'Embrace your sensitivity'

Our writer receives a heartening missive from a dear mentor.

I've been emailing my good friend and mentor, Joyce Murdoch, a lot. She is grieving her partner, Deb Price– America's first openly gay columnist whose mantra was "don't let fear choose your path".

Joyce has been encouraging me write fiction for years. I recently told her I was struggling with workshops I had attended, and the process involved in receiving feedback. She wrote back, with trademark elegance. 

Hello, my friend--

Deb used to always say that she didn't know what she thought until she
said it out loud. I didn't want to speak until I knew what I
thought....That was a minor source of conflict over the years. She
always wanted me to speak a bit more; I always wanted her to speak a
bit less. And now, of course, I'd give every cent I own just so speak
with her again.

Anyway, that's a long way of getting around to saying, once again,
that I think you ought to take the risk of writing fiction. Just write
it for yourself. Get the pleasure of seeing your thoughts and feelings
take shape on paper (well, on a screen at least). And do NOT--repeat,
do NOT--show a word, a paragraph, a chapter to anyone until you are
satisfied that you're done. Yes, writers are extremely sensitive,
especially to anything that smells like criticism. Yes, writing
something that actually matters to the writer feels like opening a
vein. Yes, the entirely human response to having one's creative
writing critiqued is to want to run away and never pick the project
back up.

Despite all my years as an editor, I have never ever understood why
anyone thinks writing workshops or sharing a writing project while it
is underway are good ideas. Creative writing should be just
that--imaginative, new, unique, something no one else could have
written in quite the same way. And it should tap into--for lack of a
better word--the "soul" of the writer. Premature feedback--if it
doesn't simply shut the writer down entirely--is going to push the
writer back toward the expected, back toward works that are already
out there in the world, back toward what the "group" thinks you ought
to be saying with your writing, not what the blood spilled on your
pages tell you.

Embrace your sensitivity. Cherish it. Nurture it. Respect it. Your
sensitivity is one of the traits that, I feel confident, will one day
make you a fine writer and, if you want, a published author. Do NOT
try to pound your sensitivity out of existence. You would, I think,
kill off your creative spirit at the same time.

Several years ago I wrote a novel, Twelve Turtles. The project began
as simply catharsis: I had things I needed to "say" and nowhere to say
them. The person I wanted to say them to wasn't speaking to me at the
time. As the word count grew, the writing became really enjoyable. I
loved spending hours on end with the characters I was creating and
enjoyed discovering how they interacted with one another in ways I had
not expected and seeing where they were taking the plot, which had had
only the vaguest outline in my mind at the start. I wrote the chapters
in a thoroughly haphazard order, depending on what part of the story
was speaking to me at the time, and had to sort them out later.
Eventually, the novel felt complete. And I was quite pleased with it.
Still am, in fact. I think it's one of the best things I've ever
written. Because I didn't want the novel to be public, I paid a vanity
press to print 15 or 20 copies. I gave most of them to a few close
friends. And even then--even when I gave them to professional writers
and editors--I said, "This is a gift. I hope you enjoy it. This is not
an invitation to critique the work." Even though my novel was a work
of fiction is was really personal and if people had "helpful
suggestions" about how it could have been different I just didn't--and
still don't--want to hear them any more than I'd (theoretically) have
wanted to hear that my baby would have been more handsome if his eyes
weren't blue and his hair weren't curly.

Can you imagine if Mary Oliver had "workshopped" my favorite poem,
"Wild Geese"? People would say, "what's with the first line'''You
don't have to be good?' Sounds like the intro to a self help book!"
And "Why 'wild' geese? Why not just 'geese'? And on and on....until
the wonderfully strange amalgam that makes "Wild Geese" so meaningful
to countless readers would been ruined.

Gotta run to mahjong. Would love to hear your thoughts.

-Joyce