"But the very terms that he employed showed me Literature as something entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray, and I realized that I had been doubly right in renouncing it. Until now, I had concluded only that I had no gift for writing; now M. de Norpois took away from me even the desire to write. I wanted to express to him what had been my dreams; trembling with emotion, I was painfully anxious that all the words I uttered would be the sincerest possible equivalent of what I had felt and I had never yet attempted to formulate; which is to say that my words were very unclear. Perhaps from a professional habit, perhaps by virtue of the calm that it acquired by every important personage whose advice is commonly sought, and who, knowing that he will keep the control of the conversation in his own hands, allows his interlocutor to fret, to struggle, to toil to his heart's content, perhaps also to show off the character of his face (Greek, according to himself, despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was being expounded to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient - and deaf - bust in a museum."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 488
In this passage Proust is struggling with the words of M. de Norpois and his own desire to be a writer. Years and years ago I wrote a novel, which was pretty bad, and a collection of short stories, which were a little more promising, but still pretty rough. I sent the novel and the short stories off to publishers and agents and they were all roundly rejected (and I think quite rightly so). Essentially, I was evolving as a writer and beginning that difficult process of trying to find my voice and learn the craft - or any of those words that people use to describe the grueling chore of learning to write. I showed some of my writing to my ex-wife and she was utterly disdainful of it, which I found crippling, and I stopped writing. This is not a condemnation of my ex-wife because, well, like I said, it really wasn't very good, and it was not her job to lie to me and tell me that it was. Rather, this is a condemnation of myself for giving up. It's not like me to just give up on anything. My friends will joke that I am like a force of nature when I want something. My normal response to criticism of one of my plans is an initial mini-collapse, and then I come back even stronger and in a much more determined and structured way. My normal joke is that you're just better off to accept this version of the plan because next week's is going to be much grander. But it was not that way with writing. I just stopped. Now, it could be that I was just playing at writing, and that I wasn't meant to be a writer, or it could have been that writing is such a deeply personal process that to I could not accept the criticism because it was too close. Or maybe it was just a case that at that moment in my life I was not prepared to deal with the criticism or put in the hours to make myself better. Either way, I've always regretted it. I saw where Helen Mirren recently said that if the seventy year old version of herself could have told anything to the twenty year old version of herself it would have been to feel free to tell more people to fuck off. That is truly sage advice.
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