The Importance of Being Mediocre

It took me a good three years or so of writing before I felt I could tell people I was a writer. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it. But why? I get paid to write. It’s the primary source of my income. You might even call it my ‘job’. I write stories, too. Short ones, usually, but sometimes poetry and I’ve got a half-done second draft of a novel stashed away somewhere, too. Is that not enough?

Well, no. It’s not. I’m not entirely sure why, but I have a faint idea. I grew up in awe of writers. Wordsworth was a writer. Shakespeare was a writer. Fitzgerald and Woolf and King and Rowling were, and are, writers. They were greats. They were historic and beloved and known. The idea that there were bad writers and decent writers and okay writers just never crossed my mind, until I began to write myself.

And here’s the crux of the thing I’ve never told anybody: mediocrity is my greatest fear. I know I’m not a bad writer — I’ve had enough support from the magnificent people in my life to see that. I know I’m not a great writer, either — because I know what a great writer is, and I know I’m not that. I find myself, then, sitting in the in-between; a grey zone of amateurism which ought to be a halfway house that leads to real talent but now, over half a decade after I first began to write, looks suspiciously to me like an inescapable purgatory.

This wouldn’t be such a problem, of course, if it didn’t have a tendency to send me down an utterly hopeless road. Perhaps for somebody who was better equipped to deal with their own flaws, it might instil a sort of humility in them, or push them to go further and be better than they already are. I, however, am instead blessed with inertia. It’s a lovely way to be. The creeping uncertainties and lingering doubts prey on your own motivation, and it only takes the slightest misgiving about your own ability to send you into a creative spiral that ends with no more than a single blank page and a wasted month.

Of course, this doesn’t just stop you starting things. It stops you finishing them, as well. My portfolio, if I had one, would be littered with incomplete non-projects: scripts and poems and treatments and notes and stories and ideas and, yes, that novel. Each is thrown aside when the faith just isn’t there, soon to be replaced by something new. And when you’re up to your waist in crumpled paper (or its digital equivalent) and you see somebody else, be they a friend or an acquaintance or even an artist you admire and love, finish their thing and release it into the big bad world for people to read and enjoy, you just end up resenting your own half-baked misadventures in fiction. So you give up. And you move on to something else.

I’m not special, though. Other writers beat themselves up over stuff like this, too — the internet is awash with articles and posts in writing communities about how almost all writers feel these feelings. It helps to read that. It really does. But then, those writers still get it done. They feel the feelings but they still tell the story they need to tell. So what’s my excuse?

Look at the writers who had it worse: look at Emily Dickinson, with her anxiety and bipolar-riddled isolation, or Hemingway and his deep, black cocktail of disorders and psychoses. Or even Sylvia Plath, who was so afflicted by mental health issues that such a thing as the ‘Sylvia Plath effect’ exists, which posits that poets are more susceptible to depression and mental illness than other creative writers.

I’m lucky. I am not depressed. I do not have bipolar disorder. I don’t suffer from any anxiety beyond a preference to not speak on the phone with strangers. So to find myself wallowing in stagnation and inactivity for no better reason that I just can’t find confidence in the writing (and even to find myself unable to write because of it) seems like an utter disservice to the memory of people who’ve had it far, far worse and did far, far better. “They managed it. Everybody else manages it. You’re not talented enough to be tortured. Get over it. Get good.” But it never quite happens.

It does come in peaks and troughs, though. Sometimes a good day comes along, and suddenly the ideas are there, and then the writing flows. And then you finish that writing, and — by God — you actually love what you’ve made. And you show people and they like it and it all begins to make sense again. And then it goes. That feeling can last an hour, a day or even a week, but it always goes.

No matter how far you make it, you still feel that touch of inadequacy on the back of your neck; a stark reminder of every needless semicolon and hackneyed metaphor, every drawn-out, overlong sentence, every other failing of the form, each of which finds its own way to perpetually stain your mind and your memory. The mistakes bury the successes; one defeat obliterates every victory. You re-read a thing you loved… and there’s that semicolon again.

With the uncertainty, naturally, comes the stagnation, and the circle completes its revolution. Everything starts over, and you’re back on the bus, looking out the window, wishing you were better than you are. It’s a sort of twisted ambition, I suppose, to want to achieve just to prove to yourself that you can. But when you feel that you can’t, and uncertainty becomes stagnation, the self-fulfilling prophecy kicks in — and you don’t.

There’s not a lot of point to expressing any of this, other than it being a mildly useful therapeutic exercise. There’s even less of a point to posting it publicly, other than out of the hope that someone feeling this way might now know that someone else does. Or maybe it’s vanity. It doesn’t exactly do to be so unsure of your own subconscious motivations, but, hey, that’s life. Sometimes it’s unsteady, sometimes it’s better and sometimes it just is. But if all this sucks — and suck it does — it at least feels good to have written about it.