On Writing: Breaking from the Herd & Other Heresies

I received a rape threat recently. Right after I posted my second article on Substack and syndicated it to Goodreads.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. That my piece Burn the Whale Down was low-key about silencing women and here was someone trying to silence me.

Granted, they were hiding out behind their AnonymousMail in a pair of shit-stained boxers scratching at their back pimples with a set of kitchen tongs, but still…

My mind knew it wasn’t real with its all caps and “DO NOT SHOW UP AGAIN ONLINE WITHOUT PAYING MY BOSSES FIRST. I HAVE YOUR ADDRESS!” language.

I’ll tell you what though…My animal body didn’t know it wasn’t real.

At all.

That “R” word lives in the marrow of women’s bones, and it rides on our shallow inhales and exhales like a plastic grocery bag in a riptide.

But, the whole experience reminded me that there are more insidious forms of silencing.

The Polite Kind

My past few Substack posts marked a reemergence into the public writing world for me. While I’d worked studiously on revisions of my first novel, and wrote the first draft of my second novel, it was all safely underground and locked up in password-protected documents.

Instead of putting my own words out into the world, I worked writing-adjacent because I couldn’t abandon it completely. But for nine years, I didn’t write publicly.

Not since my MFA where I found that I didn’t much care for the writer’s world and didn’t particularly want to belong to it or play its games.

I’d had inklings of this during my undergrad when my creative writing professor had offered a critique of sixty pages of my novel and said I could pick it up on the first day of Spring Semester. I waited next to his door on that cold checkered floor every Wednesday during office hours.

For eight weeks.

I skipped lunches and ate strawberry Pop-Tarts propped up against the brick wall, burping up my angst for feedback that never came.

But by the time I signed on to pay upwards of $100K for that next level of shiny, published professionals in grad school, I knew this time…it would be different. I would pack my brand-spanking-new binder full of empty college-ruled notebook paper and write down every single word of brilliance from the experts with my Cross rollerball.

I would capture it all.

And I would finally belong to this society of “artists” and “literary folk.”

What I didn’t allow myself to fathom was that this society was a world full of literary criticism, a deep fawning over the Iowa Writers Workshop (my own included), devastating critiques from students who read Faust once, and a whole lot of ego (mine always sitting front row with her spectacles, btw.)

It was of my own doing. And I own that. But I also know I’m not alone. If I had a dollar for every writer I know who hasn’t written a solitary word since their MFA, I’d be rescuing more horses, hiring barn help, and expanding my sanctuary.

Waiting for Evisceration

I remember where I was sitting in 2017 when I received the email from my mentor that my MFA thesis passed.

Barely.

I’d just finished watching The Last Jedi with my brother and as we walked out of the theatre I happened to open my email, and I sat down on a cement bench and sobbed until my guts—full of undigested buttered popcorn and half-chewed milk-duds—all but fell onto the pavement.

I’ve experienced abuse in my life, both emotional and physical, along with incessant criticism. (Like when I brought home all A’s and one B in fourth grade and my step-father pulled out the vinyl from The Wizard of Oz and played “If I Only Had a Brain” before I headed off to school each morn. My own asshole inner critic often takes on his voice.)

I’m intimately acquainted with rejection, as well.

But I’ll tell you this. Nothing has felt more eviscerating in my life than someone telling me that my writing, this lantern that lives in the cave of my heart, wasn’t good enough, bright enough, or enough. Period.

It wasn’t just that my art baby, this thing I gestated and opened my veins and bled for, was ugly, it was that my very ideas weren’t sound. That the unconscious material that was trying to bubble up to the surface and land on the page wasn’t enough either.

My whole second year’s experience was one blow after another to my artist’s ego. My mentor for my first year had given me the green light on my thesis novel. I was then switched to a new advisor who told me I needed to rewrite the whole she-bang, in one year, because it simply wasn’t believable to have men and women at war and that women would never give up their rights in this country.

Oh, how I’d love to have had a conversation with her when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Or as I scroll through Instagram and watch hordes of women denouncing relationships with men and choosing bears over the masculine.

After much Resistance, I did as my second mentor told me, and went on to write a new novel, from scratch, about a girl who longs to weave the story that shapes her world. Unfortunately, her country is ruled by a narcissistic dictator whose mouthpiece is a rooster who crows the dictator’s propaganda to the citizens each morning. He insists that it’s perfectly sunny when it’s raining outside and that he is the only Story Weaver and anyone else who tries to change the narrative will be put to death. (By the way, I wrote this book in 2016, but I’ll get into prophetic writing in another essay.)

Both mentors read this newly revised thesis. My first one sang some praise, gave me constructive criticism on how to make it better, and passed me. The second-year mentor gave me the “barely” news as if she were AI reading the stock prices through a hollowed out tin cup.

Her feedback was polite, for sure, but it lodged in my throat like a 12-foot splinter.

The Log of Wood

Not too long after my MFA, I signed up to attend a writer’s workshop in Cape Cod and showed up with my thesis crinkled in my sweaty, desperate hands. I sat next to an agent whom I considered to be the most glitterati of the literati. I had followed her for years and thought she was the most brilliant agent on the planet so when suppertime rolled around, I sat right next to her just to bask in her shade.

I had barely buttered my dinner roll when she said, “I hope we don’t see a bunch of overly polished MFA theses.” Or some such. Were I still drinking at the time I would have slammed five glasses of pinot noir on the spot. (And I don’t like wine unless it’s glazing my roast beast.)

The next day, I was so frozen during her critique session I don’t even remember what she said.

Do you know of any other artists, aside from writers, who get a ten-page chance to prove themselves worthy?

Imagine a painter paying thousands of dollars to cover their painting with a tarp. When they arrive in the room with the critics, they’re allowed to pull down just two inches of the upper-right hand corner of the tarp to show their artwork and say, “Hey, what do you think?”

It’s insanity.

“The Dark Side”

And I’ve willingly participated in both sides of the insanity with folks paying me to critique their writing, to “rip it apart,” to tell them what’s not working. And my writing-lovin’, Virgo stellium, OCD-ish self was happy to remain in that world of words.

I once shared my angst with a client over critiquing people’s art given my own devastating experiences. He denied that he had felt devastated by me. But… he did always hold on to something I shared with him that I heard from Mike Robbins years ago.

The first thing your mind says when you receive feedback is “Fuck you.”

And I have dozens of clients who had carte blanche permission to say just that, “Fuck you, Melanie.”

And they did.

Out loud.

When they got past, “Fuck you, Melanie.” They landed in “I suck” territory. And that does feel devastating.

But it passes, and then they move on to the next phase, “Wait. What was that?” And that’s where the magic of revision can happen.

But there is an art to feedback and criticism that doesn’t cripple an artist. I hope to hell I’ve been on the “right side” of that line. Maybe sometimes I haven’t.

“Jung on Art”

But I didn’t know what I didn’t know during those years.

I wish I’d had these words Jung wrote in 1929: “Although my patients occasionally produce artistically beautiful things…I nevertheless treat them as completely worthless when judged by the canons of real art. As a matter of fact, it is essential that they should be considered worthless, otherwise my patients might imagine themselves to be artists, and the whole point of the exercise would be missed. It is not a question of art at all – or, rather, it should not be a question of art – but of something more and other than mere art, namely the living effect upon the patient himself….A patient needs only to have seen once or twice how much he is freed from a wretched state of mind by working at a symbolical picture, and he will always turn to this means of release whenever things go badly with him.” —Jung on Art: The Autonomy of the Creative Drive by Tjeu van den Berk

I feel that freedom from the wretched every time I sit down with Louis—a gnat in my weird western novel whose soul gets separated from its body which is stuck to the spur of a low-down cowboy named Tucker.

I also deeply wish I’d understood that my soul was speaking to me in both of my thesis novels. My exploration of my first rejected thesis was really about the war between the masculine and feminine within myself. My second? A grappling with the mother complex.

I would have known that fitting in, adapting, and making art that is “worthwhile” to the “society of artists” isn’t the point at all. My job as an artist isn’t to serve the ego, it’s to allow my soul full expression, to allow my voice, my stories, my complexes, and my Self to emerge.

I live happily outside the society of artists these days. I know that these words from the Gospel of Thomas are true for me: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Because not creating feels like it blocks my airways.

Creating is a path to the Self—to know thy Self. There is no craft book, no course on How to Write Your Book in 9 Seconds, no bachelor’s or master’s program, no artificial intelligence that can work out your autonomous complexes, that can allow your psyche to speak to you except applying your own ass to your chair and letting it speak.

Some of the most powerful words Jung ever spoke in regard to art were these in 1930: “it is not Goethe that creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe. And what is Faust? Faust is essentially a symbol…any work of art is a symbol that has crossed the threshold of consciousness.”

When my ego rears up, which it still does, and imagines hitting the Times list, I remind myself not to be so riddled with attachment over the future of my art baby. Of course, I may want it to go to Yale and then to Oxford. To become a lawyer or a doctor. But my baby may want to work at Arby’s and that’s perfectly noble too.

I have no idea what will happen to my art. For it is art.

Art for Art’s Sake

I feel it in my marrow now. Rape threats, or no. Mentors be “damned.” I create art for art’s sake. It’s not perfect. It’s full of run-on sentences and purple prose, at times.

Creation is my business.

Where and how it lands, that is not my business.

P.S. If you are threatened online, you can report it. I did. Both to my Sheriff’s office for the paper trail, and online at https://www.ic3.gov/