Chapter 99: Earworms

My students are poised to start writing. I am excited. I am nervous. Excited because they are about to bring to life the stories they have been reporting for close to two months. Nervous because faced with the prospect of writing – as opposed to filing weekly reporting memos/letters – I worry that they will panic, and fearful that they are doomed to fail, default to form. 

When that happens the spark will evaporate from their writing. The stories they so urgently need to tell will be fine. But they will not be what they could have been. The students will know it. That is the hardest part of all.

I have written in the past of the anxiety most every writer feels as the moment approaches when they will have to confront the keyboard and begin putting words on the page. I sleep fitfully the night before the writing begins. Time, age, and experience do not make this easy. Easier, perhaps. But never easy. And where is the joy in that?

There is an expression in boxing: the punch that knocks you out is the one you don’t see coming. The message is clear: keep your guard up. For a long time I saw the peril – the metaphorical left hook aimed at my noggin – in single form, inspired by Gail Godwin’s great essay of decades ago “The Watcher at the Gate,” the voice that creeps into your head to remind you that as you write you risk failure.

But I have begun to see that perhaps I was not seeing the peril, the punch, fully – that it was not a single voice that gets in writers’ ways, but many. Like earworms.

Earworms – those dreadful songs that lodge in our heads, generally at dawn when we are just rising and, from the auditory standpoint, undefended. No one wakes up with a song they want to hear; it is always music we’d avoid. Yet somehow, there it is, like Baby by Justin Beiber or, for my generation, Barry Manilow’s Mandy. On repeat.

The earworms are voices of, at turns, parents, friends, classmates who never took us as seriously as they took themselves, teachers (same deal, only with the authoritative standing), editors (more on that later). I have a colleague who implanted a nasty earworm in my head just by saying “I read your book,” and nothing more. There it was, stuck, maddening, vexing, corrosive, undermining. Damn. 

Young writers think this happens only to them, like heartbreak and career frustration. It happens to us all. The other day, I got a note from a writer whose journalism I have long admired. She wrote to say she was at work on her first book and having a hard time of it.

She wrote: ​​The challenge for me is that I am editing myself before I get enough of anything onto the page. It's been hard for me to get the paper out of my head. It's not just the straight laced institutional voice, though that's an issue too, but also the voices of every critical editor ever. 

Consider the keywords: editing myself; institutional voice; voices of every critical editor ever.

Here is a wise, gifted writer with things to say, and yet she is struggling to find her way clear past those voices, those earworms. Even as she writes she is editing herself, which is another way of saying second guessing. She hears the BIG voice. And all the lesser ones, too. 

Hands raised if you feel her pain. 

You can all put your hands down.

In her essay, Godwin advised finding ways to trick her “watcher,” diverting him or her long enough to get something written before the watcher took notice and began whispering in her ear, you know you are gonna screw this up, right?

But that suggests a single foe, a one-on-one Texas-death-match for your creative soul.

How do you fight the Dragon of Doubt when every time you lop off a head it sprouts another?

You don’t.

Come again?

You don’t because, if you approach the work differently, you already have.

The other day, when I will confess, I was very ready to go home and put my students’ work aside until the next morning, I opened one last Google doc and began to read. The memo (better to call it a letter, because that’s the approach that feels least freighted) grabbed me immediately. It was so good that as I read I wanted to stop and mark a single paragraph to show the student how well she was writing. But I could not. There was no single terrific paragraph because each paragraph led effortlessly to the next and the next. She was not preparing to write. She was writing. 

I wrote to her: i read this memo as if i were reading a short story. it drew me in and in it your dad and Miles and you and your sister began to come alive

i suspect that that may not have been the intent, that you were simply writing what you’ve learned this week. but look what happened – if indeed i am seeing this right – when you used your writing as a means, not the end, when you were not worried about form or getting it right.

as i was reading I was going to highlight a single paragraph. but i just kept reading and reading and as i did i could see that there was no single graf to highlight. It was all there

Better still was her reply: I re-read my last memo again and had the same reaction as you. I think there is something there…

That is what you want to hear – a young writer giving herself permission to feel good about what she’s beginning to do. More of my students have been approaching me in the past few days and, in essence, asking me for that same permission: one did it with a wonderful burst of boasting (“I know it’s good!!”). Another was more tentative (“I think I may be on the right track. Am I?”) They were saying the same thing: I can do this, right?

Yes, you can. You already are.

There is, of course, an inherent irrationality in this – the quest for approval that ALL writers share; I mean we do write to be read, and praised for what we do. Not everyone is willing to put themselves in this position every day at work. 

We do. Which is pretty nuts, right? Yes, it is.

So I tell my students to accept the irrationality of what we do rather than to fight or dismiss it. 

Why? Because you will be in a better position to deal with those earworms – be it in the form of an editor coming back to you with the classic passive-aggressive query “The question has been raised…” (this is a real thing; ask anyone who ever worked at at a certain period at The New York Times) or a colleague who, insisting they were only trying to help, saying, “This is not your voice. I don’t like it. Where is your voice?” (I am not making that one up, I swear.)

Anything you can do to delude yourself into thinking you are not really writing for keeps – a letter, a note to self, a ramble on a doc to be shared with no one – can keep the earworms at bay. Try this and you will discover that by the time you are ready to take the leap into writing that counts, the work is largely done. The earworms may appear but the damage they can inflict is minimal. You haven’t fought them because doing so is a losing game. By telling yourself you are lowering the stakes you will have sidestepped them.

I replied to the seasoned writer that she might consider pausing and instead of plowing ahead, write herself a Dear ___ letter. Perhaps it will allow her to see how much she knows, and how wise she is being in the telling.

Meanwhile, I tell my students that my job is to help them traverse a metaphorical rapids – from one side where by now they have written thousands of words of memos/letters/ramblings to the other, where their full draft waits, ready for what by now are the finishing touches because they have been writing it all along.

In between, in that churning, boiling river comes every voice repeating the same refrain: you cannot do it.

Like with an earworm. You cannot will the voices away. 

But you can skip to a new song.