Carrie Lamanna

practicing the art of resistance writing

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Learning to Trust My Writing Process, Not My Perfectionism

May 16, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna Leave a Comment

a photo of one of my neglected flower beds
What perfectionism really looks like—a weedy mess.

A piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned. 

I have seen variations of this quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, E.M. Forster, and Paul Valéry, just to name a few. It seems writers and artists struggle with knowing when a work is complete and I took that struggle to Olympic levels. In school, I was always the student who was printing off her paper five minutes before class, not because I had procrastinated but because I was always trying to improve what I had written in some way. (OK, sometimes it was because I procrastinated. Happy now?) I was also the academic sitting on the hotel floor outside her conference presentation room balancing a laptop on her knees and making last minute changes to her slideshow as the audience filed in. For me, deadlines were essential to finishing because without them I would hold on to my writing forever trying to make it perfect. I needed everything to be perfect because my fear of criticism was so intense it felt like impending death.

I think this inability to abandon my work was part of the reason I was never able to publish enough to become a tenured academic. (That and I hated every minute of it except for the teaching part.) I had drafts of at least four articles on my computer that I never submitted for publication because I didn’t think they were good enough. I needed someone to knock on my office door and say, “Time’s up. Give me the manuscript.” But that’s not how things work in academia. For some reason you are expected to be a grown-up and take responsibility for your own work, but I don’t remember that being explicitly stated in the contract I signed. In the end, I decided to quit and pursue a life as a writer on my own terms. Thing about that is there are even fewer deadlines as an independent writer. At least as an academic I had a tenure clock ticking in the background of my life for seven years, and even that wasn’t enough to overcome my fear of criticism and rejection. 

My perfectionism and resulting inability to abandon my writing to an audience is why I almost bailed on my promise to publish one blog post a week. After four weeks of doing the work, I was ready to quit because I was feeling overwhelmed and didn’t think I would have enough time to write something I could allow you to read. And maybe this post isn’t fit for publication. Maybe I should have spent more time on it, but because perfectionism is part of my OCD I can’t rely on my internal sense of what’s finished and what’s not. I have to trust the process (one afternoon of writing = one post) and force myself to hit the publish button. I’m working with the same perfectionism in my garden. I have to set limits on the work I will do in each flower bed or I will spend all summer trying to perfect one while the others die of neglect. My perfectionism lost me an academic career and more than a few expensive plants, but I’m determined to make this writing career happen. If writing is what you want to do with your one wild and precious life I hope following along on my journey helps you make your dream a reality too. 

All I can do is trust the process. The process matters more than the product because without the first the second would never exist. Ass in seat, fingers on keyboard. That’s what matters today and every day. So, I will be live on my Facebook page again tomorrow writing and asking you to join me. 

Do Next Write Thing: a 30-minute weekly writing retreat. Fridays at 10 am MT

Writing is Messy, Communal, and Scary

April 22, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna Leave a Comment

Overhead photo of a woman's hands typing on a green typewriter. To the left is an open notebook, a stack of letters, and flowers. To the right is a latte and a cookie on a blue plate. The text added to the photo reads "Writing doesn't look like this."

After neglecting it for months, I promised myself I would start posting to my blog once a week. My first post was just over a week ago on Saturday, so I haven’t exactly achieved my goal yet. At least it’s progress. (I’ve been told I need to focus more on small wins instead of focusing on how I fuck everything up. Not sure I’m doing it right, but I’ll keep trying.) The thing is, I don’t have a plan for what I want to say to you today. I just know I promised to write, so I’m writing.

Maybe that’s how it has to start. You sit your ass in a chair and write even when you don’t have anything it say. Of course that’s how it has to start. I know this. I have a damn Ph.D. in writing studies. Writing is a process of discovering what we have to say, not a delivery method. The final published work might be about delivering our completed message, but the process of creating that message—the actual work of writing—is knowledge production. We know more after we have written, even for just five minutes, than we did before we started. Even when we sit down with a clear plan for what we want to write, the process changes things. It’s fascinating to watch this process unfold with an author who’s working on a novel. Characters they thought were villains unexpectedly reveal themselves to be heroes. A coward turns out to be the bravest one in the story. No matter how much they plan and storyboard, fiction writers can never be sure how a story will end until they write the last word.

Fiction writers don’t invent their characters—they get to know them through the writing process. When we write about a nonfiction topic, we learn as much through the act of writing as we do through the research process. When we write about ourselves, we get to learn who we are. But that process is unsettling to say the least. We aren’t fictional characters after all, and realizing that maybe we don’t know everything about ourselves is downright scary. And the fact that we are sharing our recent self-discoveries with a public audience brings the fear level from “damn scary” to “fucking terrifying.” When I hit publish on my previous post about my struggle with anxiety and OCD, I felt like I was standing naked in the middle of the busiest street in town with TV cameras and cellphones pointed at me. In reality, maybe 100 people even bothered to look twice at that post, and most of them were friends and family (hi mom!), so my fears might have been a bit exaggerated. But it doesn’t matter. In my head the fear is real. It makes me feel alone in this world, and more often than not, it stops me from writing.

I don’t want to be alone in this process. I want you to come along with me so it doesn’t seem so scary. The romantic notion of the writer alone in her ivory tower is a myth that holds us back. Writing happens in communion with others. Sure, you have to sit down with pen or keyboard each day and put words on a page, and that has to be done alone. But what happens before, after, and in-between the writing requires people.

I would never have finished my dissertation if it weren’t for a friend who invited me to her house in Michigan for a weekend. She provided another friend who was struggling to finish and me with rooms of our own. We spent the morning writing with our doors closed. At lunchtime we came downstairs to a wonderful meal she had prepared for us. We ate and got some exercise while she read our drafts and provided feedback. We then went back upstairs to revise before heading out to dinner together. We did this for two days. I wrote about a third of my dissertation that weekend after struggling for almost a year to write more than a few good pages. At the time it seemed like magic, but the magic was simply doing the work in the company of other writers and friends who supported and believed in me. When I quit my academic job and decided to start writing memoir and creative nonfiction, I knew I would need that sort of support again, which is why I jumped at the chance to join Janelle Hanchett’s first Renegade Writers group. We’ve had two face-to-face retreats now, and both have been magical.

Obviously, it’s not possible to go on a writing retreat every weekend. (Who would do that laundry I’m always bitching about?) But it doesn’t mean we are doomed to struggle alone either. I’ve found that something amazing happens when we share our writing process with others. We realize we are not alone. Friends and family I would never have suspected of having any interest in writing confess that they too want to write a novel, a memoir, or start a blog. They too thought they were alone, that sitting down to write was scary because they didn’t know what to say and were afraid to show it to anyone, that everything they tried to write turned out a hot mess, and what difference did it make anyway because they would never have the time to be a “real” writer. This is the bullshit we say to ourselves when we try to write in secret. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I didn’t know I had you to read it—even if “you” is sometimes only my friend Jill and my fellow Renegade writers.

I stopped writing when I stopped reaching out and sharing with my writing community. Once I started getting outside my own head, my writing fears didn’t go away, but they stopped controlling my process. My fears became something I could lift and set aside for a precious moment instead of a crushing weight on my chest. Over the next month I’ll be sharing more of my writing process here and on social media. It’s going to be a weird ride, but I’m ready for it. It’s time.

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