Embrace Your Cringe Writing
It will tell more than you think about your voice and style. Trust.
Last week I was a woman engulfed in boxes. Stacking books on bookshelves and thumbing through the pages of old lovers and toxic friends. Having lived with so little for years, I was tyrannical about editing down my collection. And as I was making piles for donations, I came across a small tome, really a leaflet, and I was jettisoned back to the spring of 1997 where I wore baseball caps, binge-drunk, and celebrated scoring a job at an investment bank before graduation. I’m with Liz and we’re thumbing through J. Crew catalogs and junk mail when a guy stops me. He’s holding a print-out of a short story I wrote and he asks if I really wrote it. Because he can’t make the connection between writer and finance major.
And for years, I couldn’t either.
After the story is published, I attend a launch party which amounts to sitting in a bar with warm beer and everyone gives me a double-take. The editor, the guy who stopped me in front of the cafeteria, looks at me differently. It’s a look that no longer holds disdain, but curiosity, as if I’m a woman who needs to be figured out. A tiny gold baby glinting in a glass jar. I am the party’s amusement.
Years later, that short story will change and evolve into an essay I’ll submit with graduate school applications. And even later still, it will evolve into my first book, The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here.
While many writers know their style from the jump, I was forever confused. Traumatized by an MFA program and pressured by an editor to re-write my chapters in a “traditional” format, it would take quitting a job that had been slowly killing me, fleeing to Biarritz in the off-season and starting what would become my second book did I find my voice and style. I remember that night in an inn in front of the ocean, cuts from barnacles on my hands. The writing came from nowhere, a torrent, a storm with a ferocity that frightened me.
And when I sent a chapter to an old friend—a writer whom I admired, a woman who didn’t get a cell phone until she had her first child in her late thirties (and is the only person I know who has zero online presence), a woman whose writing is beloved by Don Delillo—and she took pictures of her notes on a paper shaped like an octopus. Until that day in 2013, she had never been impressed by my work, even after I published Sky. But now, now I was on to something BIG and I felt it too.
For years, I wondered why I only sought her approval. I didn’t care what people thought, but what Kira thought, mattered. And it only occurred to me recently that I cared because our styles are very similar (although she’s far more experimental and opaque—a true line writer) and I wanted the confidence and command of language she seemed to have in her own writing. She knew her voice and style from the jump and here I was, 38, finally discovering mine.
Fast forward to me on the floor in 2024 and reading this story I wrote for a college literary magazine.
To tell you I cringed would be an understatement. While it was raw and real, it felt try-hard, and for a minute I was willing to toss it into a bin but I made myself read it to the end and I was shocked because my style and voice had been there all along.
The non-linear approach, the interruptions of other media, the lyrical nature of it, the sarcasm. It was all there. Granted, it wasn’t as smooth and assured as it is now, but it was there.
For a long time, I made a point of not reading my old work. I was embarrassed by it. I haven’t even read my first book since it was published in 2008. But that’s a mistake because reading your old work is an education, albeit a cringe-worthy one.
Reading work between points in time (even the same story but in later drafts) not only shows your growth, but also gives you insight into your tics. The things you tend to repeat in each story. How you construct sentences. The words you use and how you arrange them like song or symphony. Print out 1, 5, 10, 15 years of work and you’ll see a through-line—you just have to set your emotions aside.
You have to regard your work as an act of excavation. Forget the story, what trends do you see in how you approach writing? Do you focus more on the language, the storytelling, or a mix of both? How do you construct scenes and sentences? I tend to open scenes with a specific action that jolts the reader or dialogue. I love starting in the middle of the action. When it comes to sentences, I prefer to juxtapose long lyrical lines with staccato-like, short terse ones. I read my work aloud because the rhythm of a line matters to me. The sentence has to move, and I will excise any word that impedes that movement. How do you introduce characters? I tend to lean more on developing characters by what they say and think rather than lean into massive exposition. I let them reveal themselves, by degrees. What point-of-view do you tend to employ and why? I notice when I need emotional distance from a narrative, I will employ second or third person. When I am most confident, I meander into first person. Are there any literary devices, tools, and techniques you tend to lean on? I’m big on knitting in outside media—I remember reading Don Delillo’s White Noise and feeling the interruptions from the radio news reports and television and how it felt right. I need to take the reader in and out of the story, I need to bring in context, in order for my story to be larger than itself.
You’ll see your individual tics and trends only through enduring the pain of reading through your body of work or successive drafts of a full-length work. Physically print out your work. Read through it with a pen in hand. Notice the things you tend to do on a narrative and line level and ask yourself if these are things you like to do, things that move the story forward and give you confidence or are they crutches, bad habits that help you move through a story but somehow hinder it. I noticed I was getting too into language to a point where it called attention to itself. It felt like a parlor trick and I had to comb through my writing (and I do this now still) and ask myself: is this line here because it makes me look cool or is it here because it moves the story forward?
I only wish I made myself re-read my older work because I would’ve found my voice sooner.
This is a beautiful piece and wonderful encouragement for those (like me) who wonder about our voices, and how to strengthen them.
Okay, this essay went straight into my Felicia file on my computer. To read again and again. I'm reworking a novel I wrote in 2003, and yes, I'm cringing. Thank you!