the loss of boundless possibility for me and my writing became entangled.

Yes, I’m admitting my mind leapt from inspiration to intimidation in record time, as maybe yours does when you compare yourself to your writing idols. Have you, too, ever thought, I love writing but I’ll never be as good as the greats? The danger with this belief, of course, is: 1) it might not be true and 2) it could easily spiral down into another, more insidious thought: If I can’t be the best of the best, why bother writing at all?

Why bother? Let me count the ways.

But, first, let’s explore some of the realities of being a writer.

Your writing abilities are not static; you have it in you to improve. Even Didion wasn’t Didion when she first started out. In her 1976 essay, “Why I Write,” she claims she resorted to writing because in college she wasn’t good at anything else. Doth the lady protest too much? Sure. But the point still holds: she discovered something she had an affinity and talent for, maybe even a calling.

And even once she abandoned her original goal of acting and committed to becoming a writer, she still wasn’t Didion. She learned to write by typing the novels of writers with completely different styles: Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. In fact, Hemingway’s stripped-down sentences were in part a rebellion against James’ long, flowing ones. In an interview with The Paris Review, Didion referred to Hemingway as writing “perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.” She described James’ sentences as “perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them.” Didion acknowledged being so in awe of James’ sentences, it “made [her] afraid to put words down.”

Isn’t it comforting to know that just as we’re intimidated by Didion or others of her stature, she was intimidated by James?

And so she shifted her perspective. Rather than competing with these giants or feeling daunted by them, she made it her mission to study and learn from them, and, in doing so, she arrived at her own style, which is a blend of the two yet also thoroughly original.

But, you might say, what if the literary legends we admire are simply more naturally talented than we or nearly any other writer on the face of the planet? Well, that may very well be true. The question is: Can you live with this knowledge?

Annie Dillard puts the dilemma in perspective in The Writing Life (1989):  “Out of a human population on earth of 4.5 billion [now 8.9 billion], perhaps 20 people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth….There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”

Writing is an extreme sport and just entering the arena takes courage. But expecting to be as good as the greats almost guarantees you’ll be crushed.

The author Cheryl Strayed in her “Dear Sugar” column addresses the paradox of being “up too high and down too low” as a writer: having the ego to believe you should be the best and then feeling awful about yourself if you’re not. Think of the chutzpah it takes for any of us to believe we should be better than everyone else or just give up!

One insight I gained in doing the research for my book for creative people in any field, What’s Your Creative Type?, is that many artists and writers who are driven by competition and validation actually have pretty fragile egos. Picture a balloon: the more you inflate it, the larger it grows, the more it thins out and is likely to pop. All of the ego-driven writer’s bluster may actually be overcompensation for their sensitivity, vulnerability, and fragility. As we all know, writing—and especially sharing your writing—is a really vulnerable thing. Who could blame us for seeking a guarantee of reaching certain heights?

But there are no guarantees. There’s only the work. And working at the work.

And, so, I’ll circle back to my earlier question: Why bother writing? Why bother when it feels too daunting, too vulnerable, and too heartbreaking, especially when you feel your reach exceeds your grasp?

Write because you have a killer idea or story. Write because you have unpopular but necessary opinions. Write because it’s cathartic. Write because you believe you have something original to express. Write because you hope your words or life story will benefit or inspire readers. Write because you’re a really good writer and you aspire to become a great one.

Don't write to become the next Joan Didion. Write to become the next best version of you.

Let me know in the comments if there’s a writer who both inspires and intimidates you. I’m interested in finding out who everyone has in mind!

Zoey allowed me in the pic, as long as she was front and center. :)