A small group of fiction writer friends and I have started to get together once a month at a local Irish pub to talk shop. The idea behind the group was the desire to discuss craft — the standards like character, plot, and voice, but also the second-ring things like habits, style, and software. And our insecurity, apparently. One of the constants for any working fiction writer is this nagging fear of being discovered as a fraud. Even Neil Gaiman, so I am told, keeps nervously waiting for the day that some guy with a clipboard shows up on his doorstep to tell him that the gig is up.

What is this peculiar feature of fiction writers? And it is peculiar to fiction; no professional nonfiction writer colleague of mine has ever reported jolting awake in the middle of the night with the fear that the readers of Sheet Steel Industry News are finally going to discover that he’s been faking it all these years.

Is it tied in with the whole Facebook Insecurity thing that everyone secretly feels? As someone once wisely described FB, it’s like comparing your outtakes against everyone else’s highlight reels. When you’re comparing your fiction against another person’s work, you’re pitting something that you know intimately against something that you’ve only seen in final, polished form. When you look at your own piece, you see all the seams and patches and holes; when you look at the other person’s piece, you see a gleaming, polished surface. Somehow we fool ourselves into thinking that, while we had to open an artery and bleed onto our keyboards to get our story, the other person’s story must have emerged like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully formed and wearing shiny armor.

Speaking of the ancient Greeks, I think the solution lies partly in Plato.

Plato is the guy who came up with the concept of perfect forms. There is an ideal form for everything — a Perfect Tree, a Perfect Dog, etc. Everything is striving to represent its ideal version of itself, and everything in our reality can only invoke it, without actually embodying it. And so it is with our fiction. We have an ideal version of the story in our heads, which we can see or hear in a kind of abstract perfection. We can imagine our satisfaction with it. We can imagine the reaction of the reader to it. And we strive to create something that comes close, ever so close, to that ideal version in our head.

But there’s always that one scene that we just couldn’t get right. That one bit of exposition that feels too contrived. That one line of dialogue that sounds flat. Or worse, that one whole chapter that you had to stick in there because none of your beta readers could figure out how you got from X to Y even though it was so clear, so obvious, in your head. So naturally you end up not as happy with it as you had imagined you would be, and of course you expect your readers will be just as disappointed with you for not providing them with the perfection-bound-between-two-covers that they believe they deserve. And when the reviews come in, the good ones are just flattery anyway. And if it gets an award, well, that’s just the result of politics and horse-trading, right?

Here’s what I think. Feeling like a fraud is the coke that results from the combustion of our creative fuel. The harder we try to write that story to match the perfect version in our head, the hotter we’re going to stoke that flame and the more of that ash we’re going to create. We have to recognize it for what it is; evidence that we’re working our tails off. We just have to remember to shovel it out of the oven every now and then so it doesn’t choke off the fire.

Jeez, that sounds like some real motivational poster crap, doesn’t it? I think it’s still a good metaphor anyway, though.

It’s like I’ve said before: if it’s true that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” then let me stand with the perfect and declare the good my enemy as well, and march into battle under its proud banner.

And to be honest, there are stories that I haven’t seriously attempted yet because I am intimidated by their perfect forms. Channel 37 stories are fun because their perfection is much more easily achieved. But I am feeling the pull more and more — the need to don my armor and fight my own personal Agincourt, to back a trainload of coal up against the blast furnace, etc. — to start doing these stories some justice.

You’re right, Bud. There’s going to come a point where I’ll want to do more.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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