Better To Be Silent, and Be Thought a Fool?
Down below I wrote a little bit--or ran at the mouth, rather--about my writer's block. And again, I'm not sure the term "writer's block" is an accurate way of describing my particular difficulty. As I understand it, most blocked writers struggle with having something to say, and that's not been my case. I've had plenty to say, but enormous difficulty saying it.
It was so bad at one point that I'd feel physically ill at the prospect of having to write a single sentence, and sitting down at the keyboard produced nothing more than complete mental paralysis. I was able to talk about the things I was interested in writing--and for required expository writing I was able to speak in fairly decent prose, which S. transcribed for me. But I could not perform the physical act of writing myself.
I've analyzed the problem from a hundred different angles, both alone and with the help of professionals from whom I'd hoped to gain some insight. But we never did get at the root of the problem. Though things are obviously not as bad now as they were, I still have a lot of ground to cover.
One of the issues I keep coming back to is early praise. From a very young age I was told that I was a very good writer. And my parents, being creative hippy types, encouraged me. At five or six I remember writing plays that my sister and I performed. Sometimes they were alternative episodes of the televisions show "Little House on the Prairie," a family favorite. In third grade my best friend and I each wrote "books." We filled the pages of our own separate composition notebooks (the kind with black & white speckled hardcovers) with an original story in chapters. My memory is fuzzy on the details, but I remember that for some time we carried those notebooks with us everywhere and were terribly excited about the project.
This, coupled with my nearly perfect grades, met with strong approval from my teachers. My only flaw, as far as they were concerned, was my awkwardness. (I wasn't the cutest little duckling in my class, and I was painfully shy.) Therefore, being a good writer and reader became an essential part of my identity.
In high school I took a major detour through much wildness (the transition from a small, Catholic grade school to a large, public high school didn't go exactly smoothly), and my grades fell sharply. I kept writing though--graduating from fiction to poetry, inspired by song lyrics, the Beats, and my bohemian friends. We'd get plenty drunk and plenty stoned and hold candlelit readings wherever adult-unsupervised space was available. Afterwards I was usually approached by at least one person lavishing praise on my work. (Those notebooks are still in my possession, and one of these days I'll post up a poem or two so you can have a nice, long laugh with me.) Needless to say, I came to think pretty well of myself as a poet.
Then I got married. Way too young, but when one's life is a crazy ass mess and one's parents are crazy ass hippie stoners, one craves stability. I dropped the writing like a bad habit, and chased the American Dream--hard. I actually remember thinking to myself that all my creative endeavors were the whimsy of youth and it was time to grow up. Because I'd dropped out of high school, I hadn't the formal education to correct my misinformed belief that most artists were reckless junkies.
Always a hard worker, even in jobs that didn't warrant the effort, by twenty-one I'd gotten pre-approval for a mortgage and very nearly bought a house. Had I gone through with it, I'd probably still be living there today, leading one of those lives of quiet desperation. But my gut backed out before we made a serious offer.
By twenty-four, my early mid-life crisis was in full-swing and I was back in school looking for a way out of the ultra-conformist box I’d built up around me. My English Comp I professor was so impressed with my skills as a writer that she recommended me for the college honors program, and my ambitions as a creative type were reborn.
Once again I was an academic success. A history professor asked my permission to use one of my papers as a model for future honors classes. An English professor told me I’d found something in a Robert Frost poem that three Nobel laureates had missed. Enter: the poetry workshops—and more praise.
So what could possibly be wrong with all that?
My guess is this. I think the years I spent not writing stunted my creative growth—by at least seven years. In contrast, I think my maturity and sophistication as a reader has proceeded normally. Therefore, Ginger the Reader is painfully aware of Ginger the Writer’s deficiencies, and whereas I was blissfully incapable of objectivity as a teenager, I am counter-productively self-critical these days.
I think I may be afraid to fail, even privately, because all that early praise had me convinced of my enormous potential. There’s a popular expression that’s to the point. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. Better to be ignorant of the limits of one’s talent, than to become intimately acquainted with them through failure. And the more I’ve felt as though excellence is expected of me, the more inhibited I’ve become.
So, part of my mission with this blog is to open myself up to the prospect of failure. I don’t know if anyone’s actually reading it, or what, if anything, they/you think of the writing—but I’m getting the words down and putting them out there. I’m practicing vulnerability. I’m willing to be the fool.
