Sometimes it's beneficial to remove the other flaws and worries so you can find the one that is causing all the other worries. I was recently worried about my monthly bill payments. Since I am not making enough as a writer yet to cover all my bills, every time bill due dates came up, I went into an inner panic. Several weeks ago, seeing my tense fright, my wonderful boyfriend offered to cover the bills I couldn't handle and told me to keep working on my writing and helping out the best I could with expenses. I must tell you, that was a huge weight off my shoulders. But what I came to find out is that what was disguised as financial worries (and I had no way of knowing until those worries were taken away) was something far deeper that plagued me. I felt this growing trouble and was finally able to tell myself that it was not my bills. With my financial worries pushed aside, I found there was indeed something else that had me trapped in its clutches. But what could be more worrisome than not knowing if you could make your next car payment? I dove into my mind to investigate.
It turns out I've gotten stuck on my first book, my first full-length novel. (It's kind of a big deal.) I wasn't sure how this could have happened since I had a plot, characters, and knew the outcome of the story, heck, even the plots of the two books to follow. But there I was. Sitting down every morning feeling this same sense of not knowing what to write as the day before. I thought all it took was the simple act of making myself write, of writing the next logical thing that should happen in the book. I had read writer after writer's advice on writing and they all spoke of having a time to write and often of having to make themselves write for an hour before anything truly worthwhile came out. But they looked at this as success because now they had something to work with, something to edit and mold.
Now, hang on a second. When I wrote as a child and early teenager, I was sure my writing could use some work, but I also believed that I could write my first novel and have someone accept it on my first submission. Simple youth, you say. Yes, part of it. But I also believe that I had something so essential to success besides the curse of hard work that everyone spoke of. And now as an adult, I wanted that thing back. However, everywhere I turned everyone told me I just had to do the fucking hard work. Something deep inside really did not sit well with that cursed idea. But I didn't listen to my heart. I listened to them. I tried their ridiculous methods of hard work.
Now hold on a second here. I'm not saying hard work doesn't produce results. There are several New York Times bestselling authors that sound like they have a "hard work" schedule and they have results. I see their names time after time as they produce a new book yearly, if not more often. They have made millions already with their writing. I'm happy for them. The success of another author is my success. But I had to face it, I'm no Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts. I've heard one such author writes ten pages a day without fail. But for me, there's a let down to having written ten pages only to take those ten pages out in the editing phase. Perhaps it's my personality. For the life of me I can't fathom why someone would want to dive into a task then fix it so much it's like they're doing the thing twice, when they could have just taken a little more time and done it right the first time. Kind of like assembling a piece of DIY furniture. You have the directions right there. Why would you not follow them and have a successfully assembled piece of furniture the first time rather than try to put it together on your own only to have to tear the whole thing apart because there was a vital piece that should have been put in on step two? This is just the way I think. And now we're getting to the root of my dilemma.
For six years I taught high school English in a private school in Pennsylvania. Teaching required certain things out of me that my personality doesn't possess, such as the ability to quickly identify important details from unimportant details. As a writer, every detail is important to me. Also, a teacher has to accept that there are some A, B students and so on. I believed that every student was meant to be an A student if they just had the right attention and teaching. However, this goal required a whole lot more than I could give as one person and I would have been less frustrated and felt more successful when my B students made a B.
I struggled the first year, like most teachers do. My principal told me that it takes new teachers three or more years to adjust and become good at what they're doing. So I taught another year, then another, and another. I was there for five and three quarters of a year before I finally realized I was trying to make myself be good at something my personality would never naturally do. The result? Feeling like a failure pretty nearly every single day. No matter how great or comfortable a job situation you have, if you feel like a failure nearly every day, you will come away from the job acting like a failure. Deeply wounded on so many levels (part of the story not included here is the most horrendous one-sided romance story that is far too long to put into one blog post), I took myself to North Carolina, a state where I had met a guy that opened up the possibility of a different life. He was not the person for me, but through meeting him I did realize there was so much more in life than what I had been living. And I was going to find it!
Now here I am. Some days I think my world's problems should be all solved by now. I've been here almost two years. But I find days where I cannot follow my dreams. Something is still holding me back. I also find that ignoring those things or pushing against them blindly only tires me out. Joseph Prince talks about working in rest. (Google him. He's easy to find. You can't miss his great hair.) That may sound like the strangest viewpoint on work you've ever heard. But it's making more and more sense to me. Sometimes you literally have to rest. Take the day off. Get extra sleep. Relax. Watch movies, do something you enjoy. Other times it means working in a spirit of rest, which I can best explain as working with the confidence that even your mistakes will be turned into successes. An example from my childhood explains what this means for me and my writing.
As a child I had a secret hiding spot that no one knew about, not even my brothers or sisters. If they were coming close and I was afraid they would find me, I crept out of my spot before they could see where I was coming from and pretended I was just walking casually along. I would do anything to protect the secret of my sanctuary. Oddly enough, we would play in this very spot together at times and that didn't bother me. It was the knowledge that this was my place of refuge, of conjuring up magical stories that must always be kept secret from them. They must never know the depth of what this spot meant to me. I would go to this spot to write. In my childhood and teenage years I could never write out in the open. I could jot down ideas of which I never let people read over my shoulder. But writing the actual story had to be done in secret. That's when my best writing was done. My stories were very personal to me. You could not see a correlation between them and my life, nor were they a diary of events turned into a fiction piece. They were something so much more. They were a reflection of my hopes and dreams for the future. I loved when people read my stories. I was never too shy for others to see them, often in their incompleteness. But the creation of the stories had to happen in private, just as my life dreams did.
As an adult I noticed I don't require this same secrecy. And just yesterday I found out why. Somewhere along the way, I stopped putting my heart into my writing. I felt the desire but no longer knew how to do it. I thought I lacked discipline or commitment. So I set some goals and decided I was going to push myself through no matter what: this, from the advice of other writers. My result: unmet deadlines and the uninspiring feeling of being a fraud, being so juvenile I couldn't even keep my word. However, I was writing as others advised, not as was natural to me. Even though I was in my proper field, writing instead of teaching, I was still feeling like a failure because I was still trying to do things the way others did instead of the way that works for me. That's when I remembered the joy of writing during my childhood. I never made myself write. I wrote because I wanted to. I was driven to write because I felt an excitement for what I was writing. Sometimes I wrote much, sometimes little. I always worked on several stories at a time.
As a creative person I loved variety. The freedom of writing several stories at once satisfied the need for variety and always kept me moving forward on my stories. So different from these recent feelings of frustration from boxing myself in to one idea and forcing myself to write on it till it's finished without even the freedom to jot down any new ideas that come to me. I don't know why multiple ideas come to a writer. I just choose to believe that if new ideas come to me, even when I'm committed to one project, I would be better off to ride out the creative wave when it comes and write about that new idea rather than to block it.
From experience I have found that the only result of trying to block specific thoughts or feelings is emotional and spiritual constipation. I used to block myself from the pain of rejection. Along with that I ended up blocking creativity. When trying to block yourself from pain and hurt, you also keep love from coming in. So I believe if you try to block random creative ideas, you will also block yourself from useful creative ideas that pertain to the project you're working on. The result is tons of uninspired, hard work now necessary to complete your project by deadline. I totally believe there are different types of creative people, and some of you may not identify with anything I'm saying. But I also believe there are so many like me, hiding their real selves in the shadows because we don't match up to other people's ideas of how writing or creating should be done. I've tried their methods, and they just don't work for me. I want to live my real life, not some pretend life just so I'll be accepted by those who are so bossy that telling themselves what to do is not enough. Our journey in life should never take us to that wicked place of making a person feel bad for who they are and how they naturally do things.
As I look back on my childhood methods of writing, I realize a good dose of discipline would have helped me finish many more stories than the few that had to be completed because they were English writing assignments. However, as an adult, I've realized discipline can never replace true inspiration that comes from writing the way I was truly meant to write. I've felt guilty for a long time just for the fact that writing is now my chosen profession. After all, how can you call it a job if you're at home all day and not doing work for someone else? But I have learned better. People will think what they're going to think. My wonderful boyfriend has taught me that. (Yes, I met him when I moved to North Carolina. Just another reason why I know I'm in the right place. Our dating story is a completely different blog post for another day.) I moved away to start living my life, not continue living my life as other people see it. Writing with emptiness because I'm forcing myself to keep a schedule or "working hard" so I have a comeback for people's questions of "What are you doing with your time?" is not enough. All along, my heart has yearned for something more. Something I was denying myself until now.
So today I face the question placed as the title of this post. Is writing from the heart really worth it? My answer: I know I couldn't live any other way.
