Humility is one of those concepts in life that are good for us to achieve and many desire, but it is also one of those desires that even those we tend to see as humble have not done enough of to master.
Writers grapple with staying humble every day we sit down. It springs up in other areas as well. We lack humility in the emotions like the fear we face when we work to produce and publish our thoughts.
So, why is humility so important for a writer?
The simplified answer is that a lack of humility prevents us from writing. The ego centered mind has problerms getting the words out for the thought bouncing around in hour heads. Humility is one of the great assets writers develop over time to consistently get us in our chairs and cracking out verbiage.
Later, the same humility allows us to rend our creations through the editing process till the final work is ready to see daylight. This same humility allows us to let go of the work after a point so we can ship it. We publish or deliver to the client the final work. Then humility comes once more when we get the payoff and feedback from our work. We can now evaluate and understand what to do to get better.
Once our work is finsihed humility shows up one more time to put us back before the blank page to start the process anew. This process eventually defines us as professional writers. We are not defined by money or accolades but rather defined by our love of the work and our devotion to see the work done every day. We show up. Do the work. As Steven Pressfield would say, we are pros.
That is a lot of work for so simple of a virtue.
How we get humility and improve the noble trait
First the good news. You already have humility. The bad news is unless you are working on par with the likes of Steven King, Steven Pressfield, or millions of far less famous but still very professional writers out there, you need to get in the gym and develop some humble muscle.
Even better news. Not only can the humble muscle be developed and far more than you might think yours can, it can be done a million ways. Your hard part is choosing something to work with and then get to work.
Just a couple of humble ideas:
Look to improve yourself.
Working to improve yourself drives out the idea that you are already perfect. As a writer you know you don’t have it all down yet. So get humble and take classes, read books. Learn what you can on your own and with a study partner. Look for things you can use to improve your weaknesses as well as things you did not know you did not know. Make a game out of it. What new nueance can you find in that book you have read last year? Remeber M0rtimer J. Addler advised that to read deeper you needed to read things multiple times, especially when we want to read beyod entertainment for information or for a deeper understanding of that information.
What do you get from the work then?
You find that you can improve. What is more important is that you become firmly entrenched in the philosophy that you can improve. You might one day be as immortal as Scot Adams, JRR Tolkien, or Hemingway, but even those at the peak of fame know the truth of the path to that peak. There is still more mountain to climb for everyone. The more nuances we find within our work the better is can be made. That is where the path leads. The Japanese have a word for this process. They call it Kaizen, never ending improvement. That’s life, the path, writing and everything. Who wants a status quo? That leads to death and decay. Life is growth. To grow you must find what can be improved.
As John Matthew Fox said in an article,
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.”
I could not say that better.
Praise others.
Praising others gives you the chance to take the view off yourself to see all the worthy aspects of others. When we take the time to praise another for somehting our mind shifts from our own ego driven interests to look at another. For that moment we become selfless.
Let the sunshine in.
Stop hiding your work in a closet. Get it out so sothers can read it. Go to classes and competitions or submit your work to journals, magazines and websites. Even putting something before a writers’ group is good for building your humble muscle.
When other people read and give us feedback our work we gain perspective on our work. We also learn what else is out there and how is applies to our work. When you look at your piece next to others, you can see where you line up and where you need some work more clearly.
Have you missed the mark, maybe bettered it? Get that manuscript submitted and you will know. What will you will find? You are not perfect, but you will also find that others are not either. Your skills are likely far better than you might have thought or worse than you thought. Neither being worse or better matters. Both depend on the feedback or lack of it you have received till now. Now you are playing the game in real time. Now you can see where things sit. So there is no need to stress about being perfect, rather you can now start to work at moving toward perfect.
Avoid the status quo, go with the flow.
As writers we are blessed with a fluid mind full of fantastic ideas. The problem is it is also has a rather loud negative side. We often find ourselves a wash in insecurities and doubt. The self-sabotage is everywhere. This often seems to be alleviated by delusions of grandeur (aka Greatest writer ever!) when we find some nugget of praise come our way. Swimming through this fluid flow is the task we set before ourselves when we first sat down to pen our ideas. It’s a roller coaster ride from on high to down low.
Our only recourse is to learn, as Kipling said
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”
IF – Rudyard Kipling.
When it comes to writing summed up in a poem, Kipling’s If is about as good as it gets. In one short list you have 20 keys to the writer’s world. If, of course you have the wit and wisdom to mine it for all it’s worth.
My take on humility
Humility, like all good habits, comes down to first being aware of yourself. Then reminding yourself how to respond as the situations arise. In time the goal of having the virtue become a habit that only grows stronger as you continue to practice it. With enough practice it becomes part of your personal discipline.
From humble to cleaning in one stroke… De-cluttering More Than My Desk Saved My Writing
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash