Guest Blogger Hal Zina Bennett writes about our inner critics.
Most of us writers are plagued by inner critics, those still small voices that speak from within, asking unsettling questions such as: “What makes you think you’re a writer?” Or, “This is drivel.” Or, the classic, “Don’t leave your day job.” Everyone has these inner critics, though some of us find their voices louder or more cutting than others. In their most insidious form, we feel these inner critics as our own self-judgments, not truths that we must accept. The author Storm Jameson put it well: “There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.” We write a few lines or pages that upon our review are “just terrible.” Instead of just rewriting or editing them, we point to them as evidence that we really can’t write.
It’s difficult to accept that these inner critics, who stop us in our creative tracks, are within us; they may have originated through events that happened in our past but today exist only in our minds. To free yourself of these inner critics’ influences only when you own them, fully acknowledging that you yourself are creating them today. If you can own your inner critic, you have a choice — to cling to their judgments or not. Try to push them away and they only grow stronger, arguing like willful children or belittling parents. You can let them go, let go of your attachment to them. How? Start by making them characters in a story or in vignette you write in your journal. Describe them in detail, the more detail the better. Give the color of their eyes, the color of their hair, their body type, their voice, their stench.
C. G. Jung encountered a form of inner critic in what he called the animus. His experience, reported in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was that the animus, or inner critic, has its most powerful impact on our emotional life only when it remains unconscious and unnamed. As long as it is unconscious and unnamed, we experience it as inseparable from us. We can feel quite attached to their harsh criticisms.
Jung found that by “personifying” them we essentially “strip them of their power.” They still exist in our psyches but are better able to take their harsh judgments with a grain of salt. As writers, we can even use them as seeds for characters in our stories.
If you’re plagued by a particularly bothersome inner critic, recreate them as a character in a story. Satirize them, if you wish. The more you’re able to give them a reality on paper, the more you will be able to accept them as having a right to own opinions, their own distorted pictures of you. The more real they become on paper, the greater will be your choices about accepting or rejecting what they say about you. I’m convinced that some of the world’s most memorable villains were created in this way—and in the process their creation has defused their power as inner critics.
Hal Zina Bennett is a bestselling author of more than 30 published books, including Write Starts: Prompts Quotes and Exercises to Jumpstart Your Creativity, from which this article was excerpted.
Permission has been granted for use of the requested passage from the book Write Starts. Copyright © 2010 by Hal Zina Bennett. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com.
