(In the audio above I read this newsletter. Apologies if the the sound quality isn’t the best, I record these on my phone for a little added extra…maybe one day I’ll get a mic and actually edit it. For now, I quite like the perfect imperfection :))
Over these last few weeks, I have been thinking quite a bit about what it means to be a writer who puts their writing out in the world. It’s one thing to write something (and an achievement in itself by the way) but it is another thing to publish it. It can feel sometimes like putting yourself on show, like laying your soul out into the world for it to be critiqued.
In a recent mentoring session with a client, we got talking about a short story that I wrote a number of years ago. He said he had read it and I immediately felt a little embarrassed and wanted to qualify that it was just a “little” “silly” story I wrote way back when. I cringe a bit about that story, and I haven’t read it back since I published it. However, I started to question why I should feel that way?
If you are working at your craft, your writing is going to improve over time. That is the way it works, so cringing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is a sign that your writing has got better. If my writing hadn’t improved since I wrote that short story, I would be wondering what the hell I had been doing in between! I am glad that the Susannah who wrote that story had the guts to publish it and I know that she was proud of it at the time. (Maybe I should read it and write a newsletter with my thoughts…).
I have always taken some comfort that Zadie Smith has mentioned that she cringes when she reads her first book, White Teeth, a book that I know many people would love to be able to say they had written. But again, it makes sense. She was in her early twenties when she wrote that book, her writing has changed and she has changed, I am sure.
On the flip side of this, there are also times when I look back on old articles and am pleasantly surprised by them. I think “wow, you were better than you knew!” And I can feel a little tinge of sadness for the times when I didn’t believe that. In both cases, cringing or marvelling, it is almost like someone else wrote what I am reading and I am looking on it with different eyes.
So, what I want to say is, handle your writerly self and your work with care. Love the things you put out into the world because they were the best you could do at that given moment. Delight when things you wrote feel awkward to read now because you are noticing all the things you would change or do differently, because ‘oh how you have grown.’ And back yourself. Because your best right now might just be far better than you think.
And I will leave you with this thought. What would have happened if Zadie Smith hadn’t published White Teeth? For one thing, the world would be just a little sadder and she may not have had the career she’s had. A career which includes feeling a little uncomfortable reading White Teeth to audiences of avid fans, who have bought every book she has ever written since then.
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