Sentimental Attachment

When you venture into the writing community and start to interact with other writers, one of the first things you come across will either be positivity and support for you and your work, or negativity and criticism.  Which one of these you encounter first will depend a lot upon the extent to which your work conforms to the expectations of others.  The other will follow in time as no writer seems to be able to escape both of these unless they write and never share with the world what they write.

As a writer you will likely attach a certain level of sentimental attachment to your work, which can lead you to the mindset where your work becomes an extension of you as a person, and subsequently any criticism of the work is taken to be a criticism of you as a person.  This isn't something unique to the writing community, it's also quite common in the world of work in general, where anyone who takes a degree of pride in their work invariably develops a sentimental connection to it.

Learning to separate your personality from your work, and by extension achieving a separation of your personal and professional lives respectively can be something that is very difficult to achieve.  Indeed, many people never manage to achieve this feat at all and as a result move from job to job after they reach a point where the criticism of their work accumulates and leaves their self esteem completely devastated, this can be sudden and dramatic or it can come through attrition.  The same is true for writers, many progress to a point in their career where the accumulation of criticism of their work reaches a point of devastation and they give up and move on to some other creative outlet, or they spiral into self destruction, the latter possibly serving as the origin of the stereotype that all writers end up as raging alcoholics in their twilight years.

When it comes to the idea of conforming to the expectations of others, this can be defined in much more specific terms.  The first is the concept of quality that people perceive when they read what you have written.  Whether through conscious choice or through unconscious bias writers develop 'markers' or 'signs' through their experience both as a reader and as a writer that they regard as increasing or decreasing overall quality of a piece.  The best example of one of these markers is the issue of the use of clichés in writing, as examples: "Fire in his eyes" describing rage, "Black as coal" describing the depth of darkness, and "Cold as ice" describing someone who is callous or indeed in the literal sense describing something that is freezing cold.

Open up the debate by asking a room full of writers whether they think clichés should be included in your writing and the range of responses you will receive will reach from pure animosity and disdain, through neutrality, through to those who practically profess their undying love - in defence of the cliché as an LGBT author acutely aware that my community in particular adores another camp in nature, clichés used effectively can ramp up the camp factor of your writing.  As with any narrative trope however I would argue that those aspects of writing in and of themselves should not serve as a marker of quality, rather what the author chooses to do with them and how they employ them within the work itself should determine quality.

The very definition of quality in this regard however is problematic because ultimately these markers are a matter of opinion and taste, or lack thereof depending on your viewpoint.  There are however other markers of quality that are less subjective and more objective in nature, these tend to centre around semantics such as structure, depth, and pacing.  To put yourself beyond criticism is a desire fuelled by ego and nothing more; we are biased in our perception of our work because our ego will naturally be inclined to favour what we create more than that which others create.  Shielding yourself from criticism completely can be a detriment as a writer because it prevents you from identifying these semantic issues with your work and it may be the case that those issues are what is preventing your work from gaining a greater following.

Whilst the ego leads us to prefer our own creations over those created by others, it also has unrealistic expectations that it places on our own work that it does not attach to the work of others.  In other words, the ego desires perfection in our own work, amplifying the imperfections whereas with others' work it is quite indifferent - that is unless it feels threatened by that work in which case jealousy can magnify our attention to detail and actively encourage us to rip others work to shreds with a hyper critical mindset.

Make no mistake, all of these problems centre around the concept of toxicity and whilst my focus here is on the writing community, this issue is systemic and is pervasive across the internet as a whole, and I would argue that it even extends into the real world to interpersonal relations.  The behaviour of people in general no matter the setting is driven ultimately by the extent to which we feel insecurity and shame or conversely, security and pride in what we do.  Success as a writer just as in life in general comes when you can increase your sense of security and pride in what you do so that you can share your work and accept criticism of it without taking it as a personal attack.

If you lack that security or pride unfortunately there's no quick fix when it comes to achieving it.  In my personal life it has taken me the better part of two decades to reach this point in my life at age 32 where I don't take things so personally.  I discount the first decade of life because children have a remarkable ability to do things without thinking about it too much - over-thinking really is the greatest enemy of self confidence.  It has taken introspection, personal development, therapy, and a lot of things going wrong in my life and learning how to cope with it all to reach this point and I wouldn't consider myself "done" there's so much more left to do.  Be wary of those who try to sell you a quick fix to these problems, the self-help industry in the US alone is estimated to be worth in excess of $10 billion and it continues to grow.  If the solutions they promised actually worked then the industry would rapidly shrink.

It is important to have pride in your work, and part of that comes from writing something that embodies the narrative that you had envisaged, but like an artist painting a canvas, what you actualise will never perfectly align with what you had envisaged but that is not a failing on your part.  Practise and continued development of your craft will bring you to a point where it becomes much easier to translate your thoughts into something material.  The pursuit of perfection is our enemy and serves as an obstacle to the production and completion of our work, just as over-thinking serves as an obstacle to our self-confidence, the pride we have in our work too can then be seen as confidence in our work and the failure to achieve the standard of perfection desired by the ego subsequently being the reason we are never satisfied with our work just as we are never fully satisfied with ourselves.

Learning to accept your own personal imperfections and learning to accept the imperfections in your work go hand in hand but again the separation of the two can be hard to achieve.  When it comes to your life itself, the pursuit of perfection will likely never end completely until you die, if you held onto the same mentality when it comes to writing, you'd never finish anything.  You have to learn when to stop, when you have done what you can in contributing to a piece, and release it or pass it on for review, accepting the criticism that is given as feedback that can inform revisions of the same work or as areas of focus for improvement in future works.  Being able to accept that criticism and confine it to the creative process and not allow it to be taken as a personal attack requires the ability to limit your sentimental attachment to your work.