A Writer's Greatest Insecurity
Esquire published an article earlier this month that got people in my circles talking. Kate Dwyer penned this excellent piece entitled, “Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author?” I encourage you to read it before you read my reflections, as I will not regurgitate her main contentions.
Articles like this tend to make people like me uncomfortable because being an author involves pouring your life onto a page. Even if you are writing fiction, you have a story and a series of images in your mind. You have made it your life’s mission to get others to see what you see. Unfortunately, they cannot look directly into your mind, and you know this. You wonder if you can ever illustrate exactly what you want the reader to see, hear, touch, and feel. If you are honest about it, you know you cannot.
I have been an editor for several years, and I think this is the deepest insecurity for most writers. They do not worry about whether they are good or not. Most people realistically understand that there is always someone better than them at their craft. I can write an adequate essay, but I am not Ray Bradbury or Wendell Berry. That doesn’t worry me. I don’t need to be the best. I just need to be able to communicate, and, just as importantly, I need someone to care. Writers want the validation that someone will take the time to try and consider their thoughts or enter their subcreated world.
Articles like this get that insecurity, albeit unintentionally. By suggesting that it is very difficult, if not practically impossible, for most people to be able to pursue a career in writing, there is the underlying secondary assumption that very few people care enough about your work enough to pay $20 for your thoughts. You will sell a few copies to family and friends because they care about you as a person, but your book might sit on their shelf unread forever.
If any writers are reading this, have these paragraphs been painful? Have you ever wrestled with the question of whether or not anyone even cares about what you have written? The article ends without much help for the writer, who is stuck with the reality that writing as a career is financially impractical but also stuck with the underlying insecurity I have established. Does anyone care what I have written?
As I reflect on this question and why I write, I am humbled by Gandalf’s words to Bilbo near the end of The Hobbit. He says, “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” I am also quite a little fellow. You, or at least the vast majority of my readers, are quite little fellows. The world is not orchestrated around me (it is actually orchestrated around God’s providential purposes, but that is a conversation for another post). To put this in the context of writing, just because I write something does not mean that all of the great ideas of adventures and fantasy came into my mind to change the entire world. For some people, it does. Ironically, for J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote these lines, it did impact millions and millions of people. However, for most of us, the inspiration to write, the good words to say, and the stories to tell do not necessarily exist to benefit us in that fashion.
Nevertheless, they do exist in our minds. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity in an argument that we usually apply towards the existence of God, “The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” For the purpose of our discussion, though, the desire to write is a desire that can find satisfaction in this world. Like food existing to satisfy our hunger, there are computers and notepads available for writing. Consequently, we work to satisfy this desire, and we start writing.
However, if what I said above is accurate and this insecurity is true, the satisfaction is not just putting words on a page. Satisfaction is successfully communicating some idea in our mind that others need to know about. It is dependent on our ability, and it is dependent on someone to communicate with.
Fortunately, the insecurity is not true. A satisfaction exists for the desire to write; it is just as simple as putting words on the page. The insecurity that we worry about when we worry that no one will ever care what we think is patently false.
If you struggle with this insecurity, I want to offer an encouraging conclusion. Someone notices you. That Someone gave you the desire and the talent that you have cultivated. That Someone sees every page you write and loves that you are doing as much as possible with what you have been given. The ultimate purpose of talents is to do what you can with them. You are not responsible for the result. You are responsible for the attempt. This is beautifully portrayed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle.” If you haven’t read it, read it. It will point you in the right direction.