On Ignoring Writing Advice

Writers get lots of advice. Go to workshops, read magazines and websites for writers, attend webinars, take a class….advice is the one thing you are sure to get plenty of - maybe more than you’d counted on. Since a recent experience, it struck me as ironic that one type of advice regularly given has to do with what is frequently called “the internal critic” and, for the most part, that advice consists in finding strategies to ignore it. Not entirely, of course - teachers, workshop leaders, etc are all careful to say you want to ignore that internal critic when it is preventing you from writing, but that there IS a time to invite that critic back - once you have a full draft and need to begin revision (and, sadly, many of us take the first part of that advice to heart and like to ignore the second part). Why is this advice now ironic to me? Because it asks you to ignore your own internal voice telling you that something is wrong and crush forward in spite of those warnings, while I believe that your internal voice can be your best friend in writing, certainly if your goal is to be a writer whose writing is real, authentic, and the kind of writing, the kind of words, that speak to a reader in a voice they can’t ignore. The notion that anyone involved in a creative process should ignore their internal voice is, to be, the absolute antithesis of good advice. Following such advice seems to me to be dangerously close to actually suppressing (perhaps totally destroying) personal creativity in order to move towards the type of creativity the community around the writer expects and approves. Let me be clear: there are some fine lines to be aware of here. If the internal messages are lack of confidence, self-criticism

of your own abilities, and messages that all your work sucks, then you do need a break from it - but simple doubt, simple uncertainty, a small voice telling you that something is wrong with the direction you’re taking could be trying to send you a very important message. It is easy, as a person in the world, to attribute more wisdom to your community than to yourself - and that could well be true. But, when it comes to what it is you need to create, how it should be, what form it should take, no voice is more important than your own. Recently, I took a break from writing, and, as it happens, from many other things. My reasons had nothing to do with pandemics

or politics-fatigue….or anything but a need for some time, some space. I’ve been writing daily for a very long time, but had been ending each writing session with a vague sense that something I was doing was not right. When I tried to narrow it down, I kept thinking of the days I spent with my graduate writing cohort, and how the frame of mind I was in after each of those produced some of the best writing I have ever done. I needed that frame of mind. Desperately. I spent years teaching writing, decades in writing groups, and have worked with teachers, other writers, editors, and students evaluating writing - all of that provided valuable tools for improving writing technicalls. I needed the frame of write that focused on what matters to learn to put all of that - every bit of it - aside, and welcome the frame of mind, the mental ability, to improving writing fundamentally - finding the spirit, the core, and light in my mind, that knows the important things that only I can say, and that will always, always move me there. For that, I needed space from the world. And thank God I listened to the voice urging me in that direction. To my voice. Listen to yours.