Due to many factors, including some physical ones, I’ve had to step away from doing much work in June – particularly in the back half.
In that time, I’ve been working on this outline for a comics mini-series (a four-issue horror story that I’ve codenamed SEASIDE). As I’ve written before, I finished around 80% of this before I stopped working on it, and only started back up in the last week of June.
In the meantime, I wrote two comics scripts and several blog posts and essays, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing. It’s more that I haven’t wanted to … take up space.
Writing short stories and comics is … sort of for myself, but writing a whole mini-series, that will be drawn and coloured and hopefully published – that’s a commitment, not just from me, but from several others. And as I got to the end of my outline, that started feeling too big.
As I wrote in my last post on this topic, I was listening to an episode of Scriptnotes, and something Craig Mazin said clicked with me and hasn’t left my head since.
Loosely paraphrased, he talks about how writing is an act of immense ego. You’re standing in public and demanding that people pay attention to you.
Thinking a little more on this – it’s not just demanding that people pay attention to you, but that people stand and listen to something that came out of your mind. You’re saying that this thing you made up is worth their time and attention.
No wonder Neil Gaiman used to talk about someday growing up and getting a real job.*
* His Twitter bio now reads, “Grew up, never got a real job. Still making things up, writing them down.” Which helps, I’ll be honest.
The last time I “quit writing” – which is, oof, a decade ago now – the crisis of confidence I had was that I was no longer sure what I had to say with my writing.
Instead, I started lettering – helping other people tell their stories. It’s far easier to be happy with my work as a letterer because even if I fuck up on occasion, I can (and usually am) still thrilled with what the writer and the artist have done.
Being a writer is a braver act. Whether it’s a novel – in which case you wrote every single word – or a comic, where your words convinced others to put in months of labour in creating the scaffolding for your vision – it takes a lot more confidence to stand up and go, “Look at me. It’ll be worth it.”
That’s a big part of what I’ve been struggling with. Over the years, I gained confidence in what I had to say through my fiction – how I view the world and why it’s interesting. If anything, I love writing more now than when I started, because I appreciate so much about it.
But it’s still difficult to ask everyone to look at me.
There are two factors here. One – I am happy to spend my time writing, but is it fair for me to ask someone else to put in that time and effort? Even if I’m paying them for it. Part of this is the “failing in public” thing I talked about last time – the answer to that is, of course, you just gotta try anyway.
Two – the more insidious one – is something I discussed with my therapist last week, and we had a bit of a breakthrough.
When I was a teenager, and I declared to my family that I wanted to write, the adults told me – Sure, I should write. But on one of two conditions: a) I make good money from it, or b) I keep a day job and write around that.
In my twenties, I did my best to fulfil condition a, but I failed. I made my peace with that failure, stepped away for a while, and then came back to writing with the intention to write only for pleasure – I have a stable job that I love, so I don’t need to earn through my writing, so I might as well only spend time writing things I really want to write, and have a good time doing it.
As it turns out, the problem with doing something around everything else is that everything else will always take priority. So whenever something came up – busy week at work, family needs me, I want to go hang out with friends – and I needed to cut something out of my life for that time, writing was it. And the way you treat something affects how you think about it.
Over time, I’d begun to see my writing as an indulgence – something I was doing for my enjoyment, but not something necessary.
It didn’t help that I hadn’t encouraged people to engage with my writing as something that mattered to me. It’s not their fault. I have my first readers – a group of close friends who read my writing and give me feedback. My friends and some of my family read my newsletter and are incredibly supportive. I’d just forgotten how to demand that writing be seen as an integral part of who I am.
After I quit, I made writing something I did for pleasure and nothing else, and my writing and I have suffered somewhat on that account. I wrote, but I was no longer “a writer”. Thinking of it this way helped me get through the heartbreak of quitting something I wanted to do since I was a kid, but that was a short-term solution. And it’s a solution that doesn’t work for me anymore.
Here’s the thing. My writing’s not a trifle. It brings me pleasure, but that’s not all it is for. I feel the stories that I have to tell are going to make the world a richer and more interesting place.
And when I cut down on my lettering work, I wanted to treat my writing like that – as a substantial, non-contingent part of my life – and I failed.
Which is alright, honestly. I needed rest – a lot of it – and writing takes up a lot of mental energy, so it had to be put away for a while. But to make that happen, I convinced myself that it wasn’t important – that it was optional.
But I’ve had my rest, and I can’t treat writing as optional any longer, because it isn’t.
The breakthrough was simple – writing is a huge part of me, and I need to treat it like the important thing it is. For anyone else to take it seriously, I have to take it seriously.
Because my writing is not an indulgence, it’s not a hobby. It is work, and I’m going to treat it as such.
