Much as we must believe in ourselves and our work, a writer’s humility serves her far better than trumped-up self-assurance. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector,” said Ernest Hemingway. “This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.” It's a radar that must be pointed not only at our work but also at ourselves.
In This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, Steve Almond says writing is a process of decision-making, nothing more and nothing less. “If you refuse to pass judgment on these decisions,” he says, “if you walk around thinking you’re the Messiah, you’ll wind up settling for inferior decisions, by which I mean imprecise, contrived, masturbatory ones.” We must learn, he says, to second-guess our decisions without second-guessing our talent.
In a follow-up essay, Almond notes that art is first and foremost about the transmission of love, of the kind ascribed in the gospels to Jesus Christ. (By the way, Almond is Jewish.) “You love people not for their strength and nobility,” he says, “but, on the contrary, for their weakness and iniquity.” Only as we humbly acknowledge our own weakness can we love it in others, including our characters.
When you’re full of yourself – and we all are at times – your work is full of you, too, and not in a way that speaks meaningfully to readers. In Walking on Water, author Madeleine L’Engle reminds us of how readily ego gets in our way. “The important thing,” she says, “is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness.”
This fall Deb is teaching an online Children’s Literature Apprenticeship and a Anchorage-based workshop called Description and Detail: The Glint and the Squint through the 49 Alaska