Starved Egos &
Self-Consciousness

Of the hundred or so stories that I may read in a semester of workshops, all but a very few will at first fail—fail to engage me as a reader, fail to find a publisher. Writing stories may be among the most self-conscious of undertakings. The materials we work from are personal: our memories, our experiences, our fears and fantasies.

If writing stories should be a natural process, why do we writers struggle—and, more importantly, fail?

Most of the pitfalls we face as writers are internal, and especially hard to distinguish and avoid. All of our stories live inside us. And so do many of the problems that keep us from writing successful ones.

148}ATTACK OF THE DEFENSIVE EGO:
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

I reach into my shoulder satchel, pull out a story. Halfway down page one I read:

…Vivid images of dreamful places lie scattered about on library shelves in the castle walls of his mind. He feels immediately lost among the memories and hopes scribbled on the walls and the veritable vaults of past thoughts and future dreams that will never come true. He passes through the traumatizing memories room but not without turning his head to say hello to the last happy image of his dear departed wife. After a wave hello he runs on through skipping along hallways of time past and present not knowing what he’s looking for. A picture of a chapel suddenly fills the screen of his mind’s eye and the wedding scene with his friends and family replays like a reel-to-reel slideshow, his memories of those better days bright and illuminated. Suddenly the cocoons that filled his stomach before are the butterflies that fly there now, with his thoughts placed like subtitles under his subconscious movie …

I lower the page with a sigh.

Some beginning writers operate under a false assumption: They assume that stories are about language. But language is merely the medium in which stories are created.

Here, that false assumption is hard at work. In that blizzard of mixed metaphors (castles and libraries, slideshows and movie screens), what is being evoked? Little beyond a flurry of words— words that remain dreamy abstractions (“traumatizing memories,” “bright and illuminated”). Where is the world of the story? Who are the people? Is there a story?

With rare exceptions (Ulysses, Lolita), stories are never about language, or never exclusively about language. Yet the above passage gives me nothing else. It is, essentially, a piece of writing turned inward against itself. The subject of the passage, in fact, is the way in which it has been written. It was written to call attention to itself, to writing as a self-conscious process, and thus to the writer himself.

But good writing doesn’t bring attention to us as creators; it directs the reader’s attention to a created world. We do that by losing ourselves in telling a good story—making discoveries that we invite others to enter into with us. New writers don’t do this, often because they don’t understand that they’re supposed to do it.

Did my student intend to draw attention to himself? Knowing him, I would answer, No. In fact he’s a shy, self-effacing person. Raising the question: How does a shy, self-effacing person end up creating the rhetorical equivalent of a billboard that shouts LOOK AT ME!?

Self-consciousness (not to be confused with self-awareness) inevitably impairs our capacity for empathy and understanding, substituting a competitiveness and overcompensation bred of our own insecurities. On behalf of our starved egos we show off, drawing unflattering attention to our work and to ourselves.

All of which happens unconsciously.

Except for clowns and sitcom stars, no one really wants to make a fool of himself. But the ego has its own agenda. That is why egos can’t write. They can string words together, but every word that they string is informed (and corrupted) by the desire to impress others—a desire fed not by strength, but by weakness, by self-consciousness.

Not that there haven’t been egotistical authors, including some great ones. The headline of Norman Mailer’s obituary in the Times read, “Towering Writer With a Matching Ego Dies at 84.” Some “towering egos” manifest in the scale and sweep of their owner’s ambitions (Balzac, Ayn Rand), others through the flamboyance of their public personas (Wilde, Hemingway). Mailer did both. Jean Cocteau famously remarked, “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.”

Then there are artistic egos that express themselves defensively. For Tennessee Williams, every bad review was an obituary that would plunge him into an alcohol- and pill-supplemented isolation. So protective was Saul Bellow of his ego, he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of his work from even his closest friends; no sooner did they criticize him than the friendship ceased. Even a Nobel Prize failed to thicken Bellow’s skin. Ernesto Sabato⁶⁰ reminds us, “Only a thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an artist is an extremely thick skin.”

149}BRANDO BLOWS HIS LINES:
ON WANTING TO BE “A WRITER”

Not long ago I watched a video of Marlon Brando being interviewed by Larry King. It was an old interview, obviously, done some years before Marlon died in 2004, at age 80. Marlon is a hero of mine, the greatest male actor in my opinion. But the same man who exuded musk in Streetcar, mumbled and scratched his way to a (snubbed) Oscar in The Godfather, and broke Maria Schneider’s heart (and took liberties with other body parts) in Last Tango in Paris, could be obnoxious in person. No celebrity has gone to greater lengths to thumb his nose at his public. He also denigrated the acting profession, in this case by denying it altogether:

Everybody here in this room is an actor. . . . The best performances I’ve ever seen is when the director says cut and the director says that was great. That was wonderful. That was good … When you say how do you do, how are you, you look fine, you’re doing two things at once. You’re reading the person’s real intention. You’re trying to feel who he is and making an assessment and trying to ignore the mythology.

King might have pointed out that, while everyone may be an actor offstage, the instant you point a camera at them most people either freeze or turn into lousy actors.

This is what happens to writers much of the time. Call it performance anxiety. The greater our desire to be writers, to be seen and admired and judged as writers, the more vulnerable we are to this syndrome. The mere act of thinking of oneself as a writer and not as a storyteller (or better, as someone who happens to tell stories) is an act of self-consciousness—and an act of self-sabotage.

Attached to this notion of being “a writer” is a legacy of misunderstandings and misconceptions, undermining the qualities that truly equip us to write stories. Writers are “supposed” to be romantic, exotic, quixotic; dashing dandies in spanking white linen suits; heroic outdoorsmen—Teddy Roosevelt with a typewriter. (There are stereotypes for women writers, too: the suicidal modernist, the gifted young poetess, the proto-feminist.)

But, first and foremost, a storyteller must be a human being— and not necessarily an extraordinary human being. A writer’s ordinariness, combined with empathic power and an urge to tell stories about other ordinary people, is what makes a writer good or even great. In embracing the label “writer,” with its blinding twinkle and flash, we shun our essential ordinariness.

150}“TALENT” & “GENIUS”:
THE EGO’S FALSE GODS

Self-conscious writers suffer especially from misunderstandings connected with the words talent and genius.

Nietzsche questioned whether these “gifts” are merely a result of other traits:

Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it) through [other] qualities . . .: all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to construct the parts properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, the brute Stanley Kowalski says, “Luck is believing you’re lucky.” He might have said something similar about talent: Among other things, talent is believing you’re talented.

The principal difference between people who can sing and those who can’t hold a tune is that the former were told that they could sing. Or anyway they weren’t told that they couldn’t. Once, when I presented her a crayon drawing of the Empire State Building, my kindergarten teacher—Mrs. Decker—kissed my cheek. An artist was born. Was the drawing any good? Who knows? It was good enough for Mrs. Decker.

Does this account for what I’ll call freakish talent, the sort of talent one associates with Mozart, or any prodigy? No. But it accounts for most of the rest. And freakish talent isn’t the subject here. Freakish talent gets its own book by someone who knows something about it. Which lets me off the hook.

Talent lifts us out of self-consciousness and, depending on how talented we think we are, propels us up into the cloudless, fearless heights. But like any catalyst, lubricant, or impetus, to work talent needs to be applied to something. It needs to be applied to industry, to practice, performance, to discipline. Like luck, it exists only to the extent that some goal or process is touched by it.

But like luck, talent can be fickle. It’s easier for the young and inexperienced to be “talented”: Their faith in themselves hasn’t yet been tainted by things like rejection and criticism, by the voices whispering no in our ears.

151}FAITH & ENDURANCE:
MORE VITAL THAN TALENT

According to Nietzsche (who was among other things a frustrated poet and novelist), the blame for an author’s inability to produce a masterpiece owed less to lack of genius or talent than to lack of faith and endurance. The “recipe” for writing a great novel was, according to him, simple enough. But—

… to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer … one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise for some ten years; what is then created in the workshop … will be fit to go out into the world.

Talent fades; skill and perseverance endure and even increase. This explains why, at nearly eighty, John Updike was arguably as good or better a writer than he was at twenty-five. If he seemed less “talented,” it may have been because we’d come to expect great things of him.

152}A GENIUS KNOWS HIS LIMITS:
THE ART OF WAR

“Artistic genius is knowing and working well within your limits. In his sixth-century b.c.e. treatise on military strategy, The Art of War, Sun Tzu declares:

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.

One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.

One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.

The wisdom of The Art of War has by now been applied to business, politics, sports, and other competitive undertakings. I see no reason why it shouldn’t apply to the art of fiction writing. In knowing themselves, fiction writers, too, may avert the dangers of “a hundred battles.” And a big part of knowing oneself is knowing one’s limitations.

I don’t mean to imply that great artists don’t challenge themselves. But every great or successful artist knows the difference between practice and performance, between experiment and success.

Amateur writers, on the other hand, are always exceeding their limits. They use techniques that they haven’t yet understood, let alone mastered, flinging freshly discovered words that reek of the thesaurus. In their anxiety to be “original,” like the Starship Enterprise they boldly go where no one has ever gone before. But in their case the voyage may be bound for disaster.

To invite failure via experimentation isn’t a bad thing; it’s good and necessary from time to time. But when invited, the odds are that failure will indeed show up.

There’s another kind of genius, though, immeasurable and mysterious, that can’t be willed or saddled or forced, that rises from the depths of our egoless souls, and that seems not to belong to but to be using us, laying claim to our bodies and brains as aliens do to their victims in horror movies. But artistic genius is a benevolent force, one that seizes only a few select souls that volunteer themselves—and even then genius may not strike. This type of genius isn’t a product of drudgery and has little to do with intellect; intellect may even be antithetical to it. But it has plenty to do with patience, courage, generosity, and faith: faith that the mystery will present itself; patience to wait as long as it takes; courage so if and when it does we may look it boldly in the eyes; and generosity to share with others what we have seen.

The best writing, however, happens when we somehow break through the wall of common knowledge and perceptions and enter into a different world, the realm of the sublime. Some call it “writing from the gut” or “seeing with the third (or inner) eye.” Jung spoke of the collective unconscious.

As Lewis Hyde tells us in his marvelous book, The Gift, the “gift” of artistic genius belongs first and foremost to those who are most prepared and inclined to give it away:

We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that “I,” the artist, did not make the work. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” says D.H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize “the gift” phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.