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My best advice for beginning writers and all writers is to stop trying so hard. When in doubt, lower your standards.
“Don’t have any standards outside the feeling you have as you write,” the Oregon poet William Stafford says. “Permit yourself to like what you are doing.”
“One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing.”
Write the first sentence, and the next sentence. Keep going. Don’t worry about it.
“If you feel any qualms, then veer towards what feels good—why oppose the only compass you have?”
Somehow writing brings out our fears and our sense of unworthiness. We can’t stop thinking about sounding stupid or the mistakes we will make and so we get blocked. We don’t write anything, or when we do, we’re using a lot of big words we don’t normally use, trying to sound like we’re going to college, and our sentences get all balled up and ungrammatical.
Peter Elbow analyzes the psychology of this. “Almost everybody,” he says, “interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil onto the page.” This is partly because our grade school and middle school and high school and university English teachers seem to be obsessed with our mistakes, and so we get obsessed with them, too.
It’s not that we won’t need to revise or that we don’t need to conform to whatever the rhetorical situation is. It’s just that all that comes later.
The paradox is that when we do postpone the editor, what we write sounds like us and so flows out of us and ends up actually being better, as writing, than what we would have produced otherwise, once we edit and shape it to the purpose. Now we have something to edit and shape, something authentic at least.
The real problem is that “premature editing” doesn’t just make writing difficult for us. It also represses our real voice, the natural way words come out of us, unique to each of us, our natural rhythm, our natural force. Premature editing makes our writing “dead,” and writing doesn’t have to be that way.
Maybe we don’t like our voice, Elbow says, but too bad. It’s the only voice we’ve got, and we better step aside and let it come.
Veer towards “what feels good,” Stafford says. “Why oppose the only compass you have?” That’s the question not just for the writing life but for the spiritual life: why do we always doubt who we really are?
Our sin in the garden wasn’t that we were naked but that we were ashamed to be.
For this command that I enjoin on you today, Moses says in Deuteronomy,
is not too mysterious and remote for you. It is not up in the sky, that you should say, “Who will go up in the sky and get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out. Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?” No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.
We think that to pray or try to have a relationship with God means we have to be spiritual athletes. We have to be saints. We think holiness is something beyond us, something rarified—and scary too and unattractive, because it seems sterile or lifeless.
We think we have to earn God’s grace and we can only do that by denying who really are. We think we have to hide ourselves. We think we can’t be ourselves.
And this points to our sense of who God is, who we’ve been told God is: he is the Great Editor, the Angry Editor, the Impatient and Unforgiving Editor. Often this is an unconscious assumption, and that’s worse, because then it can operate on us without our knowing and its effects are even stronger and longer lasting.
But that sense of self-loathing and self-doubt is never the voice of God. Never. “Have no anxiety at all,” Jesus says, “but make your requests known to God.” God so loved the world. Jesus never rejects sinners, Richard Rohr says. He rejects people who don’t think they’re sinners. He welcomes the poor and the outcast and the leprous. He calls the disciples when they’re a bunch of clueless fishermen with all kinds of mixed motives. He doesn’t wait until they’re good enough. He says, “my yoke is easy and my burden light.”
*
“This is how it is with the kingdom of God,” Jesus says in Mark:
it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.
Let go. Work hard and plant the seeds and tend the crops, but then let go. Because the land yields “of its own accord.” The grain grows when we’ve lowered our standards, lowered our defenses, fallen asleep, deeper than our conscious mind. It comes. It flows out. All we have to do is get out of the way.
A woman I know and admire, a wonderful yoga teacher, speaks simply and directly when she teaches and writes that way in her weekly posts for her newsletter. Her natural voice is gentle and wise.
But when she wrote a cover letter to go with her application to offer yoga classes at the university, she wrote with the same “cloudy vagueness” George Orwell complains about in the writing of bureaucrats and politicians and academics, and I think it was because she felt she had to write that way. It was what the situation required, but it wasn’t. She needed to adapt a little and write a bit more formally, but her voice is her voice, and it’s a compelling voice, and that’s what would convince her readers.
In her yoga classes she is always saying, trust yourself. The perfect pose is the best pose you can do that day. When you look in the mirror at your body, approve of it, whatever it looks like, give thanks for it, because it is a gift. It’s beautiful.
And yet here, as we all do in these situations, she lacked the courage of convictions. She felt she wasn’t good enough just as she was. She had to deny her real self and conform to exactly the kind of cold and humorless world her teaching of yoga is resisting.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to strive for the virtues, that we don’t need to repent, that we don’t need to constantly reform our lives, seek out new disciplines, make an effort, just as we need to revise what we write if we want to share it with others.
In some ways the life of faith depends on re-vision, re-seeing, re-penting, because most of us can hardly ever act with patience and love in real time. We need to think back, and remember, and reflect, and amend.
We all need to try to get the pose as right as we can make it—but that effort is a response to the fact of God’s love, not a condition for receiving it. It should come out of confidence, and it should come out of joy, and it should come out gratitude.
“If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others,” as Rohr puts it, “it is not likely the voice of God but the ego.” Here’s the rule:
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
The self-loathing that afflicts all of us, Rohr points out, is literally Satanic:
If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks.
I think shame is our Original Sin. This is how the serpent tempts Eve, by convincing her that what she has and who she is isn’t enough itself. She has to be like a “god,” not like herself.
This is what ruins writing and this what ruins faith, this voice of the Editor in its darkest version, the voice that says, be someone else. Try to sound grand and noble and holy. People will laugh if they know who you really are. It’s the voice that is always whispering in our ear.
Have you noticed that whenever people talk about God or about faith, they almost always lapse into the language of conventional piety? It’s hard not to. It’s hard to try to put our religious experiences into words. They’re beyond words. And we want to honor the Church and honor God and we want to avoid exposing ourselves as hypocrites, which of course we are, and we want to avoid letting anyone know our real selves. But our real selves, our true selves, are loved by God, are infinitely loveable, however flawed.
Sometimes we long for this language, we need this language, we feel such gratitude for the scriptures and the tradition, because it’s given to us, and it’s not our own language, and yet it is.
Once a young writer in the MFA program took her own life, and a memorial service was held in her memory. The grad students stood in a circle beneath the gazebo in a park and spoke from their hearts, each taking a turn. I was asked to give a short blessing, because the young writer had been a believer, and when I shared the simple words of the traditional graveside service, eternal rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her, suddenly the mood changed. There was a new quality of silence. May she rest in peace. May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. We had been lifted out of the vague, sentimentality of the usual things we say into a genuine poetry, into something dignified and simple and beautiful. You could feel it.
This is what we felt, underneath, this is what was true: that this young woman who had taken her life was infinitely loved, was precious, in herself.
Jesus came into the world not to condemn but to save it, because it’s worth saving. It’s precious in his sight. It’s only we who don’t believe it, and that’s the sin, the most basic sin of all, to not believe in our own goodness, deep down, and the goodness of others.
Anthony Bourdain said that “your body isn’t a temple, it’s an amusement park,” and so we should have fun, and I think that’s partly right—not “fun” in the sense of self-destructive and excessive fun, fun that doesn’t end up being fun at all, but fun in the sense of whatever leads to real pleasure, that doesn’t give us a hangover, that comes out of our real self.
*
To lower our standards for ourselves is an act of humility, and of confidence. It’s an act of faith. It’s a radical letting go because it’s grace that saves us and lights up our world and gives us meaning, and it’s offered to everyone, everyone. We’re not worms. We’re not disgusting. We’re not unlovable. We’re just small. We’re just limited. We’re made in the image and likeness of God but we’re not God.
Ideally there comes that point for all of us, usually when we’re older, when we realize, hey, I’m just like everyone else, I don’t have to impress everybody, I’m just me, I can admit that, and maybe that’s depressing at first but finally, pretty quickly, it becomes a cause for joy. It’s freeing.
Our best writing comes when we no longer try to be God, and that’s how things open up, too, in our lives. When we say, I can’t handle this myself. I’m not capable. I just need God. All I can do is what I can do. “If you can’t be brilliant,” to paraphrase Joseph Williams says, “at least I can be clear.”
It’s not Paradise Lost, E.B. White once said of something he’d written, “but at least it’s shorter.”
“Humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God,” Merton says.
It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life?
It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person God intended you to be.
And in the end this idea says something, too, about who God is. This has to do most fundamentally not just with how we look at ourselves but how we look at God.
In a sense we have to lower our standards for God, as God lowered his standards for us.
We want fireworks and voices from heaven and miracles, we want the special effects, we want the CGI. We say, well, I’ve never seen anyone walk on water. I’ve never seen anyone the calm storm. So those must just be stories. God must not really be here.
( Although it’s important to notice that the people in the gospels get all those things and end up killing Jesus anyway. Apparently, miracles don’t settle anything.)
But God reveals himself to us in subtle things, quiet things, gradual things. Like seeds growing we know not how. Tiny seeds. We don’t even see them.
Like waking up and working and going to sleep again. All these quiet, tiny things.
Like the body you see in the mirror. Like the voice of the wise yoga teacher saying, you are here. This is your body.
Like the word that suddenly appears on the page when you’re writing, like the sentence, the paragraph. It’s as if it’s quotation marks. It’s exactly you, it’s exactly what you’ve always wanted to say, and at exactly that same moment, exactly that instant, you realize, wait a minute. That’s God speaking.