NaNoWriMo and Writing

After several years, I came to understand why writing was so difficult for me. It was about choosing, all the damn time, “a writer is choosing, and a mistake is something that a writer chooses to make.” I know that it’s that way for all artists. But for me, it was paralyzing. And then I learned how to overcome that. One exercise was to write a sentence or paragraph as many ways as possible. I was choosing over and over again, dozens and dozens of times. The wild conclusion that I came to is that practice makes your choices better and your mistakes less. Sometimes I wrote entire manuscripts or poems, never to look at them again. But I was confronting my own anxieties and doing it with no fanfare, no applause, no validation, none of the usual rewards that writers crave and need. That changed me deeply. I learned “slowly” was better and “eventually” became my motto. I also surrendered to the idea that I was writing for myself alone, though I knew I had ambitions. I was never defeated by rejection. I was defeated by my refusal to choose and make a mistake I didn’t want to live with. Of course, I had to have help to understand how my mind was really seeing the creative process because I was always so unhappy working even when I had good successes. Even now, after choosing and working on a project I love, I live with the idea that I will fail at my purpose.