I cringe when people compliment me on an essay I’ve published on this site, or on the fact that I have a blog at all. And this isn’t because I’m bad at accepting compliments. Instead, the compliments remind me of my dishonesty, my duplicitousness and that is what makes me wince.
You see, I’ve been writing dishonestly.
I write because I have to
Because I have to… There is so much behind that statement that a list is called for.
- I have to write if I want to become a better writer. Everyone who writes, and whose writing I admire says writing consistently (read: all the time) is a prerequisite for a good writing. So I write, everyday, because I have to. Because I want to become a better writer.
- I write because it is important to me. This one is difficult to explain. There is something about evoking a feeling or creating a whole new world for people through words that feels like magic. Not magic as in a trick but real magic. And I like being able to do that for people.
- This one is tough to admit, but I write, or at least I have written, in the hopes that you find me impressive. My ego desperately wants to be admired in the same way I admire creative people who inspire me. And it’s all ego. It’s insecurity, desire, arrogance, belief and a lack there of, a need for confirmation of purpose and a mountain of other wordless wants; all rolled together like a plaited pastry that won’t cook.
- I also write, because it’s always been there. Since I was six, writing has been a constant hum in the background that has throughout my life built up to now become a ribcage rattling thunder. And I can’t shake it. It keeps coming back, like an answer to a question I don’t want to ask myself.
- And then there’s this other thing. I have a few natural talents. I can swim reasonably well. I’m good at seeing patterns where others don’t. But, what I consider my super power is my ability to read people’s emotions. They are as obvious in people around me as the colour of their hair. I can feel when someone is angry, I can see from a distance, without knowing how, if there is tension between two people having a conversation that I can’t overhear. And this gift also seems to make me reasonably good at evoking emotions in people, through both speaking and writing. It’s a gift I’ve used in every iteration of my various careers, but it is in creative endeavours that it really comes to life.
On that note, be aware that this essay is likely to make you feel like you just walked into the bathroom where I’m standing naked looking at myself in the mirror.
I’ve been focusing on the wrong thing
Most of what I’ve written on this site has been driven by point 3. My ego. It desperately hopes these essays will help me gain admiration and respect. While also harbouring dreams of an editor contacting me after reading my essays and asking me to write a column for their magazine.
Which means that I’ve been stealing from you.
I’ve implied that I’m generous when I write here. That my ideas are a gift to you. But, I have been enticing you to my site under false pretenses. Instead of sharing gifts with no strings attached, I’ve been sharing ideas, which, granted, isn’t in itself a selfish act, but the motive behind my sharing has been to get something from you; recognition.
I promised you that I’m here to share thoughts that’d be interesting and meaningful to you when, in fact, I’ve brought you here so that I can show off.
I’ve been practicing dishonest writing.
Mr. Renshaw (not his real name)
When I was 15 I had an English teacher, Mr. Renshaw. This is not his real name, as the heading to this section makes clear. And, to be clear, I’m not changing his name because I’m considerate and I respect his privacy. It’s just that I’ve forgotten his name and I can’t for the life of me recall what it was. A good memory is not one of the natural talents I’ve been bestowed with.
So, Mr. Renshaw is a nice enough teacher. He tried to be a bit ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, but we were an unruly bunch, and it didn’t take long for his idealism to be ground out of him like hope in the pestle and mortar of a lottery draw. Anyway, Mr. Renshaw enjoyed giving us creative essay assignments. We’d go off, write stories, and then he’d mark them. And my young writing aspirations told me that this was my opportunity to prove to myself that I would one day, indeed, become a writer. And yet, no matter how creative, eloquent and wacky I was, I never did better than end up with a mark that had me at a steady ‘not bad, but not great’.
I grew desperate. Being a writer seemed to me to be the only solution I had to the riddle that was posed to me throughout my youth; “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I had ‘writer’ and nothing else. Maybe an ornithologist, but that never really felt like a real option. And wanting to be a writer meant that this teacher needed to see my potential. He needed to call me back after class and tell me that there is something to my writing and that I need to stick with it. But that conversation just didn’t seem to want to happen.
And then I got it into my mind that Mr. Renshaw just didn’t like me. So I decided I’d test my hypothesis. I found what I consider one of the most amazing passages in literature and plagiarised it. If he still gave me a ‘steady as she goes’ mark, then I had proof that he had a personal vendetta against me.
The book’s name from which I stole that passage was The Tin Drum, the author was Gunter Grass. To be fair, I didn’t copy the passage word for word. But I did liberally help myself to his imagery. I had underestimated Mr. Renshaw, which may have been a large part of why I didn’t do very well in his class. Turns out Mr. Renshaw had read The Tin Drum.
To anyone planning on plagiarising a piece of fiction for their English class, I recommend avoiding any novel written by an author who’s won a Pulitzer Prize.
I received 20% for my efforts, while Mr. Renshaw gave Mr. Grass 80%.
Nothing good has come from dishonest writing
As I looked at the mark on that essay, the lesson I took away from that moment was, ‘never copy another persons work – ever’. But now that I’m here, there is another lesson that I’d failed to recognise. And it is potentially the more important of the two lessons in this story.
Your writing won’t progress while you attempt to impress your reader.
Ernest Hemingway once said; “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” And that is the secret to writing that delivers gifts. Writing, painting, sculpting, photography, art, any art, art that matters is solely about telling the truth.
It all changes today. From today I will be generous with my ideas and thoughts and observations. I will give freely and expect nothing in return. I will write honestly, transparently. And I will write true sentences, the truest sentences I know.
And with that I’ll leave you with the closing of remarks of John Green‘s presentation to Kenyon College in 2014.
“Millions of writers and readers are working together across generations to make stories that can be a light in the way-down-darkness which is you. Writing and reading isn’t about a singular mind emerging from isolation to create unprecedented art. It’s a massive collaboration spanning millennia and it includes all of us. I know that it won’t last forever. I know that we’re all going to die, and that all of those novels upon novels upon novels will be rendered irrelevant with our extinction and that the universe will go on just fine without us, but not today. Not today. Today we have the opportunity to honour those that came before us by making art as they did: as a gift.”