#NaNoWriMo 2021: Be Your Self
It doesn't matter whether your writing is "like" anyone else's. What matters is that you're writing.
Just to follow up briefly on yesterday’s note reflecting on the Twitter question, I got an email from novelist Emily Gould this morning—well, a newsletter, anyway. (I don’t want to oversell the extent to which I hobnob with the literati.) This passage, one of several self-established goals, caught my eye:
“abstain COMPLETELY from all forms of social media that invite me to compare myself to other people/feel like failure because am not, eg, born-rich bestselling novelist, young hot media darling, person with a professionally decorated home, owner of country house (or in fact city house), person who has just signed life-altering book deal, person whose book is being adapted into TV/film, in other words person other than SELF, A PERSON WHO IS ENOUGH AND HAS ENOUGH AND IS CAPABLE OF BEING/DOING MORE BUT MAYBE NOT AT THIS EXACT MOMENT IN TIME”
I think that’s a pretty solid goal. Emily’s story isn’t mine to tell, but it’s enough to say that she’s got hard-won personal experience in the dangers of taking your cues from social media, as well as the dangers of living even a portion of your life in the full view of social media (or any media, for that matter). What I would feel comfortable saying is that she and I were set in opposition to each other by competing media forces, and we both leaned into that for a while, until we stopped, but that experience drove home some things I needed to know about myself, and I’m grateful for that, and grateful too that after we abandoned that competitive mode, I became better able to recognize the thoughtfulness and insight in her writing. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, you know I believe you can’t fake that. (If you haven’t, well, you know it now.) She’s the real deal, and you should be reading her.
But you don’t have to compare yourself to her—that’s the whole point. You’ll see the excellent work she’s doing, sharing the best version of her stories she can at this given moment, and then, hopefully, you’ll apply yourself to developing your best writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s “better” or “worse” than hers, or anyone else’s; right now, it doesn’t even matter if it’s like anyone else’s writing. What matters now is that it’s your writing, and you are engaged in doing it.
Another line in Emily’s newsletter I think you might find helpful is her resolution to “stop waiting for sign from universe that am ‘real novelist’” and commit to a regular writing practice. I don’t really have much to add beyond that, so I won’t.