Inkpunks

This is Part 3 in a series of posts chronicling the journey of one writer from self-defeat and creative paralysis back to a love of writing and productivity, heavily inspired by Ray Bradbury’s excellent Zen in the Art of Writing. Part 1 | Part 2

“If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.”
– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing, “The Joy of Writing”

Guilty as charged.

On that long drive up I-5 one of the things I realized was that I had become far too concerned with what everyone else was doing, what they were reading and reviewing, where they were publishing and how often. The internet is a mixed blessing: our friends and colleagues, while perhaps geographically distant, are present in our lives via social media. It’s wonderful to be able to stay in touch so readily, but it also creates such an abundance of status to measure ourselves against. It can be paralyzing.

When Twitter is abuzz with a new themed anthology, we might conclude that the market is saturated with stories like the one we’ve been secretly working on. Dispirited, we set it aside.

Or the short list for a prestigious award is announced, and none of the stories on it are anything like the adventure story we just outlined and yesterday couldn’t wait to get to work on. We may conclude that the type of stories we write are not what people want to read, and the outline is abandoned while we wrack our brains trying to come up with an idea we think people would notice.

Or maybe someone we think of as notable says something on Facebook about a subgenre they think is played out. We may love that subgenre, and have multiple works in progress, maybe even a serial. Granting Facebook Big Shot oracular powers, we dismally drag our files to the “Trunk” folder.

Driving through Stockton I realized I had done all of those things. Again the answer came, and I gave myself some sound advice:

“Eyes on your own paper, Yant.”

“Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.”
– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing, “The Joy of Writing”

Look to your zest. See to your gusto. Not someone else’s. Not “the market’s.” It’s time to stop saying things like “I wish I were more like Big Name Author,” or “I wish I could write stories as important as Award Winner’s.” It’s time to stop wishing we were more like other writers, and start wishing we were more like ourselves.

We’re here to reconnect with the joy and anticipation we used to feel about writing. The first step toward that is reconnecting with our authentic selves, what we’re passionate about—our loves and hates, our hopes and fears, the things that have shaped who we truly are.

Next up: Part 4 – Space Travel, Sideshows, and Gorillas

Trackback URL