The Importance of Being Honest

Some of you may have noticed I didn’t publish a post last week.

My usual posting day fell right in the middle of a pretty bad spot of writer’s block. So, instead of agonizing over something that wouldn’t have ended up being very good, I decided to skip posting for a week (well, I guess it’s technically been two.)

I’d just gotten the first couple weeks of two disappointing college courses under my belt. I was dumping more hours into one than I’d ever put into a class before only to find out some of the struggle was due to glitches the professor had yet to fix. After a video meeting, I thought things were worlds better… then I ran into the same glitch again on another assignment. Argh.

Everything is worked out now. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I love the class. It just means I’m no longer tearing out nearly as much hair.

The other class is easy enough, just not what I’d expected. The genre I chose doesn’t get much coverage in the course, even though it was one of the options.

So, the fact that school is taking up so much mental and emotional bandwidth probably had a lot to do with the writer’s block I was experiencing.

However, part of it was more writer’s “blah” than block. Realizing the reason for that and working through it has helped me reorient myself in my writing career as a whole. It made me take an honest look at what I was being told, what I was telling myself, and, above all, what was actually true.

In any creative pursuit, there is a lot of subjectivity. So many different styles and opinions are always flying around that it’s easy to get trapped in comparison and discouragement.

Any art form is powerful. Almost everyone can point to an example they found important, influential, or inspiring. Unfortunately, these examples tend to come only from certain categories. The things some unknown entities have deemed “classics” are often viewed as the most important pieces of art, music, or writing. I touched on a similar topic in my last post.

Even if something isn’t old or an official classic, a lot of the writer types I’ve encountered still expect it to have enough philosophical layers to fill a literature syllabus.

I’m not saying that’s bad. I read and enjoy many “deep” things, and I believe that many people have deep ideas worth sharing.

The problem is that I let the narratives spun on writing forums make me and my work feel unimportant.

The only things they discussed were ones they could describe as “beautiful” and say brought tears to their eyes.

At least for the online writing group I’d joined, reading and writing were expected to always be a spiritual experience.

While I acknowledge that my writing talent is a gift from God, I don’t view writing as a spiritual practice.

I write humor, mysteries, sci-fi, blogs, essays. I’m more of a nerd than a philosopher most of the time. As a rule, I’m not much on magical tales, poignant memoirs, or works that probe our deepest mind and soul-parts.

And so, I started worrying that my work was unimportant. Why pour time, tears, and a series of aggravating courses into something unimportant.

What finally snapped me out of it – and, yes, this is kind of silly – is when my mom said that, by that argument, Agatha Christie wasn’t really important. 

Based on what I’d seen from my soulful writing forum fellows, neither Agatha nor most of the 500 plus other books on my shelves are that important. They don’t make the reader cry, they don’t break any molds or try to explain the meaning of life.

Then again, maybe every last one of the writers who seem so deep is staying up late, flashlight-under-the-covers style, to read a few more chapters of one of the books I love. Maybe, like me, they’re just embarrassed to admit it because they have themselves convinced it isn’t important enough.

And maybe it isn’t. But that doesn’t make it bad.

If it gives me pleasure to write and someone else pleasure to read, maybe we ought to re-evaluate if we really understand the word “important” after all.

I couldn’t resist.

A postscript:

Since I first drafted this post, I’ve encountered more writing opinions and advice. In one of my college courses, the textbook stated that people are not emotionally invested in a Sherlock Holmes story. Reading this as someone who most certainly is emotionally invested in the Sherlock Holmes stories made me realize another aspect of the issue I discussed in the post. What is important to us is dependent on our personality. The textbook author finds it hard to get invested in Holmes, he prefers things that probe the darker, deeper sides of humanity more overtly, based on the examples he cited. Other people are drawn into romances, I’m not. As I said earlier, writing is subjective. There are as many different tastes as there are neurons in the human mind. What is important quite often depends on how the writer or reader is wired.

So, if you can’t relate to writer’s blah/block, the broader takeaway from the post is this: the things that are important to you are just as much a part of your personality as your sense of humor, your fashion sense, or your favorite pasta dish. Don’t let it get you down if someone likes ravioli better than linguini.