Yes, another book on writing. I've read it before, but during a time when I wasn't struggling with writerly confidence. You know, when I didn't really need it. But the past couple weeks, confidence gremlins have been riverdancing through my mental happy place. The more I wrote on my blog, the less I wrote on my projects, the less productive I felt, and the more certain I became that everything I write is crap.
Which, of course, snowballed. I couldn't be sad about being a crappy writer without berating myself for being sad about it. And then I felt worse because I had to berate myself for being sad that I was a crappy writer, and then I felt stupid for being sad that I had to berate myself for being .... in a spiral of lameness that was periodically interrupted by me flinking myself with a rubberband(it seemed less silly than swatting myself on the nose with rolled up newspaper).
But then I found my book! And I didn't even have to read all that far before I found a short sentence that somehow made everything better, so I'm going to share it: No one hates himself more than a writer who isn't writing.
That was like a prescription to write crap just to feel better about writing at the level that simply fails to live up to expectations. The equivalent of take two of these and call me int he morning... So I dashed to www.writeordie.com and in Strict Kamikaze mode, pounded out 2100 words in 62 minutes--which I think is some kind of record for me.
Six hours later I re-read it, and it didn't suck sugar-frosted monkey nuggets, as I expected it to. I revised and edited, layered in emotion, clarified the conflict, wrote a synopsis and query letter, and submitted it to the Riva Fast-Track in about 24 hours time elapsed time. It might get no where, but I feel confident stating: It's not crap! I'm even kind of happy with it.
There's something very cathartic about forcing yourself to produce fast. There's no time for second-guessing or berating yourself. It's a good feeling. I've never been one who can shut off the internal editor. But if this is what it's like, I'm so going to have to do this more often.
