This morning I sprained my ankle on my way to work, and was summarily dismissed from my office as a potential liability. I ended up in an Internet cafe in Newtown, thinking about writing.
Most of my writerly goals are either incredibly immediate (“Write short story about getting lost in a fabric store”) or incredibly long term (“Become successful author, attempt to maintain such.”) I tend to not muck about in that mid-range of things to accomplish in the middle future. This is remarkably counterintuitive at times, and I’m trying to break the habit.
For starters, I’ve decided that during my time in this program, I need to get over my workshopping issues. I have a tendency to release my work with great reluctance, to pass everything off as a first draft, to cringe whenever my pieces are read aloud.
Once, at a party months ago, Sarah was sitting on my bedroom floor with me. Above her head a half-finished painted was stuck to the wall.
“I like this,” She said, gesturing to it.
“Thanks,” I answered. “I sort of hate it right now.” And I did hate it. It was muddy and confused, the tangled limbs of the models fading into the background.
She turned to me. “Do you hate everything you make at one point or another?”
“Wow.” I was startled. As usual, Sarah is both brilliant and insightful. “Yea, I do.”
I hate every piece I write at some point in that piece’s lifetime. I even hated this blog post, for a miniature flash of time.
I need to get over that. Perhaps not the hatred, because that hatred is usually a signal of promise, the possibility of something brilliant that I just haven’t gotten to yet.
But the reluctance that hatred produces, the critical fear and compulsive shyness, all of that needs to go.
I used to have trouble with peer criticism because I would inevitably think that the critical opinions of my peers were more valid than the decisions I had already made. I had trouble owning my work, making and sticking by conscious choices.
Then, sometimes that hatred flips. Sometimes I love the things I write so fiercely that the thought of exposing them to criticism makes me ill. I get caught up in the idea that words are living, breathing precious things.
I have been practicing consciousness and self-critique. I have been practicing the art of critical choice and conviction. And I will get over this workshopping shit, and be better for it.
2 Comments
Dont lose the hatred someting an artist has to to learn is to not stop becasue of the hatred or dislike or whatever negative emotions are generated by any stage of the creative process but to embrace it and to understand it. Thats your creative mind pushing to move whatever it is your working on forward.
Orson Scott Card once said that writers have to be able to flip back and forth between two equally strong beliefs, and to do it at specific times: hate the piece when you’re actually sitting down to revise it, and think it’s the best thing ever (as distinct from loving it, like one loves a kitten) when it’s time to drop it in the mail. He is less clear on what you should feel in between; interestingly enough, author Patrick Rothfuss decided that holding two contradictory ideas in the mind generates enough power to fuel the entire magical system in The Name of the Wind.
Two cents, anyway :0) Having a good workshop helps, too; I’ve just joined a writer’s group. Let’s do it to it. I like hearing about what you’re up to with writing things.
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[...] avoid peer critique. I know critique is hard. I have mentioned before how much I get tangled in my own work, and how devastating a bad critique can be. But how am I [...]
[...] For a time this frustrated me. I admit, for a time I was so irked that I complained, quite a lot. I was 14,000 words deep in a project I’d had about a half hour’s worth of feedback on. A project I was being graded on, and was emotionally invested in. (In my heart of hearts I confess that I adore this thing that I am writing, in a way that’s very new and strange to me.) [...]
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