Getting kicked when you’re down sucks,
we all know it. But getting kicked when you’re trying to get up can be even
worse. As I’ve mentioned, I struggle to be internally motivated in my writing.
Thankfully, my WIP has been patient enough to lurk in the back of my mind for
months despite my startling neglect of it. For some reason, the last few days
have been unusually productive when it comes to at least my mental development
of the story [especially considering the start of school and that fact that I
don’t have thought room to spare on such “extra-curricular” stuff, I’m supposed
to be graduating here!] and today I finally talked myself into pulling out the
trusty ol’ notebook and carving out in crude language the scene that had been
much more gracefully painted itself in my head.
Sometimes,
that’s all you can manage and I remind myself that all the questions and holes
that I discovered in the writing of that scene are positive things because now
I know more ways that I can make my characters better. Positive things, right?
There are always more of them in our little writing blunders and mishaps than
we think.
So,
considering my own relatively low standard for daily writing and the fact that
I managed to acknowledge holes as questions I can build on, I was feeling
pretty proud of myself. I had started to pick myself off the sticky floor of
lazy-bum-writer-dom. And then the kicking came. One of the hardest things to
swallow when you feel like you aren’t succeeding? The success of other people,
especially if it seems like they didn’t even have to try. A coworker shared the
awesome [because it really is awesome]
news that her husband is getting published. A book that he wrote over the
summer and that she helped him edit has been picked up by the first [and I
think only] publisher that he
submitted it to. Awesome right? That’s the kind of sudden success that I think
all aspiring writers dream of and I really am happy for him.
But
I’m going to come out and say it, a little part of me [okay, maybe a currently
significant part of me] is not only jealous, but resentful of his success. I
think we’ve all experienced something like this in our lives, whether it is
related to writing or some other achievement or recognition that we really
want. It happens, but it doesn’t help me at all to feel that way. So what do
you do when it happens to you?
I’m
a psychology major so, in keeping with the critical self-analysis that we’ve
been focusing on in my classes this semester, I immediately realized that I’m
never really upset with the people I hear about who have these great
experiences. Instead, what I’m doing is projecting my dissatisfaction with
myself and my own failure to pursue and realize my talents and goals with the
determination I know I should. It can be easy, when you’re picking yourself up
and you get “kicked” by the fortune of others, to just lay back down again and tell
yourself that you’ll never be that talented, driven, lucky, etc. But when we do
that we are wasting a perfect opportunity for hope. I get so caught up
sometimes in comparing my success with that of others as if it’s a competition
and there are only so many winning slots. Instead of despair, though, these
pieces of news should remind me that success as a writer can happen to me. If it can happen to some random kid who doesn’t
even want to pursue writing as a career, then why not me? I know I have lots of
things to work on, but that’s going to be true of every area of my life for my
whole life, it’s not a bad thing. The only thing standing between me and writing
a good book and then getting that book published is myself. GO TEAM!
Now
that we’ve gotten the pep-talk out of the way…
There’s
a step in between realizing that you can
do it and actually doing it. Actually, it’s more like a pit of fast-acting quick-sand
than a step. In order to make it through said pit alive, we need to actually
make changes to the things that aren’t working [you know what those things are,
and if you don’t, take some “me time” and think about it, you’ll thank
yourself].
If any of you play
Portal/Portal2 and don’t have a natural aptitude for video-games [me] then I
have the perfect example. Portal is a visual-spatial puzzle game that makes you
think outside of the box. The way Portal asks you to problem solve isn’t
usually in line with your normal thought patterns and so the game can be
frustrating and stop you in your tracks with levels where you can see where you
need to be but have no clue how to solve the puzzle of getting there. As my
husband is constantly reminding me, an important key in playing Portal is not
being afraid to die. This seems counterintuitive but, as you aren’t given a
limited number of lives or tries on a level, the purpose of the game is to make
you explore visually and mentally. The point is to get you to think in new ways
and sometimes you have to try a lot of weird ideas to break out of your old
ways of thinking before you find the answer. This relates to writing in a
significant way for me because, just as I am inexplicably cautious of dying in
Portal, I am also afraid of writing badly. I’ll get inspiration for a new scene
in my WIP but when I write it out it doesn’t look as shiny as it did in my mind
and I stall out, unable to push past it. Sometimes the expectation of such a
let-down keeps me from trying to write at all. But, just as in Portal, this paralysis
is pointless. The best thing about writing is that nothing to write is
permanent, you can, and probably will change the majority of your first draft
and that’s okay. So much of the time,
solutions and good books only come from our willingness to dive in, die [not
literally] or write crappy scenes that you hope no one ever reads before you
get a chance to edit them. The quest for instantaneous perfection is crippling
and it’s something that I need to overcome if I’m ever going to give Sam a
story, let alone an ending.
What do you need to
conquer in your writing? Have suggestions, pep-talks, or success stories to
share? Email me at emily.buhler.loveless@gmail.com
and we’ll celebrate together!
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