I didn't want to face the hard work of making my words better, deleting some of those lovely scenes I struggled to write and replacing with scenes that better suit my characters. Or face the possibility that I don't have what it takes to get the job done. So I went back to my self-defeating behaviors of wanting to start over, wanting to abandon a project midway through, wanting to switch genres, wanting it to be perfect the first time.
In other words I was whining about it being too hard, too much work. I wanted it to be easy. To be magic. But I've spent ten years looking for the fairy dust to make writing a book a walk in the park. It doesn't exist. There's no secret handshake the published authors share that us unpublished have yet to encounter.
The only way to write a book is one word at a time.
And where have I heard that phrase before?
4 comments:
Wow - you have touched on every fear, angst, hope, wish I've had, Anne. Thanks for being brave enough to put that out there :)
And if you ever do find that fairie dust, could you let me know?
Anne - you have nailed it! And now you can move on. I think we are all looking for it (along with the "eat whatever I want and not get fat" fairie dust), but knowing that it's nothing more than hard work -- and the kicker -- that you want to keep doing it anyway? Then you've officiously become a real writer.
Whoa...what do you mean there's no secret handshake??
Yeah, you know what they say -- if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Which of course wouldn't be good because who needs all that competition, right? :)
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