A few weeks ago, I hosted my #BeTheStarOfYourShow Workshop at Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn and this question popped up: How do you silence the critics and write for yourself? Side note: This isn’t your Grandma Joyce’s workshop. It’s based on my book Famous! How to Be the Star of Your Show and it’s fun, interactive and we discuss e’rything from politics to pop culture. It inspires outspoken girls to talk non-stop while quiet girls…okay, more on that later.
The theme was confidence and all the things that make us feel great, like buying a new outfit, spotting an appreciative nod from a cutie, acing an exam, writing a dope poem and crushing it at the step show. This energetic group of middle school girls had diverse career interests from choreography to politics to law to medicine to writing.
Hello, writing!
Naturally, I asked this aspiring writer about her work, “Where can I read your stuff?”
Tumblr?
Scribophile?
She—let’s call her Vee—was one of the quiet girls I mentioned earlier, and whenever I spot girls like her in my workshops, I turn the spotlight on them because they’d never grab it for themselves.
Vee didn’t appreciate the attention. She stared at me, long and hard with all the warmth of a glacier. She reminded me of my elementary school self—timid, hiding behind books and glasses. My smile beamed enough heat to melt her ice and she warmed up to a semi-eye roll.
Vee said: “I don’t share my stories with anyone. I’m worried that people won’t like it.”
I understood. Writers can be heady and self-conscious. We pretend to have thick skin, but we get in our feels about our creations. The best way to describe it is like this:
“Keep in mind that I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my sh*t.”
Shout out to my fellow Pisces Erykah Badu for telling folks exactly how we feel. Our work is personal and if someone doesn’t like it, then we think they don’t like us. Right?
WRITE FOR YOURSELF
I told Vee and the other girls the truth. You never really get over that feeling, but you learn to manage it by obeying this cardinal rule: Write for yourself. (Click here for writing tips.)
Don’t give anybody access to your head. Not your teacher, agent, editor, reviewer or cousin Peaches. (What does she know about writing? Nothing.) The minute you start thinking about Peaches your story is doomed, or worse, it may never make it to the page. Characters will stop sharing bits of dialogue in the shower. Scenes won’t play themselves out like a movie during your hour-long commute. Those strong feelings about your father’s fifth wife start to boil, simmer and cool because you clogged your mental piping with other people’s beliefs and opinions.
Writers aren’t the only ones to deal with this problem, it’s a challenge for all creatives, fashion designers, painters, musicians and anyone who puts something out into the world for public consumption. Oh, and successful people aren’t immune to the self-conscious flu. I’ve interviewed enough actors, singers and entertainers to know that they worry if fans and critics will get their work.
But I digress.
There will always be readers who:
1) Hate your writing voice
2) Criticize the plot twist
3) Disagree with the protagonist’s decision to stay with her cheating spouse
4) Completely miss that two important characters are Black. (Yes, I’m talking about the Hunger Games’ Rue and Cinna. People skipped over that in the book and had the audacity to be irate when the movie came out. Please. Stop.)
And the list goes on and on.
Or, you can pretend, like essayist and author Margaret Atwood suggested that no one will read it.
She said:
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Thanks for the tip, Ms. Atwood.
Whatever path you (or my new friend Vee!) take is up to you. It doesn’t matter if some people (and that goes for Peaches too) don’t like it.
You’ll find a group who does like it, possibly love it, and those people, as Seth Godin says, are your “tribe.”
Are you ready to write for yourself?
