Be Less Introspective

We write because we have seen something in the world around us, and we want to show it to someone else. Why, then, do we spend so much  writing time thinking about ourselves? 

You’re there at your desk, trying to work out the next sentence, and before you know it, you’re thinking about yourself instead: your failures, your ego, your word-count goal. You speculate on how you’re going to feel when you make your goal. You get a jump-start on the self-loathing you’ll feel if you fall short. You wonder what people are going to think when they read what you’ve written. You wonder if anybody will even read it. You question whether anything you’ve ever written was actually good. You buck yourself up, remembering that, yes, you’ve written plenty of good pieces–brilliant pieces, in fact. Which makes you suspect that you’ve already used up all your brilliance. Then you ponder Edgar Allen Poe, who died penniless and alone in a Baltimore gutter. It occurs to you that you’ll never write as well as Edgar Allen Poe. In short, it takes about 45 seconds to decide that you’re the piece of garbage that the universe revolves around.

Saint Augustine (among others) spoke of sin as incurvatus in se–a curving in on the self. This truth is nowhere more evident than in the neuroses and dysfunctions that so often accompany the act of writing. Self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-promotion, self-loathing, self-justification, self-doubt, self-aggrandizement–incurvatus in se.

Writing demands a certain amount of introspection. But introspection doesn’t have to become self-absorption. In my own writing life, I have found that writing can be a means toward blessed self-forgetfulness. As I get absorbed in a subject I’m writing about, find that I am freed from self-absorption–and I am able to do good work. When I stop asking “What will my reader think of me?” I start asking, “What will my reader think about this person or event or idea I’m writing about?” And good things start to happen. I don’t live in that place all the time, or even most of the time. But I don’t get much good writing done when I’m not in that place of self-forgetfulness.

In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis evoked the idea of incurvatus in se as he explained why Satan rebelled against God and lost his place in heaven: “in the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Satan] could think of nothing more interesting than his own prestige.” I write because I live in a world that is full of wonders and I count it a privilege to point out a few of those wonders to a few of the people I share this world with. I write because I live in a world that’s a whole lot more interesting than my own prestige. And yet I am forever stalling out because instead of looking outward at this astonishing world, I look inward. Instead of wondering at the world, I wonder what the world is going to think of me.

So here’s my challenge to you, my writerly friend: be less introspective. Look outward at the world and at your reader, and leave yourself out of it. See what you see, and then write it down.