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02/22/2003 Entry: "Productivity, of a sort"

I actually managed to clear CFFML down to under twenty messages for the first time since, um, October. Go me. ^^ Now, having managed to finish various other projects, I'm ready to attempt to get some actual writing done after dinner. *Gasp!* You may all faint from shock now.

Before I go off to try to do something creative, though, I felt I ought to address this. (It's the February 17 entry, in case it gets archived.) Honestly, Rae, if you write and you like to write and you aspire to improve your writing, that's good enough. ^_^ Writing, contrary to what some people might think, doesn't have to be an issue of preordained destiny or the hub of an ongoing psychodrama. It doesn't need to involve frothing and snarling and weeping and bleeding on the carpet; it certainly doesn't need to involve being psychologically messed up. Mostly it's just about showing up and doing the work, though a side-order of perceptiveness and an individual train of thought don't hurt. So don't think that you're less than other writers because they have Big Drama and you don't. (For what it's worth, my own life is almost alarmingly drama-free.)

It's also totally normal to feel that your work doesn't measure up. I'll let you in on a secret--I think most writers who have aspirations toward some writerly goal always feel as though they're falling short of it. That's how you learn and grow, by always chasing a standard that's just a little bit better than you are. I think if I ever feel totally satisfied with anything I've written, I'll give up writing and take up, oh, I don't know, painting or costuming, at least until I feel as though I've been out of the writing long enough to approach it with that beginner's spirit again. Once you stop growing and learning, you're on the way down into entropy.

Besides which, you're already much better than I was at fifteen. At fifteen, I was writing crappy Duran Duran fanfics--or rather, *trying* to write them, as I never got past chapter one. I'd share some with you, but mercifully the hands of time have stolen them all away. I was also writing rather awful pseudo-epic poetry about my invented mythology, a saga which included all my friends as Mary Sues, and myself as a Mary Sue magical horse. I kid you not. But your stuff is actually rather good. I especially liked "Stained in Red." ^_^