I’VE spent a lot of time thinking about the egos of writers. We live in a culture suffused with therapeutic language that has shifted its meaning with broad usage, and ego is a good example. In its original sense, it was value-neutral, meaning only the thinking, conscious self, the one putting sentences together, anxiously replaying conversations, having coherent qualities and consistent likes and dislikes. The ego is just the self. In classical psychoanalysis, the ego was what mediated between the world and the raw, chaotic id. The ego does your taxes, decides what peanut butter to buy, comes up with something appropriate to say at baby showers, while the id boils and quakes somewhere underneath, obsessing about sex and death.
Writers have a reputation for having egos that are more sensitive and more demanding than the average,maybe more than other art forms, requires a horrific putting-forward of the self. Fiction, in particular, has a way of revealing private preoccupations, weaknesses, and wounds that the writer is not necessarily aware of, or at least did not intend to reveal. It does this in much the same way that dreams do—in themes, patterns, shapes, and, at times, symbols that are humiliatingly obvious. When writing, I know what interests me, I know what problems feel knotty enough to spend hundreds of hours with and which ones don’t, but I often do not see until years later (years!) why I was hung up on that particular thing at that particular time—and this kind of hindsight is embarrassing, frankly. In our work we are transparent and oblivious at the same time. We are doing a little dance, and our fly is down. This unawareness is the reason we need the workshop, and it’s also the reason the workshop can be so excruciating.
