January 27, 2021
Day 114, Week 16
- Words: 63,250
- Chapters: 31
- Point in Book (Save the Cat!): All is Lost
- Ego Size: Orange
- Emotional State: Steady State
Today I’m in a good space. My story is progressing, I have an idea of what happens in the next chapters and things are working. Yes, I have some more complexity and layers to add. But I’m just rockin’ along, writing my book.
But this weekend was another story altogether.
I sat down on Saturday and wrote the big scenes for my protagonists – the All is Lost scene where they fall, down down down, and land at rock bottom. For one of them, it was a manipulative rollercoaster ending in total disaster. For the other, it ended with a (spoiler!) death and a banishment (at least in her eyes). And I cried during the second chapter. But quietly, because my husband was sitting next to me at his computer. Have you ever done that? Watched, read, or in my case, wrote something while crying and trying not to alert the other person in the room? It’s tricky.
But I managed it. Tears streaming down my face, attempting to control my face (not very successfully), as I wrote out this heart-wrenching scene for my MC. And I tried to use my own facial expressions to add some flavor to hers, but you know what? It’s really hard to describe the way a face contorts when you cry – like really hard. And so I stuck with the tried and true.
I finished the chapter, entitled “The Clearing (Dead Blooms Can’t Be Saved), and decided I couldn’t review it just yet. I needed distance and time. So I poked around on Reddit. Looked at my social media plan, tweaked some posts. The usual time-wasting suspects. And when I returned to the online platform where all of my writing is: there it was. The message I knew was coming. The news that I was greenlit to move into publishing. That I’d written enough, in good enough form, to move to phase 2 of the program and get my book out to the world for everyone to read. If I’m being honest, I knew I’d get a greenlight (I work in the same program I’m using for my book – I know what it is needed to pass). But knowing I’d make it and actually getting approved are two very different things.
I freaked out. A little. Okay. A lot. Had an overwhelming need to be active, to do anything than just sit there at my computer. So I walked downstairs. Made another cup of tea for me and coffee for my husband and freaked out some more. And then I debated about exercising (I should’ve – I didn’t do any that day and that was the moment I didn’t seize). In the end, I just played video games, killed some stuff and did some quests. For hours.
But in the back of my mind, burbling away, was the message and what it meant. While making dinner, it came back and I started to freak out again. Started doubting the program and wondering if it was the right path for me. And then I got my husband involved to do the math, to see if it was worth it. While telling him the facts of the program, I talked myself around again to giving it a shot and seeing what happens. At the root of all of that freakout, however, wasn’t the program or if it was the right path. It was that people would read what I wrote. It would no longer be safe away from prying eyes and out there for everyone to read. And judge. And criticize.
And that’s what makes art, in any form, so very hard. We put our guts on the page, for everyone to see, to pull apart, dissect, and judge. It’s not just a story in my head. I feel the emotions my characters feel. I get angry when they’re angry, I get sad when they are sad, I’m mostly neutral when they are happy (hmmm…maybe I should look into that), and I laugh when they say something funny. They aren’t real, but they are pieces of me, of my soul, slapped down for people to see.
So be gentle with your fellow artist friends, be constructive in your criticism, and if it just isn’t your taste, just say that. I’m not asking you to lie or to not give it to me straight, but I am asking that you frame it in a way that helps me rather than crushes me.
Because we are easily crushed beneath the heel of your criticism, just like that flower on the path someone plucked and dropped.