Vampires

It's been quite a while since I've written anything. That doesn't mean I haven't been reading. I read quite a bit over the spring semester, for my last semester as a master's student at UCO. Finishing my thesis, taking Hemingway and Composition Pedagogies, as well as reading a few pages for fun here and there, in order to clear my brain of all the academics, kept me reading far too much for me to have time to write anything on this blog.

And now, when I am writing, instead of reflecting on reading, I'm going to reflect on what I've been viewing, because it directly relates to my writing, which is connected to my reading. So it counts.

I went to see a musical tonight (or rather last night, since it is now the wee hours of the morning) entitled [Title of Show]. It's about a couple of guys writing a musical about a couple of guys writing a musical. As they work, they are faced with the difficulties of writer's block, and later, with the difficulties of maintaining the integrity of their project or giving in to mainstream demands in order to make a profit and make it to Broadway.

The friend I attended this musical with insisted that I go see it with him, while we were having a chat conversation about writing. I'm grateful that he did, because it particularly pertained to me. There's a song that relates self-doubt and despair to vampires, and I can relate. Sometimes I question my own ability to the point that I am drained of the capability of writing anything at all.

It makes me think again of something Ira Glass said, about producing massive amounts of work that isn't really that good, in order to get to the work that is. If I continually doubt myself and block myself from creating anything at all, how will I manage to work through all the mediocre and even down right shitty writing in order to get to something that actually has merit?

I've been attempting to work on a novel I started a couple years ago, and writer's block keeps plaguing me. My intention when I started this novel was to write, simply, a romance novel I could market easily for some quick cash. As the story develops, however, I've realized that it's not going to be marketable as a good old fashioned bodice ripping romance, you know, the kind with Fabio on the cover, holding a fainting woman in a tight corset that looks ready to burst. At first I thought I should keep out the plot tendencies that were making my book more than a silly romance. After all, why was I writing it? To have a marketable book for some quick cash. The thing is, I don't want to write something that's just quick cash, and that I have to publish under a pseudonym so I can look at myself in the mirror every day. I want to write something good. And as I struggle to write something good, I am concerned with what my readers will think, concerned that it really is only bodice ripping romance after all (even though no bodices have yet been ripped, in the literal sense).

A line from the musical, and a line that my friend quoted to me (unbeknownst to me until we were actually watching the musical) said that if any stranger on the street walked up to us and expressed the doubts we harbor in our minds every day, we would think that stranger was crazy, and be offended. Yet we tell them to ourselves daily.

The question I am left with: how do I stop doubting myself long enough to free up my mind to generate mediocre text so that I can later polish it into something shiny? The only answer I've been able to find so far is to tell myself to shut up and just write.