“That he was also capable, not of malice, but of a certain critical ruthlessness amounting in effect to cruelty, took everyone by surprise.”
Oh, read that again will you? Do these words, their rhythm, the contstruction of the sentence, make you as happy as they make me?
It’s a quote from short story I came across today: “Last Man’s Season” by CK Stead. It was the 2010 winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and you can read it in full here (just scroll down to 2010). It is also, by the way, words describing the man in the drawing, if you were curious who he was meant to be. If you want to more, I really do suggest reading the short story. I don’t share its worldview, but as a piece of literature, I thought it was quite amazing.
Reading the sentence again, I wonder what it is about it, that is so pleasing. There is something about the exactness, I think; that words are chosen precisely for their meaning, almost as in an academic paper, rather than as a result of the kind of word diarrhea so common among less proficient writers. Of course, I am not above this myself, but what I mean is the difference between, for example, “terribly painful” and “excruciating”.
Anyway. When I read this sentence today, I wanted to share it with you, whoever you are, whenever you are; whenever it is that you come across this post. Then, predictably, I started to ramble a bit, and was surprised to find that the theme of my thoughts of late, very much go hand in hand with the theme of the quote I started with: critical ruthlessness.
Lately, I’ve desired honesty, maybe as a natural result of feeling very confused and lost in this season of my life. That’s why I’ve written no posts in the last month: when I get overwhelmed like that, I generally can’t condense my thoughts into anything but a random, emotional ramble.
Having gotten this far in the post, I stop and look at what I’ve written. I still doesn’t quite ring true. Let me try again.
Maybe I want to appear better than I am. Maybe I’m falling into the selfie trap too, the very thing I would so hate to be true of me: that I’d be caught up projecting the life I wish I lived, focusing more on a pretty facade than on the actual substance of my life. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, with words.
But I don’t think that’s why I stop myself from being honest, or why I have trouble sharing life when it’s messy. It’s not that I’m a narcissist who wants to appear perfect. It’s that I am an artist who at times feels so riddled with doubt and vulnerability that I become fearful of showing weakness, or exposing a nerve. I start to think that criticism might devastate me. I have enough trouble silencing my own inner critics. I don’t need to add on to that burden.
But I will let you in, anyway. So. Deep breath. Honestly, what is going on in my life?
Besides working a lot, I spend a lot of energy apartment hunting in a different country and in a different language. Being the emotional and introverted person that I am, my mind is continously churning, making mince meat of my ability to focus on seeminly anything. I’m tired constantly, and that, of course, impacts how I feel about my writing. And though I have long since learned not to base my idea of what’s true on my fleeting emotions in the moment, naturally it wears on me, feeling rubbish about something I love so much.
So here I am, currently. I have novel that I love, but that is gathering dust and doubt, and I have a short story which wasn’t good enough to capture the judges’ attention in a competition I entered. I have buckets of questions and frustration, and a banner that reads: “How good am I really?”
It shifts and changes, of course. One moment, the inner critic is eating me up in greedy mouthfuls. The next, I am convinced I am amazing, or, just as often, that I suck, but that I have the potential and the willingness to become amazing, one day, maybe, if I work really hard and don’t give up. And that is a pledge I have made: I will write. Come hail, come storm. I will write. Because I have stories that burn inside my bones, that I am aching to extract, somehow, and turn into words on paper.
Very much an interesting dichotomy.
To finish off, let me tell you about an interesting thought I heard semi-recently: that writer’s arrogance is an intrinsic part of being a writer. Why? Because without some measure of arrogance, you would never have enough confidence to try, or to even think that you could be a writer. Isn’t it funny? I think it is, because for me, this is so true.
Only when I was quite a far way into the pursuit of becoming a writer, did I realize: “Oh wow, I actually suck … and what I know I believed was amazing just a few years ago, I now know is absolute garbage.” And yet some amount of arrogance has to remain. You have to keep thinking you are better than you are – at least for some tiny minority of the time, when you’re not busy thinking you’re a miserable idiot to even set aside time to do something so silly as write on a novel. I know, I know – we writers are like that. Ruthless critics of ourselves. Hopefully we are more sympathetic towards others.
Love, Randi
PS: If you have any recommendations for really well-writen short stories, please let me know!
Lys Wordsmithery 