I’m Gonna Quit You Baby and Mosey on Down the Highway, Get Some Distance Between Me and You
Written by John Erianne on July 16, 2008 – 6:24 pm -Emotional distance.
It’s one of those made-up phrases given to us by clinical psychologists:
Tommy has been emotionally distant since his father’s suicide.
Dr. Nelson found it difficult to distance himself emotionally from his patients.
In creative writing, we usually speak of emotional distance as being a personal detachment between the writer and what has been written — a process of letting go. This process of letting go happens (or, in the case studies I’ll get to shortly, sometimes fails to happen) at several junctures during the writing process.
Writing can, at times, be an emotionally draining experience for the writer depending on how much effort that writer puts into it. One’s personal attachments both to the material and to one’s own personal reality can be as much a hindrance as an asset during the creative process. For my purposes, I’m going to illustrate three different types of stumbling blocks toward establishing emotional distance in one’s writing: Attachment to personal reality, attachment to fictional reality, and attachment to one’s own ego.
Attachment to personal reality
As writers we often use our own lives and our own surroundings as source material. This becomes a problem when a writer’s desire to exorcize some personal demon takes precedence over any other consideration. Let’s take my friend . . . well, let’s call her, “Cassandra”. Cassandra is a fine writer, don’t get me wrong. However, last year Cassie got her heart broken by this asshole. Getting over him was made harder by the fact that he was someone she had to see everyday. Naturally, she wrote about it. In the beginning, though, her fictionalized accounts were told solely from the perspective of her broken heart. Mostly, her stories were revenge fantasies. Stories in which her fictional counterpart either got back at her ex for hurting her or got him to come back to her. Not many editors would have seen the flaws in her stories because she often writes stories about jilted lovers and not all editors would’ve been privy to her personal circumstances or had the opportunity to read all of these stories and see how they evolved over many months. And they did finally evolve. Once she mended her broken heart and found much needed emotional distance, she gained a new perspective. Instead of using fictional reality to work-out a problem in her personal reality, she was finally using her personal reality to create a fully realized fictional reality.
Attachment to fictional reality
This is an impediment to a writer’s ability to achieve emotional distance. In some cases, the writer suffers from some psychological or developmental disorder that affects their writing and the way they talk about their writing. Let’s take my friend . . . ah, let’s call her Bertha. Bertha has Asperger’s Syndrome. Now Bertha has been writing a story for what seems like an Ice Age. The story is about a cursed man-demon with a goofy name I can’t pronounce. Beyond that, I have no clue what the story is about really — although, Bertha talks about this character constantly. She speaks about him as if he was a real person. She speaks about him as if he was her lover. She can’t seem to finish the story either. She keeps getting caught-up in the minutia of her characters — so much so that a coherent, well-developed story never emerges. What she has instead is an overlong, over complicated, overwrought character sketch. Whenever she speaks to me about this story, I think, My God! She’s sinking in quicksand; somebody throw her a rope!
Attachment to Ego
This is by far the most common type of impediment. It comes in two flavors and usually happens after the completion of the first draft. The first type is due to a lack of confidence in one’s own writing ability. This writer is so certain that their writing sucks that they can’t detach themselves from their fear of failure and humiliation so their writing is never revised and submitted for publication. It usually ends-up in a drawer somewhere with the writer telling people how they’d “like to be a writer someday.”
The second type is the opposite: this writer has too much confidence in themselves — so much so that they refuse to listen to any constructive criticism that might help them improve their writing. They are completely lacking in emotional objectivity about themselves or their writing.
For the first type, I refer you to my friend … how about we call her, “Maggie” (and, yes, I do realize I have a lot of female friends, so shut up). Now, Maggie writes quite a bit. She’s very young and attends a community college. I feel very paternal towards her and, believe it or not, have tried to encourage her development because I think she has some potential. But, for all the writing she does, she rarely finishes her stories or tries to publish her work. She’s just too self-conscious. Not that she can’t handle criticism — it’s more that she’s a little too eager to accept the slightest criticism at face value without any mechanism to filter that criticism and judge the fairness of it.
For our second type, I offer you, “Juliet.” Juliet is a young woman about the same age as Maggie. She also attends college. Juliet was a sickly child and because of this, her parents and everyone else doted on her and indulged her every whim. When she showed an interest in writing at an early age, her parents and English teachers encouraged her to the point where they convinced her that she was the next Joyce Carol Oates or Sylvia Plath or whoever. Juliet, for the record, does have a magnificently large vocabulary and is mature for her age. But, many of us who’ve read her work — at least those of us who don’t have a vested interest in inflating her ego, find her writing to be incredibly dull, unimaginative and unengaging. However, anyone who dares offer any serious criticism of her work receives a long-winded rhetorical defense of her “technique.” She absolutely refuses to see her writing objectively and never revises anything.
Hopefully, these examples fairly demonstrate how distancing yourself emotionally from your writing can help you along the path:
– that when using aspects of your own life as source material, it should be in service the fictional reality you are trying to create and not the other way around — in other words, leave the therapy sessions for your journal.
– that while it is important to have an emotional connection to your characters (after all, if you’re not attached to them, chances are your readers won’t feel attached to them either), it shouldn’t be your raison d’etre.
– Be fearless and confident enough to honor your commitment to the creative process, however . . .
– also be realistic about the limits of your talent and understand that even the best writing is flawed and is subject to improvement. Even Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac had editors.
– Ego has no place in the creative process.
– be your first, most cold-blooded critic. if you can impress that guy, you may be onto something.
