I don’t listen to many podcasts. It’s not that I don’t like them. Podcasts, it’s not that I don’t like you. It’s just that between reading, writing, playing with the kids, and telling off the kids because I’ve failed to notice things have escalated in the seconds my attention was elsewhere, I don’t seem to be able to regularly carve out time for podcast episodes. When your superpower is a blend of procrastination and inconsistency, with a dollop of self-doubt, regularly tuning into an hour or 1.5 hour-long podcast is kryptonite.
There’s one podcast that never fails to inspire me, however, and that’s The Screenwriting Life. Hosted by Pixar alumni Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna, it discusses, in their words, not just the craft of screenwriting, but the life. I’d even take it a step further. Much of the candid, wonderfully insightful advice is applicable to all creatives, especially any one brave enough to dare whisper that they’re a writer.
I am a writer.
Just writing those four words feels like I’m pushing this blog post into the realms of fiction. What gives me the right to make such a statement when I have only recently packed in the “proper” day job? And when my writing brings in enough money to comfortably house the family in a cardboard box? Recently, Lorien posted on The Screenwriting Life Facebook page asking the members to simply state that, regardless of their situations and incomes, they are writers. It was impressive to witness people engage in all sorts of mental acrobatics and lodge more caveats than in a typical engineering report just to avoid saying those four words. The discomfort radiated from the screen.
Of course, while every writer surely goes through periods of self-doubt, not all struggle to simply acknowledge that they identify as a writer. Unsurprisingly, it tends to be the less experienced ones, or those who have been rocked by a major setback, who resist uttering the “four words.” This group may be described as beginners. Newbies. Baby writers. There are many terms used, most varying degrees of condescending.
But Meg and Lorien use a term that always strikes me as both gentle and encouraging: emerging writer. As I understand it, the designation denotes a writer who is taking tentative footsteps into the creative world. They battle resistance with the goal of building a body of work. The emerging writer probably struggles to call themselves a writer.
I love the term because it suggests movement, progress, which, as alluded to previously, is something that I struggle with. Rather than coming saddled with expectations, it’s instead gently inspiring. It also, for me at least, brings to mind a tortoise. I’m not sure why, but when I first heard “emerging writer,” I immediately conjured up the mental image of a tortoise. On further thought, I think the metaphor holds up pretty well.
First, when a tortoise feels threatened, it can retract its neck and hide in its shell. It will only emerge when deemed safe to do so. As an emerging writer, my overriding impulse is to stay hidden away in my shell in perpetuity. After all, sticking my head out, showing my writing to the world, is terrifying.
One of the cruellest ironies is that many writers, me included, are introverts. But, to tell compelling stories, it’s often necessary to plumb the hidden depths of our vulnerabilities and fears—what Meg and Lorien call “the lava.” We pour this into the work, and then offer it to someone to be torn to pieces or simply dismissed. Just as the tortoise must summon the courage to poke its head out, so too must the writer. We must leave behind the soothing yet restrictive safety of our shells and look out on the world, for that is the only way that observations can be made to be woven into tales.
Pondering everything tortoise also makes me think of Aesop’s famous fable, The Tortoise and the Hare. The story tells of how the Tortoise defeats the cocky Hare by plodding on, never giving up, and generally being a smug git. Hang on, scratch that last bit.
It’s a good little story—Aesop knew his onions, didn’t he? —but it always strikes me as slightly strange. If the Hare hadn’t taken the dubious decisions to have a long nap in the middle of a race, the Tortoise would have lost. Let’s be honest: the Tortoise was a little foolish to challenge the Hare to a race. He could have at least picked something that required patience and clear-thinking.
Anyway, questionable decisions aside, there is something of the writer in the Tortoise. The writer must commit to a life that will be riddled with doubt, rejection, and often met with bemusement. But it is not someone else who is the cause of all this resistance, but ourselves. The Hare lives in the mind, and all we writers can do is ignore those mocking voices urging us to quit and keep moving forward.
But it all starts and ends with those four wonderful, horrible words: I am a writer.