Friday, February 7, 2014

Why bother writing?

When I was little I spent an inordinate amount of time writing truly terrible fiction. I read frequently, but apparently much of what I read didn’t impact or improve my writing until I was much, much older. Meanwhile, ten-year-old me would craft story after story about heroines who were all named Laura or Elizabeth and all had extremely limited vocabulary, but somehow still managed to win the boy and defeat the evil headmistress at the orphanage.

Later, I reread my stories and realized that I was a terrible writer. I decided to spare the world any more attempts at authorial fame and stopped my creative writing efforts.

The older I got, the more the idea of writing a novel seemed absurd. I was far too practical for that. The odds of getting published were slim to none. The odds that I had talent even slimmer and I didn’t like the idea of doing of something that I was bad at. Sadly, this attitude has stopped me from doing many things in my life, from taking many risks that could have potentially been rewarded, and from learning things that would have helped me grow as a person.

I am not sure at what pivotal moment I started writing fiction again. I think one of my friends started talking about her own creative writing pursuits and in a nostalgic fit I broke out the laptop and tapped out some fairly decent – or at least not completely abysmal – prose. Then NaNoWriMo happened. I heard about NaNoWriMo from this same friend and was instantly intrigued – write a novel in a month? What’s more, write a novel in my FAVORITE month (November)? Why not! I made it to 22,000 words that month on a goal of 50,000. It was much harder than I’d anticipated. But the damage had been done and I was officially writing again. Not only that, I had two (TWO!) different story ideas bouncing around.

This was momentarily delightful, but soon writing began to seem like a waste of time – what purpose did it serve, after all? I certainly wasn’t going to be able to make a career out of it. The more research I did, the more evident it became that unless I was fast friends with someone in New York who happened to be an agent, it was unlikely that I would ever get published. So why rack up outrageous word counts on sub-par novels only to have them sit in a file on my computer?

My enthusiasm waned.

I trudged through a few different novel ideas, always running out of steam quickly once I reread my prose (once I was over 30,000 into a novel when I realized it was utter garbage and stopped the draft).
And therein lies my dilemma. I cannot separate the creative act of writing from my skill. I have the mistaken notion that art must well-done to be worth doing – a theory that complete ignores the artistic and creative process. A theory that ignores the pleasure derived from creating something out of your own head, with your own hands. A theory that claims that art is only worthwhile if it makes it out into the light to be appreciated (or despised) by others.

Recently however, I believe I discovered a cure to this debilitating viewpoint.  I read Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem, a manual on inspiration, the writing process, and quarantining your inner editor. Baty assures his readers that the joy of writing novels is found in using your imagination to tell stories, no matter how terrible, and just because you can. In short, writing is about the joy it brings you, not about any hoped for material gain or fame – and therefore, it doesn’t matter how good your novel is, it only matters that you wrote it.

And so, dear readers, I will henceforth no longer regard my writing as just verbal spewing on a page, but MY verbal spewing on a page, the spewing of which I very much enjoyed. I will find joy and entertainment in writing my novel instead of pride, which is far too fickle, and I will view novel writing as a new kind of literary therapy, as rewarding and entertaining as reading a book.

If you are lucky, perhaps I will treat you to a sample of my latest caper…it is about a young, dynamite blonde named Beth who works as an editor for Webster’s dictionary and therefore has an absurdly large vocabulary, but alas! her evil boss has it out for her and never lets her leave, which is why she has no love life -- until she decides to overthrow her boss and start her own dictionary!

Happy noveling to you all.