With a shadow of doubt

What I've learned after six months of writing

It’s been six months now since I began writing, and reflecting on this reminded me of two quotes. Taken together they seem to capture my experience so I decided to take a crack at it:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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“Running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.”

— Sean Parker

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Writing is like staring empty-eyed at these two quotes trying to come up with a clever mashup to complete the other side of the equation before eventually writing about how writing is like failing to do even that.

But that doesn’t prevent any good practitioner of mediocre writing from continuing on. Indeed one could say it is actually an integral part of his masochistic dedication to the craft where blank pages are the primitives of a mediocre writer, primitive stares his response to those blank pages.

It gets worse. It should follow naturally that behind those blank stares stirs a storm of self-consciousness. What may not be obvious is that acknowledging this self-consciousness does not make it go away. To the contrary, dwelling on his self-consciousness forces upon the glazed-eyed cave-dweller an added layer of self-consciousness in succumbing to his own debilitating self-consciousness as a writer in an Escherian staircase of unmitigated self-loathing.

But even that doesn’t stop the bullheaded mediocre writer.

He presses on. Periodically, as he only vaguely remembers at any given moment what he has just written, he climbs back up the page for a reread. This serves the same purpose as listening to a recording of his own voice. That is, to remind him how much he hates the sound of his own voice.

If he has the good sense to stop writing at this point, he may decide to visit the words of his favorite authors for inspiration. Anyone who starts writing will tell you he has writers he looks up to. His heroes. But make no mistake, this is as close to a love hate relationship as it gets. To read their words is to know truly great writing and to know how far off he is from it.

Now seems an appropriate time to tell you that this is one of those places I just mentioned where I took a periodic pause to reread what I just wrote. And just as appropriately, I should tell you that only in taking that periodic pause did I notice I have been writing in the third-person for the past several paragraphs. And only now am I realizing that writing in the third-person was no amateur’s accident but rather a mediocre writer’s — sorry, my own — desperate attempt to distance myself from the mediocre writer. And, oh god, trying to distance myself from the mediocre writer is not like chasing my heroes but is rather much more like running away from my own shadow.

Like my shadow, there is nothing to my writing.

I shadow my heroes by reading. By writing I see my shadow; through writing I’ve learned to love my shadow.

… Did you think that was the punchline?

Well, dear reader, as it turns out I was able to complete the equation after all. All I had to do was invent a mediocre writer as a phantom auxiliary variable of sorts.