Who's Really Behind The Voice That's Blocking You?

Sometimes it's an internal voice. Sometimes it's an actual voice, literally telling you to stop. Weirdly, the first one is harder to manage.

Who cares what I have to say? Who am I to write a personal essay/memoir/novel? Why would I even try this? Who do I think I am?

I hear this sort of thing a lot from writers and would-be writers. Who cares about my story? I’m nobody, says an accomplished woman writing a brilliant, sexy memoir. She’s an incredibly smart and funny writer with a fascinating story to tell. I know you want to read her book, but it’s going to take her a while to feel that in her bones.

Then there are the stalled novelists. I’ve been working on this novel in fits and starts for years, says a talented wordsmith who writes copy for a living but dreams of publishing a book, and yet I’m afraid to really go for it. What if no one wants to publish it? Or, maybe worse — what if it gets published, and everyone hates it, and judges me?

Listen. I want to hear your story and your voice, and I bet a lot of other readers do too. (I mean, unless the thing you want to say is “Hey actually the Nazis made some pretty good points,” in which case, well for one thing how did you get to this newsletter?)

In which Jupiter tries to SILENCE MY VOICE

I’m not immune to self-doubt. When I hear that judgy little internal voice sniping at me, I say, “Listen, sis. Some of my favorite novels and memoirs and essays and short stories in the world are written by regular people about their regular lives.” Except none of the writing is ‘regular,’ because who has a regular life, actually? What is a ‘normal’ person, really? You know what book I adore? May Sarton’s A Journal of a Solitude. You know what it’s about? A middle-aged white lady living in the country and like, gardening and shit. It’s an absolute page-turner; I could not put it down. Go figure!

Here’s the thing: Your experience of life on Earth is completely unique. No one knows all the things you know. No one has your exact flavor of brain. That’s what can sometimes make life a bit lonely, in fact, but it’s also why everyone has something interesting to say.

Here’s the other thing: This kind of thinking (who am I to write?!) is often an advanced stage of procrastination masking itself as logic. Think of Procrastination as the bad boyfriend who spouts soul-withering bullshit and then tells you he’s Just Being Logical. Thanks but no thanks, Procrastination, we have work to do here, so you can keep your creativity-boner-killing discouragement to yourself, byeeeeee.

Then again, sometimes the voice telling you not to write — that what you have to say isn’t worth saying — is an actual human voice coming from an actual human. I don’t know about you, but I encounter these sorts every time I write anything that comes close to resembling my real life, whether that’s fiction with autobiographical elements, or essays about any aspect of, well, anything really.

Sometimes these voices are easy to dismiss, like all the men who wrote me after my recent essay about marriage and divorce was published, to tell me that I should shut up already and that their marriages were just fine, thankyouverymuch, just fine, fine, fine. Congrats, men, on being so totally fine that you had to write me, a stranger, to tell me you’re fine! Sounds like everything’s fine!

Sometimes, however, these shushing voices have valid concerns. No one wants to be immortalized as a schmo just because they had the bad luck of befriending a writer, which to be fair is hard to avoid because we are terribly charming and, of course, great at words. Sorry! I love how Anne Lamott handles this, in the classic writing text Bird By Bird: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”

Then again, some of us aren’t as tough as Lamott, and inconveniently enough we often do have to continue living in our lives even as we write about them. Sari Botton, memoirist and Substack goddess, noted recently in Poets & Writers the importance of “trying to determine the most ethical way to approach writing about other people.” Here’s how she dealt with it in writing her memoir And You May Find Yourself: “With an eye toward generosity, I extracted any unnecessary details of other people’s choices and behavior. I worked to get the stories to a state in which they were no longer just about me and the specific people I included but more broadly about common cultural phenomena that others would relate to.”

Even so, people might not like what you write. You can write the gentlest version of a thing, and they still might accuse you of, oh all sorts of wild things. But as long as you’re writing with as much generosity and truth as you can, you’re always allowed to tell your own stories.

When you start to lose your nerve, remember all the stories other people have written that you’re glad exist. Consider the novel or essay or whatever it was that made you feel seen, that articulated something you had been wanting to but couldn’t, quite. Aren’t you glad that writer silenced their judgy inner voice? Or their judgy outer voice, the person in their life who said “Oh please, could you stop making such a fuss?”

Think about it. Once you pinpoint what — or who — is silencing you, you’re that much closer to writing through that block.

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Exercise: What’s stopping you from saying what you want to say? From writing what you want to write? What would you write if you could feel totally free? Freewrite for fifteen minutes. You never have to show this to anyone, so just be as honest with yourself as you can.

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My Get Unstuck writing clients have been absolutely killing it lately, with recent publications in Jezebel, Tablet, and the LA Times. I’m so proud of them for getting their work finished and out there!

If you’d like to learn more about publishing your work online, join me in December for a 1-day class on pitching and writing for the Internet.

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