dragonmud

[dragonmud]

I am going to try and write something real

What am I supposed to write? I want to write stories but I can’t think of a single thing to say even though I tell myself stories all the time. If this was a university assignment, I would be able to do this so much easier it’s not that I can’t think of ideas but I just cannot get myself to start. What is worth writing about? What is real? Is everything I write cheesy? Mum never missed a chance to tell me writing could be better. I guess it’s the same with my art. It was all criticism and telling me I need a lot more practice before I was good enough. Purple prose. It was always telling me I wrote purple prose. Too flowery, too much. Be better. Never mind that I got amazing grades in English, that my teachers thought I was amazing. That at university I did a creative writing course and did so well, and did it easily. All I can hear is that my characters are too much like me, that of course this seems like something I would write (derogatory). Writing is so vulnerable. I describe things strangely. Why focus on that? What a strange story. What a strange girl. What a weird way to look at things. Oh no I like things that are interesting, this is boring, this is too fast paced, slow paced, too much description, not enough description. Anyone who has read my university essays says I am good at writing, anyone who has heard me tell a story is amazed that I just come up with it on the spot. What am I supposed to do? How do I take all that is inside me and turn it into something beautiful that I can actually share. I want to start so I can get to work on improving. I know my first attempts will not be very good. It is like my painting. Every painting I make is better, and I can see their flaws but I am at a stage where I am happy to give my art to family when they like it and let them hang in on a wall. I don’t want to come back and take it down when no one is looking. I still think my art is not that great but I have gotten over the hill of hating everything I make. I want to aim for that place with my writing as well. I want to know that I have put hard work into something and that it is a completed piece of literature. A whole piece. I only ever start things. I get scared or lose my puff. I never know how to end a story. I need to end a story. I need to write ONE THING to completion even if it is terrible. If I know it is terrible, I still have to try and finish it. This means I have to contend with the voices in my mind that tell me it is rubbish. So embarrassing. Burn it. Never show anyone. Not worth finishing this crap. I have to be able to listen respectfully to those voices and then completely ignore them and keep going. The agony of pushing through will definitely be painful. I still go through that with my painting every time I make something but I did get through the initial wall and now sometimes I can sit down and make a composition and take it seriously and produce and entire painting that I am happy enough with. It took months, years, of crying and therapy and flashbacks but I can do it. But writing is even more vulnerable, it is direct. With painting you never really know for sure what I mean, what I felt. But with writing I just say it. Its right there. My whole truth, even if you can’t figure out why I say it or what it means to me, I’ve still put it there. I know what it means and I’ve just gone and told anyone who reads it. I feel like if I don’t try and write I will regret it for my whole life, so I am going to have to go through this pain and see what happens when I get to the other side. Maybe I will make something beautiful?

If I put this online it will immunise me. Just a little bit of vulnerability, anonymously, and that discomfort might adjust me to the bigger discomfort of writing a whole story.