Anna Holmes reflects on her rookie mistakes as a writer (NYT):
Mostly, what I regret is the ease with which I assumed that others’ prose styles were something not just to study and learn from but to imitate. This chameleonic impulse, a talent I developed at an early age, certainly came in handy during my stints as a writer and editor for women’s service and celebrity magazines — publications that, then and now, demand a cheerful and wholly unremarkable “female” voice — but it also did a fair amount of damage to my writerly sense of self, not to mention my ability to execute stories on issues that had nothing to do with sex tips for singletons, swingy summer dresses or the assignations of Angelina Jolie. My adoption of others’ voices made it even more difficult to find mine, and it wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I began to realize I could honor other writing styles while also asserting my own. (This development may or may not have been influenced by my entrance into the world of blogging, an environment whose freewheeling, breezy and often very personal approach to prose has inspired any number of now-established writers.)
Leslie Jamison, meanwhile, shakes her head at her early commitment to an idea of “honesty” that translated to oversharing “the parts of myself I liked least — or the situations I most regretted”:
These were my two first mistakes about honesty: I thought it meant relentless self-flagellation, and I thought it could redeem everything. I believed there was nothing self-awareness couldn’t save. My readers taught me otherwise: They often read my self-awareness as meanness or self-indulgence or delusion. It didn’t endear me to them at all. It didn’t dissolve the flaws it confessed.
I’d always believed I was being unfair to my fictional characters if I didn’t grant them the chance to redeem themselves with desire or effort, with earnest attempts to transcend their flaws and limitations. It felt unfair to be their God and then refuse them certain saving nuances. But in my essays I was doing just this — refusing myself access to anything but my own worst tendencies. So I had to consent to making myself something more than a brat or a binger — to treat myself to the rigorous grace of complication instead.
The Dish 