I learned today about the value of pushing through. I was writing, and the words were good…but they weren’t great. They were missing something. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I knew it in my gut, and because writing is still so new to me, has been so up and down to this point in the year, whenever I feel like I’m hitting up against a wall and I can’t figure out why, it makes me worried that I’m broken.
I worry that I’m bumbling about in the dark, and more acutely, that I’ve lost something in me since deciding to turn pro–an internal compass that used to tell me which direction to go.
But, none of that is true.
I proved it to myself today.
I put my writing down, I stepped away from it, and I did some other things for a while, and then laying on my bed next to Cooper, enjoying his company and how soft he was, it came to me what I was missing.
And it worked. These scenes that looked so pretty on the outside when I was gazing at them inside my head, but then turned out to be dead husks with nothing on the inside once I wrote them…came to life. I was engaged.
I think that’s a key word for me and my writing: engaged. It’s the different between me just writing words to fill a blank space, and me leaning forward in my chair, gripping the armrests, and measuring my breath because I might pass out. A fuck, I know that is a direct connection with my reader; if I’m feeling that engaged, so will they. If I’m staring at lifeless words, aching for them to be better, I know they’ll feel that, too.
I will say, as early-on as I am in my career as an author, I do feel like I have a pretty strong sense of when something is truly engaging and when its not. That could be naive and premature–I suppose time will tell in that regard–but I do have that feeling in my gut, and thus far, it seems to bear out in reality.
I also did a bunch of other minor stuff, normal life stuff like paying bills and such, and the Ho and I went on a walk together with the pups. We encountered a lunging dog that was able to get off-leash and cause us quite a stir–Coco slipped out of her collar and took off running in a panic–but in the end, everyone was safe, the dog was merely poorly socialized and didn’t do any actual biting, and Coco was caught before anything bad could happen. Oof. High stress.
I ended the night watching a bit of the first Thor movie. It’s really, really good. I’ll probably finish it tomorrow. We’ll see.
Oh! And there were freaking thunderstorms today! WTF LA???
Night!