is cringe stopping you?

bearing the gap between your reality and your taste

We’re all a little afraid of being Elaine. Or is it more honest to say I’m a little afraid of being Elaine? Because I am someone who would volunteer to get the dancing started…

But how often does our fear of making a fool out of ourselves stop us from trying something promising, something that might enliven us or even change the course of our lives?

I’m talking about cringe — that visceral recoil from imagined embarrassment — and how it can stop us, like an invisible guardrail of ego protection snapping into place before we do an Elaine.

Cringe is on my mind because I’m living in a near-constant state of it. I’m writing a contemporary fantasy novel with a climate twist and my first draft is so awkward, it’s like wearing an itchy cringe suit while doing the Elaine dance. So much to change, so much to rewrite but first, I need to finish the first draft. I know firsthand the danger of stopping to fix all the things that are bugging you before writing to the end - for me that way lies death. I do rewrite as I go but for character and story development. I make a ton of notes about what I need to go back and fix. I do this because I once spent two years rewriting the first 40 pages of a novel.

Still, there are days I stop writing and sink into a funk because the gap between my taste and where my book is now is so ginormous. Grand Canyon has got nothing on my gap.

In the past, when I had less support and experience, I quit writing because of this gap.

I quit because of cringe.

This makes me wonder: how often do we decide something is past due, too late, why bother when if we can learn to live in the cringe (with the cringe?), we would try again?

How can we learn to live in the gap between what’s here now and what we envision? Like-minded friends to bitch with helps. So does taking a break. So does a simple meditation practice and lots of self-compassion.

But most of all it’s knowing cringe goes with the territory of trying anything you care about.

We can move forward and cringe at the same time. It’s probably what Elaine was doing - cringe and kick, cringe and stick your thumb out.

I quit because of cringe. But you won’t.

There’s another form of cringe. This one can keep us from starting in the first place so we always wonder: could I have? This article by Lev Grossman speaks to getting over that hump, allowing yourself to follow your tastes, even when your community, family, or fancy alma mater thinks it’s beneath you.

I wrote fiction for 17 years before I found out I was a fantasy novelist. Up till then I always thought I was going to write literary fiction, like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Jhumpa Lahiri. But I thought wrong.

The mistake, as a lot of mistakes do, had its origins in my childhood. I grew up in a very literary household. My mother was a novelist. My father wrote poetry; in fact he won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship for it. They were both English professors. Like most people, I read a lot of fantasy as a child — “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was the first novel I ever got good and lost in. But I think there was an understanding that I would eventually move on.

Which for a while it looked like I was doing. I got a fancy education (Harvard) and then a fancier one (Yale). But I always led a double life as a reader. By day, the giants of the Western canon — Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner — and fantasy by deepest, darkest, starriest night: Lewis, Tolkien, White, Leiber, Le Guin, McCaffrey, Cooper, Moorcock, Zelazny, Pullman.

I published two novels, the literary kind, one in 1998 and another in 2004, but even then I knew they were missing something. They had a chilly quality. The writing came slow and hard. There was something inside me that just wasn’t making it onto the page. I hadn’t found my voice yet. I was starting to wonder if I even had one.

Lev dares to try writing fantasy and:

The first time I wrote a sentence about a person casting a spell, it was like I heard distant alarms going off. I felt like there must be a control room somewhere with a bunch of people sitting wearing headsets and looking at a red dot blinking on a map, and the dot was me, and the people were saying, He’s breaking the rules! We can’t let him get away with this! I was writing against my education and my upbringing. I was writing against reality itself — I was breaking rules, and not just the literary kind but the thermodynamic kind, too. It felt forbidden. It felt good.

Better than good: it was the most profound, intense writing experience I’d ever had.

Our cringe factor often decreases with experience and age — we realize we won’t die if we look like a fool and we have fewer f**ks to give about what our family or community might say (or they’re all dead). But sometimes we believe our cringe factor is gone when it’s gone into hiding behind our love of comfort and routine.

We say to ourselves we aren’t afraid to play soccer again or try out for the local play or travel to Istanbul alone, we’re happy with the way things are, we like fruit for breakfast and our coffee a particular way from our espresso machine and we don’t know anybody who can take care of our ancient dog the way we do.

Thus we ignore the flutter in our belly that says, “Try this, come on, there’s something juicy there, there’s more life to be had.”

I’ll keep wading through my cringe and writing my novel. I won’t let my cringe stop me like before. It doesn’t mean my novel isn’t cringe-worthy right now, it is, but I see it for what it is: a phase. A long painful phase but one I can work through.

I know it’s never too late to cringe and keep going. Elaine is my spirit animal.

If you need any cheering to get through a current state of cringe, I’m happy to help - just click the purple button.

Love,

Jen