But that one night…

Contrary to the inanity that I write hereI don’t suck at writing.

That is not an easy thing for me to admit out loud. (Or in print on the internet, as the case may be.)

I am the queen of self-deprecation, and depression and anxiety like to try to convince me I suck at merely existing most days. I have a difficult time saying I’m a good writer without feeling like a complete fraud. Every time I put something out for the world to see—no matter how small an audience it reaches—I feel like I’m exposing myself for the hack I really am. This is why the best I can do sometimes is admit that I don’t suck. And even that is a challenge some days.

But believe me, it’s a drastic improvement from the way it used to be a few short years ago.

Personal growth and all that.

I used to do my best writing in the middle of the night. Inspiration would always strike when I should have been sleeping, and I would pound out pages and pages of text. Most of my very favorite things I’ve written were produced in the unholy hours, sitting by myself in the dark.

These days, with no job to kill my will to live on a daily basis, I can write at any time of day I want. Yet it’s still ingrained in me to want to write at night. As long as my computer is running, Word is open, and I tab in and out of it all day long. I get a lot of writing done throughout the day (writer’s block notwithstanding) but I’m more apt to feel the overwhelming drive to write the closer it gets to bedtime.

I’ve been going through my writing folder, attempting to summarize each active project. It’s a slow slog because I don’t always know how to adequately summarize my plot lines. I’ve also been skimming through each one, trying to find a decent snippet to pull out and pair with the summary. It’s not easy to find just a few lines—I want to pull entire scenes—especially when I have so much dialogue to sift through. But going through all of these projects, I find myself wondering…why did I stop working on this one?

When I go back and read through things I’ve written—in all their disjointed glory—I’m quite often surprised by what I find. More and more I like what I read. There’s still plenty of crap in there, but it’s much easier to find things that I actually LIKE.

I’m reminding myself why I’ve put so many hours into these stories. Why I started writing them in the first place. Why I keep torturing myself when I’m spinning my wheels at the bottom of the hill.

I’ve had a long-running love/hate relationship with my writing—I love to hate it. But the older I get, the better I get at writing, the more I appreciate the good stuff, and am able to forgive the WTAF-is-this stuff. There is still some truly terrible things buried in those files, but I don’t beat myself up as much, as often as I used to. I’m slowly learning to accept taking the good with the bad.

In writing, that is.

The rest of my life is still questionable.

 

Drive By
Train

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