Agonies
Why the heck do I do this to myself? Nobody makes me write anything, or post it if I do. And today I put up the second chapter and now I know there are 4 comments on it and I can't bring myself to look at them! I'm alone in the house - that's a miracle on a Friday night, it's the perfect time for a writing jag, and I'm just this horrible bundle of nerves.
Do actors feel like this when they go on stage? Or musicians? And how does anybody survive having something they wrote on TV or on the stage and actually getting it reviewed?
The hardest thing to do is see your work as others see it. To read it as if you don't know all the things that are in your head but not on the page, and obvious to readers. Sometimes people point out something doesn't seem quite right, and often once that's done it's so blindingly obvious that you wonder how you could possibly have missed it.
Writing is like peeling off your skin. Any little thing I write is so unimportant in the vast cosmic scale of events and yet it becomes absolutely critial and life-defining to me. And I can't tell anyone I'm doing it. I'm too embarrassed. It's agony and ecstasy at the same time. It's the most confusing, conflicting feeling since falling in love, which it resembles in many ways.
"The lunatic, the lover and the poet/Are of imagination all compact." Trust Shakespeare to put his finger on it so well. Did he ever feel like this about his stuff? If he didn't, he must have been a hard bastard.
Do actors feel like this when they go on stage? Or musicians? And how does anybody survive having something they wrote on TV or on the stage and actually getting it reviewed?
The hardest thing to do is see your work as others see it. To read it as if you don't know all the things that are in your head but not on the page, and obvious to readers. Sometimes people point out something doesn't seem quite right, and often once that's done it's so blindingly obvious that you wonder how you could possibly have missed it.
Writing is like peeling off your skin. Any little thing I write is so unimportant in the vast cosmic scale of events and yet it becomes absolutely critial and life-defining to me. And I can't tell anyone I'm doing it. I'm too embarrassed. It's agony and ecstasy at the same time. It's the most confusing, conflicting feeling since falling in love, which it resembles in many ways.
"The lunatic, the lover and the poet/Are of imagination all compact." Trust Shakespeare to put his finger on it so well. Did he ever feel like this about his stuff? If he didn't, he must have been a hard bastard.