stolen from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
deathtoducks, for <lj site="livejournal.com" user="ki
May. 19th, 2004 01:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellienihonCredibility
By Julia Cameron
The day is gray. The atmosphere is heavy and oppressive. A storm is coming in. My mood matches. This is a hard day to write. This is a day when my censor is awake, alert, and active, responding to the incoming storm with ominous hissing and aggression – the way snakes in a reptile house grow restless when the barometer drops.
“You’ve got nothing to say,” my censor hisses. “That you think you have to say hasn’t been said before and better? Who do you think you are, trying to write a book about writing?” This is the same helpful fellow who used to tell me, when I was a newspaper columnist, that the man at the security desk would not believe my ID and let me in to write because I “didn’t look like a real writer.” (Whatever that looked like.)
I call this the “credibility attack” and it is a familiar one. All writers suffer credibility attacks; learning to ignore them is part of surviving as a writer. Based on the idea that writing is product, not process, the credibility attack wants to know just what credits you’ve amassed lately. The mere act of writing, the fact of which makes you a writer, counts for nothing with this monster. What matters is where your passport has been stamped. What matters is who says you’re a writer besides yourself.
America is a product-oriented country. If we tell someone we wrote a novel, their most common response is not “How wonderful!” but “Do you have a publisher yet?” In other words, will it be a book, and will you make any money from it? If it gets published, if you do make money, then there is the next question, “So how is your book doing? Has it made any of the best-seller lists?”
Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction – which is naïve and misplaced – that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” We treat the unpublished writer as though he or she suffers an embarrassing case of unrequited love. We say things like “You may not want to put all your eggs in one basket.” And “You might want something to fall back on.” Books proliferate on what we “should” write and how we can “write for the market.” There’s not much advice along the lines of “Write what would make you happy.” There is something patently foolish, it would seem, in doing something just for the love of it.
This morning I had breakfast with a woman who said to me, “I’m not a real writer.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Oh, I write all the time and have since I was a little kid and I do it almost daily and I think of it as being my best friend, but I’m not a professional writer,” she replied.
This was a sophisticated woman, a spiritual adroit, a woman whose consciousness has escaped many of the nets and snares of group-think and yet, and still, though she wrote constantly and happily, she was not, in her mind, a real writer.
“My grammar is why I’m not a writer,” another woman who writes all the time told me. “I love to write and I write little stories and poems and occasionally an article, but I don’t really know anything about the rules and so I’d hardly think of myself as a writer.”
I thought of the articles I had read under this woman’s name, the letters I had received and enjoyed, the fact that she had “fooled” me. Until I heard her reservations I would always have thought of her as a writer.
“I can’t spell to save my life,” yet another woman told me. “I love to write but with spelling like mine, I’m sure I can’t take it very seriously.”
The woman with the “bad” spelling actually suffers from a reading disorder, dyslexia, and her love of writing has persisted despite obstacles.
“Just use spell check,” I told her. “Or even just a dictionary. After you write something, check it over. It doesn’t matter if you ‘can’t’ spell. We’ve got computer programs to do it for you.”
“But isn’t that cheating?” the woman wondered – as if writing were some circus trick that she had failed to master and any help, and “net” took away the glory of the stunt.
“I suppose I’m a writer, but I’m just a business writer,” a man recently told me. “I write pamphlets on how to do things. I don’t really think that counts.”
Why doesn’t it count? Writing clearly and well on how to do something is one of the most difficult forms of writing that I’ve ever encountered. What makes it less “writing” than a short story? Where does this pecking order come from? This notion of “real” writing and “other” writing? This notion of hierarchy, writing that is “art” being a higher form of writing than writing that is merely artful?
“I think if I ever got published, then I would believe I was a writer,” a student of mine tells me.
Maybe and maybe not. The credibility attack has been known to be cunning and baffling, raising its bar to keep pace with a burgeoning career.
“You may have written one good book, but that’s all you’ve got in you.”
“It was a fluke they took that article.”
“Sooner or later they’ll figure out that you don’t have what it really takes to sustain a column.”
Writing for the love of writing, the sheer act of writing, is the only antidote for the poison of a credibility attack – and the antidote is short-lived and must be readministered.
“Did you write today?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re a writer today.”
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.
Excerpt from Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write
ISBN#1-58542-009-3, Penguin/Putnam Inc.
By Julia Cameron
The day is gray. The atmosphere is heavy and oppressive. A storm is coming in. My mood matches. This is a hard day to write. This is a day when my censor is awake, alert, and active, responding to the incoming storm with ominous hissing and aggression – the way snakes in a reptile house grow restless when the barometer drops.
“You’ve got nothing to say,” my censor hisses. “That you think you have to say hasn’t been said before and better? Who do you think you are, trying to write a book about writing?” This is the same helpful fellow who used to tell me, when I was a newspaper columnist, that the man at the security desk would not believe my ID and let me in to write because I “didn’t look like a real writer.” (Whatever that looked like.)
I call this the “credibility attack” and it is a familiar one. All writers suffer credibility attacks; learning to ignore them is part of surviving as a writer. Based on the idea that writing is product, not process, the credibility attack wants to know just what credits you’ve amassed lately. The mere act of writing, the fact of which makes you a writer, counts for nothing with this monster. What matters is where your passport has been stamped. What matters is who says you’re a writer besides yourself.
America is a product-oriented country. If we tell someone we wrote a novel, their most common response is not “How wonderful!” but “Do you have a publisher yet?” In other words, will it be a book, and will you make any money from it? If it gets published, if you do make money, then there is the next question, “So how is your book doing? Has it made any of the best-seller lists?”
Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction – which is naïve and misplaced – that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” We treat the unpublished writer as though he or she suffers an embarrassing case of unrequited love. We say things like “You may not want to put all your eggs in one basket.” And “You might want something to fall back on.” Books proliferate on what we “should” write and how we can “write for the market.” There’s not much advice along the lines of “Write what would make you happy.” There is something patently foolish, it would seem, in doing something just for the love of it.
This morning I had breakfast with a woman who said to me, “I’m not a real writer.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Oh, I write all the time and have since I was a little kid and I do it almost daily and I think of it as being my best friend, but I’m not a professional writer,” she replied.
This was a sophisticated woman, a spiritual adroit, a woman whose consciousness has escaped many of the nets and snares of group-think and yet, and still, though she wrote constantly and happily, she was not, in her mind, a real writer.
“My grammar is why I’m not a writer,” another woman who writes all the time told me. “I love to write and I write little stories and poems and occasionally an article, but I don’t really know anything about the rules and so I’d hardly think of myself as a writer.”
I thought of the articles I had read under this woman’s name, the letters I had received and enjoyed, the fact that she had “fooled” me. Until I heard her reservations I would always have thought of her as a writer.
“I can’t spell to save my life,” yet another woman told me. “I love to write but with spelling like mine, I’m sure I can’t take it very seriously.”
The woman with the “bad” spelling actually suffers from a reading disorder, dyslexia, and her love of writing has persisted despite obstacles.
“Just use spell check,” I told her. “Or even just a dictionary. After you write something, check it over. It doesn’t matter if you ‘can’t’ spell. We’ve got computer programs to do it for you.”
“But isn’t that cheating?” the woman wondered – as if writing were some circus trick that she had failed to master and any help, and “net” took away the glory of the stunt.
“I suppose I’m a writer, but I’m just a business writer,” a man recently told me. “I write pamphlets on how to do things. I don’t really think that counts.”
Why doesn’t it count? Writing clearly and well on how to do something is one of the most difficult forms of writing that I’ve ever encountered. What makes it less “writing” than a short story? Where does this pecking order come from? This notion of “real” writing and “other” writing? This notion of hierarchy, writing that is “art” being a higher form of writing than writing that is merely artful?
“I think if I ever got published, then I would believe I was a writer,” a student of mine tells me.
Maybe and maybe not. The credibility attack has been known to be cunning and baffling, raising its bar to keep pace with a burgeoning career.
“You may have written one good book, but that’s all you’ve got in you.”
“It was a fluke they took that article.”
“Sooner or later they’ll figure out that you don’t have what it really takes to sustain a column.”
Writing for the love of writing, the sheer act of writing, is the only antidote for the poison of a credibility attack – and the antidote is short-lived and must be readministered.
“Did you write today?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re a writer today.”
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.
Excerpt from Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write
ISBN#1-58542-009-3, Penguin/Putnam Inc.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-19 08:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-19 02:57 pm (UTC)Thanks, though. I'm saving this.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-19 09:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-23 07:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-25 03:10 am (UTC)