Have you ever sat (or stood) somewhere in the middle of a lively conversation and had absolutely nothing to contribute? Have you ever been forced to listen while those around you ask insightful questions, spit out hilarious responses, and come up with sarcastic quips in the blink of an eye? And all the while, you’re trying not to look like Joey Tribbiani from that one episode of Friends, the one where he reads the V encyclopedia in order to sound intelligent, while the group moves from Vivisection and the Vas Deferens to the Korean War.
Sometimes I feel the same way about my writing. There are so many voices out there, so many of them better or cleverer or catchier than mine. And while I don’t expect to be the greatest writer of all time, or even one of them, I find it almost impossible to judge myself in an objective way. Sometimes I’m saying exactly what I want to say, and I think–Wow! I really have gotten the hang of this. Other times, every single word that comes out of my brain reads like the most pure, unadulterated crap. Never mind that it’s the same words I thought were great a few days before. The way I see my writing is dependent on so many factors that I fear I’ll never know if I’m any good at it or not.
I remember reading years ago that other artists and creative types (I’m talking the true geniuses here, the ones most people know and admire) are almost never truly satisfied with their own creations. That’s crazy, I would think. How can you have millions of people who know you and love what you do and still think you’re awful at it?
Well, I think I know now. Because no matter how large (or small, in my case) the audience is, art itself is such an intensely personal thing. I remember downloading self-published novels on my Kindle and feeling smugly superior to so many of those writers, picking apart grammar, sentence structure, and plot (or lack thereof) with the glee of a child demolishing a tower of blocks. I would think how much better I could do, as evidenced by the wonderful stories bouncing around in my head, all of which simply had to be more worthwhile than all of the pulpy garbage I would wade through in order to find something readable.
Fortunately for my younger, more judgmental self, I eventually realized that putting those stories on paper is about a million times harder than dreaming them up. Everyone has ideas. What separates a writer from a non-writer is their ability to flesh them out, to build the world and add structure to it, to insert in the exact right way all the details that make characters believable, rather than two-dimensional cutouts. And when I realized all of this, it finally hit me just how much blood, sweat, tears, and effort go into every piece of artwork that has ever existed.
As creators of art, we open ourselves up and reach deep inside to the forge of our soul, hoping that what we pull out will be a shiny new piece with a recognizable shape and a pleasant aesthetic. Most of the time, though, it starts out as a lump of dull metal, in sore need of pounding and polishing. No matter how hard we work, the simple fact is that many, if not most, of these lumps stay that way forever. That doesn’t mean we don’t give each one our best effort. And who’s to say that a terribly misshapen lump won’t eventually turn out to be one of our inadvertently best efforts? OK, perhaps that’s a bad example, but the point is that it’s impossible to predict ahead of time what will be worth your time and what won’t be. For me, it’s a feeling. It’s the way the words flow out of my head and onto the screen. It’s coming back to a page or a chapter, reading it, and thinking, Wow. It’s almost as if a real author wrote this.
Too many times, though, that misshapen lump just doesn’t turn into the David I know it could be. And that’s not the fault of the forge or the metal. It’s that I don’t yet have the tools or the resources to turn it into what it should be. But I keep pounding at it. I keep trying to come up with the words, the right words that will turn my latest work into something worth reading. And I keep trying to pick up a loose thread in that endless conversation. Hopefully some day, I will.
Katia Cole 