Feeling chuffed?
I’ve just learned a new word from a new Australian friend. Chuffed means being proud of oneself. And as I sat around trying to use this word in a sentence, my tongue kept getting stuck on the word. Can you ever use “writer” and “proud” (or “chuffed”) in the same sentence? Is a writer ever proud of her work ? I doubt it. I’ll never forget the feeling when I hit send on the final draft of my manuscript. It was a mixture of anticipation, fear and dread but pride didn’t even enter the flury of emotions spinning in my stomach.
I’m currently rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s Circle of Quiet, and she devotes almost a chapter to this discussion. She believes that a writer must totally obliterate himself in order to create. “When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.”
I think this is the best description I’ve read to explain why I lose time so easily when I write. She goes on to say that we can only maintain this lack of hubris while we’re creating. Once the work is out of our hands, then the pride and self-consciousness can enter. “A writer may be self-conscious about his work before and after but not during the writing,” L’Engle adds.
So, what do you think? Can we be proud of our work and yet completely unmindful of ourselves while creating the work? Or can we never truly escape ourselves, our ego, our sense of our role in the world, even when we’re in the act of creating?
