Breinthewild

It starts like this: you can’t write. Or at least, not consistently. You can do it for work or last-minute for class. But on your own, for the stories you’re burning to tell, something always comes up. Even when you lock yourself away, avoiding a night out with friends to sit at your desk with fingers hovering inches above the keyboard, something comes up. The rest of the night is lost to a book or video game or the endless updates of social media or or or until you end up where you were before: a failure.

You’ve been here before but that knowledge doesn’t lessen the crushing feeling of defeat, of worthlessness, of watching your dreams slip through your fingers with no one but yourself to blame. The best part is, you get to wake up the next day determined to get it this time… Only to fail again.

The good news is, this isn’t the end. It’s a beginning of a different sort.

I’ll get to that in a bit.

One of the first bits of writing advice I ever read that stuck with me was John Scalzi’s 10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing (and his following post). At the time, I agreed with just about everything on the list. Years later, I still do. It’s an excellent bit of advice, particularly for young writers. I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already.

This piece isn’t about the advice itself as much as what teenage Bre took from it. Point #1 on that list is ‘your writing sucks right now.’ It caused such a flurry of comments, Scalzi ended up writing a second piece to further expound on his ideas. Specifically, he responded to the ‘I’m a teen and my writing is pretty great actually so get wrecked dude’ crowd. They got stuck on point #1 because they didn’t agree with it.

I got stuck on point #1 because I did.

I knew my writing sucked. Knew it deep down, the way an aunt’s aching knee knows a storm’s coming or stoplights know when you’re late to work. I figured I was a decade or more away from being ‘okay’ at piecing sentences together. I did the math, figured out what 10,000 hours looked like spread across 10 years, calculated the time I’d need to put in to cut it down to 7 years, or 5. I was going to suck and it was going to be okay and I was going to grit my teeth and get through the teenage cringiness and be a genius on the other side.

And then I didn’t write.

Oh, I scribbled some things down. Turned in some last-minute columns for the school newspaper. Started dozens of chapter ones and revised them over and over until they lost every spark that interested me in the first place.

The whole time, I was determined not to be an arrogant teenage writer who thought their latest drivel was God’s gift to the writing world. And I wasn’t. But I was arrogant.

I thought of arrogance as extreme self-confidence and the inability to see flaws. Which definitely wasn’t me. If anything, I was the opposite of arrogance, with my extreme self-loathing and the inability to see strengths.

Right?

Turns out, the key to both is the word ‘self’. Whether confident or insecure, arrogance is you focused on you, to the detriment of all else. There’s no room for growth in these spaces, no room for change. There’s only you and the insidious lie that this is who you are and what you do and it is your past and your now and it might as well be your future, who are you kidding?

It’s very lonely, this place. Mine was an underground garden filled with dying plants crumbling the darkness, surrounded by poisonous thorns.

It’s difficult to write from this place. It’s almost impossible to see your own work clearly and revise from this place. Some people can pour the tortured bits of their soul out on paper and be beautiful in the madness. I am not one of them. Instead, I drowned myself in distraction.

The hard part isn’t starting for me. It’s continuing. Despite. And unfortunately, I don’t have a 10 bullet breakdown on how to do that. I can only tell you what happened to me.

In the end, I took those ten years (and likely more than 10,000 hours). Not for the writing’s sake but for mine. I had to start uprooting that garden in the dark before I could even plant something worth growing. The first step was honesty. The second, letting people in. Everything else came after.

I’m still digging and will be all the days of my life. But I can write now too, finish and be proud despite the inevitable mistakes. There’s a separation between the things I create and who I am. I can fail without being a failure. This is the place where things grow.