Thoughts on Writing #45: You Brilliant Hack You.

[seanan_mcguire]

At last we have reached the forty-fifth essay in my series of fifty essays on the artistic masochism that is the act of writing. Considering this whole thing was an accident, I think I'm going rather well. All fifty of these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which means I am blessedly, mercifully, almost done. And there was much rejoicing.

Now, to the essay itself. Our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #45: You Brilliant Hack You.

Exposition is part of both these roles, so here's today's expanded thought:

You are brilliant and you are a hack. Sometimes you're going to be both in the same day. Embrace these two sides of your soul. Then bash their heads together until they start playing nice with each other, because nobody likes the golden goddess whose every word is a honeyed pearl, and nobody likes that other girl, either.

One truly of the fascinating things about the writing process is the self-contradictory nature of it all. You have to have enough faith in your skills and your ideas to sit down and put them on paper, where anyone can see them. And then, if you want to be a professional writer—if you want to actually do this for a living, rather than as a form of private catharsis—you have to find a way to let people see them. Critique groups. First readers. Eventually, if you're lucky and determined, an agent or an editor. All those people are going to poke holes in your work. And this is going to suck.

So how do you balance the ego needed to write with the humility needed to take critique? How do you walk the line between ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR and "screw it, rocks fall, everybody dies is a valid plot choice"? It's time to talk about the angel and the ape, and how we are supposed to balance ourselves between the two. Also, about why being a hack isn't always a bad thing.

Ready? Good. Let's begin.

First, Let's Lose the Judgments.

If I say "brilliant," how does that make you feel? If I say "hack," how does that make you feel? Okay. Think about those feelings for a moment, and try to set them aside.

I know that when someone calls me brilliant, it makes me happy, and makes me feel like I'm validated in my work. When someone calls me a hack, it hurts my feelings, and makes me wonder why the hell I bother. The trouble isn't that other people call me these things. I can't control what other people call me. The trouble is that sometimes, I call me these things, and that can be a serious problem.

We need to strip these words of their power over us. Don't let "brilliant" make you cocky; don't let "hack" make you sloppy. Remember that they're two sides of a coin that we spend every day flipping, over and over again. Sometimes it's heads, sometimes it's tails, but it's always going to be the same coin. Maybe you can increase the number of times you get one side or the other by practicing your flipping until your fingers fall off, but you can't get a coin with two heads, or two tails.

So you're brilliant. So what? You still need to work. So you're a hack. So what? You still need to aspire. Embrace both sides of the coin, without automatically elevating one over the other.

So Wait. Are You Saying Being Good Doesn't Matter?

There's a big difference between being good and being brilliant. "Brilliant" implies that you've just had some incredible stroke of genius, something that will forever change the status quo of your psyche—or at least enable you to say "dude, did you ever think about..." and have all your friends say that you're deep. There are lots of brilliant thinkers who aren't good writers. The two words aren't interchangeable.

Also, "hack" doesn't automatically mean "bad." According to Wikipedia, hack is "a colloquial and usually pejorative term used to refer to a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books 'to order', often with a short deadline." You know who writes books quickly? I do. Cat Valente does. Tim Pratt does. Lots of people do. The idea that anything written quickly must be of low-quality is silly. Good and bad will be achieved through practice, talent, skill, and insane amounts of hard work. Anyone who's ever let a homework assignment slip until the eleventh hour knows how to be a hack.

Let me be honest: I enjoy being a hack. I get uncomfortable when a book takes too long to write, like I must be doing something wrong, or it would already be finished. I like seeing words appear on the page, sometimes as fast as I am physically capable of typing them. Being brilliant is super-fun, but that comes before I sit down and start hammering out the actual text of whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish.

What's Your Point Here?

Some days you will be amazing. Some days you will not. Some days you will be swift and sure. Some days you will not. Some days you will have people tell you that your best ideas are trash, and that your worst ideas are gold. Some days you will not.

Some days you will drive all your friends crazy. Some days, you will not.

Be brilliant. Be a hack. Be whatever works for you. And if someone tells you that you're doing it wrong, tell them to go flip their own coin for a while, and see what comes up.

Comments

[mariadkins.livejournal.com]

i'm hacking brilliant! :P

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Yes, dear.

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

I love that pic.

[murgyt.livejournal.com]

"...It's time to talk about the angel and the ape, and how we are ..."

I feel like I'm missing something here. Am I?

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know exactly what Seanan was getting at, but the quotation is from Pratchett: Humans are "the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

I believe the next paragraph was actually from her last essay in this series, so I think something got copy-pasted/edited incorrectly. Hopefully it will be fixed come morning.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

I fixed the glitch in the re-post, and it should make a little more sense now.

[inkgrrl.livejournal.com]

My sensei calls this the god/wormshit cycle. Personally I get uncomfortable when I'm told I'm brilliant, as I start thinking I have to live up to something... like, "crap, what am I gonna have to pull out of my ass next to impress this person?" Hack, on the other hand, I like. Means I'm getting paid ;-)

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Oh, word. I freak out when I get praised too much.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

I think the pejorative implied by "hack" is the suggestion that the deadline is the more important element, as opposed to the actual work; "we need to set three column inches at 5 on Thursday or rocks will fall and nobody will eat this week, so what it actually is doesn't matter so much" -- like filibustering by reading the phone-book, because the measure being used is the "wrong" measure (say, volume not weight?). It gets tangled up into absolutes about working-speed because the popular image of stuff produced under those conditions doesn't cover the outliers who do naturally self-edit well under pressure...

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Right, exactly.

[manwe-iluvendil.livejournal.com]

I totally feel you. After two years of world-building and backstory prep, four years of deciding on the medium, and thirteen years of working out the story in my head, I'm finally plugging along on book #1. I'm only getting a few pages out a day, which is a little disappointing, but my momentum is unprecedented.

UNPRECEDENTED.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Good for you!

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I really, really needed to read this today.
Thank you.
Maybe now I can finish the book without anxiety.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I enjoy the adventures of many a scumbag ... because they usually have a core of goodness in them.

Lobo from DC Comics will gladly step on your head...unless he's promised not to then nothing can make him.

The Coreleones will beat the hell out of people...as a second option. Peaceful means first.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Hee.

[firebirdgrrl.livejournal.com]

You *rock*.

Thanks for this.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome!

[muddlewait.livejournal.com]

I really like how you view this.

There was an episode of Radio Lab a while back that talked about the statistical certainy of seemingly miraculous events if enough opportunities for them to occur are created -- about the idea that, say, a coin coming up heads seven times in a row is nearly impossible in seven isolated flips, but after a few thousand, you're almost guaranteed to have it happen at least once. Craft and experience modify the odds of any individual flip, of course, but in the end I think the whole world is a bunch of people flipping coins, highlighting and combining the results they want, making miracles one incredibly improbable event at a time.

Your entry also brings to mind one of my favorite passages in any novel, from which I now feel compelled to quote.

Sometimes Inigo would wake to find him weeping: "What is it, Father?" "It is that I cannot do it. I cannot make the sword. I cannot make my hands obey me. I would kill myself except what would you do then?" "Go to sleep, Father." "No, I don't need sleep. Failures don't need sleep. Anyway, I slept yesterday." "Please, Father, a little nap." "All right; a few minutes; to keep you from nagging."

Some nights Inigo would awake to see him dancing. "What is it, Father?" "It is that I have found my mistakes, corrected my misjudgments." "Then it will be done soon, Father?" "It will be done tomorrow and it will be a miracle." "You are wonderful, Father." "I'm more wonderful than wonderful, how dare you insult me."

But the next night, more tears.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's brilliant. Thank you for sharing.

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

Being able to read things I've written has been a hard-won skill. Letting other people read them takes time.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

You will get there.

[nounsandverbs]

... and having been linked to this post through dulcinbradbury, I must friend you now.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Welcome.