Writing: A Love Story
Feb. 5th, 2013 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyOnce upon a time, there was a little girl who liked to tell stories. Sometimes she told them with words and pictures, and sometimes she told them with just words. From the time she could pick up a pencil, she wrote stories and drew pictures to go along with them: early evidence remains of the adventures of Bobby the Alien, written and drawn on flimsy 3x5 notepad paper and carefully stapled together; pages-long fantasy epics penciled on yellow lined paper and bearing a striking resemblance to The Neverending Story or the Lord of the Rings; countless half-page beginnings of worlds in which sphinxes lived in hollow trees and girls found doors to another realm hidden at the back of department store dressing rooms.
In elementary school, the girl won awards for her writing. In middle school – with the arrival of the home computer and her much-faster-than-by-hand typing speed – her stories grew exponentially in length. In high school, she discovered the glorious world of the internet, and her stories migrated to its role-playing message boards, where she learned the joy of collaborative storytelling.
When she went to college, she met the most amazing girl: cool, smart, so funny, absolutely beautiful. And this girl was a writer too. With their forces combined, our heroine wrote more than she ever had in her life – character upon character, twisting storyline melding with detailed backstory until all she wanted to think about was her writing.
And she loved reading other people's writings. She loved it so much that she decided to pursue a graduate degree in literature rather than in creative writing. Writing for enjoyment filled her with happiness, she reasoned, but the atmosphere at her university wasn't particularly warm toward genre fiction and she considered her love of analyzing other people's writing to be more sustainable.
That was when the avalanche hit. A crushing, icy cascade of self-criticism poured onto her from the Mountain of Doubt. Spending every waking moment critiquing the writing of authors far more prestigious than herself made her see her own stories in a horrible new light. Not only were they technically amateurish, they were – far worse – indelibly tinged with privilege, spiritually meaningless, and offensively ignorant. She wrote countless papers, clinging to any tenuous grasp on the concepts her professors urged her to use, but their feedback on her success was often incomprehensible to her. She became paralyzed. Carefree writing no longer satisfied her, but anything more complex brought on fears of contributing to worldsuck instead of fighting against it.
So she crumbled. For years, she wrote only here and there, slowly repairing the pieces of the joy she used to feel. Her friends kept her writing afloat with safe spaces to write, as infrequently as she wanted, in obligationless fun. She participated in Nanowrimo, but only made it to the goal twice in the six tries. She had a brief, passionately prolific period in which writing Sherlock Holmes fanfic and pastiches satisfied her impulse to write. Writing was a large part of her day job, but it was a cold, technical, repetitive sort of writing. Time and again, the need to create worlds of her own design and tell her own characters' stories broke through.
As she learned more and more about the movement to fill in the gaps left by authors who only told the stories of male protagonists, or straight protagonists, or white protagonists, her desire to write found a partner in her desire to contribute in some small way to society's improvement. She was awed and inspired by luminescent stars and appalled by hatred and ignorance. The doubt is always still there – remember how many projects you've abandoned? – but nevertheless, she came to a decision.
It's been six years since I completed my MA in English Literature. I learned a lot in graduate school, and some of the lessons took years to kick in. One of the most important is this: the possibility of failure is no reason not to try. That's easy to say, but very hard to come to terms with. I won't say I've accomplished that, but I'm through with unfinished projects. I'm through with "maybe writing isn't my thing". Writing is my thing, and it always has been. I thought I needed to throw away some interests in order to improve at others, but I don't believe that anymore.
I'm working on a story right now. It started out as my Nano novel last November. Normally, I take ages to figure out what's going to happen in a story. With this one, a general plot outline, beginning to end, fell into place in one evening. I have my doubts, as I'm sure I always will, but I'm determined to finish first one draft, and then another, and then as many as it takes.
I'm horrible at talking about my stories to other people. No matter how I describe them, they always sound boring and stupid to my ears. So I typically don't talk about them at all. That's something I want to work on.
I'm writing a YA fantasy novel about two girls fighting against a supernatural plague that threatens everything from their families to their identities to their entire country. It's also their love story, and the story of the profound effect each has on the other's life.
It may take time - but I'm going to give myself that time. Wish me luck. <3
In elementary school, the girl won awards for her writing. In middle school – with the arrival of the home computer and her much-faster-than-by-hand typing speed – her stories grew exponentially in length. In high school, she discovered the glorious world of the internet, and her stories migrated to its role-playing message boards, where she learned the joy of collaborative storytelling.
When she went to college, she met the most amazing girl: cool, smart, so funny, absolutely beautiful. And this girl was a writer too. With their forces combined, our heroine wrote more than she ever had in her life – character upon character, twisting storyline melding with detailed backstory until all she wanted to think about was her writing.
And she loved reading other people's writings. She loved it so much that she decided to pursue a graduate degree in literature rather than in creative writing. Writing for enjoyment filled her with happiness, she reasoned, but the atmosphere at her university wasn't particularly warm toward genre fiction and she considered her love of analyzing other people's writing to be more sustainable.
That was when the avalanche hit. A crushing, icy cascade of self-criticism poured onto her from the Mountain of Doubt. Spending every waking moment critiquing the writing of authors far more prestigious than herself made her see her own stories in a horrible new light. Not only were they technically amateurish, they were – far worse – indelibly tinged with privilege, spiritually meaningless, and offensively ignorant. She wrote countless papers, clinging to any tenuous grasp on the concepts her professors urged her to use, but their feedback on her success was often incomprehensible to her. She became paralyzed. Carefree writing no longer satisfied her, but anything more complex brought on fears of contributing to worldsuck instead of fighting against it.
So she crumbled. For years, she wrote only here and there, slowly repairing the pieces of the joy she used to feel. Her friends kept her writing afloat with safe spaces to write, as infrequently as she wanted, in obligationless fun. She participated in Nanowrimo, but only made it to the goal twice in the six tries. She had a brief, passionately prolific period in which writing Sherlock Holmes fanfic and pastiches satisfied her impulse to write. Writing was a large part of her day job, but it was a cold, technical, repetitive sort of writing. Time and again, the need to create worlds of her own design and tell her own characters' stories broke through.
As she learned more and more about the movement to fill in the gaps left by authors who only told the stories of male protagonists, or straight protagonists, or white protagonists, her desire to write found a partner in her desire to contribute in some small way to society's improvement. She was awed and inspired by luminescent stars and appalled by hatred and ignorance. The doubt is always still there – remember how many projects you've abandoned? – but nevertheless, she came to a decision.
It's been six years since I completed my MA in English Literature. I learned a lot in graduate school, and some of the lessons took years to kick in. One of the most important is this: the possibility of failure is no reason not to try. That's easy to say, but very hard to come to terms with. I won't say I've accomplished that, but I'm through with unfinished projects. I'm through with "maybe writing isn't my thing". Writing is my thing, and it always has been. I thought I needed to throw away some interests in order to improve at others, but I don't believe that anymore.
I'm working on a story right now. It started out as my Nano novel last November. Normally, I take ages to figure out what's going to happen in a story. With this one, a general plot outline, beginning to end, fell into place in one evening. I have my doubts, as I'm sure I always will, but I'm determined to finish first one draft, and then another, and then as many as it takes.
I'm horrible at talking about my stories to other people. No matter how I describe them, they always sound boring and stupid to my ears. So I typically don't talk about them at all. That's something I want to work on.
I'm writing a YA fantasy novel about two girls fighting against a supernatural plague that threatens everything from their families to their identities to their entire country. It's also their love story, and the story of the profound effect each has on the other's life.
It may take time - but I'm going to give myself that time. Wish me luck. <3
