Writers/South Awards Judge Spotlight: Ron Rash

Charlotte Lit is honored to have acclaimed writer Ron Rash as the fiction judge for our inaugural Writers/South Awards.

Ron is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestsellers Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Nervous

by Judy Goldman

“Whenever something good happens to you regarding your writing, you just get nervous,” my daughter tells me. She’s talking about when I’m on my way to publication, when I get a positive review, when I win a prize.

What’s also true is that when something bad happens to me regarding my writing (publication impossible, bad review, no prize), I get nervous.

Rejection makes me nervous because it confirms what I often believe to be true about myself. Acceptance also makes me nervous because I’m convinced some major rejection is next.

For years, I’ve told students in my workshops they need to possess both arrogance and insecurity to be a writer. Arrogance enables you to think that what you write might matter to somebody else. Insecurity forces you to keep going back to your work to revise, to strive to make it better.

But what role does nervousness play? And what is the key to getting rid of that nervousness or, at least, tone it down a notch? How do you become a person who approaches writing with a sense of calm?

Be a dead writer?

Maybe.

But if you’re reading this, you’re alive, and we need to work with that. Is there some trade secret all the successful writers know?

Ann Enright, an Irish writer, says, “Writing is mostly a case of mood management.” So how do you manage your mood? Well, this is what not managing your mood looks like:

1. Praise paralyzes you. You think, surely they’re just trying to make you feel good. Or maybe the praise is sincere, but they don’t know good writing, so you can’t trust them. Or maybe they know good writing and meant what they said, but you know all that could change in an instant.
2. You know you’ll never get it right. It’s the contrast between the image in your mind of the work you want to create vs. what actually ends up on paper. How they rarely match. If only readers could see inside your head, they’d know what a fabulous writer you are.
3. You’re so afraid of failure, you don’t take risks. Your inner critic is forever blowing the whistle. Maybe you stop yourself before you even begin, before you take the risk of writing at all.
4. What’s the use? is your mantra.

And what is really excellent mood management?

Persisting. Persevering. Without discouragement or bravado. With curiosity. With wide-eyed wonder.  With the attitude that anything can happen — and so what? Regardless, you’re right there, at your sturdy little desk, pecking away. The writer Fred Leebron once said to me: “It’s a war of attrition. Don’t attrish.”

So, it turns out the key to continuing to write even while riddled with nerves is to continue writing even while riddled with nerves. It’s the trade secret every successful writer knows. It’s also the problem every successful writer struggles with.

Judy Goldman is the author of seven books – three memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry.  Her new memoir, Child, will be published May 2022. 

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