It’s Not Me, It’s the Story
By Guest | May 26, 2022 |
We’re thrilled to have returning guest Danielle Davis on Writer Unboxed today! Danielle has had dark fantasy and horror published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Astounding Outpost, and multiple anthologies. You can find her on most social media under the handle “LiteraryEllyMay” and at her website, literaryellymay.com
It’s Not Me, It’s the Story
Have you ever reached a point where you couldn’t see the path forward while writing your story, and found yourself saying, “What is wrong with me?” It’s an easy trap to fall into, to see our stories as a projection of ourselves and to equate our story’s perceived value with an internal sense of worth. We put so much of ourselves into our writing that it’s a natural tendency to create an inflated sense of connection between the two and to take it personally when the story doesn’t want to work the way we want it to. This, in turn, drains motivation and makes it hard to move past those negative feelings.
In her TED Talk, “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection,” Reshma Saujani provides the anecdote of a friend who is an instructor at the University of Columbia. During office hours with his computer science students, he noted that men struggling with an assignment would say, “Professor, there’s something wrong with my code.” But when the women came in, they said, “Professor, there’s something wrong with me.”
This resonated with me. I, too, struggle with the culture that Saujani coins “perfection or bust” when I’m working on a story. I often beat myself up about not being further along as an author or tell myself that it’s a personal failing on my part. I tell myself that mine are pipe dreams and I’m just not cut out for this work. It’s a pervasive thought, that you aren’t enough, and if you’re not careful, it can fester and grow into a writer’s block that sticks.
Not too long ago, after wrestling with a sudden dead-end in my WIP, I went to my husband and lamented, “It’s not working out. I think I’m just not the writer for this story.” He very quickly (and correctly) called me out about it. Talking with him made me realize that it wasn’t ME. I wasn’t the failure. Elements in my story needed to be improved. A few tears and several days later, I realized what wasn’t working and made the necessary corrections. And it began to move again.
In the process, I began to identify several ways to fight that sense of personal failure and inadequacy:
- Realize you are not your story. Your story is like a clock, full of small cogs and gears that have to be precisely and finely tuned in order to work properly. You are merely the clockmaker, tuning those gears and lubricating those passageways. It is your job to tweak it until it comes together and flows. Working on your story is a job to do, not a definition of what value you have as a person.
- Understand that you are not the sum of your accomplishments. If you tie your self-worth to what you’re able to achieve, you will always be chasing a moving target. You are worthy of the story just by the fact that you are the only one who can write it. You have intrinsic value that goes far beyond any one story, and you need to identify that finishing it is a goal, not a reflection of you.
- Call a friend. Reaching out to others when you start to feel like a failure can be an important way to remind yourself of the value others see in you and can bolster your own self-confidence. What might seem unmanageable in your story when you’re sitting at home by yourself can be tackled more easily by opening up to someone you trust, someone who understands what you’re going through. While this may be a writer friend, it doesn’t have to be. Anyone who can boost your confidence may help.
- Practice healthy coping skills. This is a tough one, as it’s often the hardest to teach yourself to break the I’m-not-enough cycle. When you find yourself becoming emotionally dependent on the success of your story, take a mental reset: take a walk, play with the dog, take a bubble bath. These things can help break the emotional ties you’ve formed with your story and can put you in a healthier state of mind to tackle your story’s challenges.
We need to realize, when we hit that wall with our writing, that it’s the story that’s not working out at the moment. That, like the cogs in a clock, the singular components in the machine of the story aren’t doing their jobs. It’s not that we are personally failing our story or at storytelling, and it’s not a sign that we aren’t capable of success. It’s just a puzzle piece that’s out of place.
Have you encountered a time where you felt like you weren’t the right writer for your story? What did you do to turn it around? How did you bypass the “perfection or bust” mentality and persevere?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
This is a wonderful, very relevant article. Our writing is so personal, it is easy to assign blame for difficulties on ourselves rather than the fact that writing is a truly difficult practice. Thank you for this.
My forever novel will never leave me. I have written two more (all unpublished, sigh) but I always go back to the first one. I am proud of it and will soon be looking to publish. The characters simply live with me. I could never abandon them. Thanks for your post.
Thank you for this good reminder that you are not your work, your doings, you’re a human being. I remember way back in graduate school when I was having trouble with an experiment–I was getting ambiguous results and I felt like such a failure. I redesigned the expt. so that it would answer the question I was asking, but it took time to figure all this out. With writing, when something doesn’t come, I have to put it aside, work on other things, until I find a way back in. And I’ve discovered that the very act of writing separates me from what I’m writing about. I have my wip and a document called wip notes where I ask myself or my characters questions and write the answers. I’ll listen to that TED talk with my afternoon tea.
Love this approach and reminder. Why are we as creatives (and yes, often as women) so quick to find the fault in ourselves?
One thing I always love about makeover shows like What Not to Wear and Queer Eye is that the experts always tell the guests, “If the clothing doesn’t look right on you, there’s nothing wrong with you or your body–it’s the wrong clothing.” I have reminded myself of that for so many years when shopping–your lovely post reminds me to do it with my creative efforts too. Thanks for a helpful post, Danielle.
Sooooo much of this resonates with me, and has been the biggest part of my writing journey over the past decade or so, as I’ve matured past youthful fantasies of my career and settled into the “work-life balance” compromise phase. (Especially with having kids now.) But I’ve never heard of the clock / clockmaker analogy before, and I loved that! Thank you.
I’m surprised more people who agree haven’t chimed in – I would have though abandoning an unsuitable project is part of ‘best practices.’ But then, who am I to judge – I’ve been happily working on this trilogy since 2000, and am just embarking on Book 3 while preparing 2 for publication – and I can’t imagine anyone else writing this one.
But I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back to the trunk novel series.
Thank you for this Danielle! It was perfect timing. My developmental editor returned my WIP yesterday, and although I paid her for critical feedback, I felt a little defeated reading the critique. Some of the same thoughts you mentioned were running through my mind…maybe I should forget this novel, what’s the point etc. I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring this voice and carrying on, which I will do, but your article was a wonderful boost for my morale and confidence.