Creativity vs. the Ego (Or, the Value of Unpublishable Stories)

Why are you writing?

It’s a question almost as vast and confusing as the dreaded, “What are you writing?”

Why we write… We write for ourselves. We write for others. We write to have fun. We write to pay the bills. We write for fame and glory. We write in search of hope and justice and meaning.

So many reasons, each as valid as the next. It can get confusing to try to sort through the variety to find a central motivation. For many of us, the reasons we started writing or making up stories—perhaps as far back as our childhoods—have become enmeshed within our life practices. We write now because that is how we have learned to express ourselves, to share the insights and symbols we believe have value, to scratch a creative itch we don’t always contemplate so long as it stays scratched.

That creative itch goes very deep indeed. It represents life’s ineffable questions and our driving compulsion to find answers however abstract. As my new favorite quote from Cynthia Ozick says:

[Writing is] a kind of hallucinatory madness. You will do it no matter what. You can’t not do it.

That truth is almost inescapable for most of us. Even when we’d very much rather not write—or even not be a writer—something keeps bringing us back to the page and the words. Still, the purity of that compulsion can get muddied by the many other motives and goals to which it gives birth.

Often, these other goals—publication, for example—can seem so worthy in their own right they take over. We forget the reason we’re writing really isn’t “to be published.” We forget that’s another thing entirely. When we forget that, we’re also inclined to forget that the worth of what we write and the time we spend writing it cannot be judged by anything so neat as “publication.”

Creativity vs. the Ego

The ego has staked out a big plantation in the land of our creativity. From childhood onward, so much of our creativity is related to our identity and therefore our self-worth. Whether Mom and Dad liked our finger paintings may give us a huge boost of confidence—or not—in the art we make later in life.

The ego, however vital and useful, has a way of taking over the show. It’s so easy for our art to become a servant of our ego, rather than the other way around. We want the world to tell us our writing is clever, brilliant, life-changing, un-put-down-able. When we receive the praise, we purr. When we don’t, we sometimes go so far as to give up altogether.

Either way, when creativity serves the ego, we often get confused about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we are really getting out of it.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

I’ve been blessed to spend the last three months reading Julia Cameron’s incredibly elegant and poignant classic The Artist’s Way. The entire book is about creating for ourselves. She writes:

…if I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem—whether it will sell or not.

That’s a hard pill to swallow—especially if you’re a professional writer with obligations to fulfill. But even if your initial response is resistance, I’ll bet you can also find at least a spark of begrudging relief too.

As I’ve occasionally written about throughout the past year, writing has been really hard for me lately. Partly, that’s been due to some personal crises and growth. But largely, it’s  been due to the fact that I had this genius idea to turn my standalone portal fantasy Dreamlander into a trilogy. Never mind that writing sequels and series is uncharted territory for me, there’s also the little fact that this story was never intended to be more what it was. [Insert appropriate *what was I thinking?!* meme.]

I’m not yet giving up on the project, but I am having to contemplate the fact that I may not, at this time, be able to finish the series in a way that’s worthy of publication. If that turns out to be true, there’s a part of me that is tremendously disappointed at having “wasted” four years.

I think, however, that Cameron would want me to ask if those years were really wasted after all. In a morning journaling session after reading her book, I found myself having to recognize how much of a driving force my ego is in my creativity:

As I struggle to turn my Dreamlander sequels into stories of true form and depth—stories that are good enough to publish and share—and as a great part of me doubts that this may be possible—I find myself realizing the surprising weight of my ego pressuring me to calculate the worth of the work based solely on the accuracy of its storyform and the potential for its impact to not just touch a reader’s life but to receive his or her acclaim.

I say routinely that I write for myself and that the process of these stories, even if that’s all there is, is worth it. But at some level I don’t really believe that. The time and the lessons may not have been strictly wasted; but how much better to have gained the lessons through time spent on a fruitful project that could have been brought full-term with grace and control?

But that—I see suddenly with shocking clarity—is ego talk.

The story is for me. The creation is for me. If it is a misshapen child, I need love it no less. If I have poured my passion and my fury and my desperate hope into it—and they have burned so hot that they have melted straight through all my current grasp of the craft that tries to contain them—surely, that is a sign of something greater rather than something weaker.

Do I judge the worth of my work on whether it is shapely, whether it is pleasing to others, whether it earns the lofty distinction of “making a difference”?

The work is the worth—because I am the work. My whole life is the work. To judge the worth of that on the satisfaction of others, who are not me, or the craving for the power and control that would allow me some hand in shaping the world—that is the cry of the ego. That is not the heart of the work. The ego is not my judge.

6 Beliefs to Foster Creativity and Growth

I write this post with something of a bitter taste in my mouth. As I acknowledged in the journal entry, I don’t really like the idea that I should see an unpublishable story as worthwhile in its own right. (My ego is currently sitting in the corner of my brain, arms crossed, looking very huffy.) Honestly, I don’t think many of us really do.

For almost all writers, the goal is to publish. It is a worthwhile goal. We see it as a way to fulfill our dreams, to earn a living doing something we love, to live an impactful life (and also, let’s be honest, to be rich and famous, beloved and acclaimed). It’s hard to refute this in a global writing community that is predominantly focused on commercial appeal. It would seem everyone judges creativity by its net worth.

But as individuals, we don’t have to. Nothing is ever wasted. I believe that even if I decide not to publish these sequels to Dreamlander, the lessons I have learned as a writer and a person (and they have been manifold) have been life-changing.

My encouragement to you (and me) is to remember that the true worth of creativity—as a mirror of life itself—is in the journey much more than the destination. Joseph Chilton Pearce writes:

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Sometimes that wrongness can be as simple as writing something magnificent… that we can’t publish.

Some of you reading this are writing projects right now that you fear (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly) will never go farther than your desk. Some of you are writing projects you already know, deep down, aren’t going to fly free in the world. Some of you are writing projects that were always and ever intended only for yourself. And some of you are writing projects that are going to make it off the launch pad, maybe even all the way up to rattle the stars.

Whichever story is yours, the distinction doesn’t matter right now. Right now, as you’re writing, this story is yours. Here are six affirmations to keep in mind whenever you find yourself judging your writing and yourself too harshly.

1. Believe the Act of Writing Has Worth in Itself

The struggle is the glory. Or as Brenda Ueland says:

Why should we use our creative power…? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.

2. Believe Every Story You Write (Even the Unpublishable Ones) Teaches You About Yourself and Your Life

Picasso said (I’m shamelessly stealing quotes from those Cameron curated):

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

3. Believe Every Story You Write Teaches You How to Write Something Better Next Time

I’ve written before about the value of “lost” novels. Failures are only failures when we give them that distinction.

4. Believe Your “Failures” Are Less About Your Lack of Skill and More About Your Great and Ambitious Potential

We always intend to write something better than what actually shows up on the page. Always. With some stories, the gap between our vision and our current level of skill is more noticeable than with other stories. But the fact that we can dream up something so tremendous—even if we don’t yet know how to get it out of our minds and into reality—doesn’t signify failure.

5. Believe That if You Love Your Story, It Doesn’t Matter if Anyone Else Does

This one is so hard—but so important, I believe. If I write something that helps me—in any measure—that thing has worth. I’ve been compelled to set stories aside before, but they are still my children just as much as the published novels—perhaps even more so, since they are mine alone, to be cherished with a fondness unadulterated by anyone else’s opinion or experience.

6. Believe You Are Writing What You’re Supposed to Be Writing—Where It Goes From Here Is Not the Most Important Thing

Not every story deserves publication. Being able to acknowledge when a story doesn’t measure up to a reading audience’s standards is an important instinct for writers to develop. But just because a story doesn’t deserve to be published does not mean it doesn’t deserve to be written. Write what you love. Write what you’re passionate about. Write what makes you curious, what gives you hope, what helps you seek justice. Write to the ragged limit of your skills. Or as Andre Gide says, in one final quote:

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

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So here’s to stories that are amazing and perfect, well-formed and publishable. We all like those. But here, too, is to stories that are the precious, malformed byproducts of our growing pains. May we know the difference, and may we see the worth in each, so that we may count our hours at the desk in the light of our triumphs rather than our failures.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you feel about the stories you’ve decided aren’t “good enough” to publish? Tell me in the comments!

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