How To Write Egoless Prose, At Least For a Little While
The moment you sit down to write, two forces bear down on you. The first is an absolute conviction in the importance of your work, the shivery sense that you have been called to the language in some spiritual capacity, that you (and you alone) have stories the world must hear, that these stories are ready to spill out of you with the hot urgency of scripture and that when they do you will be recognized as a rare talent, a writer of the first order and eventually—why fight it?—the Messiah.
The second force is the creeping suspicion that any sustained effort to write is doomed, that you will never transcribe the story so perfectly arranged in your mind, will never convey the insight and depth of emotion sloshing around in there, and that the best result you can hope for is that your mother will drive to your apartment with a Crock-Pot full of soup and ask why you’re depressed.
It will help to take a step back from the keyboard and consider the essential nature of the activity. What is writing, if you boil away all the romance? Writing is decision-making. Nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Which characters to undress and in what manner? It’s relentless.
