The Art of Questioning Yourself

I know this will come as a shock to you, but I have a pretty healthy self-regard. I like myself, a lot. Other people? Not nearly so much. Cats? It’s close … but I still win.

That doesn’t mean I’m not well aware of my flaws, and there are many. Many, many flaws. In fact, it’s probably not crazy to say I am more or less 90% flaw at this point. If I was grading myself as a person, I’d give myself a solid C minus. And yet! I am still my own favorite person. I think this is healthy.

The reason this comes up is because one of my many, many flaws is a tendency to get inside my own head and be a walking Bubble. This means that I sometimes lose objectivity, because I do things a certain way and I’m the only one aware of it, so there’s no pushback. There’s no one there to tell me I’m full of shit.

Which is fine if it’s just me, wearing an old school backpack as underwear and generally living like an animal, as one does. The problem comes when this sort of Bubble Thinking makes its way into your writing, because the worst time to discover you have some very strange blind spots is immediately after you’ve pressed PUBLISH on a story or novel.

AAYAAJ

Here’s the rule: Always Ask Yourself ‘Am I a Jackass?’

Look, we all get some strange ideas, habits, and attitudes. Normally, social interaction will correct these over time. You go out with other human beings and pick your nose at the dinner table, someone will gently correct you. If you go out on a date with someone and tell them that you believe the world is flat and secretly ruled by the Moon Men, they will probably correct you. Or back away slowly while dialing 9-1-1, but either way you at least get the general sense you’ve fucked up, and over a long enough timeline this should lead to introspection and adjustment.

But sometimes we manage to smuggle some serious weird shit into our writing, and if we never question it, it’s gonna get published that way. And you may not even be aware of your odd attitude towards women, or ethnicities, or economics. That is, until you publish a book filled with pervy male-gaze bullshit or elaborate justifications for racism or secret Moon Men conspiracy theories presented as fact, and that correction comes far too late.

This isn’t an endorsement of censorship, self- or otherwise. But when you’re working in the silence of your own brain, it’s easy to sometimes to lose objectivity and believe some seriously Moon Man-esque stuff. The challenge is that when you are your only audience for ideas, it seems like it all makes sense — until you unleash those views and crash into reality.

I read a lot of books. Some for pleasure, some for work. I get sent a ton of ARCs and galleys and such. And I can’t tell you how often a writer — usually, though not always, self-published, because when you self-publish you sometimes lack the people who are being paid by someone other than yourself who will be happy to tell you how full of shit you are — will drop a nuclear bomb of insanity in the midst of their story, and do so casually because they assume everyone shares their serene opinions, or their way of describing women, or their theories on proper behavior. A single conversation with another human being might have demonstrated how wrong they were, and saved us all a lot of trouble.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish my story about how everyone is mean to middle-aged white writers because we are universally awesome.