I’m one lucky duck. There’s no doubt in my mind. I get to work on my book everyday in my hermetically sealed house … away from the distractions of life. (By the way, I highly recommend a home energy audit, our house has never held it’s heat so well.) It’s a real pleasure to do this. It’s—for lack of a better word—therapeutic. It makes the process of getting these stories out and onto the page as easy as pie. But it’s also way too easy to be hard on myself.
I’m trying to do everything right. Trying to follow my own rules of the road, trying to … stay in my own lane, so to speak. The more I do it, the easier I get the that sneaking suspicion that some of these stories are only interesting to me. And that’s the hard part. That self-doubt. In the end, it’s a judgement call I make on myself.
I had a dear, dear friend who lived with me for a few months when I was alone and lonely in Missoula. One day, she flat out asked me what was wrong with me. Why wasn’t I taking people out on more than one date? Why wasn’t I participating? In a moment of utterly sincere, open disclosure (hard for me back in the day, I’m the first to admit) I told her “I think anyone who is interested in me must be crazy.” To which she replied, “You don’t have a dating problem. You have a self-esteem issue.”
She was so spot on, a kick in the head couldn’t have knocked more sense into me.
And it’s weird, years later, how that self-esteem issue comes to the fore whenever I get into the weeds writing about … let’s say … The Nixon Administration. So I kick myself in my own ass and whack away. Thinking to myself, Hmm. I wouldn’t want to read that about me if I wasn’t me.
In writing, there’s this rule called the 10% rule. I used to think it was something I only heard from my boss, but it turns out, it’s widely known. Read what you wrote, cut ten percent, then cut another ten percent. Lately I’ve been amending that. I read what I wrote, cut what bored me senseless, then keep writing. Well, for all of you that are about to get all Pollyanna on me, I got to tell you … what bored me senseless? Well, it was about eleven percent of what I’d written.
In the end it’s a good thing to do. It’s good. But it’s hard. And it’s easy.