Ditto Kee

It's funny that Kee posted a link to a blog entry from Janet Reid, because I was mentally preparing a post on that very subject. So here goes...

For me, the crux of the quote by Ira Glass was this:

[Y]our taste is why your work disappoints you.

Recently, I have found myself in a rather unattractive wallowing phase, which is one reason why I haven't been posting here. I don't want to write about it, and no one wants to read about it, so why bother. But if I think back on it, I recognize that I was playing the self-blame game, and the main thing I was accusing myself of was a lack of creativity. "If only I were creative enough, I would be able to make this writing thing work."

That, to use the words of one of my characters, is total bullshit.

When I look at what was really going on, I was regularly going back and considering new scenarios, new contexts, new angles for my story, i.e., I was being creative. It's just that the new scenarios, etc., were not actually to my taste.

In my last couple of posts, I talked about things "clicking" and "falling into place", and they did, *for that particular version of the story*, but that turned out to be a version that was also not to my taste. But that doesn't mean that the effort was totally in vain. It was a good exercise in plotting.

I will admit that it was disappointing to have expended so much mental effort and then not be able to use the fruits of it, but then I remembered that I am the person who will rip out rows and rows of crochet or cross-stitch to fix a mistake, not because it would be glaringly obvious to other people, but because I would know it was there and would be dissatisfied.

I just have to keep in mind that, ultimately, my writing has to please me.

And I am happy to say that once I used my creativity--which I definitely have, thank you very much--and murdered a few of my darlings--that is to say, tossed out some firmly held ideas I still had about who was the main character of my story, etc.--I have come up with a beginning that I am excited about it. I don't have an ending yet, but I am eager to just follow and see where it takes me, and none of my beginnings so far has managed to do that.

*Note to Kee: I will probably be sending it along to you soon, short though it may be.