Mar 16, 2007

Promises

I made myself a promise tonight that I would spend some time writing. I've had a bad couple of days regarding the house, and I felt like now that I've calmed down a bit, I could channel my anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, helplessness, etc into something positive. My book has not really gotten much farther than just some main ideas, some basic character sketches, and finally figuring out the reason behind the tense relationship between my two main characters. That's it. Aside from some notes, I haven't written anything. It upsets me because as each day passes, I haven't made progress. It's just one more step closer to never finishing. One day closer to never realizing my dream.

So I sit here and blog, but I don't write. I broke a promise to myself.

I just don't know how to get over my fears. My fear of committing to this book. My fear of failure. My fear of success. It's all so overwhelming - the process of writing, not knowing how and where to start, putting myself in the face of criticism. Usually, I'm my own worst critic, but what if someone else is worse than me? What if after all those years of my teachers and professors telling me that I am a good writer, they were all wrong? What if (God forbid), I'm just "average"?

1 comment:

ACE said...

Hey girl-
This is so weird, I posted on something very similar today! I know exactly what you mean, about the fear. For me, and I by no means imply it is the same for you, it was the fear of finding out ugly things about myself. Upon writing, I would often get to a point where I was writing about something personal, and would start making excuses why I was blocked. Weird, how our minds can do that to us.

I hope you can get through the block- it always sucks.