I am a professional writer. Well, let me amend that.
I write all the time. In my job. School reports.
Recommendations for students. School publications. And for
fun. Poetry. (see:www.1daypoems.blogspot.com) This blog. Most
recently, work on a short story based at a bar called "County Line."
I have also taught English for nearly twenty years - high school and
middle school. Over the past few years, I have attended the Iowa Summer
Writers' Festival. I teach creative writing and advanced creative writing. I briefly joined a short-lived Augusta writers' group.
I've read my work publicly in Iowa and Georgia. I've been around the block,
using writing for various purposes: on the job, in service of others, for
personal enjoyments, as gifts, and for publication.
In
all of these settings, I have found those who read or heard my work generous
and thoughtful. My work is certainly not perfect, but I am doing the
work. In talking with others who write professionally and personally, I
have found that the vast majority of them are encouraging and interested.
Then, I found the group. You may recall the old saying:
"There's one in every crowd." Well, this is a crowd of them.
I
joined a group on Face Book which purports to support writers in a particular
endeavor. Imagine my surprise when I came to realize that the group has
deteriorated into a group designed to sap the confidence out of its members.
Judging from the posts in this group, the idea is to snark at and
belittle the other group members because we all know that if you denigrate
others then you automatically become more valuable. And, you will be more successful if others
are less successful, right? Of course
not. That’s silly, to say the
least. However, that’s how these
individuals are conducting themselves. There were several moderators of the group who were conspicuously quiet.
"If
you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I don't know that
this applies in every circumstance. Sometimes encouragement can take the
form of something being said that isn't very nice. I used to have a sign that read
"Diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that
he actually looks forward to the trip." Even in the high school classroom when a
student was curiously off-topic or misunderstanding a text, I would say, “Well,
that’s one interpretation,” and then ask the student to support or elucidate
his idea. Most often, he came to his own
conclusions, “What I said earlier was kind of off-base, wasn’t it?”
I
attended a summer writing workshop where the instructor told us that really the
only rule in the session was that you cannot be negative about your work, and
if you are thusly tempted, you are to say, “This smacks of brilliance.” Likewise, at the start of my creative writing
course every year, I find a time to give a little talk to my writers about the
fact that the world is more than willing to judge and berate them, they don’t
need to do it to themselves. High
schoolers being high schoolers, are apt to run themselves down as a protective
measure. For example, “if I note that this
poem is weird then it will hurt less than if someone else says it’s weird
because I know that it’s not really weird and it’s really about my grandma but
I can’t let anyone know that.” But, if I
can get them to be kind to themselves about their own work, we are one step
closer to being happier and more thoughtful people. Plus, if you act like you know what you’re
doing, you will find that you often do; you were just letting your inner critic
run you down.
In
addition to those pesky inner critics, we can stumble and fall on those outer
critics as well. We all know them – the ones
who stop mid-sentence the minute you walk into a room. Or, as a friend recounted earlier this week, “I
returned to the table, and I overheard [my mother-in-law] say, ‘She just
smothers me.’” Never mind that my friend
was there caring for mother-in-law after a surgery. There’s one in every crowd. In teaching there’s a joke that we tell each
other when nothing seems to go right in the classroom:
You know what the headline would be if teachers could walk
on water?
No. What?
Teachers refuse to swim.
So, for
today, whatever it is that you are doing – writing, swimming, teaching, gardening, cooking, leading a book
club, managing a multi-billion dollar deal, organizing a shoe drive for the
homeless, do it well and enjoy it. And, don’t let anyone else tell you
otherwise. Don’t let the bastards (or
your Face Book groups) get you down.
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