I’ve been reading a handful books about writing lately, which is an emotional journey comparable to reading a handful of books about parenting. You feel a little seen, a little defensive, a lot panicked, and then by the third or fourth book, a little like this life is probably just a video game for aliens and the one controlling you doesn’t have the cheat codes.
There’s a lot of contradictory information, is the thing.
I could give you a hundred examples from parenting (just whisper the word gluten into a PTA meeting and watch the Lord of the Flies begin to swell upon its stick), but let’s stay with writing for a minute. Here are two great and wildly successful authors, Stephen King and Anne Patchett, discussing plot.
The thing I relied upon most heavily to get me out of bed in the morning was the power of plot. It was my indispensable road map.”
Anne Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
You may wonder where plot is in all of this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere… Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.”
Stephen King, On Writing
And here’s another set about characters:
And if you do your job, your characters will come to life and start doing stuff on their own.”
Stephen King
No matter what you might have heard, the characters don’t write their story… As much as I might wish for it to happen, my characters no more write the book than the puppets might take over the puppet show.”
Anne Patchett
Got it.
This is the seven billionth confirmation of something I need to hear seven billion and one times, apparently, in area after area, Barnes and Noble section after Barnes and Noble section: there’s more than one right way to do the thing.
At first, this is maddening. I like to have the right answer. One right answer, specifically. It’s nice to have a formula for doing things, not only because it whisks a lot of angsty decision making away, but also because you get to hide behind it when you screw up. If there’s no right answer— or worse, if they’re all right answers—then I have to CHOOSE and what if I CHOOSE WRONG and then it’s time to get out the T-charts and the Audible subscription and the paralyzing indecision.
At some point, however, all this contradiction is stretched through absurdity into sweet, fluffy liberation. If everyone has different advice for you and they’re all cancelling each other out, then what they’re really giving you is not a menu of execution methods, but a permission slip. Look here. If Stephen King writes without plot and Anne Patchett writes with plot, I am now permitted to visit the Museum of Doing Whatever Plot Stuff Works for Me. And look there! They have soft pretzels and pump cheese at the food court.
This goes for parenting and eating and exercising and everything else that I like to take other people’s advice about, too. You don’t all want to be writers, but some of you might, like me, have a complicated relationship with trusting your instincts. There’s a lot of on again, off again, Mulder/Scully, Rachel/Ross push and pull to it, a symbiosis with my fragile ego and intense aversion to risk.
Strangely, I’m more likely to trust myself on the big decisions—like, say, changing careers with no connections, prospects, or clear ambitions—than on the daily minutiae that do the actual heavy lifting in my life.
I second-guess myself shopping for valentines (Candy or no candy? Tattoos or no tattoos? What are the other parents sending? What if someone’s dog ingests a heart-shaped window cling? WHAT IF SOMEONE IS ALLERGIC TO NINJA TURTLES) but not shopping for school districts. I trust myself to choose the President of the United States but need to consult Michael Pollan about my breakfast cereal.
The truth is that in my advanced age, I have a pretty good idea what works for me. But I would still strongly prefer to hear someone else say it, because they aren’t calling from inside the house. I’ve been to that house. It’s messy and poorly ventilated and neurotic. Someone else has the advantage of calling from a house I have never visited, and so which I am sure is breezy and lightly styled in a French country aesthetic.
I needed the reminder to trust myself today.
Anne Patchett and Stephen King (and Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert and John Cleese, for that matter) certainly have much to offer me as a beginning writer, and I did find a lot of help and encouragement amid all the inverse fractions. In addition to their expertise, however, I’m trying to carve out a nice warm spot for my own intuition.
After all, I am the world’s leading expert in myself (followed closely by my therapist), and I can trust myself to take what works for me and to leave behind what doesn’t.
And so can you, no matter what your house looks like. And probably, when you choose the way that works best for you, it’s going to be better and lovelier because it’s the way that only you can do it, and you’re here right now for a reason, after all.
So make yourself some cupcakes (with or without gluten), buy some fine leather goods (or fine vegan leather goods, whatever works for you), and let us commence Trust Yo’ Self 2021, my friends.
