jebmo’s posthaven

In the book Art & Fear, authors David Bales and Ted Orland describe a ceramics class in which half of the students were asked to focus only on producing a high quantity of work while the other half was tasked with producing work of high quality. For a grade at the end of the term, the “quantity” group’s pottery would be weighed, and fifty pounds of pots would automatically get an A, whereas the “quality” group only needed to turn in one—albeit perfect—piece. Surprisingly, the works of highest quality came from the group being graded on quantity, because they had continually practiced, churned out tons of work, and learned from their mistakes. The other half of the class spent most of the semester paralyzed by theorizing about perfection, which sounded disconcertingly familiar to me—like all my cases of writer’s block.

Being a writer sometimes feels like a paradox. Yes, we should be unswerving in our missions to put passion down on paper, unearthing our deepest secrets and most beautiful bits of humanity. But then, later, each of us must step back from those raw pieces of ourselves and critically assess, revise, and—brace yourself—sell them to the hungry and unsympathetic public. This latter process is not only excruciating for most of us (hell, if we were good at sales we would be making good money working in sales), but it can poison that earlier, unselfconscious creative act of composition.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott illustrates a writer’s brain as being plagued by the imaginary radio station KFKD (K-Fucked), in which one ear pipes in arrogant, self-aggrandizing delusions while the other ear can only hear doubts and self-loathing. Submitting to journals, residencies, fellowships, or agents amps up that noise. How could it not? These are all things that writers want, and who doesn’t imagine actually getting them? But we’d be much better off if only we could figure out how to turn down KFKD, or better yet, change the channel—uncoupling the word “rejection” from “failure.”

There are two moments from On Writing, Stephen King’s memoir and craft book, that I still think about more than 15 years after reading it: the shortest sentence in the world, “Plums defy!” (which he presented as evidence that writing need not be complex), and his nailing of rejections. When King was in high school, he sent out horror and sci-fi fantasy stories to pulpy genre magazines. For the first few years, they all got rejected. He stabbed his rejection slips onto a nail protruding from his bedroom wall, which soon grew into a fat stack, rejection slips fanned out like kitchen dupes on an expeditor’s stake in a crowded diner. Done! That one’s done! Another story bites the dust! That nail bore witness to King’s first attempts at writing, before he became one of the most prolific and successful authors in the world.