It’s my experience of life that ego is the enemy of much that otherwise might be good, but rarely does knowing it make a difference.
It’s one of the things I write about, though surreptitiously, as are all the things I write about. (To digress for a moment, I don’t set out to write moral fables or with such a clearly defined themes. I write stories that are true in themselves and which – as it happens in life – touch upon these elements and illuminate them).
Ego can also lead you astray in your writing, though I’ll speak only for myself.
I’m thinking about it now as I’m writing this, asking myself, what is good writing? There are probably many different answers to that, but at this moment, I think it’s connecting honestly with a deeper truth and putting it on the page without shame.
To become a writer of this ilk in the first place suggests sensitivity and quite possibly some introversion. Certainly, it suggests curiosity and thoughtfulness, and perhaps even some humility. And, to be good, honesty as well.
Writing is a solitary, anti-social business, and together with that set of attributes, there’s nothing to suggest the writer has any greater ego than most, and very likely less – and in my reading, it seems that there are many who have so subverted themselves in service of their work that ego doesn’t exist.
But, of course, writers are people too. They – we? – come in all types, all shapes, all politics, all beliefs and attitudes, all personalities. Sometimes, we’ll see that in the writing; sometimes, we laud the writer for their unique vision and individuality. This is what we’ve come to see.
Ego in writing is a balancing act. If it’s ego that leads the writer to boldly walk the plank where no one else dares go, then let’s go there. But equally, the writer who removes the ego from their work creates something that draws us in because it’s on a scale we can identify with – and so becomes our story as well as theirs.
In my case, I don’t have much choice in the matter. I have an abundant ego and a healthy dose of narcissism as well. The combination has favoured me often, made me bold when I needed to be and strong when I had to hold the line. It’s also made me stupid sometimes and led me to crash and burn more than I can say – but at least it has provided excellent fuel for the creative fire.
The voice you hear now is the voice of the ego. It’s the projection of me in my writer’s get-up. I won’t tell you any more than I want you to know and in a voice calculated to charm and intrigue. It’s not false or insincere; it comes unadulterated from my mind (you get the first draft), but the tone is curated to create an image of me as an individual. Never mind the other shit I keep secret from you.
But later, when I sit down to do my actual writing, I’ll look to set that ego aside. That’s a work in progress, but then I’m doing this for a reason. Fiction writing isn’t a vanity project. I set out writing all those years ago for a range of reasons. Ego was one of them – I wanted to leave a record, a mark, of my existence. But what drove it forward was curiosity, wonder, and a search for a kind of truth that made sense to me, and ego had no part in that – just the opposite.
This is not to say that ego is absent from my fiction writing. It informs how the stories come together, and it’s there in a voice I want to be heard. I’m not so humble that I want to take myself out of the story altogether, but the trick is to manage it, which means being ruthless sometimes, like Faulkner said, killing your darlings when they need to be killed.
In this way, at least, I am without ego – as I’m not in life, I seek to prostrate myself on the page. There’s a kind of glory in such humility, even if at one remove. Everything is subject to the raw truth. I’m searching for it for myself, and you readers get the chance to come along for the journey.