Advice on writing, fear, and shame

For a writer who worries readers will think, “What the hell is wrong with this person?”

Welcome to the latest installment of my occasional advice column. Previously: Advice on creative growth. Note: I’m taking the next three weeks off, returning to your inboxes January 10.

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Dear Subtle Maneuvers,

A while ago you wrote a newsletter about marketing and fame. In it, Ron Hogan said, “We want people to see [our work], to recognize its significance—and, inevitably, to recognize us as the only people who could deliver just this work of art in just this way.” This sentence gave me a funny feeling, and it prompted me to write this email about a struggle I’ve been having. (Yesterday a remark from a friend made me finally decide to press send. After reading one of my short stories, they commented, “This is really dark. Are you okay?”)

I am okay, but I’m afraid that my work is too dark. Without going into too much detail, my current project addresses sexual abuse and inherited trauma. Sometimes, reading back over my writing or thinking about showing it to others, I can’t help but think that readers will look at my work and think, “What the hell is wrong with this person? What happened to them?”

I know that there are writers who are comfortable putting their dark thoughts and traumas into the world. Personally, no matter how thickly I wrap my ideas in fiction, I am still terrified of anyone knowing that these thoughts are mine. That they’re in my head. Especially now, with the rising popularity of autobiographical novels, I fear that readers will conflate writing with lived experience and assume things about who I am and what I’ve done. Of course this is all hypothetical; I’ve never been published. If I did publish, I know I would use a pseudonym. Still, I don’t think I could ever engage in any marketing around my work. 

I know some writers take this approach; Elena Ferrante comes to mind, and the investigation into her identity makes me queasy. I feel that I need to address the guilt, shame, and fear I have about both my work and my desire to have my work recognized while hiding myself.

So, I suppose my question is: How do I overcome my fear of the darkness in my work? Is there shame in wanting to put my work out into the world but keep my identity private? Do you know of any authors who struggled with these feelings?

Best,

A 

Dear A,

The first thing I thought of after reading your letter is a story about Samuel Beckett. As he was nearing his 40th birthday, Beckett found himself profoundly stuck: He had published one book, a collection of short fiction (and, before that, he had completed a novel for which he was unable to find a publisher), but he was dissatisfied with that work and couldn’t figure out a way to write that did satisfy him. One night, standing at the end of a stone jetty in Dublin harbor during a winter storm, Beckett had a revelation: that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life and his writing should, in fact, be brought to the forefront of his work. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”

He did make it work for him: Beckett’s realization spurred a two-year period of intense creative activity during which he produced some of his finest writing. (This period is known, wonderfully, as “the siege in the room.”) And the whole type of work that we now think of as Beckettian—the bleak, mordant, despairing comedy of seedy solipsists and parents in dustbins—comes from that act of recognition and acceptance.