Don´t fear Honesty
Hello Neophyte, I hope you are happy that I will find that Corpo soon enough. No, don’t give me that face; I know that once this is all over, you will thank me. But for now, you paid for the lessons, you are getting the lesson, and today it’s one in honesty—that dreaded thing.
You see, when it comes to writing, it is one of the things we dread the most. It takes guts to just write without any preconditions, without any fear to soothe nor an irrational thought to forestall. When, in reality, we are trading punches with shadows, with the petty and tiny tyrant that is fear. Irrational thoughts are nothing but mere thoughts; we give them power when we give them meaning and importance. Soothing fears? You really like wasting time.
Neophyte, fears shouldn’t really be interacted with, at least not that way. More often than not, fears are information—information about what is dangerous or can be dangerous. I will always say this: fear of the dark is not fear of the actual dark but of not being alone in the dark, a mighty instinct of self-preservation to have in the open savannah when that innocent rustle of high grass could have been a gust of wind or a lion on the hunt. But in a dark room, not so much. You can waste time soothing fears that are born out of primal fears and ancient mechanisms ingrained in our brains, or you can just understand them and move on. The more you stall by being hooked on a thought, the more time you will waste.
As for the guts part, yes, it takes guts; it takes courage. What we consider our true self is something that more often than not, we protect and shield, almost always to our own detriment. We fear that exposure to sunlight might turn our own identity to dust. Setting aside the implications of that truth (this is not the space for that kind of discussion), we latch on to that identity and fear losing it with a vicious grip.
What does this long-winded rambling have to do with writing? Well, Neophyte, I was just getting there; try not to interrupt. In order for writing to be meaningful, it has to be honest. And that means that a little something of ourselves is imprinted onto the page. Onto the characters, onto the plot, onto the setting. Even if it is just a cookie-cutter archetype set in a medieval world, it will be not just your view of that medieval world but how you understand it to be. The way characters interact and identify is going to be laced with our own ideas and preconception, our own experiences, our success and failures, the good and the bad. A little bit of everything that makes us is going to be imprinted in our craft.
Writing with Honesty means accepting that fact and being loyal to it to the end, perhaps modifying things according to the rules of writing but never changing the essence.
On the other hand writing in a dishonest way would be surrendering your judgment and control to some imaginary third party that doesn’t really exist. And that imaginary entity is called “what would other people think?” Which I consider the very summation of all the arrogance and pride the a human being is capable of distilled into the ultimate ambition of control, spawned more often than not in fear, in primal basic fear.
And as I always say, fear is but a petty tyrant that shouldn’t have real power. While we may suffer under it, it is understandable. It leads to falsehood in our work. Daring, in this case, is to venture forth into the stories we wish to write, no matter how repeated and used up it feels. Heeding what has been done and achieved but not fearing what people might think.
Because most of the people that think about stories are those like you and me, Neophyte—those who pay attention not just to the story but to how it was constructed and how the component parts work. Most people are not like that; the overwhelming majority of the consumer base does not go through life paying attention, not just to stories but also to their own lives. So overthinking your work beyond any reasonable limits is a moot point, and trying to please the picky crowd is going to lock you out the larger crowd.
With that said, though, in mind, I hope that I have made you aware of the fear of honesty in writing. This doesn’t mean that you can go and write in whatever fashion you like, doing whatever it is that you want to do, uncaring for basic rules. Yes, we still have to abide by those because, as I always say, writing is but a series of proven patterns that work.
