I just finished reading this really phenomenal book called All The Light We Cannot See. It won the Pulitzer and I can see why, because it was amazingly poetic in its language. The story was deep and rich, the characters felt alive. I was sad to put it down. And that's the best kind of book to read I think.
Now I'm pretty sure I will never achieve something like that unless I take some sort of surprise turn later in life. The stuff that wins awards is the stuff created out of thin air, and I don't have a fiction story in my head to flesh out and turn into award-winning prose.
But the author did inspire me to continue pushing forward in my own work. Because to toil for 10 years on something (that's how long it took him to write it) and have the finished product affect people in that way...well how rewarding is that? How meaningful can you get?
I just wrapped up another birthday on Friday and therefore I can announce I'm now 37 years old. It was a challenging day in some ways because our plans got messed up, but at the end of it all, things turned out just fine. I got to be with my favorite person, I fed the ducks at the pond, and I ate some really delicious cake.
But the day after was better, because I woke up with renewed vigor and determination (although I finally got some sleep and didn't wake up feeling like death, so I'm sure that helped). And I've been rubbing my hands together ever since, trying to plan and scheme my way into finally achieving the things I want to achieve. To finally applying myself, and using my writing talent in ways that mean more to me than what I've been doing so far. Which I'm not sure is much of anything of importance.
I could be being a bit hard on myself, I suppose.
I realize now that I use this blog as sort of a crutch many days. It's a way for me to write when I want to write, in a public sort of way, without the pressure of having it be anything worth reading. A baby step, really. Because when I write here it can just be a post. And it can just be average at that. And maybe nobody will even read it.
And that means all the internal pressure to succeed instead of fail sort of gets washed away, allowing me to write here without fear most of the time. Now while I think it's good that I have a place to go to keep my skills alive, I think it's bad that I turn to it when I could be turning to other things that have more risk. Like the two books I'm working on. Or the three other abandoned manuscript drafts saved to my hard drive.
They say that realizing something is half the battle, right? I think that being able to verbalize I'm afraid is a really important first step. I also think that as the years pass by I become less afraid, because I have less time. And when you start running out of time you start running out of fear. Fear about doing things, anyway, because the fear of not having done them starts to grow over everything like a rogue English ivy.
So this week I'm going to sit down and write. It's a new year for me, a new start. I'm still afraid, but maybe a little less so. Maybe I can push through that fear and do something, at least for a little while.
And if/when I can't? Well, I'll just keep coming here. Because it doesn't hurt anyone and it keeps my mind and fingers practicing, so that when the day (or days) come that I'm finally not afraid anymore, I'm ready to take off from the gates.
No comments:
Post a Comment