Manage Your Ego
Learn to Turn It On and Off Like a Light Switch
A paradox, if you will.
Writing requires you to have a healthy, robust ego. You have to be able to put some garbage down on the page and believe that other people will be willing to read this—indeed, that they would part with their money for the chance. Revising, editing, and submitting require you to hold your work forth for criticism and then to accept with good grace that some or all of the criticism you receive is valid and necessary—that your work could improve, or is simply not good enough presently to achieve what you hoped.
Good morning. It is the beginning of the second half of January so I hope everyone has dispensed with their New Year’s resolutions and is ready to get back to real life. If you have not yet put your treadmill on craigslist, I urge you to do so now and return to reading when you’re done. I will wait.
There’s nothing like chucking out a goal when it no longer serves you, rather than letting it lurk in the back of your mind to make you feel stressed and guilty. An article on that very topic probably coming soon. As my brother is fond of saying: Heck with feeling bad. He doesn’t actually say “heck with” but Shelf Life is a profanity-free zone except when we’re talking about my friend’s new book, which came out last week.
Today’s article is about the writer’s ego and how to manage it during the cycle of writing: How to keep it elevated so you can get a draft down on the page; how to squash it down out of sight so you can make the most of feedback while you revise and publish; and how to keep it in check once your work is out there in the world.
Every writer whose writing sees the light of day will get responses to their writing that they don’t want to hear. Some folks believe they will skip over the part of the writing-editing-publishing process where one receives feedback—or worse, rejection!—that can injure your feelings and crush your dreams. Most people who tell me their plan to skip over “that part” have a very good sense of where they are likely to encounter that feedback, except it varies from person to person. To wit:
Beta reading—beta readers don’t know anything, I’ll go right to querying without revision.
Submitting to an agent—agents reject everybody, I’m going directly to the publisher.
Working with a publisher—publishers demand edits that I don’t want to think about, I’ll self-publish.
Readers—oh no.
Listen, even if you skip over every step in the publishing where someone might suggest revisions and changes to “your baby,” if you put the writing out there for people to read, you’re opening yourself to criticism. If you publish in a venue where people may read you for free (like Wattpad or AO3, for example) the reviews and criticism may be more constructive than what you get when you sell your writing for money. Amazon and Goodreads reviews don’t exist to give the writer feedback but to help other readers decide what to buy.
Beta readers, peer critiquers, and editors will have constructive criticism. Agents and publishers will send rejections. Readers will have thoughts to share with other readers and their thoughts won’t all be favorable. This is a reality we all have to get comfortable with somehow, in spite of our substantial writers’ egos.
To the writer out there who is reading this and shaking their head, saying, “I’m a writer but I don’t have a lot of ego behind my work, I’m self-conscious about my writing and I don’t have high confidence.” Your ego is working as intended. You believe in your own creativity and your ability to write something other people would enjoy. Some of us are more protective of our ego than others. If you hesitate to share your work because you believe it isn’t good enough, I encourage you to give careful thought to what it means for writing to be “not good enough.” What happens when writing isn’t good enough?
Hint: It’s not like when medical technology isn’t good enough or like when elevator-cable quality control isn’t good enough. What’s the consequence of writing not being “good enough”? Somebody says they don’t like it and your ego may be bruised.
What I’m getting at is, if a person genuinely believes they have nothing to say in writing or that their writing is bad, they don’t write for long. When people lack confidence in their writing I have found they are afraid of how the writing is received externally (criticism or rejection) rather than afraid that their writing objectively has no merit.
When I say ego I’m not using it in the psychological sense primarily. First I mean, one’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance. I will digress for a moment to clarify that I see self-importance as a value-neutral term. Writers have to have some sense of self-importance to write. We have to believe that another person—many other people—would be enriched or entertained by reading our thoughts. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary by which I live and die, defines self-importance thus:
an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance
That is an circular definition: How can self-importance be defined as having too much self-importance? This definition suggests there is no acceptable level of self-importance. To have self-importance at all is to have too much. That’s not true: It’s okay to have a sense of yourself as an important person in the social world around you. Though usually right on the money, Merriam-Webster is both logically wrong and wrong-wrong in this case.
Secondarily, I am using ego in the psychological sense of Freud’s id, ego, and superego. Briefly, this framework posits
the id is the primitive and instinctual part of your psyche;
the superego is the critical and moral conscience part of your psyche; and
the ego is the mediating part between the other two.
This sense of ego applies in writing, too. In this case the id is the side of your mind that tells you everything you do is great and it doesn’t need any work, just splash it on the page and go. The superego is the part of your mind that is hypercritical of your writing and tells you it’s terrible, just put it in a drawer and forget about it. You have to use your ego, the conscious part of the mind, to mediate between these and arrive at a compromise: Neither of those extremes can be allowed to run unchecked or you’ll never get anywhere.
The alter ego is your pen name. That’s not relevant here. I mean it is but I’m not getting into it right now.
When ego comes into play, in both of these senses, writers have two problems:
Not enough ego (or too much superego): Low- or no confidence in your writing, get discouraged and give up
Too much ego (or too much id): Overconfidence in your writing stymies the revision, editing, and publishing process
You have to have the right amount of ego invested in your work during the right parts of the process.
Drafting: Build Up Your Confidence
When you’re drafting, I don’t think there’s any such thing as having too much confidence in your writing and your story. This is the part of the process where unbridled confidence can only help you keep going and can’t hurt you whatsoever. There’s nothing too ballsy that can happen during drafting that couldn’t be adjusted during revision: There’s no downside. If you feel enthusiastic about your writing as it’s coming out of your pen and you’re eager to see the story unfold on the page, that will keep you moving forward to the end.
Not everybody comes equipped with outsize confidence and self-importance standard; I would especially like to acknowledge that if you are a woman or a member of a locally or globally marginalized community then you have more stacked against you when it comes to feeling confidence in your writing.
If you are not a woman or a member of a marginalized community and you wonder why I would say that, go ahead and Google “all time best authors” and let me know what you see.
For those who—for whatever reason—don’t have the confidence they would like to have in their writing, here are some tips to build it up.
First, monitor your self-talk and change it if necessary. I have some guidance on doing this in previous article on retraining your brain. When you talk down to yourself about your writing (about anything, really), you undermine your confidence. Your confidence will drain away beneath the surface until its gone like the oil reserves in the I Drink Your Milkshake movie. You won’t notice it going or, if you do, you won’t connect it with the way you talk to yourself—you’ll assume that your confidence in writing is low because you’re bad at writing and not because your brain is talking smack about your writing. If that’s how you’re used to talking to and about yourself, your confidence may have been in a slump for a while but it’s never too late to regrow it.
Second, remind yourself that the book products on the market for you to read are not the writer’s unpolished first draft. Don’t compare your draft to someone else’s finished, published book. A draft is a work in progress, not a finished product. Polish comes later, with revision. You get better at writing with experience, just like with everything else. Compare your writing today with your writing from last year or last decade or heck last millennium, some of us have been writing that long. No one’s first effort is a masterpiece. If you are tempted to characterize your writing as “bad” reframe that as “on its way to being great.” Most great things come from bad things.
Third, find the successes that contradict your concerns. If you lack confidence in your ability to follow through with writing an entire manuscript, chart your progress. Writing is cumulative so every 500 or 1,000 words you write is proof you can write at least that much—if you did it once you can do it again. If you lack confidence in your ability to write something compelling, copy your favorite sentences, dialogue exchanges, or scenes into a document you can keep handy to remind you of your favorite bits of what you’ve written. Whatever part you lack confidence in your ability to do, there’s an antidote somewhere in the form of success that proves you have done it. Figure out what that antidote is and put it in front of your face all the time.
Revising and Editing: Temper Your Reaction
You might think that revising and editing is the time to shut your ego off, put it in a box, wrap the box in chains, throw the chained box in the ocean—so you will be ready to hear the constructive criticism, suggestions, feedback, rewrite requests, and (gulp) rejections without reacting defensively. Just throw your arms open wide and take it all into yourself for processing and then turn around and start revising or editing.
Incorrect! Revising, submitting, revising some more, and editing require you to manage your defensive reaction. That is true. However, receiving constructive criticism does not mean you lay down and play dead while the criticism marches over your dead body and into your manuscript. The author does not become a passive conduit through which criticism flows.
Some writers believe that when they finish their draft their work on that manuscript is done; it gets handed to the agent, then the editor, then the printer, et cetera, but the author has moved on to the next thing. This is not true. When you finish your draft the work on your manuscript begins. Before you finished the draft there was no manuscript to work on. Manuscript did not exist. The manuscript now exists and you begin to work on it.
This is a hard part of writing and some people don’t enjoy it. There are two easy routes and they’re both bad: You take all the criticism, wholesale, and incorporate all of it doggedly. Or you reject all the criticism, wholesale, and incorporate none of it. Either of those methods lets you off the hook. The hard work is in understanding the criticism, where it comes from and what it intends, deciding which requests and suggestions require action and what that action is, and which do not need to be taken and addressed.
For this you need your ego working full time but in check. You need to be able to stand up for your work as a whole manuscript with merit that is undergoing an improvement and polishing process. If you let your ego run amok you won’t be able to use the valid criticism you receive. Worse, if you subvert your ego entirely in order to incorporate every suggestion impartially and without consideration, you can fracture or disjoint your manuscript or ruin its voice.
Post-Publication: Humility Is King
When your finished product is published, you’re likely to feel your most accomplished. It’s out there, it’s alive, whatever publishing path you took, that path has come to its end and your book is launched. You’re a published author with a book on the shelves, virtual and/or actual.
The flip side of this is, as of publication day that book is out of your control. You no longer control who can read it, or what they say about it, or to whom. My hope and yours is that readers will love it and share genuine, glowing five-star reviews—and readers probably will! At the same time, though, there are no longer any guarantees. If a New York Times book critic reads it and hates it and publishes a widely circulated vicious review, there’s nothing you can do about that. If an Amazon user gives you a one-star review and it skews your whole average, you can’t argue with them. If your book doesn’t make the Goodreads Choice Awards and you think it should have, you can make a big fuss about it on social—but this is a terrible look and I don’t recommend it.
Once your book is out there, delight in your positive reviews. Enjoy your successes. But don’t engage your ego with slights real or perceived. There is nothing you can do about them. You can learn from them if there’s anything viable to learn, but you can’t change a bad review or make it go away.
Not everyone will like every book and there are as many reasons for liking or not liking a book as there are readers. There are going to be people who don’t like your book and say so, publicly. Here’s how you deal with that:
Don’t take it personally.
If there’s value to be had from their critique, take it for future use.
If there’s nothing of value, move on.
Finally, remember—and this is not true just for book reviews: When someone says something baldly unkind or even hateful about you (or your book), that only says something about them and says nothing about you (or your book).
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