Who Writes This Crap?

Grace Metalious , the author of Peyton Place said  "I'm a lousy writer and  a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste."

Let me tell you a true story. I had just published my first novel. It was a good book, not a great one, and I had some success with people buying it. After the book was in bookstores,  a friend came to my husband and said that he liked the book but he skipped about fifty pages in the middle because he thought they were boring. He didn't want to tell me because he thought it would hurt our friendship.

After I recovered from my hurt, I went to talk to my friend so he could  tell me why the book bored him. I aspire to be a good writer, and  I don't want to bore my friends, but there was something else I wanted to confront. The truth is that  sometimes I believe  that reviewers who are  negative are being more truthful than people who are praising the books.

Why is that? Why should the man who tells me the book is boring be more truthful than the one who says they love it? I don't know. Right now, success and failure as a writer seem to be only a hair's breadth away from each other. A book that fails involves the same amount of work as a book that succeeds and both have the same amount of effort put into the publicity.  Nevertheless  negative  comments seems to fulfill my deepest belief that what I write isn't very good. Am I alone in this belief?

I am a watercolorist and a watercolor teacher as well as being a writer. I work with watercolor students every day and I see how they struggle. And when I was first learning to paint, I remember how I I had this huge desire to do something well, and I would look at the work of professional artists and long for that skill. But the skill to be a good watercolorist was years in the future and in the meantime all I felt was frustration and sometimes anger. I believe that many of us  who attempt to find a creative outlet experience this feeling. We have an idea, more than an idea, a longing that we want to express, but we don't yet have the skill to express it. Maybe this is what lingers in me when I hear my work praised. I know how far I've come as a painter and a writer, but I know that I have only touched the edge of what I really want to say. The gap between what I want to say  and my ability to say it, even after five novels, still feels enormous.

I don't know if there is a cure for this feeling of failure in the midst of success.  Elizabeth George, a writer I admire very much keeps a writing journal. This is not part of the novel she is writing, but her feelings about herself as a writer. The book is called "Write Away" and is worth reading. And the practice of keeping a writing journal is worth trying. The idea here is not only to write your story for the public, but to keep in touch with what you are feeling as a writer as you are writing.

To backtrack. I grew up with a mother who was not abusive, but was not overly affectionate either. Sometime in my middle years I longed to have her say something kind, something encouraging, but she wasn't that kind of mother. So, instead of letters written to me by my mother, I wrote letters to myself  pretending that they had been  written from her.  In my struggles to find my writing voice, I needed someone to tell me I was wonderful. if I couldn't get that validation from my mother I would provide it to myself.

So, here's an idea. Write a letter to yourself, telling yourself what a wonderful writer you are, what a good, honest person you are, how you are  worth every bit of honor that will come your way. If you put the letter away and bring it out later, you can read it and some part of those words might stick in your psyche. Really listen to your friends, maybe they are not all just trying to flatter you. Let those positive reviews nourish your creative self.  And one last thought. Just show up. This means putting your butt in that writer's chair at regular intervals, even when things are not going well. It means making a list of everything you need to do to get that book noticed, even when you secretly believe that the work is crap and your friends who say they love it are lying. Put yourself out there, keep working, show the world that you are a real writer. Just show up.

Marguerite Mooers is a fiction writer whose five novels, Take My Hand, The Shelter of Darkness, A Casualty of Hope, The Girl in The Woods, The Life That He Lived, and The Lies That He Told,  are currently available on Amazon, Draft2Digital and Google Play. Her website is margueritemooers.com