Shame is the Biggest Barrier to Great Writing

Feelings are the ink in every writer’s pen. If you can distil them, you can make magic, so self-awareness is one of your best assets. Want to know the worst of them? Shame.

Shame is the great silencer. It will dilute all those gorgeously-distilled emotions and leave you with generic prose that reaches no one. Learning to write is learning to become a more evolved person, so I think therapy is every bit as important as reading.

An old cliché goes, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”

Well, you’re only as boring as your shame.

If you can’t rip your entrails out and glue them to a bloody page, you’re never going to reach anyone. That’s just as well because sharing that page is a great way to learn that your bloody mess is exactly like everyone else’s bloody mess. If you share it all, people will begin to identify with you. They’ll tell you they always sort of knew this but never quite managed to put it into words.

Isn’t that what writing’s for? To connect? To find the universal emotions of this existence? I think so.

I have a friend who’s a literature professor, and he cannot, for the life of him, find those universal emotions because he’s never tried. He’s been learning the mechanics of writing for three decades, but he hasn’t spent a second trying to connect. He doesn’t much care about universal emotions. He just wants to fake it, and he knows it.

It’s taken him four years just to learn to expose a little of himself. It’s a tough exercise, but the sooner you do it, the happier you’ll be. I really believe that. It happened to me.

I’ve become used to exposure, so these days, I find it easy. That wasn’t always so. When I first began writing, I used poetry to hide who I was. I only began to reveal my true experiences and feelings seven years ago. It was one of the most terrifying things I ever did. I would tell myself I was writing something nobody would ever see.

That way, I could keep my inner editor out until it was time to share that not-really-secret piece of writing.

Shame dies on exposure. It’s my favourite cliché, even when we’re talking about writing rather than therapy. The more you show, the more people will identify with you, and the smaller your shame will become. That’s it. That’s the goal. Learn to expose yourself. It’ll be one of the best things you ever do.