Mary Karr’s breakthrough memoir The Liar’s Club was not just a brilliantly written book, pulsing with dark wit and cutting insight, it was also pretty unsparing about herself. Years later, she wrote in The Art of the Memoir about how she started The Liar’s Club on the assumption she’d be telling the story of her father leaving her. But when she really looked at what happened, the opposite was true:

I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash – a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him…

In an interview with The Writer, Karr talked about the necessity of confronting the truth, even if doing so might not cast you in the best light:

The reader will forgive you anything except lying.

You might think that a writer like Douglas Adams, who not only wrote for Doctor Who early in his career but also collaborated with Graham Chapman and even appeared in a Monty Python sketch, would have no problem with confidence. But as Writer’s Desk has previously noted, Adams was an infamous procrastinator, the kind who send publishers into fits and makes readers impatient.

But Adams was also aware of how to avoid blockages and not stay too in your head, wrapped up with anxieties.

At one point, Adams wrote a note to self that he would apparently look at when needing a reminder about how to get on with things. It deserves repeating here:

Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them. Give yourself time, you can come back and do it again in the light of what you discover about the story later on. It’s better to have pages and pages of material to work with and off and maybe find an unexpected shape in that you can then craft and put to good use, rather than one manically reworked paragraph or sentence. But writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it . . . !

Pleasure. Fun. Relaxation. Not qualities one normally associates with writing.

Try writing your own note to self. And carry on.

(h/t LitHub)

New Year’s Day is usually the time we start making promises to ourselves about what the coming year will bring. Writers are the same. We measure so much of ourselves by what we have produced. This makes us very susceptible to ideas of self-improvement, measurement, holding ourselves accountable, and feelings of letting ourselves down.

But as important as those things are when it comes to getting things done, none of it is worthwhile if you never enjoy yourself.

That is not to say every minute laboring over your piece is going to be a picnic. A lot of it will be be frustrating, a slog that challenges your desire to ever write another word.

But if that is all you feel, then this is the year to find the joy in this. Write for yourself for a while. Make yourself laugh, cry, or even just reminisce. Maybe you will never show it to anyone. That is okay. Writing is never a waste of time if you enjoy it.

Wendy Knerr said this in Writer’s Digest:

I’ve talked to published writers who are nostalgic about the days when all of their writing was just for them, before editors, agents and readers were influencing their craft. A friend who has published several short story collections told me he spent three years writing just for himself before considering publication and that he wishes he had spent 10. He said the time before the pressures of the market bear down on your creative spirit are often the best times of your writing career. You might think it is easy for published writers to lament their exit from the bliss of “pre-publication.” But this hindsight is an indication that, published or not, you already have access to the most rewarding gifts that writing has to offer…

Remember: This is supposed to be fun.