Nathan Bransford, the Deafness of Phantasms, and a Blind Man's Faith in the Possibility of Sight

As most of you writers in Internetland probably know, the inestimable Nathan Bransford is leaving agenting. What many of you might not know (though some have probably guessed) is that I've been working with Nathan on my novel for quite awhile now. So the news, for me, certainly hit home. Luckily I got an early heads up! Otherwise some of my brain might have melted out of my ear upon reading his post. :)

I told him I was thrilled for him - it's a great opportunity. And he's still got my back, and I've got his (not that he needs it). Nathan has always been an agent who puts people first, and I think it's important to return that favour. If this choice is the best for him and his family, then it's the best choice.

And yet there's always a sense of loss, that sense of what might have been. These thoughts have been stewing together in my mind, along with Wanu's post of last week about taking a leave of absence, as it were, from writing. The two are strangely connected for me.

(I'm not leaving! Don't worry! Unless you want me to leave. Shit. I won't think about that.)

Nathan was not the first agent I worked with. A few years ago I had another, Joanne Kellock, but she passed away from cancer at the time we were going to start submitting. (Yes, I'll accept all donations of rabbit feet for agentish luck) This came on the heels of another loss - my father, who had recently passed away.

At the same time, I had just finished my last degree, gotten married, started a new career and then quit it to start another, and been diagnosed with a disease. What this all meant, when lumped together, was a longish fallow period in my writing. I fiddled with a few old things, maybe wrote a page here and there, but for the most part I simply didn't write.

This, though, wasn't a bad thing. Yes, writing through things is hugely important. You can't endlessly make excuses - in the end, you simply have to get the work done if you want to get anywhere. But... but... but... sometimes a break is not simply okay, but necessary. I didn't write because I had nothing left to put into writing. Every bit of my energy had been sucked out, had been pulled into other things. And I was grieving. My focus was elsewhere - rooted in the real world rather than my imaginary ones.

And yet I think the most important thing I did was allow myself to do this. I gave myself permission not to write. I didn't worry, didn't fear, didn't shout "Oh my God, writer's block! Save me!"

I have always felt that writer's block is a bit of a fallacy. Not that people don't get blocked, but that Writer's Block becomes this almost mythic beast, this phantasm of the writer's mind. It grows, and grows - and yet it's so insubstantial that there seems nothing one can do fight against it.

But the truth of the matter is that it's insubstantial because it's not real. There is no capital W, capital B, Writer's Block. Just many little blocks - a thousand, a million of them, each one unique to each unique writer. For some it may simply be a plotting problem, for others a matter of confidence. For some it might be fear, for some it might be a simple lack of time.

I think it's better to try and find the specific problem and deal with it, rather than beseech the phantasm, pleading for release. He's not listening - he has no ears to listen with.

For me, it was about accepting this period of grief and redirected energy. The words were still in my head, and they would never leave. They would find their way to the page in their own time.

And yet this can be hard, can't it? To allow yourself these moments? But they can be worthwhile and important. Farmers leave fields fallow on purpose - sometimes the soil needs it, all to make richer crops in the years to come. So goes things for writers - we need rich soil to grow our words in.

It's a matter of faith, perhaps, and confidence. Confidence in our ability and in what it is we are meant to do with our words, our stories, our thoughts and dreams. Yet that confidence can be hard to find.

I'm not entirely sure where mine comes from. Belief in my ability, perhaps, and a gift from all those who have believed in it, too? People have helped along the way, with advice, with support, with simple appreciation for what I've put on the page. Perhaps some of that confidence is simply natural, an outcropping of personal pigheadedness. I, shall we say, do not like failure. Now, I may define success and failure on my own terms, but I'm pretty determined to meet my own criteria for such success.

And yet a lot of that confidence to persevere and continue, I think, is about accepting that old saw, that it's more about the journey than the destination. Hokey, maybe, but it's about understanding the value of those hours at the keyboard. Not simply as a means to an end, not even as practice. You do it because you're a writer and that will always be a part of you. And you do it, even more than that, because there is something necessary and valuable about the specific act itself. Not just a matter of identity, a matter of training, or the creation of a product, however poor or extraordinary. But the act itself, the value of an imagination acting upon a blank page.

Because to me the most important thing is those hours of actual writing, the process itself. And, in truth, it's not just about me, about the blank page and the story that might form on it. It's about the world and my perception of it, and, in those moments of writing, how I explore and seek to understand it. Writing, to me, is my filter for the world, the lens with which I bring it into focus.

I'm naturally fairly blind, but contact lenses make the world clear for me, perceptible and understandable. Writing frames my consciousness in the same way. the act itself is important, the transformation, the formulation in words of a million perceived and felt things. Writing is an act of clarity, an act of envisioning.

And I don't think that ever completely leaves us. You can take the writer away from the keyboard, but you can never entirely take the keyboard from the writer. Inside, the words are there. The mind makes stories. Memory itself is a story of oneself, a narrative framed as explanation, as motive and cause. And, if you wait long enough, I think the blank page will always start to call once more: the desire to make concrete the silent and hidden stories that flit through our consciousness, that help us make sense of the world as we experience it.

Confidence: A Scam?

It's a mercurial thing, writing, fraught with complex dangers. You want to write something good, or even something great... but how do you go on, day by day, to get there?

I think confidence is part of the key, but confidence for writers can be a tricky thing. Writing, by its nature, is an act that, in many ways, is cut off from the world. We hide away to write, touching the world only in memory and thought... and that world rarely touches our words. And when it does it's often with a critique, a rejection. How do you persist in the face of doubts, in the face of the void that always hovers, seeking to steal your words? How do you keep confidence when pressed on all sides?

Luckily, confidence is an irrational thing. Ain't it grand? I've been thinking about confidence the last few days, ever since I read a survey on literary agent Nathan Bransford's blog, where he asked his readers if they were better writers than his average blog reader. Two thirds said they were... and I'm guessing some of those who voted no were, in their kindness and decency, merely being modest and secretly thought they were better (oh that heart of hearts...). So most of the writers thought they were better than average (defying the mathematical odds), and the same holds true for most socially affirmed abilities or qualities.

Part of this, in the case of writing, might be on account of the secret, hidden nature of writing. In a sense, we writers are like Saramago's city of the blind, all lost in our own isolated landscapes. It's hard (and subjective) to determine what's average, and who's above (or below) that line. Cognitive scientists call it the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where ignorance more often leads to confidence than a lack of it. And part of it may simply be that we'd rather not think we've been wasting our time. To spend all those hours, all that effort, just to find out we're less than average (or even less than average amidst a sample of talented and committed writers)... better not to think about that.

I have a feeling, though, that there's more to it than this. I think there's a wilful element to the irrationality of confidence, for I think a writer's drive, a writer's hope, often leaks into their confidence. It becomes a sort of faith. It's self-belief in the face of lacking evidence... or even in the face of contravening evidence.

I often think this is necessary. We need a bit of ferocity in what we think we can achieve. It's that ferocity, that willed confidence, that lets us write through criticism, through rejections, through "this isn't right for us". We measure others by what they are, and ourselves by what we might be. In our own words we see the shadows of a future ideal, something we can strive and reach for, something we can attain, for in our hearts we've already attained it.

Now, I don't think we need to leave rationality entirely behind. Indeed, we shouldn't. If you're a beginner who has trouble with basic spelling, grammar and syntax it probably doesn't do you much good to think you're a genius and the second coming of Cormac McCarthy (becuz he spells things funny too). But a healthy belief in your talent will take you fairly far, I think. True arrogance will only impede you, blinding you to your faults, the areas where you need to improve. Your confidence should be less like an unpassable barrier and more like a wide-spreading light that opens the road before you.

In the agent's poll I voted yes, I voted that I was better than the average writer. I didn't make that vote out of anything that I considered arrogance. Indeed, it was hard to press the Enter key. I believe in humility... but I also believe there's a danger in false modesty (whether conscious or unconscious). And making that vote, of course, doesn't mean I am better than the average reader/writer of that blog. But I think I have a need to think so, regardless of the truth.

Studies have shown that people suffering mild depression actually see themselves more accurately than those who aren't (though they also rate others higher than they should). It's interesting, and not a little disturbing: most of us are deluding ourselves, at least a little. But to me it's also confirming. Human endeavor is about moving forward, about what might be rather than simply what is. Human advancement is often based on a sort of blind faith, even if only in ourselves, in what we migth do or become. It's a matter of self-belief.

So if confidence is a scam, it's a trick we pull on ourselves. And happily so.