Week of: 8/16

Still at it, lol.

Evidenced by my actions, this has been more the year of reading (so far) than writing -- but I'm doing both, honest! There is a connection between the two, moreover, though I can't allow myself to forget that the primary thing a writer does is write.

Writing is intimidating, though. It's so hard. Not hard in the sense that finding the words is difficult (though it can be). Not primarily. It's hard in that it wears on the ego. It threatens to expose us to ourselves as fraudulent.

After all, let's say that Hemingway was right, that the first draft of anything is shit. Well, then: how much time would you feel comfortable writing shit? I don't like it at all. I don't like giving up a day, a morning, or even an hour, and then looking at my execrable output and thinking, "it was all for this??" It takes a level of faith that perhaps, as an atheist, I'm ill-disposed to employ, to believe that somewhere further down the line -- in another draft, perhaps, or (more likely) another work in some future year -- that shit will resolve itself into gold via some literary alchemical-editing process.

It may help that faith to develop to see some level of success, preferably early. I've had successes, but I've also had failures -- and some horrible feedback. I remember making a book in second or third grade, a crudely hand-drawn affair, a sarcastic prequel to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. (In this one that selfsame fox is trying to outwit a chicken; when he fails, he resolves to try to get the tasty looking grapes instead, which I think accounts for a plothole in the original: why is the carnivorous fox bothering with grapes to begin with?) I had a bit of trouble when the teacher wasn't satisfied with my onomatopoetic rendition of the fox falling off a ladder (his ACME-flavored attempt at getting the chicken) being rendered as KERPLAT. She insisted that it ought be KERSPLAT. Now, I'll agree that this is more conventional, and that I'd been operating out of age-appropriate ignorance. But still, to require me to revamp so much of my artwork (the fox falling off of things, KERPLAT!, was a running gag, you see, and it was rendered in big, colorful letters across the several pages) to rectify this almost-isn't-an-error was... well, it seems to me now a bit of an overreach.

I'm rambling. What's my point? It's that it can be disheartening to try to hard to do something you really care to do and to feel as though the results are poor, continue to be poor, will be poor again in the future. I console myself that, really, we are poor judges of our own work (which I think true); and I have had some genuine successes in the past. But in the end, what can I do but resolve that, if it be shit, at least it will be mine -- that I will embrace being bad and do it anyway.