I'm Anything But Mediocre

Behind the Book: Reflections on Loving My Own Writing

Today is the official launch of the paperback version of MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. I received my copies of the new paperback a few days ago. My partner Gabriel grabbed a copy and read through the new preface, as that was the one part of the book that he hadn’t read yet.

Image Description: photo of the paperback version of MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

One of the many things I love about being partnered with another Black person is that you rarely have to wait to know how they feel about something. As he read he kept exclaiming, “mmm hmmm…” and “ooohhh” and “yup, yup” and, if you know Gabriel, “woooowww.” He finished reading, looked at me and said, “You wrote the hell out of that.”

I looked at him with a little surprise and said, “I did?”

I have documented what a long, miserable process book writing is. It is easy to believe, when the writing becomes particularly tough, that your writing is very, very bad. It is easy for all the self doubt that you had to shove aside to creep in and convince you that you are not a good writer at all and that this is all an “Emperor has no clothes” situation that will become apparent to anyone the moment your book gets its first review.

I have, at this point, mostly gotten past these attacks of self doubt. But I was still a little surprised just because when I am writing a book I kind of go into this weird autopilot and the hard work of translating all of the thoughts, feelings, sounds and smells in my brain into the written word is a process that I don’t fully understand. It is not uncommon for me to carry very little conscious knowledge of what the finished product actually looked like when I finished. People have quoted me to me and I’ve looked at them and responded, “oh, that’s really great!” and then stood there in awkward silence as it dawned on me that those are my own words.

Anyway, I read the preface, it’s so good! Then I jumped to the end of the book and read the last chapter. Also very good! And now that we are launching the paperback and I’m all in my feels about this very good book I wrote, I decided to ramble a little bit about what it means to be a Black woman writer who loves her own work - what it means to know that I’m a damn good writer, and how I got here. Because if you are a writer, I want you to love your work too.

Many of you know that I started my writing career relatively late, in my early thirties. I did not have a journalism or English degree. I had no internships or any previous experience with publication. I just needed to be heard. I started writing because the words inside of me were packed so densely inside that I was afraid I might explode.

But it wasn’t easy. The first time that I sent an essay to an editor I thought I might die. I’m only exaggerating a little. I had a full panic attack. I spent a full day looking at the “send” button trying to get the courage to push it, while literally bawling my eyes out. I - a broke, fat, queer Black, single mother - had put myself into this piece. I had written about myself, my life, and my feelings, and had decided that the world needed to read about me. Who the fuck did I think I was? I remember asking myself that. Who the fuck do you think you are? I remember calling myself selfish. I remember calling myself foolish. I called my brother and my sister in law multiple times, asking them to please read the essay again to reassure me that it wasn’t horrible and I wasn’t making a huge mistake. At the end of the day, gasping for air, I hit send.

I did not die.

Over the years a lot of the things that I had feared actually happened. I have been told that I have no right to share my story. I have been told that my opinion doesn’t matter. There have been times where I’ve been wrong in what I wrote. There have been times where my work was selfish and caused harm. People have threatened me because of my work. People have called me every imaginable name. And none of it ended me. Because I discovered that I’m a great writer, and if I remain dedicated to my work, and responsible to my community, I’ll only become better.

It started with that first piece. The response, while mixed, was generally positive. I started writing more pieces for small independent websites, some paid, some free. I had a small group of friends who volunteered to read my pieces before I submitted them. With each bit of feedback my writing became better, tighter. With each publication I would read through comments and try to separate the constructive feedback from the destructive.

I even made charts grouping feedback by common characteristics to find trends. It might sound weird or robotic to make charts of feedback, but it’s important to understand the unique place I was in. I was a mostly instinctual writer with little formal training. My work that I was doing for myself was resonating with others in a world that was constantly telling me that someone like me would never be able to create art that people would want or need to engage with, and I needed to know why. I was not writing like the J school grads were and yet, for some reason, people were reading my work and asking for more. Also, I’m a chart nerd.

I know that I’m not the only person who has been inundated with messaging that says that only certain voices deserve to be heard. I hear from trans people, women, people of color, disabled people, people who speak a language other than English as their first language, and so many more who would love to write and have so much to say - but they are battling the overwhelming amount of messaging that says that nobody wants to hear from them. I have tried to share some of the things I’ve learned in my own journey to loving and trusting my writing and here are a few tips I’ll share with you.

1. If your writing effectively communicates your ideas to your community, it is valid. A lot of people who write or speak in regional or racial dialects are told that they need to learn how to write “properly” in order for their work to be effective. This idea is racist, classist, and xenophobic. It’s also just really inaccurate. The ways in which many of us are taught writing in school is narrowly defined by classist white supremacy and doesn’t reflect the ways in which we talk in our homes or communities. In insisting that we all write this way, we are also insisting that many people from communities outside of upper and middle class whiteness constantly translate what we are writing and reading in order for it to be useful to us. Here’s the truth: your community is valid. If your writing is understood by your community, it is just as valid as writing that is understood by white communities. Here’s another truth: white people are just as capable of translating language meant for communities of color as we have had to be in order to read language written through a lens of whiteness.

2. Your writing doesn’t have to be for everybody. In fact, it shouldn’t. This does tie in to my previous point, but there is also more to it. When I started writing and began confronting the fears of all of the negative feedback I could get from my writing, I had to consider who I was actually writing for. I am a Black woman. Anything I do to be heard or seen in this world is going to bring negative feedback. So I really had to ask myself, “whose opinion matters to me here?” I have had to figure out three things each time I sit down to write: Who am I writing to, Who am I responsible to, and What do I want the person I’m writing to to walk away with here? Who I’m writing to is my target audience. If I had to pick one demographic of reader to read this piece and engage with it, who would they be? Who I’m responsible to is more tricky. As a writer on issues of race and gender, I’ve stated before that I’m almost always trying to be responsible to Black women and hold myself accountable to the ways in which my work may impact other Black women. But in writing about race and gender I must also make sure that I’m responsible to the particular ways in which my work may impact communities I’m not in, like the trans and disabled communities. What I want my target audience to walk away with is usually one or two core points that I need to effectively communicate in a way that I want my target audience to understand. Knowing that helps stop me from thinking that I have to cover every possible point or angle of a subject in order to write about it.

3. There is not enough of You out in the world. When you are struggling with self-doubt about whether or not your work is worthy of being out there, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about the quality of your writing, it’s also about what you represent. How many writers do you get to read who have your particular lived experience? How many of them are Black? How many of them are Indigenous? How many are disabled? How many are trans? How many speak English as a second or third language? How many pieces by these authors do you come across on a regular basis? How many did you see in your school library? What would it have meant for your to see more, even if they weren’t all the most skillfully written pieces of writing you’d ever read? How would those perspectives have changed your understanding of the world? What would it have meant to have overwhelming evidence that your voice deserved to be heard? Would you be questioning if your work deserves to be out in the world right now?

4. Get familiar with your voice. Read your work out loud to yourself or run it through your head like you do your own thoughts. Do you stumble over the words more than usual? Do they feel funny in your mouth? If so then, chances are, you aren’t writing in your own voice. Yes, our writing is often our best version of our words. Our sentences are cleaner, our thoughts clearer. But if it doesn’t feel like you when you say it, then it isn’t you. And in a world oversaturated with the boring mediocrity of white language norms, your voice is all you have. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: whiteness has no need for knockoff whiteness. It has that shit down. Know what you do best and try to trust it.

5. Trust editors and readers who bring you closer to your voice. A good editor will not just know what their publication needs, they will also like your voice and want to help you communicate better through it. A good editor will bring you closer to yourself than you were in a previous draft. A good editor will be curious about why you made the writing choices you made. A good editor will tie their edits back to your stated goals. Trust those editors, and learn to push back when editors want to make changes that fundamentally change your voice or pull you away from your values.

6. Celebrate growth. When you try something new with writing, celebrate it. Look for opportunities to stretch and be sure to respect the process of learning. Writing that is good for you will not always be good writing. I’ve learned more from pieces that failed than from pieces that have succeeded. Be open to those experiences and committed to learning from them. We are never done learning and our craft is never done growing.

Damn, I love writing. I want you to love writing too. I want your voices out there. I want you to be a part of the chorus that seeks to rise about the mediocrity that I wrote about in my book. I want my children to have your work to look to as evidence that they too should be heard. I want to learn from your words. So please, write. Write and put your work out into the world and love that work. I’ll see you out there.

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