"Ignore your feelings about your work"-- Annie Dillard

[carolinayellowdog]

Hey,

I just found this in the intro to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (a collection edited by Lee Gutkind): "Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful...No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it."

Two questions: is this good advice, and if so how can you possibly learn to ignore your feelings about your work in progress? I can't even ignore feelings about work published ten years ago!

CYD

[stinkeefresh]

1. In my experience

If Annie Dillard said it, it's good advice for writers.

As for this particular bit, I think I agree. How I feel about something when I created it or immediately after usually has no correlation to how I feel about it years later.

[Warpy]

2. I think it depends upon the type of writing you're doing

If you're doing technical writing, then his advice is a great idea.

However, if you're writing fiction or poetry, "sit down at your typewriter and open a vein" is the usual advice, a line so famous that Google as I did, I couldn't find an attribution.

[The Blue Flower]

3. She's referring to your inner censor

I think what she's referring to is our tendency to judge whether our work is "good" or "bad" before we ever finish getting all that we have to say out onto the page. I think she's saying just pour it all out, give your words and thoughts birth and love them as your own without making judgements about them. Once you've given birth to your work, you can then mold and shape it.

[henslee]

4. the best advice on writing that I hear over and over again in my head

is DONT MAKE A MEAL OF IT. Everytime I make a point or write a scene I like or whatever, I have a tendency to beat it to death, to milk it, to spell it out. It's not till a re-look at it, am I able to tone it down, break it down, give less but really give more.