Think Love Hurts? Try Creating!

Here’s the rudest, cruelest awakening to telling your story in writing: Most of the time, you will feel like you’re failing. Like what you’re spewing out onto paper (or screen) is the lamest, most cliché, least thought-provoking material any moron could dream up. Like the unenlightened folks in Plato’s cave allegory, you’ll be writing shadows when what you want to write is all the distinctions and realities of flesh. You’ll read your words and feel like crap. This will happen a lot.

It’s the most painful thing about creating. Whether your creation is a memoir, a novel, a dance piece, a fashion design, a piece of music, or anything in between, it will often be the dimmest representation of what you can see and feel so clearly in your mind and heart. And—in case you missed it the first time—you will feel like you’re failing. This is a fact. The question is: What will you do about it?

Are you courageous enough to plow into your work and pull out the weeds, no matter how long it takes or how difficult it is to find their roots? Or (at the risk of extending the metaphor too far) will you close the blinds so that you can’t see how those worthless stalks are killing the few fine flowers that are in bloom?

If it’s the latter, that’s okay. But you’re in the wrong field.

If you’re the former, however, welcome; you’re among others who, like you, are passionate about creating and telling stories through art and who have experienced the debilitating lows of being a perfectionist. Because that’s really what I’m getting at. For all those times we’re deeply disappointed in the things we create, it’s because those creations don’t perfectly live up to the images or ideas in our minds. And it’s our job to poke them, pull them, kill them, resuscitate them, love them, coax them, and mold them until they are right, finally, to us.

This is the responsibility of creating. Sometimes it sucks. Want a partner who can help it suck less? Contact my assistant Lauray at lauray@writersoftheroundtable.com to set up a phone call to discuss the possibilities.

Related posts:

1. The Joy of Telling Your Story
2. Tips to creating believable dialogue
3. Storytelling is a conversation—will you join it?
4. How to help your writing help you.
5. For Authors Who Love Running in Place, the Perfect Exercise: Pursuing Commercial Publication!