Another creative question from Tumblr: Q: I hope you dont mind me writing to you but youre a writer and you use tumblr, so we have at least 2 things in common. Im scared people will read my work and wont like it, so my dream will be over. How do I get over this? I want my work to be read A: You’re going to have to do two things. 1) realize that writing — nay, all creative endeavors — are not like a moon landing. It’s not like you have one shot, and if you don’t pull it off, you have destroyed your spacecraft on the surface of the moon and it’ll take more decades than you have left in your lifetime for taxpayers to buy you another spacecraft. If you fail in writing, you’ve failed once. Get up. Do it again. Wipe your nose if you have to, but for God’s sake. Get up. You’re getting grass stains on everything. 2) trust yourself. You don’t have to trust that you’re great now. You have to trust that you have the ability to learn how to be great. And a huge part of that learning process is figuring out that you get up and start moving again. And another part of that learning process is realizing that writing is a craft at its heart. Good news! Craft is learned, not granted. Think of it this way: imagine that you, young and sprightly and full of verve, have decided to build a staircase. You invite your friends to use your staircase. You have done a terrible job, it turns out, and the staircase breaks and they all fall into a heap, getting grass stains everywhere. You have indeed failed at making the staircase do its job of not bucking people off. Does this mean that you, as a person, have no ability to build staircases? You have just not been granted the staircase-building genes? NO, CHILD, GO OUT THERE AND STUDY SOME MORE STAIRCASES.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 21:33:21 +0000
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