So, since I've established that books are my one passion (see previous post) I might as well post a post being passionate about book-related stuff.
We all know about wise old mentors, right? You know, that character who shows up in a lot of fantasy stories who's impossibly old and wise and who gets way too much enjoyment out of speaking in irritating riddles and who supposedly loves and trusts the hero he or she is mentoring and yet constantly scolds, condescends to, and gets angry with said hero? Yeah, you know. Merlin. Yoda. Dumbledore. Merriman Lyon.
I have mixed feelings about these characters.
More specifically, my feelings vary from version to version. For example, I love Gandalf. But then again, Gandalf never really looks down on Bilbo or Frodo. Instead of feeling he needs to teach them deep lessons by speaking cryptically or telling them stories with unclear morals he wants them to figure out, he believes in them from the beginning and leaves it to them to learn lessons through experience. Gandalf genuinely feels that these little, non-adventuresome Hobbits lacking in self-confidence are capable of amazing things; consequently, they accomplish amazing things. He guides them to find their own worth through his leadership rather than giving them their worth through his teachings.
I like Aslan, too. Aslan, who will believe in his heroes as long as they believe in him, and who, like Gandalf, learn through experience (and I'm not talking about seemingly arbitrary, "wax on, wax off" experience - actual experience).
But so few mentor characters are like Gandalf and Aslan!
More often, I encounter mentor characters who take their belligerent, impatient heroes and assign them tasks or tell them stories or spout pseudo-profound speeches that seem to have no meaning. When the impatient and belligerent hero impatiently and belligerently demands to know why the mentor is making them do this or telling them this or saying this, the mentor says nothing because apparently the hero needs to figure out the kind of profound-ish point of the task or the story or the speech himself (or herself, I guess, but in my experience very few fantasy books have female heroines).
Take Dumbledore. There are things about Dumbledore I like. There are scenes where I find him amusing. But then there's the way he, just like half the rest of the wizard world, acts like Harry's the best thing since Christmas simply because he had a good mother, an evident opinion that clashes horribly with the way he's almost never forthright about anything with Harry! Like, seriously, does he trust Harry implicitly and inexplicably or not?
And Kilgarrah from Merlin the TV show... no, I can't talk about Kilgarrah. I hate him. I hate him I hate him I hate him. I'm pretty sure that every tragic and upsetting thing that happened on that show can be blamed on Kilgarrah, in exchange for actually helping Merlin, I don't know, once? Maybe twice?
I feel like I could go on about this for a long time, dissecting my individual feelings for as many of these characters as I can think of, trying to figure out why some of them frustrate me so much, but it would take a while and isn't actually the reason I'm writing this post.
Despite my love of some mentor characters, I'm getting pretty tired of them. After a while, it just stops being plausible that every useless incompetent supposed hero is going to run across a really old, really enigmatic, really confusing sage whose pretentious ramblings somehow turn the loser into our great and noble protagonist. And honestly, I prefer heroes who are heroes in their own right, who don't need to hear stories with morals to become good men and who don't need to be forcibly faced with horrors to become brave men and who don't need to hear nonsensical maxims full of paradoxes and vagueness to become wise men.
And thus we come to Robin Hood.
Robin Hood doesn't have a wise old mentor. He isn't chosen to be a hero because of some prophecy and then assigned a befuddling (and all-too-often befuddled) Merlin-esque teacher to make him into the hero he's destined to be. He chooses to be a hero. He chooses to rob from the rich because he's got a temper and a grudge, but he chooses to give to the poor because he's innately noble and he loves his people. In some versions of the story, "his people" aren't even necessarily the Saxons. "His people" are any people oppressed and saddened and heaped with undeserved injustices. Such is the way I've always understood the story, anyway.
And I realize that I love Robin for that. I love that he's just doing what he does because he honestly wants to, from the beginning. I love that no matter how roguish or overconfident or prideful he is, he's always fighting his battles at least partly because he feels in his heart that they're battles that need to be fought, and since no one else is volunteering to fight them, he'll have to.
And what has led me to realize this?
I'm reading a book in which Robin Hood has a wise old mentor. And MAN is it making me angry.
Admittedly, I wasn't angry at first. When she (yes, the wise old mentor is a she) first showed up, Robin was dying and only she, an expert healer, could save him. That's fine. I even rather liked her, as I assumed she'd be in the book for a few chapters before Robin, having recovered, left to go out and resolve to do battle with the Normans.
100 pages later, Robin was still languishing in her cave and I was getting frustrated.
But I didn't get angry until she told him the story.
So she told him this story. It didn't make any sense and had no lesson or moral that I could discern, except for maybe "don't trust pretty redheads" (on further reflection, that moral might be contributing to my anger just a little). However, Robin evidently found it very meaningful and, where I am now in the book, is struggling with the inner conflict which will undoubtedly lead to his becoming Robin Hood.
I'm thinking I'm probably going to get angrier when it's revealed what the moral he and the wise old mentor are seeing in the dumb story is. I'm guessing it's going to be some folderol about keeping your promises or taking responsibility or something, even though the story was about an idiot who impulsively promised something to a pretty but ultimately dishonest redhead. Naturally, when her dishonesty and manipulation was revealed he refused to keep his promise because it was made under false pretenses. Then his punishment for this covenant breakage isn't really all that terrible, so... yeah, I really don't see the moral here. Beyond, again, "don't trust pretty redheads".
To complicate matters further, I'm about 99% the wise old mentor is the pretty redhead from the story. But she's good, because she's turning Robin Hood from a knave into a hero with her story which apparently has a point. But of course Robin's too dense to realize she's the pretty redhead, despite the fact that she's rather heavily hinted that she is (which reminds me of something else I don't like about non-Gandalf wise old mentors: in order for them to be needed and for their philosophical observations to be warranted, the heroes in stories with them have to be complete idiots).
So, to reiterate: Robin Hood in this story won't be fighting for a cause he's led to believe in by his own affronted sense of justice. He'll be fighting for a cause he's led to believe in by the bizarre legends told to him by an irritating old woman.
Oh, incidentally, she foresaw his arrival on her doorstep and his eventual heroism, so this story's also leaving out the whole "choosing his own destiny" thing.
It's like the author missed the whole point of Robin Hood.
Not cool, man.
Thing is, I finish what I start. Moreover, I'm trying to be optimistic. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe Robin will prove to be noble in his own right. Elsewhere in the book, before the wise old mentor rather rudely inserted herself into the narrative, he did stand up for some defenseless people all on his own. I'm going to finish the trilogy, or at the very least this first book, to see if it gets better. Which it very well might.
But... seriously. Enough with the wise old mentors. Or, if you insist, make them more like Gandalf.
~Pearl Clayton
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
The Hunt for My Heart
I haven't really done much planning for this post. It doesn't really have a point; not at the moment, anyway. Perhaps during composition a point will creep into it. It wouldn't be the first time.
I should've written it yesterday afternoon, when I felt strangely, peacefully empty, when I was full to brimming with the thoughts I'll be writing in this post, and when I felt like I was tottering on the brink of some vast emotional abyss that the vaguest breath of sadness could send me plummeting into. I'll bet that yesterday afternoon I could've written something incredible. Instead I waited, and now these thoughts aren't commanding my headspace anymore. I waited, and the peace is gone and I can't get it back, and this post is no longer something that I need to write, and I hate that. But I don't like to leave things unfinished, so I'm going to attempt to get this written.
Yesterday morning was a bad morning. A really bad morning. I won't go into details. Suffice to say there was an external storm resulting in heated words which in turn resulted in tears (a rare occurrence for me), and that when that had blown over I had my own internal storm which blew my mind to some of the darkest places it's ever been. And when that, too, had blown over, leaving behind the deathly, glorious calm of yesterday afternoon, I sat and talked with my mom, who has had to endure many storms and many post-storm talks with her moody and melancholy daughter, and has done so with an admirable patience for which I fear I don't express as much gratitude as I should.
I told her that I feel like my heart's not really in anything these days.
My heart's not in my writing. We're almost two-thirds of the way through November and my NaNo book is stuck under 10,000 words, its icon sitting dormant on my computer screen and not even having the courtesy to mock me. I feel almost no shame. I feel no sense of urgency or burning desire to get it written. I don't hate the book or love it. I dislike it passively. It's not its fault that it's not being written; it's mine. It's my writer's block and my low self-esteem and I don't hate either of those things either. My writing is still a part of me, but there's no longer any passion behind it.
My heart's not in my schoolwork, but then again it almost never has been. I go to my homeschool group and get my assignments, and take weeks to complete them because without deadlines I have no reason to hurry. I'm not doing any independent studying because there's nothing I care to learn about. I don't care if I never learn anything ever again. During the external storm, at the horrid crescendo when the climaxing external storm clashed with the rising internal one, when my thoughts were muddy with anger and depression and self-hatred and a great rush of antisocial feeling, I said I never wanted to go to school again (more specifically, I said I never wanted to go anywhere ever again; bad days tend to have the effect of dragging my emotional age down to about five years old). As the final project in one of my classes, I have to do a research paper (one that'll actually have a deadline) and I'm dreading it. I hate research papers. A few days ago when I was complaining about it to my mother (who is, once again, wonderfully patient) she theorized that I only hate writing about things that don't interest me and that I should pick a topic that does interest me. But there's the problem. I can't think of anything that interests me enough to make it worth researching.
I told my mother all of this. Like any good mother would, she asked, "So where is your heart?"
After some deliberation, I replied, "In my chest," partly because I didn't particularly want to say something like "I don't know" or, worse yet, "It isn't anywhere", and partly because I like to cope with things that upset me by turning them into lame jokes.
In that moment's deliberation, I briefly considered saying something like "In my future", as that's where I spend an embarrassingly large percentage of my time: off wandering through a childlike daydream where I have legions of fans who hail the books and movies I make as masterpieces, where the petty grievances and conflicts and miseries currently plaguing my mind have become laughable memories which I dismissively share with my many admirers (still earning their commiseration in spite of my nonchalance, of course). I waste hours meandering through this shadowy land, where I'm multitalented and stylish and pretty and all sorts of people wish they could be as amazing as I am. I think I could safely say my heart's in it.
But while my various friends whose hearts are in their futures plan, getting jobs and driver's licenses, thinking about colleges and degrees, fixing up the old cars bequeathed to them and writing brilliant, publishable stories, all I do is idly dream. The dreams never have mention of how I got to that place before my adoring public; I'm simply miraculously there. The thing is, lurking behind every dream is a dark gray pessimism that likes to creep in and tell me that they're all far-fetched and silly and selfish and vain, one that says I'm not good enough to get published and I'd be incapable of making movies and that even if I succeeded nobody would like them. I felt it would be wrong to say my heart's in my future, because I fear that if I actually put my heart into my future, if I sent things I'd written to publishers and started looking for a college with a really great liberal arts program and forced myself to turn some more of my many ideas into manuscripts thousands of words long, I would only succeed in getting my heart broken.
Moreover, my heart wasn't in my future yesterday afternoon. In the calm after the morning's double storm, when I could feel the tearstains on my face and the fragility of my emotions, I thought nothing of my own merit. For a few hours, those futuristic dreams were utterly forsaken. I didn't compose dialogues or envision movie scenes. I never once paused in what I was doing to share my supposedly brilliant thoughts on a subject with a nonexistent audience. For a few hours, I had no self-confidence and no ambition.
And it felt wonderful.
But as good as it felt to be temporarily free of the deafening sound of my own voice in my ears, there was still the looming and dreadful possibility of having to admit that I lead a passionless life. I didn't want that. So after Mom had left to pick up my sister from school, I wandered around the house in an almost unreal silence and hunted for my heart.
And in that eerie, peaceful hush, the only place I could manage to find it was in books.
I found it in the book I'm currently reading, a homey, familial tale that's reminding me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favorite books).
I found it in the eager anticipation of some of the books I got from the library on Sunday, like the first two books of a trilogy that's a retelling of the Robin Hood legends, set in Wales and incorporating elements of Celtic mythology (you can understand why I'm excited to read these, I'm sure); and like the second book in a series in a started recently, a series designed for booklovers whose first book surprised me and delighted me, made me laugh and quickened my pulse by turns.
It felt good, finding my heart.
That's all changed a bit now, though. The hush has ended and my voice has reentered my head. When a new idea for a TV show sidled its way into my head a few hours ago, I tried to shove it away, and when I caught myself composing some gushing message board discussion of me I felt completely awful. But it's all slipping back into the way it was, like yesterday never happened. Back come the empty, obsessive daydreams; away goes the raw, quiet excitement about all I'm going to read next.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still enjoying the book I'm reading, and I'm still expecting to enjoy the books I'll read next. But I can tell there's been a change, and it's not a change I'm pleased with.
And even in the contented, vulnerable, muted afternoon, I couldn't shake the feeling that my heart was poorly bestowed. If my only real passion in life is reading books, not in analyzing them or reviewing them or writing them, just reading them, what on earth will I do with my life?
Sometimes, even when I'm not recovering from a bad day (it just happens to be much worse on bad days, like yesterday) I half-envision a future quite different from the one that generally appears. In it, the years pass by and I grow older. My sole talent is writing, but any publisher I apply to rejects me because the story's too predictable or because it feels incomplete, because my characters are inconsistent and underdeveloped, because the story won't appeal to enough people, because of any number of reasons related to the seemingly numerous faults I find in my stories. So I underperform in a job that my heart isn't in, as my perfectionism objects feebly to my bare-minimum effort but I can't find it in myself to care enough to do more, meaning that I never rise in the ranks to bigger and better things. Meanwhile, my friends start going off and getting married and having kids, so I start seeing them less and less (if at all), as first my grandparents and then my aunts and uncles and parents and teachers grow older and less like themselves, changing and sickening, until...... Until my human interaction is practically nonexistent, and I watch the world continue to modernize and change and shift alarmingly from the cold comfort of my empty apartment and the discomfort of my horrible job. And I try to stop the memories of my old daydreams from crowding in and telling me how different my life is from what I wanted it to be, but I fail, and I stoop under their weight as my life rapidly drains away. Things get worse as all my favorite actors, the ones I'd hoped to work with or at the very least meet, start dying. And time marches on until I'm alone, until I'm drowning in my own selfish misery, until not even books interest me, until I have nothing left. And thus I finally reach my pathetically attended funeral and afterwards am quickly forgotten by the world at large.
(And in case anyone is now massively concerned about my mental health and overall happiness, I promise I'm okay; this is not an everyday thing or a constant preoccupation, and as I'm sure many of you have seen I'm in general plenty happy and easily amused and prone to laughter and all that good stuff. I just occasionally have days of what my mother and I call shlumpiness. We all do.)
So now we come to the point (see, I told you I might find one): I want a passion, or at the very least a more clearly defined passion. I want a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I want a reason to want to leave my room. Some days I have them. On November 27th, there'll be family and friends and really good food. On December 17th (or somewhere thereabouts) there'll be The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and a day spent fangirling and gasping for breath and maybe crying with my best friend. On December 25th, there'll be Christmas breakfast casserole and a stocking and a tree skirt full of surprises because I don't have a wish list.
I have bad days, but I also have good days. But sometimes I feel like, more than anything, I have days that are neither, empty days of going through the motions of life without much investment in it. I don't want to just live and persevere in an effort to get to the next good day or the next good book. I want my heart to be in something other than my chest or my list of favorite books. I want there to be something, something that I'm good at, something that I love doing, something that can bring me a sense of purpose and, later, accomplishment. I want there to be something I can live for.
And so the hunt for my heart must continue.
~Pearl Clayton
I should've written it yesterday afternoon, when I felt strangely, peacefully empty, when I was full to brimming with the thoughts I'll be writing in this post, and when I felt like I was tottering on the brink of some vast emotional abyss that the vaguest breath of sadness could send me plummeting into. I'll bet that yesterday afternoon I could've written something incredible. Instead I waited, and now these thoughts aren't commanding my headspace anymore. I waited, and the peace is gone and I can't get it back, and this post is no longer something that I need to write, and I hate that. But I don't like to leave things unfinished, so I'm going to attempt to get this written.
Yesterday morning was a bad morning. A really bad morning. I won't go into details. Suffice to say there was an external storm resulting in heated words which in turn resulted in tears (a rare occurrence for me), and that when that had blown over I had my own internal storm which blew my mind to some of the darkest places it's ever been. And when that, too, had blown over, leaving behind the deathly, glorious calm of yesterday afternoon, I sat and talked with my mom, who has had to endure many storms and many post-storm talks with her moody and melancholy daughter, and has done so with an admirable patience for which I fear I don't express as much gratitude as I should.
I told her that I feel like my heart's not really in anything these days.
My heart's not in my writing. We're almost two-thirds of the way through November and my NaNo book is stuck under 10,000 words, its icon sitting dormant on my computer screen and not even having the courtesy to mock me. I feel almost no shame. I feel no sense of urgency or burning desire to get it written. I don't hate the book or love it. I dislike it passively. It's not its fault that it's not being written; it's mine. It's my writer's block and my low self-esteem and I don't hate either of those things either. My writing is still a part of me, but there's no longer any passion behind it.
My heart's not in my schoolwork, but then again it almost never has been. I go to my homeschool group and get my assignments, and take weeks to complete them because without deadlines I have no reason to hurry. I'm not doing any independent studying because there's nothing I care to learn about. I don't care if I never learn anything ever again. During the external storm, at the horrid crescendo when the climaxing external storm clashed with the rising internal one, when my thoughts were muddy with anger and depression and self-hatred and a great rush of antisocial feeling, I said I never wanted to go to school again (more specifically, I said I never wanted to go anywhere ever again; bad days tend to have the effect of dragging my emotional age down to about five years old). As the final project in one of my classes, I have to do a research paper (one that'll actually have a deadline) and I'm dreading it. I hate research papers. A few days ago when I was complaining about it to my mother (who is, once again, wonderfully patient) she theorized that I only hate writing about things that don't interest me and that I should pick a topic that does interest me. But there's the problem. I can't think of anything that interests me enough to make it worth researching.
I told my mother all of this. Like any good mother would, she asked, "So where is your heart?"
After some deliberation, I replied, "In my chest," partly because I didn't particularly want to say something like "I don't know" or, worse yet, "It isn't anywhere", and partly because I like to cope with things that upset me by turning them into lame jokes.
In that moment's deliberation, I briefly considered saying something like "In my future", as that's where I spend an embarrassingly large percentage of my time: off wandering through a childlike daydream where I have legions of fans who hail the books and movies I make as masterpieces, where the petty grievances and conflicts and miseries currently plaguing my mind have become laughable memories which I dismissively share with my many admirers (still earning their commiseration in spite of my nonchalance, of course). I waste hours meandering through this shadowy land, where I'm multitalented and stylish and pretty and all sorts of people wish they could be as amazing as I am. I think I could safely say my heart's in it.
But while my various friends whose hearts are in their futures plan, getting jobs and driver's licenses, thinking about colleges and degrees, fixing up the old cars bequeathed to them and writing brilliant, publishable stories, all I do is idly dream. The dreams never have mention of how I got to that place before my adoring public; I'm simply miraculously there. The thing is, lurking behind every dream is a dark gray pessimism that likes to creep in and tell me that they're all far-fetched and silly and selfish and vain, one that says I'm not good enough to get published and I'd be incapable of making movies and that even if I succeeded nobody would like them. I felt it would be wrong to say my heart's in my future, because I fear that if I actually put my heart into my future, if I sent things I'd written to publishers and started looking for a college with a really great liberal arts program and forced myself to turn some more of my many ideas into manuscripts thousands of words long, I would only succeed in getting my heart broken.
Moreover, my heart wasn't in my future yesterday afternoon. In the calm after the morning's double storm, when I could feel the tearstains on my face and the fragility of my emotions, I thought nothing of my own merit. For a few hours, those futuristic dreams were utterly forsaken. I didn't compose dialogues or envision movie scenes. I never once paused in what I was doing to share my supposedly brilliant thoughts on a subject with a nonexistent audience. For a few hours, I had no self-confidence and no ambition.
And it felt wonderful.
But as good as it felt to be temporarily free of the deafening sound of my own voice in my ears, there was still the looming and dreadful possibility of having to admit that I lead a passionless life. I didn't want that. So after Mom had left to pick up my sister from school, I wandered around the house in an almost unreal silence and hunted for my heart.
And in that eerie, peaceful hush, the only place I could manage to find it was in books.
I found it in the book I'm currently reading, a homey, familial tale that's reminding me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favorite books).
I found it in the eager anticipation of some of the books I got from the library on Sunday, like the first two books of a trilogy that's a retelling of the Robin Hood legends, set in Wales and incorporating elements of Celtic mythology (you can understand why I'm excited to read these, I'm sure); and like the second book in a series in a started recently, a series designed for booklovers whose first book surprised me and delighted me, made me laugh and quickened my pulse by turns.
It felt good, finding my heart.
That's all changed a bit now, though. The hush has ended and my voice has reentered my head. When a new idea for a TV show sidled its way into my head a few hours ago, I tried to shove it away, and when I caught myself composing some gushing message board discussion of me I felt completely awful. But it's all slipping back into the way it was, like yesterday never happened. Back come the empty, obsessive daydreams; away goes the raw, quiet excitement about all I'm going to read next.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still enjoying the book I'm reading, and I'm still expecting to enjoy the books I'll read next. But I can tell there's been a change, and it's not a change I'm pleased with.
And even in the contented, vulnerable, muted afternoon, I couldn't shake the feeling that my heart was poorly bestowed. If my only real passion in life is reading books, not in analyzing them or reviewing them or writing them, just reading them, what on earth will I do with my life?
Sometimes, even when I'm not recovering from a bad day (it just happens to be much worse on bad days, like yesterday) I half-envision a future quite different from the one that generally appears. In it, the years pass by and I grow older. My sole talent is writing, but any publisher I apply to rejects me because the story's too predictable or because it feels incomplete, because my characters are inconsistent and underdeveloped, because the story won't appeal to enough people, because of any number of reasons related to the seemingly numerous faults I find in my stories. So I underperform in a job that my heart isn't in, as my perfectionism objects feebly to my bare-minimum effort but I can't find it in myself to care enough to do more, meaning that I never rise in the ranks to bigger and better things. Meanwhile, my friends start going off and getting married and having kids, so I start seeing them less and less (if at all), as first my grandparents and then my aunts and uncles and parents and teachers grow older and less like themselves, changing and sickening, until...... Until my human interaction is practically nonexistent, and I watch the world continue to modernize and change and shift alarmingly from the cold comfort of my empty apartment and the discomfort of my horrible job. And I try to stop the memories of my old daydreams from crowding in and telling me how different my life is from what I wanted it to be, but I fail, and I stoop under their weight as my life rapidly drains away. Things get worse as all my favorite actors, the ones I'd hoped to work with or at the very least meet, start dying. And time marches on until I'm alone, until I'm drowning in my own selfish misery, until not even books interest me, until I have nothing left. And thus I finally reach my pathetically attended funeral and afterwards am quickly forgotten by the world at large.
(And in case anyone is now massively concerned about my mental health and overall happiness, I promise I'm okay; this is not an everyday thing or a constant preoccupation, and as I'm sure many of you have seen I'm in general plenty happy and easily amused and prone to laughter and all that good stuff. I just occasionally have days of what my mother and I call shlumpiness. We all do.)
So now we come to the point (see, I told you I might find one): I want a passion, or at the very least a more clearly defined passion. I want a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I want a reason to want to leave my room. Some days I have them. On November 27th, there'll be family and friends and really good food. On December 17th (or somewhere thereabouts) there'll be The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and a day spent fangirling and gasping for breath and maybe crying with my best friend. On December 25th, there'll be Christmas breakfast casserole and a stocking and a tree skirt full of surprises because I don't have a wish list.
I have bad days, but I also have good days. But sometimes I feel like, more than anything, I have days that are neither, empty days of going through the motions of life without much investment in it. I don't want to just live and persevere in an effort to get to the next good day or the next good book. I want my heart to be in something other than my chest or my list of favorite books. I want there to be something, something that I'm good at, something that I love doing, something that can bring me a sense of purpose and, later, accomplishment. I want there to be something I can live for.
And so the hunt for my heart must continue.
~Pearl Clayton
Saturday, November 1, 2014
The Crippling Fear of Inadequacy
It's time once again for National Novel Writing Month, and I can't seem to decide whether I'm excited or terrified.
On the one hand, I feel plenty ready. The book I'm writing this year is a sequel to something else I've already written, so I already know and love my characters. I know what new characters and plotlines I want to introduce. I know from writing the first story that this story comes easily to me, and that the narrator is both easy and fun to write as. I'm feeling competitive, ready to outdo (or at the very least attempt to outdo) my previous writing accomplishments and the friends of mine who are doing their own novels alike. BRING IT ON, NOVEMBER!
On the other hand, November's only thirty days. And I still have school and lots of books I want to read. And a lot of things are supposed to happen in this book, so who knows whether I can get them all written in such a short amount of time? And I've been having a lot of trouble with writing lately.
That last one might be obvious. If you scroll down, you'll see my latest post, a short story I finished writing yesterday after working on it for several days. If you scroll down a little farther, you'll see that my last post before that was on September 3rd.
The extent of my writing over the past few months is as follows: I wrote that last post on September 3rd. I wrote the short story over the last ten days or so of October. I wrote another short story, this one a school assignment that ended up being about 16 pages long and not quite 7,000 words, over the course of October. Over the course of last Sunday and Monday, I finally finished last year's NaNo book, writing about 8,700 words in two days (and yes, I was extremely proud of myself).
That probably seems like a lot. But it doesn't feel like a lot to me, because it took me an entire month to write a short story that was shorter than the amount I added in my book in just two days. And I went almost two months without blogging. And I know how much I struggled to write both the school short story and the one I posted yesterday. And I know why I'm having all this trouble.
The reason I haven't blogged in two months, despite the fact that more than once I came across something in fiction I felt like ranting about, is that I didn't want to post any regular posts until I'd finished the posts from the short story challenge I started over the summer. And the reason that it's been taking me so long to finish that can be found in the subject line of this post: the crippling fear of inadequacy.
The thing is, I'm afraid of disappointing people. I worry that my stories won't live up to the expectations of the people giving me prompts. It's the same reason it took me so long to write that story for school. I'd been given an assignment to write something by my favorite teacher ever, and I couldn't shake the completely unfounded feeling that if the story I wrote wasn't amazing she'd feel let down. (My working excuse for the delay while I was writing it was that I hated all my characters, but then I realized that characters very similar to the ones I supposedly hated had made appearances in my other non-assigned writings without really slowing me down at all.)
And then Sunday came, and I had to finish last year's book, and the only person I could conceivably disappoint was myself, and suddenly I was done and my book had magically become 23 pages longer than it had been before.
Thus last year is behind me and I can boldly go into a new November.
There's just one small problem.
The story I finished on Monday is a fantasy story. It features a completely made-up land with its own people and language and mythology and history, its own social stigmas and prejudices. The characters face danger and death, betrayal and fear. There're moments of poetic writing and character growth. It's not actually as good as I'm making it sound...... but I think it's pretty dang good.
The story I started writing at midnight is about a modern teenage girl with few social graces who is attempting to adjust to the idea of having a best friend, a massively foreign concept to her. She bumbles around, sassing people and trying to cope and accidentally making more friends along the way. It's a fun story, she's a fun character and, as previously stated, a blast to write; but compared to last year's endeavor, it feels a bit...... insubstantial.
My concern now is that all my friends and maybe even some family members or teachers will read last year's book and think it's good and ask to see my other stuff, and then be confused and bored by my newer manuscript and its lack of meat.
Once again, I'm being crippled by a fear of inadequacy.
*Sigh*
There's a stereotype out there that teenage girls have no self-esteem. I've heard teenage girls described as having "enough insecurities to fill a house". And some days, I feel like I'm upholding the stereotype. But where most girls presumably fret about their appearance, or their social status, or their lack of a boyfriend, I fret about my writing. No matter how many times or how many ways I'm told it's good, there's almost always a voice in the back of my head silently arguing. "But the ending was stupid." "But I didn't flesh that one plot point out enough." "But I'm so rambly." "But what about that one incredibly lame line of dialogue I insisted on putting in and then immediately regretted?" "You're just saying that because you don't want to hurt my feelings."
The voice with the fear-of-inadequacy problem is even worse. "You realize you use the exact same dialogue device in, like, everything you write, right? Someday someone's going to notice that." "This isn't up to your usual standard. Are you even trying?" "Why is this taking so long? Normally you don't have this much trouble." "Ugh, this is awful. You can't let anyone read this. For some reason they all think you're good at writing. They would be so disappointed by this."
Those who have read my non-blog writing are often besieged with demands of feedback. This is why. I get very frustrated by my own self-confidence issues, and sometimes positive comments will lodge in my brain and fight them back for days, even weeks. On Monday, as soon as I'd finished, I sent last year's NaNo to a couple good friends, and ever since I've been anxiously waiting for comments that I know aren't going to be arriving until at least mid-November. Because if they love it, and like the characters that I intended for them to like, and get excited by the things that are supposed to be exciting, it'll make my whole week. And if they don't....... well, I don't exactly know how I'll feel, but at least I'll have the opinion of someone besides myself to refer to.
I get that I'm not alone in this. Many great artists had it much worse than I do, believing their masterpieces were worthless. I actually find that comforting.
There's a Sherlock Holmes movie called They Might Be Giants that was made in the 1970s. It's about an ardent Sherlock Holmes fan who copes with an emotional trauma by forgetting his real life and believing he's Sherlock. His brother forces him to see a young psychologist, conveniently named Dr. Watson. Shenanigans ensue.
There's one bit in it that I was much amused by, when "Sherlock" is trying to convince Watson to come solve crimes with him. He says something like, "I understand that you probably feel unworthy to be my companion because of my massive intellect. But you're not! You're perfectly adequate! Just repeat this to yourself: 'I am adequate!'"
It's meant to be funny (and it is). But I'm finding it's not as easy as it sounds to say even those words and believe them.
I am adequate.
I am adequate.
*Takes deep breath*
C'mon, November.
Let's do this.
~Pearl Clayton
On the one hand, I feel plenty ready. The book I'm writing this year is a sequel to something else I've already written, so I already know and love my characters. I know what new characters and plotlines I want to introduce. I know from writing the first story that this story comes easily to me, and that the narrator is both easy and fun to write as. I'm feeling competitive, ready to outdo (or at the very least attempt to outdo) my previous writing accomplishments and the friends of mine who are doing their own novels alike. BRING IT ON, NOVEMBER!
On the other hand, November's only thirty days. And I still have school and lots of books I want to read. And a lot of things are supposed to happen in this book, so who knows whether I can get them all written in such a short amount of time? And I've been having a lot of trouble with writing lately.
That last one might be obvious. If you scroll down, you'll see my latest post, a short story I finished writing yesterday after working on it for several days. If you scroll down a little farther, you'll see that my last post before that was on September 3rd.
The extent of my writing over the past few months is as follows: I wrote that last post on September 3rd. I wrote the short story over the last ten days or so of October. I wrote another short story, this one a school assignment that ended up being about 16 pages long and not quite 7,000 words, over the course of October. Over the course of last Sunday and Monday, I finally finished last year's NaNo book, writing about 8,700 words in two days (and yes, I was extremely proud of myself).
That probably seems like a lot. But it doesn't feel like a lot to me, because it took me an entire month to write a short story that was shorter than the amount I added in my book in just two days. And I went almost two months without blogging. And I know how much I struggled to write both the school short story and the one I posted yesterday. And I know why I'm having all this trouble.
The reason I haven't blogged in two months, despite the fact that more than once I came across something in fiction I felt like ranting about, is that I didn't want to post any regular posts until I'd finished the posts from the short story challenge I started over the summer. And the reason that it's been taking me so long to finish that can be found in the subject line of this post: the crippling fear of inadequacy.
The thing is, I'm afraid of disappointing people. I worry that my stories won't live up to the expectations of the people giving me prompts. It's the same reason it took me so long to write that story for school. I'd been given an assignment to write something by my favorite teacher ever, and I couldn't shake the completely unfounded feeling that if the story I wrote wasn't amazing she'd feel let down. (My working excuse for the delay while I was writing it was that I hated all my characters, but then I realized that characters very similar to the ones I supposedly hated had made appearances in my other non-assigned writings without really slowing me down at all.)
And then Sunday came, and I had to finish last year's book, and the only person I could conceivably disappoint was myself, and suddenly I was done and my book had magically become 23 pages longer than it had been before.
Thus last year is behind me and I can boldly go into a new November.
There's just one small problem.
The story I finished on Monday is a fantasy story. It features a completely made-up land with its own people and language and mythology and history, its own social stigmas and prejudices. The characters face danger and death, betrayal and fear. There're moments of poetic writing and character growth. It's not actually as good as I'm making it sound...... but I think it's pretty dang good.
The story I started writing at midnight is about a modern teenage girl with few social graces who is attempting to adjust to the idea of having a best friend, a massively foreign concept to her. She bumbles around, sassing people and trying to cope and accidentally making more friends along the way. It's a fun story, she's a fun character and, as previously stated, a blast to write; but compared to last year's endeavor, it feels a bit...... insubstantial.
My concern now is that all my friends and maybe even some family members or teachers will read last year's book and think it's good and ask to see my other stuff, and then be confused and bored by my newer manuscript and its lack of meat.
Once again, I'm being crippled by a fear of inadequacy.
*Sigh*
There's a stereotype out there that teenage girls have no self-esteem. I've heard teenage girls described as having "enough insecurities to fill a house". And some days, I feel like I'm upholding the stereotype. But where most girls presumably fret about their appearance, or their social status, or their lack of a boyfriend, I fret about my writing. No matter how many times or how many ways I'm told it's good, there's almost always a voice in the back of my head silently arguing. "But the ending was stupid." "But I didn't flesh that one plot point out enough." "But I'm so rambly." "But what about that one incredibly lame line of dialogue I insisted on putting in and then immediately regretted?" "You're just saying that because you don't want to hurt my feelings."
The voice with the fear-of-inadequacy problem is even worse. "You realize you use the exact same dialogue device in, like, everything you write, right? Someday someone's going to notice that." "This isn't up to your usual standard. Are you even trying?" "Why is this taking so long? Normally you don't have this much trouble." "Ugh, this is awful. You can't let anyone read this. For some reason they all think you're good at writing. They would be so disappointed by this."
Those who have read my non-blog writing are often besieged with demands of feedback. This is why. I get very frustrated by my own self-confidence issues, and sometimes positive comments will lodge in my brain and fight them back for days, even weeks. On Monday, as soon as I'd finished, I sent last year's NaNo to a couple good friends, and ever since I've been anxiously waiting for comments that I know aren't going to be arriving until at least mid-November. Because if they love it, and like the characters that I intended for them to like, and get excited by the things that are supposed to be exciting, it'll make my whole week. And if they don't....... well, I don't exactly know how I'll feel, but at least I'll have the opinion of someone besides myself to refer to.
I get that I'm not alone in this. Many great artists had it much worse than I do, believing their masterpieces were worthless. I actually find that comforting.
There's a Sherlock Holmes movie called They Might Be Giants that was made in the 1970s. It's about an ardent Sherlock Holmes fan who copes with an emotional trauma by forgetting his real life and believing he's Sherlock. His brother forces him to see a young psychologist, conveniently named Dr. Watson. Shenanigans ensue.
There's one bit in it that I was much amused by, when "Sherlock" is trying to convince Watson to come solve crimes with him. He says something like, "I understand that you probably feel unworthy to be my companion because of my massive intellect. But you're not! You're perfectly adequate! Just repeat this to yourself: 'I am adequate!'"
It's meant to be funny (and it is). But I'm finding it's not as easy as it sounds to say even those words and believe them.
I am adequate.
I am adequate.
*Takes deep breath*
C'mon, November.
Let's do this.
~Pearl Clayton
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