Guest blogger Stacey Gross
I remember when I was a kid we had this parking lot in town.
I’m from Warren, Pa., so understand that the majority of my downtown experiences involved street parking and there were few opportunities to try on the fancy pants that is asking questions like “do you validate?” Parking in the lot, where the rent was significantly steeper than the dime or nickel that would get you through the streetside ATM line, was reserved for serious errands, generally of a personal health or hygiene undertaking.
Salon appointments and root canals, those sorts of things
I don’t even know if this is a thing people do anymore, so lost am I in the ether of time at my age. This may well be like that thing my grandparents all laughed about, and I knew to have gone extinct before my time; the party line.
Seriously got uncomfortable every time they brought it up for a few awkward years there between child and teenager, when I was old enough to watch Comedy Central after hours – and the commercials for phone sex lines that ran between South Park episodes – and actually understanding the concept of sharing telephone lines with your neighbors in a way that feels eerily like some kind of distinct federal felony these days.
Anyhow, antiquated methods of practical problem solving aside, the word “validate” basically means to support. To affirm. To vouch for.
It’s a friendly, cozy little verb.
These days, though, I hear it flung around more self help or armchair psychology conversations than I do being asked to my dentist’s receptionist. Colloquially, we understand validation to be a highly satisfying, almost guilty pleasure to experience.
Validation involves someone else saying, “yes. This person. What this person is doing, or saying, or attempting, or suggesting, or being is not just acceptable, but appreciable,” and I want to act as her ambassador in suggesting that you be aware of it.”
For a writer, the ultimate validation is often understood to be publishing.
For money.
Lots of money.
And fame.
And a stone cottage of the coast of Nova Scotia where anyone can ever find you again.
I hope your efforts are bearing better fruit than mine, comrade.
But validation for a writer can take a lot of different forms.
For me validation has always been external, but that’s because I was an only child, and spent my days reading books under trees in the pasture surrounded by beef cattle and thinking that there had to be a way, some magic little rabbit or mushroom, like in Alice, that would allow me to slough off the encumbrances of this meh reality for the worlds and adventures within the pages of my favorite stories.
Such solitude during one’s childhood is a recipe for a funky internal monologue. Never having another human to bounce your thoughts and ideas off of, and resorting to checking your logic against the glazed-over gaze of a Hereford crushing blades of sweetgrass and fescue, torn indiscriminately from the ground between you, between her flat, wide teeth.
Validation is essential in anything we attempt. If someone hadn’t told us, at some point, “you should keep doing this because you do not suck at it,” we would’ve, eventually, stopped doing that thing.
Validation doesn’t just keep us at our craft, however. Validation sort of seeps into us, infuses us – and by extension our writing, if we’re doing it right – with confidence, competence, and the ability to get more and more playful as we write our way through our lives.
A week ago, I sat down with editor Jess Weible for an episode of TWJ’s “Writers of the Watershed” podcast. Over the course of our interview, Jess asked me what things I’ve found validating throughout my progression to my current status of “writer.”
It was so much fun to be on the other side of an interview for a change, but as often happens after chatting up a guest for my own podcast, I spent the following days carving little grooves in the skeletal responses I’d given on mic.
One of the things I’ve always sort of understood on an intuitive, subjective level is the importance of experiencing validation as a writer. One of the things Jess asked me to consider, though, over the past week, is whether the validating experiences that have given me the street cred to say, “I am a writer,” have been internal or external, and whether the need for validation is terminal at some certain point, or ongoing.
One of my biggest hangups is that I may, in fact, be a truly atrocious narcissist at my core. It’s a tough issue to juggle with the apparent life mission of being someone willing to humiliate herself weekly in service to the ultimate goal of telling important stories.
When Jess asked this question, I had to quash that screeching voice of my inner self-critic, wailing away in some crusty decrepit corner of my head of my head that’s always been, for me, far louder and more relentless than its mirror image, which basically just takes the form of David Sedaris glancing up at me over a demitasse cup as I perform street theater on some Parisian boulevard in an endless bid for his approval and nodding, eyes rolled deep into the inner recesses of his skull in exasperation.
“Don’t let them know it’s constant,” the harpy woman shrieked. “It makes you look needy. And don’t even dream of admitting that you require others’ approval of your work because then there will be an irreversible power differential between you and your audience.”
I truly do not know who hurt this voice in my head so viscerally, but she appears, despite my best efforts, to be inconsolable, and paranoid, and hateful as a result.
But it’s true. And I think, for any writer worth reading, it’s at least a little true.
We’re being given the gift of someone’s time and energy, their attention, their empathy, and their minds when we write something we plan to show someone else.
Awareness of this unwieldy power, as we’re writing, is essential. It should underscore our entire process, especially if we’re writing nonfiction, as true radical authenticity is something only the kindest and hardiest of readers can even handle. The most important thing when unburdening ourselves of our own stories, and then going three steps further and asking readers to shoulder some measure of their weight themselves by the act of reading and internalizing them, is that we make it worth their time. We don’t want to waste a reader’s precious time by simply telling them what we had for lunch and why tuna is the least appreciated of all sandwich spreads and it’s a sin we find personally revolting. What’s a reader supposed to do with that? If there’s nothing universally meaningful in your personal experience it’s really better suited to Thanksgiving table reminiscence over pecan pie and a cup of Folgers. It needn’t be an earth shattering epiphany every time, but at least have the decency to bestow them with a charming anecdote or two. It’s not The You Show, after all.
But depending on our own temperaments and personalities, awareness of this enormous responsibility can be crippling when we sit down to actually.pin down words to pages.
Like stepping out into the grass surrounding a twilit pond edge and hearing the peeper chorus disappear in vicious unison. Not until the level of harm you mean to each individual amphibian in the choir is concretely measured will they take their hymn back up.
That’s how words are, when you have a story to tell but you’re afraid it may not be as good of a story as you believe it to be. Like thoughts, when you ignore them and focus, instead, on the ultimate silence within which we exist, if we’ll just be still for a moment, and recognize it. A drop of oil in a pan of water.
A muzzleloader blast on a crisp, September morning to extinguish the incessant birdsong.
For me, as a writer, and as a mother, and as a woman, and as a human, validation has always come from outside myself, and in writing that usually takes the form of an editor or a publisher – as Jess says in our interview, “a gatekeeper to the literary world.”
That kind of leaves a lot of us deflated, though, because editors and publishers and gatekeepers can feel a bit like Tim from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Arbitrary and absurd and inflexible in their acceptance of one’s honest best effort.
Especially if what you want to do is publish the next chapbook or novel or memoir that will bridge the two wildly dissonant worlds of popular writing and literary work, and will as a result make you lots and lots of money.
If you’re even a little honest with yourself there’s a fantasy, tucked away in some secret cubby of your brain, where someone discovers your manuscript in a slush pile and, before you can even catch your breath, you’re discussing the most superficial aspects of writing with whoever is hosting The Today Show at this yet-to-be-realized moment in time with a happy grin and less than zero animosity toward the fact that no one cares what your underlying message was, they just liked the funny parts where your narrator was clever and the happy ending, or the fact that Drew Barrymore starred in the movie made to commercialize the hell out of it.
C’mere a little closer, darling. A little closer. Let me whisper one disappointing truth into your breathless ear: that’s not what publishing looks like for 99.9 percent of writers.
It sucks. I know, it sucks. But it’s the truth.
You’re going to submit ten times the things that get published with your name, and headshot, and three-sentence bio, and social media links attached.
Them’s just facts, babe.
So if you’re like me, and need external validation to convince yourself to plant your keister at your desk in any consistent kind of way, you’re going to have to accept the fact that it’s going to involve a ridiculously greater number of invalidating experiences than invalidating ones.
The good news is that, once the validating experiences start to come, if you play your cards right, you can use one to gain momentum for the next.
Because validating experiences don’t just involve editors, or publishers, or gatekeepers.
I’ll even go so far as to suggest that the most validating experiences, the ones that will sustain you for longer periods of time, between more intermittent rejections while you await your next acceptance letter, are the interactions you’ll have with your audience, whoever they turn out to be.
An email from a reader is like a power packed granola bar for your heart. The most nutritional complex carbs for the literary soul.
If you have a soul at all, as a writer, you will savor these interactions as the delicacies they are, though if everything goes your way they will take up the fattest, juiciest segment of your validation food wheel.
I remember the first genuine validation I got from a reader. I was a brand new baby columnist at a small local newspaper in Warren, Pennsylvania, and I’d just written a column that I didn’t want to write but had to.
Like something spoiled in my guts. It had to come up for me to be okay. I wrote a short essay about attempting to pay for formula with a WIC check, and how the clunky, antiquated process of…ahem…validating WIC checks caused me to become the most atrocious villain of like thirteen people’s personal narratives for the day as they filter fed themselves into the line behind me that seemed to grow with a cruel and steady intensity until, at one point, someone three clowns back called me something I’m pretty sure Jess would prefer I didn’t repeat here.
You can pretend it’s any combination of cuss words and gender slurs you like; it won’t change the ultimate message of the piece, which was that you don’t actually know what anyone you encounter on any given day is dealing with outside your interaction, so you should probably just not be a reprehensible cretin and tolerate your frustration with your big boy pants pulled up and zipped tight.
That column ran in the Saturday print and online editions of the Times Observer, and Monday morning, as I flipped through emails about scheduled county commissioner meetings I was expected to attend and surfed through freshly filed dockets for an exciting felony to write about (“fingers crossed,” muttered the soulless reporter under her rancid breath), I found one message in my inbox with a two-word subject from a personal rather than an official sender.
“Thank you,” the subject line teased, and I opened that email with all the excitement of a child getting a birthday card in the mail, or a 35-year-old woman discovering something that was not a bill in her postbox.
It’s a truly rare and magical experience, and I recommend it highly to any coward out there who avoids her postbox like the plague, as I do the vast majority of the time. Send yourself a funny Shoebox greeting with a preloaded Starbucks gift card inside, if you must.
“My daughter was a young mother, fifteen years ago, in Warren,” the sender wrote. “She worked so hard but there was never enough, and she used WIC from the time she found out she was pregnant until her daughter was three years old. She used to stay up until 11:30 and pay her neighbor to watch her daughter so she could use her WIC checks when the store was as empty as possible. She still wound up leaving feeling bad about herself half the time, because people are jerks. I cut your column out of my paper and sent it to her. She lives in Florida now, and just got married last spring. She’s doing so well now. You will be too, some day. Thank you for telling stories about things people don’t talk about. My daughter was ashamed that she needed WIC to feed her family, and she shouldn’t have been. No one should be. She called me after she read it and we laughed for an hour remembering the dumb stuff people used to say to her. I can’t wait to read your next story.”
I have no words, except the ones threatening to leak out of my eyes even now, to this day, five years later.
I could have kept that story to myself, and imagined the shame that would descend upon me from every stranger I encountered, if I dared to tell everyone in my small town that I’d used welfare to buy formula, and held up an express checkout line to do it no less.
I could’ve split the difference and quietly published it on my comically underread blog at the time, and not promoted the post, and lived with the tenuous satisfaction that the story had been given the life it was demanding, but a halfway sort of life where it would live in its own echo chamber or pink jelly pod from The Matrix, without ever having achieved anything in its wasted, cloistered life.
But I submitted it late on a Friday night and walked out the door, and went home, where I couldn’t find it and destroy it during my last minute pangs of guilt and pre-accepted shame as I laid awake imaging what it would feel like to wake up disowned by my entire family in the morning.
And then I read it to myself Saturday morning and my feathers smoothed themselves a bit as I was confronted with two inconvenient truths: it really was a good story, and I had actually told it really well.
And then Monday morning I read that email and my own suspicions about the value of the story hardened and solidified, and I started telling more stories that a lot of people thought I should have kept to myself and been privately mortified at the idea of sharing with anyone, ever, in any venue and for any reason whatsoever.
And I got more emails. And I got messages on Facebook. And I got – and this is the best gift you can ever get, as a writer – other people’s stories, willingly given, because without ever having seen these other people’s faces I’d created a relationship between us that made them empathize with me and feel comfortable letting me do the same for them.
So many of those people who wrote to me while I was at the paper? They’re still readers. Five years later.
I promise you, here and now, that I have not written award-winning columns every week for the past five years. I am not rich, nor am I famous, and despite my continued best efforts I’m not even in the same universe of talent as our Lord and Savior David Sedaris.
And I am sure there are writers out there who would disagree strenuously with what I’m about to say, which is the ultimate point of this long-winded essay:
I do not understand how you can feel completely confident in the value of your own work if you haven’t put it out there for others to read, and been given some kind of positive feedback. from someone who’s consumed it, for having done so.
And you can do that, and have that, without involving the cumbersome network of editors and publishers and gatekeepers if you want to.
Ultimately, validation for most writers, I suspect, comes down to an interaction with someone who’s read and appreciated their work so much that they felt compelled to let that writer know it. And, once you’ve had that kind of validation, you immediately enter into this sick, cyclical loop where you continue to create in order to experience it again.
And again.
And again.
If you’re writing for publication, your goal is to have someone tell you you’re doing a good job.
It just is. On some level, your goal can’t actually be anything else.
Or maybe I’m just a raging narcissist.
Both of those things are equally possible. But I’ll leave that up to you decide.
