Friday Write #085

Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft, with biweekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start; all you need is twenty minutes and a pencil.

Greetings, writers—

A week or two ago, in The Common Reader, I read something that struck me (bolding is mine):

Tolkien was almost middle-aged when he wrote The Hobbit, going from someone who devised languages and legends in his spare time, to a popular children’s author. It was never meant to be published, being instead a book for Tolkien’s own children. He had been working on his cycle of myths and languages, now know as The Silmarillion and The History of Middle Earth. But The Hobbit was a new departure, and since it wasn’t written with publishing in mind, you might say that he wrote it under the power of invisibility. Unlike his academic work and reputation, and his intentions for The Silmarillion, this wasn’t meant to be seen.

As a person who publishes primarily pseudonymously, I can tell you that the power of invisibly is real. I would not be where I am today without it.

Knowing that a name that’s not my own will printed on the front of the book frees me from approximately 98% of the terror and doubt I would otherwise feel.¹ But why? The citizens of the world don’t know/care who Emily Chenoweth is any more than they know/care who, say, Cinda Fitzgerald is (not actually one of my half-a-dozen pseudonyms, just an example). So it doesn’t make sense for me to care, either. Except that I do, very much. And I have to acknowledge that the extra layer of anonymity a different name offers is, by this point in my two-decade writing life, probably fundamental to my creative practice.

Jane Austen published anonymously; I still can’t get over that.

Of course, I’m slowly writing a novel that may someday be published under my own name. But in the meantime I have total invisibility with that, too. No one’s read it, and no one really knows what it’s about (neither do I, some days). For sure, no one is awaiting the new literary novel by the lady who wrote six kids’ books about an evil cat from a distant galaxy.

So I should embrace the secrecy of it, and I should definitely not get hung up on imagined future reviews in which someone says something like “Chenoweth writes lyrically, but the plot of her book is both dull and frivolous,” or whatever it is they might say.

Or maybe I should embrace a new authorial persona, with another new name, for this in-process novel (working title is simply The Book²). This writer will be a woman who never procrastinates, who resists checking her email a hundred times a day, and who is confident to the point of brazenness. If this woman could write The Book, everything would be so much easier.

Today, try writing as someone else, whatever that means for you. See what happens.

1. Just to be clear, it does not free me to phone it in/take it less seriously.

2. The poet Mary Ruefle has a “beguiling compendium of prose” called The Book.