How Writing Gives the Quiet Ones a Voice

Writing doesn't just speak to us, often it speaks for us

Welcome to Writer Everlasting. This is the place where we celebrate our successes. This is the place where we lay it all out there and confess our frailties. This is the place where we leave our fears behind and get right with who we are. Who are we? We’re writers.

Repeat after me: We’re writers.

Author’s photo

I grew up being the quiet one. The observer. I stayed in the background while my cousins and many of my friends reveled in the spotlight, drawing an audience by pushing their out-sized personalities, daring anyone to turn away. They could be beguiling and enchanting and then they could be boring and insufferable. They often didn’t seem to know the difference. And before it was over, if they thought they were losing their audience, they had to resort to bragging.

I don’t know if I was brought up not to brag — I don’t remember — but I do know I’ve always seen braggarts as sad and pathetic, and not as the giants they would want me to see. When they have to try so hard, when they have to draw attention to and spell out their smarts or their achievements, what I see is insecurity. What I see is, “Like me! I’m begging you!”

So because this is so ingrained in me, it stands to reason that I was always going to suck at marketing myself. There are a lot of writers like me. Many of us no doubt went into writing because we can do it in a quiet space, away from the kinds of interactions that would require awkward small talk (I suck at that, too), or conversations where we’re stammering and stuttering and there’s no chance of a re-do.

That’s because many of us don’t know how to express our ideas without a whole lot of rethinking. Which, for a writer, means rewriting — twisting and revising, thinking out loud, coming up with better ways of telling it — and sleeping on it. I don’t have the gift of speed-writing, any more than I have a gift of gab.

The thing I love most about writing is the rewriting. It starts as a puzzle and the challenge is to put the pieces together in just the right way. In writing, there’s always more than one way to put the pieces together.

Remember E.L Doctorow’s famous quote:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Revisions on a long-ago attempt at a novel. Eventually I scrapped the entire page. And the novel.

And the fact that I can do it all by myself, with no one telling me I should do it their way, makes it the best journey ever. I love that it’s all on me. (It’s not that I have no ego at all. You know that’s not true. You can’t write to publish having no ego. It can’t be done.)

Despite that icky feeling when I’m drawing too much attention to myself, I’ve had a long history as a professional writer and I’ve loved every minute of it. For many years I could put “writer” on my IRS forms and pay taxes on my income. Along the way I’ve had to speak in public. I’ve been president of a large professional writers’ group, I’ve spoken at conferences, I’ve taught classes on creative writing, and I loved doing it because I saw it as the thing we writers do to help each other.

But, those days are behind me. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my ability to talk to large groups now. I’ve been away too long. No TED Talks for me. I would blow it big time. My main role now is as a writer. There I still have a voice.

I can’t say I wouldn’t love more attention — and more money — of course I would. We don’t write in a vacuum. We write to be read, of course, but it’s the rare writer who isn’t thinking about how to make money at it.

Sometimes the thought of making money overshadows everything else we do. And why wouldn’t it? Our society practically demands that any measure of success must have dollars attached to it. That leaves the quiet writers out. It’s rare to have any writing success without a whole lot of luck and self-promotion, but anyone who might help us along has to know we’re there first. And when we balk at having to shine a superficial light on ourselves, when we want to believe our writing should be enough, we’re guaranteed a place at the back of the line.

Success means different things to different people. Sometimes success means our personal best. We take pleasure in writing something that comes out exactly the way we saw it. Or maybe it goes beyond what we thought we could do with it. Maybe we’re so proud of it we’re busting our buttons—but nobody else seems to notice. It goes nowhere. And there we are, left scratching our heads, wondering how nobody else can see what we see so clearly.

But we don’t brag about it because that’s not who we are. We can say, “Look at this”, maybe even a few times, but after a while we’re feeling kind of silly pushing something nobody seems to want to read. So we stop. And it sits there. And we love it so much. . .

I have no answers to how to get beyond that. If I did, I would be doing it. But I want us quiet writers to be okay with who we are. I want us to love what we’re doing without being our own worst critics. I want us to go on doing what we’re doing. I want us to spread the word about our work, of course, but if bragging isn’t our thing we shouldn’t waste another minute trying to figure out how to get better at bragging.

We’ll go on writing, working to make it the best we can do, and if the world doesn’t come to us, our satisfaction will come from the worlds we’ve built with our words.

Because, as I keep saying, in the end it’s all about the words.

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