The silver lining of today’s unrelenting rain clouds was the first sexy boot wearing of the season.
The other silver lining was the MWA anthology party this evening. Sometimes the right message pops up at just the right time. This time, the message was that writing is tremendously risky and very brave. What makes a writer is the pervasive fear that everything you have to say is uninteresting and stupid, and the sneaking suspicion that it’s not.
The notion of writing as brave comes up all the time, but I was thinking about it a little differently this evening. Writing, which we do ultimately because we think we’re interesting, is laying out the whole contents of one’s mind, how one views the world, and all of one’s thoughts, even if it comes out in the framework of fiction. If it isn’t honest, it’s obvious, and everyone knows that it isn’t true. It’s worthless. If it is honest, then there it is: honestly you, just sitting there to be judged, adored and abhorred. That’s scary.
I know this applies to other creative processes as well, but narrative writing is the most accessible, and therefore the most easily judged.
It hit me, as I was sitting there listening to really smart people talk about worrying about everyone else thinking they’re stupid, that this is why I didn’t go to graduate school when I was twenty-three. I had a lot of names for it, but mostly, I think I had just faintly grasped that it was risky, and I wasn’t ready to know myself well enough to write really well. Yet. Eleven years later, I’m getting there.
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