Ego and Envy

There is a wonderful book called Writing Past Dark which I have started reading. It is about the dark side of the writer’s mind - dealing with envy, discouragement, frustration, impatience - all the things those of us who write face. How much is justifiable and how much is just a block to doing our own work while we obsess about someone else’s?

Two years ago I was faced with a situation that taught me a lot about envy. A friend and fellow writer whose work I had not read sold her book to a name publisher for tidy sum. I won’t tell the name of the book or the publisher because I am about to be very ungracious so bear with me.

When her book sold I was envious. It wasn’t the money so much though that would have been nice - it was the acknowledgment of her work. I’d been writing longer than she had and certainly had produced more work, why had her book sold? In typical fashion I seethed and sulked for awhile all the while telling her how happy I was for her. Well, I was - sort of.

Then the book was released. At first I sullenly refused to buy it but eventually succumbed. It was awful. I couldn’t even read it. And, unfortunately, neither could anyone else including a lot of reviewers. The book garnered mild reviews at best and never sold enough to justify her advance. She was absolutely mortified and has written very little since.

I felt awful for her. And I felt more awful about my own envious reaction. But it taught me a painful truth about publishing - just because you are ready to publish doesn’t mean you are going to find a buyer and just because you are not ready to publish doesn’t mean you will not be published and end up feeling foolish. It’s a difficult thing to digest.

What was wrong with her book? She has a genuine gift for language and tells her story well. The book was a non-fiction memoir about a period of her life spent in Africa. The problem was there was too much of her in the book. That sounds like a strange thing to say but even reviewers said that it sounded more like a journal kept for a therapy group than literature. As I read it I was uncomfortably aware of the author’s need to be seen in a certain way - as a certain kind of person - by her readers. It didn’t work.

Learning to deal with one’s ego has always been a struggle for writers - particularly non-fiction writers. It is such a natural human thing to want to say “hey, look what I did!” but when your ego gets ahead of your heart or even your brain you are on shaky ground.

This is especially true when writing about sex and intimate relationships. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was that amazing group of writers, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Frank Harris, who wrote blazingly, flamboyantly, and explicitly about their sexual experiences. Today we read them and there is something slightly painful in reading some of their revelations. A sense that they didn’t realize how screwed up they were as people. There’s a fine line in there - total honesty vs. excessive self-revelation.

Now when I re-read some of my early work I thank God no one wanted to publish it. Some of it is too raw, too revealing, and some is just plain embarrassing. It is a good thing to reveal one’s guts but better to do it with literary elegance than with self-indulgent ego massaging. I’ve still got a lot to work on there.

Thanks for reading.