How to overcome the worry that what you’re writing isn’t worth reading.
As I’ve been thinking about this through the day, I realized that I haven’t really been terribly worried about it. I think it’s because I love the editing process. To me that’s where any piece of writing becomes something worth reading.
This is not to say that I don’t struggle with other doubts or barriers to writing. Sometimes it’s the thought that I don’t have anything to say, worthwhile or not. And that mostly comes from tiredness in my experience. When I’m tired, my defenses are down and it is so easy for me to believe that my creations (and therefore myself) don’t have value.
Sometimes, it’s simply the distraction of the Internet. I’ve found and pinned images of many celebrities captioned with something very similar to the Tom Hiddleston one above. I have dozens of articles saved about writing, and heaps of writing prompts. But that’s not actually writing. There’s a Neil Gaiman quote about writing:
This is how you do it: You sit at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve run across that quote and been hit in the face with it. But reading that, and going, Yeah, man, that’s so true, isn’t writing either.
Last week, it was the technology challenge.
I find it interesting that my computer should randomly decide to die midway through such a productive season. I hadn’t really been straining it with anything, just regular Internet browsing and word processing. It hadn’t been giving my any signals of distress or even requests to restart for updates. I just thought to myself, I can’t remember the last time I shut this machine down, maybe I should do that. Famous last words.
Whether you agree or not, I’m choosing to view this trial (there’s a lot of lost documents, pictures, and music, that I’m mourning) as a sign; as kind of a small moment of spiritual warfare. To me, this says that I was on to something good, that what I was AM doing is important and has value and has impact. That this writing thing is something that the Darkness wanted to stop.
And that’s enough reason for me to forge ahead. There is more than enough Darkness in the world. Even if what I write doesn’t amount to much more than a porch light on a winter night, I’m going to keep letting some Light into the world. You can count on that.