On denial, hitting rock bottom, and what it took to move forward with writing

Back in 2010, Writer’s Digest published an agent roundtable about publishing memoir that’s still highly relevant today. As they evaluated potential clients, the agents agreed, they looked for three things: authorial platform, a book’s premise, and a book’s voice.

Most published writers I know have taken a long time to develop these abilities. To my mind, all three, but especially the last two—premise and voice—are the results of craft and revision.

They’re also about perseverance…about moving past the many failures that accompany the journey of becoming better at any skill.

And yet it’s easy to become discouraged along the way. So how is it that some writers get stuck while others figure out a way to keep moving forward?

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My would-be client, a retired professor, 70ish, had high aspirations for his memoir-in-progress. I knew this not only from the mutual friend who’d put us in touch, but also from the way he carried himself throughout our Zoom, sitting poised on a sharp-looking mid-century sofa; while off to one side he’d hung a row of beautifully framed photos and a tall plant strategically placed for maximum webcam effect.

The pages we discussed included a childhood filled with emotional neglect and family dysfunction.

In our call, I stuck to those craft elements I thought would make the biggest impact on revision: reshaping scenes so they weren’t written in summary but in actual scene; and rethinking the scope of his child narrator, one who wasn’t yet selecting the most telling details to help cue the reader to the author’s intent.

But over the course of our hour, he pushed back on the feedback I gave. He’d already been working on this material for years, he said, implying his narrator was just the one this book needed and his scenes were fine as written.

Later, I learned through our mutual friend that the professor was disappointed by our meeting. He’d been looking for more praise and less craft.

“But how does he expect to get better?” I wanted to know. What I was really asking however was: how might I help him move past his defensiveness? What would it take for him to want to become better?

In Zen Buddhism there’s the concept of beginner’s mind—the dropping of expectations and ideas about something in favor of approaching it open-hearted, without preconceptions.

It’s a great idea. It’s also, in my experience, so much easier said than done.

As it happens, I’ve been exactly where my professor was, believing my work to be farther along than it was, and feeling deep resistance and disappointment when I learned this wasn’t the case.

There’s one difficult memory, from a summer workshop in Vermont over a dozen years ago. Beforehand, I’d submitted an essay about the ways in which, as an adolescent (and beyond), I was enmeshed in an emotionally abusive dynamic with my mother, one that found strange relief in our early bonding over 1980s horror movies.

At the time, I’d been teaching and writing memoir for a few years. Because of this, I thought I understood how to write this story. After all, I was good at helping others to locate the deeper story they wanted to tell. But then, I myself had trouble opening up enough to get my own inner journey on the page.

It was this journey I’d spent a lot of time working into this essay. Or thought I had, right up to the moment I sat through the workshop and then read the instructor’s comments.

Where are you in all of this? he’d wanted to know.

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“It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept,” runs the punchline by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.

In the case of my professor, he’d felt as if he’d already invested a lot of time in the work he’d submitted. To integrate my feedback would be to accept, on some level, the challenge of learning craft basics. More than this: the challenge of being a beginner. Maybe even to confront some (mistaken) belief that he’d been wasting his time.

All of which is very painful. I should know – after that Vermont workshop I felt raw, angry, resentful. I’d underestimated the impact of growing up in a narcissistic household where it felt unsafe to be honest or authentic about my inner self.

No wonder it’s so much easier to maintain the fantasy that one is farther along.

Call it the writer’s version of the “sunk cost fallacy”—the concept in psychology that people have a cognitive bias to keep going with bad situations in which they’ve invested time and money, since the feeling of having “sunk” a lot of resources into something makes it difficult to walk away.

A couple of years after the summer workshop, I found myself deep in a program of personal recovery that included 12-step meetings, various types of therapy including EMDR and Internal Family Systems (IFS) and more. Over the past decade, I’ve worked hard to uncover and detach from the shame that kept me hidden in my own work.

And it was early in my 12-step life that I discovered a useful concept for what it took to move beyond denial: that of hitting rock bottom.

Hitting bottom is the point in one’s program when you finally decide you’ve had enough. When you can no longer deny that the cost of drinking, or drugs, or shopping, or eating, or spending, or the pursuit of sex/love is greater than the stopping of the behavior.

It turns out hitting bottom is hard to do—and it sometimes helps if it’s happened before you seek recovery. At least in my experience, I’d see people in my own program come and go, month after month, or year after year, while a core group remained. To a person, we had experienced some kind of serious bottom, some personal nadir that made it really clear things had gotten out of hand; that we had to change.

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The other thing I noticed is that hitting bottom proved to be a great metaphor for what it took to start doing whatever hard thing was in front of me.

As I discovered, one reason it can be hard to hit bottom is that most people, including me, resist pain. Who wants to sit with all that discomfort?

It was only when the pain of remaining stuck became greater than the pain of changing than any real change happened.

In the case of my Vermont summer workshop, it took a long time to look at that essay without feeling a stinging sense of rebuke. And yet, when I came back to it after some weeks or months, I could see exactly what the instructor had told me was right. My internal journey was nowhere to be found on the page.

At the time, I thought about giving up on writing. I suppose for some time I did. But eventually that need to make sense of my own life through writing, the pleasure of finding the right language or metaphor to explain an experience – these proved too compelling.

A kind of bottom, if you like: for me, the pain of resisting the work of deepening my inner story proved stronger than the pain of not writing at all.

The metaphor of hitting bottom in one’s writing is imperfect, to be sure. For many others, they’ve seemed (at least on the outside) to move in more of a straight line than I did.

In between all the recovery I went back to grad school and got my MFA. It was a highly imperfect experience. I learned some things, but also sometimes struggled to get myself fully on the page.

I still do.

Another program principle that doubles as a writing metaphor: I’m a work-in-progress.