Brilliance or Crap?

How's that for the title of a blog entry?

I have come to the conclusion that writers tend to fall into two distinct camps. In the first camp, we have writers who believe that everything they write is brilliant. No word of their prose should be edited. They are the greatest incarnation of an American novelist ever. When I was a book editor, I would read queries that had statements (NOT meant tongue in cheek) like: "This book represents the finest prose on the experience of poverty since Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath." Now, it might (and I am being overly generous) be all right to make such a delusional claim IF the work held up to scrutiny, but I have usually found the writers who believe this about themselves are some of the worst I have ever seen or read.

And they don't even have to aspire to Steinbeck. Every genre has aspiring and published writers whose work is cringe-worthy and whoe writers seem oblivious to it.

In the other camp are writers who think everything they write is CRAP. They rip up or delete nearly every work in progress. They stall over a single paragraph for days, paralyzed by an aspiration of perfection and therefore convinced anything they write is total garbage. Needless to say, these are often the writers who never finish any novel or novella EVER. I know some of these people. I get Christmas cards from them--still plugging away on a novel they started ten years ago.

There is nothing wrong with suffering for your art. There is nothing wrong with being a slow writer. But there is a problem if the reason you are slow is self-flagellation of the most vicious sort. If you hate your art.

I think the most (and I use this term loosely) well-adjusted novelists are the ones who can straddle both camps. I am really, really proud of INVISIBLE GIRL as it gets released this week. Like my earlier work in THE ROOFER, it is a book of my heart. It is fiction (can't really call it a romance . . . not even romantic suspense . . . not quite a thriller). I am proud of the prose. But along the way, I thought it was crap. I started it three different times, and it took a WHILE to get rolling with it (with a shout-out to Jon, in my writers' critique group, who really helped me gel the past/present technique I used). In the end, I "own" it--I think it's a good book. Along the way, I cringed. I hated chapters. I wasn't sure it was going to work.

If you think you are so brilliant you have nothing to learn . . . you won't. If you think you are so God-awful that there is no hope for your writing, then there isn't.

Learn to balance the two, and you have a path.

Anyone recognize their thought processes here?