Pages

Monday, April 29, 2013

Doubts

So, here we are. Two days remain at Camp. Less than 48 hours, and I've only got 1500 words left to go. One-tenth of my original goal. Yeah, I only set it to 15,000 words. I thought 500 a day would be all I could handle, and I've managed to make it despite a few "off" days and starting late. I'm too close to lose now, but I'm questioning myself. Could I have done better? Could I have done more? Am I not doing my story justice because I made my limit not even a full third of a normal NaNo?

I'm trying to convince myself that it's all okay, because ultimately, I've DONE it, but it's not an easy thing. We doubt ourselves, writers. Any artist, really. Our masterpiece will never be good enough. Our magnum opus will never be perfect, and that kills us. In bits and pieces, it tears us apart. Each word we hate, each scene that we run up against, every second of writers block makes us doubt, resent, lose faith, wonder if we should keep going at all. And from what I understand, that never goes away. I think it was Neil Gaiman who said as much in a NaNoWriMo pep talk several years ago. You can be published several times over, a success, and you will still doubt yourself, your stories, your characters. We're looking at a lifetime of torturing ourselves, questioning our worth and tearing ourselves apart as we struggle to make our stories come to life from nothing.

And yet, there's still nothing I want more.

Does this make me a masochist?

2 comments:

  1. Yes.

    Also, is it better to make your goal, as you did, or start off well, as I did, and vomit forth words, only to lose steam halfway through amd throw in the towel? Who's the winner? Dunno.

    So you made your goal. It will never be good enough, of course.

    It's just enough that you can chalk it up as an achievement, of course. You've made your goal on paper, amd that's all you were measuring. You can't measure your mental and emotional expectations the same way. They can't be measured, because they are boundless and knfinite.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So celebrate that graph, and remember that you can't use a measuring tape on a muse!

    You can only just pin them down a bit, occasionally. :-)

    Above all, keep working at it! After all, you can only finish a large work by breaking it down. You've finished one piece.

    ReplyDelete