It's the little things that help
Sep. 2nd, 2009 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seabird78Had some lunch with a couple colleagues today. The topic of writing came up, and K spoke about how she's been feeling the need to find a genre that gives her personal satisfaction, so that the stuff she crafts for work is not the only way she wields her pen.
She referenced me as an example. To paraphrase, she said something like, "Yeah you write here during the day to pay the bills but really, you're a novelist. You have a higher purpose."
It's funny how I'm much more inclined to believe such a statement when it comes from someone other than myself. As if it becomes that much more true by virtue of someone else being able to see that in me and recognize and acknowledge it.
I wish I knew why that's the case. Why I'm so hungry for external validation. I guess it's because I've ingrained the wrong-headed idea that creative writing aspirations are frivolous and impractical, and because I've endured more than my fair share of eye rolls when I've tried to explain them to people in the past.
After so much of that you start to assume everyone is going to feel that way. You expect that everyone is going to laugh off your impossible dreams. Or if they don't, then they're gonna address them in a patronizing tone and make you feel like a silly little girl for having them.
With this in mind, I guess it's no wonder that it's such a wondrous thing when that doesn't happen, when people like K or D or D or even M acknowledge and accept and encourage novel writing as a viable goal. When they see it as a foregone conclusion, and refer to me as an author before I feel I've fully earned the right to use that label.
Any time that happens, I get that much closer to believing it myself, or if not, then at least closer to wanting to prove them right, so as not to disappoint. I've always felt my people-pleasing tendencies were to my detriment, but in this case I suppose I can use them to work in my favor.
Sorry for all this rambling. It seems that the only writing I'm capable of lately is messy stream-of-consciousness.
She referenced me as an example. To paraphrase, she said something like, "Yeah you write here during the day to pay the bills but really, you're a novelist. You have a higher purpose."
It's funny how I'm much more inclined to believe such a statement when it comes from someone other than myself. As if it becomes that much more true by virtue of someone else being able to see that in me and recognize and acknowledge it.
I wish I knew why that's the case. Why I'm so hungry for external validation. I guess it's because I've ingrained the wrong-headed idea that creative writing aspirations are frivolous and impractical, and because I've endured more than my fair share of eye rolls when I've tried to explain them to people in the past.
After so much of that you start to assume everyone is going to feel that way. You expect that everyone is going to laugh off your impossible dreams. Or if they don't, then they're gonna address them in a patronizing tone and make you feel like a silly little girl for having them.
With this in mind, I guess it's no wonder that it's such a wondrous thing when that doesn't happen, when people like K or D or D or even M acknowledge and accept and encourage novel writing as a viable goal. When they see it as a foregone conclusion, and refer to me as an author before I feel I've fully earned the right to use that label.
Any time that happens, I get that much closer to believing it myself, or if not, then at least closer to wanting to prove them right, so as not to disappoint. I've always felt my people-pleasing tendencies were to my detriment, but in this case I suppose I can use them to work in my favor.
Sorry for all this rambling. It seems that the only writing I'm capable of lately is messy stream-of-consciousness.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 09:18 pm (UTC)I am also a people-pleaser and love feedback. But I have to strain and tell myself that feedback is often a sort of blockage, a way to stopping the momentum, of giving into fear. I'm a big believer in Carol Bly's views on creative process. I have to remind myself not to share with everyone, and remind myself that I'm in charge, no one else is, and when I let others' ideas or perceived views of my work - or god forbid, what might SELL - come into my head, it contaminates my true motivation.
Lately, I'm on one research bender after another, following the things that fascinate me until I'm saturated and sick of them. This seems to give me endless things to teach about and also write about. But I can't seem to write when I'm teaching. Or when the weather is nice. It's a good thing I live in Minnesota.