Words of Wisdom

I have finally decided to post this. These are the wise words I read in a book that snapped me out of a long standing creative funk and I know that a lot of you are either struggling with your own writings or have yet to be able to find that confidence in expressing what you have to say. So I'm posting these words by Dorothea Brande and hope that they help you as much as they did me. Because I'm not sure I would have started "Where Love Leads Us" without having read it.

"But then comes the dawning comprehension of all that a writer's life implies: not easy daydreaming, but hard work at turning the dream into reality without sacrificing all its glamor; not the passive following of someone else's story, but the finding and finishing of a story of one's own; not writing a few pages which will be judged for style or correctness alone, but the prospect of turning out paragraph after paragraph and page after page which will be read for style, content, and effectiveness.

 

Nor is this by any means all the beginning writer foresees. He worries to think of his immaturity, and wonders how he ever dared to think he had a word worth saying. He gets as stage-struck at the thought of his unseen readers as any sapling actor. He discovers that when he is able to plan a story step by step, the fluency he needs to write it has flown out the window; or that when he lets himself off on a loose rein, suddenly the story is out of hand. He fears that he has a tendency to make his stories all alike, or paralyzes himself with the notion that he will never, when this story is finished, find another that he likes as well.

 

He will begin to follow current reputations and harry himself because he has not this writer's humor or that one's ingenuity. He will find a hundred reasons to doubt himself and not one for self-confidence. He will suspect that those who encourage him are too lenient, or too far from the market to know the standards of successful fiction. Or he will read the work of a real genius in words, and the discrepancy between that gift and his own will seem a chasm to swallow his hopes. In such a state, lightened now and again by moments when he feels his own gift alive and surging, he may stay for moths of years.

 

Every writer goes through this period of despair. Without doubt many promising writers, and most of those who were never meant to write, turn back at this point and find a lifework less exacting. "