“Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy.”
Author Dani Shapiro recalls “In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends.
“It was titled ‘Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years,’ and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.
“Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone.”
She quotes Ted Solotaroff from the essay:
“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared.
“As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”
Dani Shapiro writes further on endurance and the writer’s inner life in her essay A writing career becomes harder to scale:
“Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.”
Noting there is so much pressure on the writer to sell and make an impact in the marketplace, she asks “How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?
“Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff’s essay: ‘Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness.'”
She adds, “The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to.
“And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves.
“But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.”
[Image: George Orwell chose to write Nineteen Eighty-Four while living in Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. See more in my post Solitude and creative expression.]
[Long distance runner photo at top is from post: Tips For Tackling Long Runs.
A need for persistence and resilience to succeed
Writer Rachel Simon notes, “Tenacity has always been a primary theme in the lives of successful writers: some historians believe that Plato rewrote the first sentence of The Republic fifty times; Virgil needed ten years to write the Aeneid; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which itself required five years of work, was not even begun until Flaubert had written, and discarded, two other novels;
“James Joyce’s Ulysses took eight years to write, and countless rejections to get published.
“Ernest Hemingway rewrote the final page of A Farewell to Arms almost forty times…”
She adds that Ted Solotaroff “says in his essay that Bobbie Ann Mason submitted twenty stories to The New Yorker before one was accepted; Solotaroff adds that Raymond Carver wrote for almost ten years before his first story appeared in print, then persevered another seven before publishing his first book; Harold Brodkey’s first novel, Runaway Soul, took thirty-one years of revision between its 1960 book contract and its 1991 publication.
“These are just a few of the better-known examples, but every author, even the most obscure, has his or her own stories of tenacity.”
From The Writer’s Survival Guide: Chapter 3: The General Antidotes, by Rachel Simon [posted on her site]
[Photo added by me: Joyce from Guardian article “Rare James Joyce letters sold in US auction – Letters written during the author’s struggle to publish Ulysses reach 10 times guide price.”]
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Like a number of other artists. J.K. Rowling has experienced rejection – and depression.
She wrote her first “Harry Potter” book to help overcome that depression.
In his article for Inc. magazine, Jeff Haden notes:
“Before she ‘became’ J.K. Rowling, Joanne Rowling was an unemployed single mother. She applied for welfare benefits to help take care of her 1-year-old daughter.
“She was clinically depressed and occasionally contemplated suicide.
“Rowling later looked back on that time in her life and said she was ‘the biggest failure I knew.’”
After she finished her first novel, she submitted it to publishers.
“Twelve rejected it. The thirteenth publisher took a chance on her.”
Haden adds, “What decision did she make that changed her life? According to Rowling:
“I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me.
“Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged.
“I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea.
“And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
From my article J.K. Rowling on Writing and Depression.
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Refining creative talent
“To be successful and high achieving takes inborn talent”; “Talent will out”; “You need a gift to be exceptional” – All these are myths, according to research detailed by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else.
These preconceptions also fuel a sense of inadequacy, lower esteem or decreased self-efficacy for many people, and distorted beliefs that we need to be “special” to reach high levels of excellence and achievement.
From my post Outstanding gifted adults: Geoff Colvin on why Talent is Overrated.
Those kinds of self-limiting beliefs can also make rejection all the more difficult.
Here is a related post: Grit and perseverance mean more than talent and high aptitude.
Malcolm Gladwell famously proposed a “rule” (in his book Outliers) that exceptional achievement and mastery requires 10,000 hours of concentrated practice.
Since first publishing the concept, he has modified it, and other writers have made informative critiques.
In her Creativity Post article Milena Z. Fisher writes:
“Remember that wildly popular myth about how mastering any skill requires 10,000 of deliberate practice?
“It might have some validity in certain disciplines. Now we have modified the finding: creativity requires constant and steady progress – if you produce a lot you will get there!”
From my post Outliers and developing exceptional abilities.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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