To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her…. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.
- Ted Hughes, on Sylvia Plath
This quote makes me think of how I wrote when I was in my twenties*, in my early solo-apprenticeship as a writer. I stopped working for a year and a half to write, living off savings. I wrote dozens of stories, probably. I had no internal idea editor — anything that I thought I could make a story of, I did make a story of, with varying degrees of success. It culminated in my dystopian novel All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything), which has a huge cast and universe, ideas stacked on ideas.
By the time I got to grad school, however, my idea editor began whirring. I wasn’t happy with my ideas, my plots, my characters, my writing. Someone, I believe it was Elizabeth Bear, told me that my taste had temporarily outpaced my skill, and it was so true. It is still true, but now I’m trying to push through it, trying to write as well as I can, and trying to give myself a break. I have to accept that I’m not going to spring from an MFA program a fully formed writer of Nobel-prize-worthy fiction. And maybe I won’t be that kind of writer, ever.
The worry is, for me, that my hesitancy to write because of the quality of my writing has somehow stemmed the flow of ideas. I’m not sure if I don’t have as many as I used to or if my self-editor is so quick that it shuts down ideas before I’m even aware I have them. Also, having spent years with a slushpile, I questioned people’s self-awareness about the quality of the ideas and work often enough that I wondered if I didn’t have enough awareness about my own ideas and work.
There’s fear there — fear of producing bad work, fear of failing, fear of judgment. It’s one of those things I’m so over lately. And being over it means doing the opposite of what the fear tells me. (Just one of the lessons of OCD exposure and response prevention therapy!) I need to let the ideas out, even if I think they’re lousy. I need to not be afraid of what my own mind creates.
*Seeing as Sylvia Plath committed suicide when she was thirty, this is also how she wrote in her twenties. I think that’s what your twenties are for — to exhaust your ingenuity and various other appetites and drives.
It’s often implied that ideas must be new in order to be worthy. I don’t believe that. It’s a mistake to believe that a good story is all about a good idea. That implies that an idea alone will carry you through, when really, it’s how the idea is executed, or worked that makes it brilliant. I can’t tell you the number of scripts I’ve seen that have good premises but fall apart rather quickly because the writer doesn’t know what to do with the idea.
I think Sylvia Plath had the right idea. I think there are no bad ideas, just ideas that are poorly executed. I find it inspiring to learn that Plath had the artisan approach.