Saturday, September 17, 2011

Writing: The Quiet Ones

(via tumblr.)

The book I'm working on is so quiet it's like a whisper in the wind. It's the kind of sneaky, calm book that I love reading and love writing, but that scares me to believe in. Because this book is all characters and emotion and journeys of life and even the more exciting scenes are coated with sadness and haze.

This is the type of book it is. And I am so close, have read it and reread and written and rewritten and edited so much that it's hard to tell if this is something really good or something really horrible.

Some days I think that this book is going to be great. That this is the sort of book that people will love and connect with and urge their friends to read. That is, if the book ever gets to be a book. And then other days I think what am I doing? This is a piece of junk. I think that I can't believe I'm wasting my time on this, that my writing is shoddy and the story is sad and I have no idea what I'm doing.

But I do want this to be better than good, better than great. I want it to be amazing. And mostly I think it will be, think that I can hammer it into being the book I imagine it to be. It's just that the getting-there is so difficult and being both my biggest fan and harshest critic - often in the span of a couple of hours - gets confusing.

4 comments:

  1. Stick with it, I know how you feel. Good luck.

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  2. I love quiet books. And I'm sure you can pull it off! I think everyone feels like that about their writing at times -- well, I do anyway.

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  3. Hang in there. All writers seem to suffer those feelings. I think those deep feelings come from the same place as creativity. They are inescapable. But hang in there! Keep going. There's no way out but through.

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