Sometimes it’s not the tasks of writing but the act itself that feels hard. At various times, clients have come to me looking for help not so much with writers’ block but with a sense that given the state of the world or the state of their lives, writing is irrelevant and pursuing it is selfish. “I shouldn’t,” one client told me, “be spending time sitting in a room worrying about how to communicate what’s in my head, I can’t justify it when it’s so impractical and it doesn’t solve the big problem.”
I understand this feeling that you shouldn’t let yourself write. I’ve felt it myself, the feeling that making writing even a tiny bit of a priority is somehow wrong and misguided and selfish. At times I’ve succumbed to that internal command to sit on my hands and be silent. At other times, though, I have refused to comply. Invariably it has been for the better when I’ve taken the second path.
What I’ve learned about this phenomenon comes directly from my own experiences and from talking clients through it. I can’t pretend that it’s an easy thing to wrestle, nor that I have some sort of magical answer that instantly makes it all better, but I do know three things. Sometimes they help.
Letting yourself write them is the only way the words you have inside you get to do their work outside you.
Thing One: Repairing the world requires many things, and your words may be among the things it requires. It is possible that your own personal little world is not one of the things that can be repaired by your words, true. It is also true that when there’s a task in front of you that needs you to do it, writing might have to wait. But it is simultaneously true that your words, regardless of what form they might take, might be part of what it takes to repair something, or build something new. Letting yourself write them is the only way the words you have inside you get to do their work outside you.
Thing Two: For you to assume that your words are somehow uniquely irrelevant is hubris. Whether your words are or aren’t part of repairing the world or some bit of it for someone else isn’t actually within your ability to say. Nor can they say, if they don’t have the opportunity to read your words in the first place. The tagline for my editorial business is “If your book doesn’t get written, it can’t change the world.” I chose that tagline for a reason. Again, letting yourself write them is the only way the words you have inside you get to do their work outside you.
Just as there is a big difference between being alone and being lonely, is a big difference between working by yourself and working only for your own benefit.
Thing Three: It is very easy to mistake doing work by yourself without anyone else around who benefit from it immediately for something that is inherently selfish and benefits no one. Don’t be deceived, though. The work of doing the writing may be mostly isolated, but the work that the writing itself does only takes place when others are involved. Just as there is a big difference between being alone and being lonely, is a big difference between working by yourself and working only for your own benefit. At the risk of repeating myself: writing is the way the words you have inside you get to do their work outside you.
In my experience, all writers whose work is worthwhile sometimes wonder whether they really have something to say or if it’s just logorrhea having its way, whether what they write will matter, if it’s worth their time to do it. Perhaps there are some brilliant writers who are protected from these thoughts by a total lack of self-reflection. I doubt it, though. The capacity to ask important but uneasy questions is part of what gives writers the capacity to write things that speak to others, that are worth the reader’s while.
Even if “all someone gets” from your work is a few moments or hours of pleasure and escape, can you honestly say that pleasure and escape have never held any value for you?
That capacity to speak to others through writing matters no matter the genre, no matter the form, no matter how deep or shallow the ideas or the vocabulary. Even if “all someone gets” from your work is a few moments or hours of pleasure and escape, can you honestly say that pleasure and escape have never held any value for you? Be honest, now. No one likes a liar.
We humans need the voices that can tell us the things we need to hear in the ways we need to hear them. Being those voices is part of the work we habitually do, have always habitually done for one another. It is the work you are doing when you write.
Let yourself write.
— Hanne Blank Boyd
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Exactly right I imagine. And most relate to Thing One.
Thanks for writing
Thank you, Hanne! This is very helpful. I especially loved this bit:
"For you to assume that your words are somehow uniquely irrelevant is hubris. Whether your words are or aren’t part of repairing the world or some bit of it for someone else isn’t actually within your ability to say."