I'm home.
Possibly one of the most depressing realizations I've had since I turned fourteen and I ran out of new things in life to angst about. I - aspiring novelist, college bound Asian, hobbyist musician - am staring at a computer screen and lounging on a queen-sized memory foam bed all day, fretting about my driving test in four days as I twirl my pen idly. The colors, the noise, the enthusiastic conversations about the nature of beauty and truth are now swept under the rug of Yesterday. I am home.
Really, I ought to get up and do things more. Take a walk. Build a card castle. Bake a cake. Now I understand the term "everyone needs a hobby." Even though my mind is finally free to frolic in the realm of my imagination, my body can't keep up - it gets so bored, sitting here. It gets in the way of my writing.
My writing, I hope, has improved. I have difficulty judging that, though - after all, it was only two months of learning, and I haven't gotten round to writing anything substantial since I got home last Friday. Besides, my personality often leads to inconsistent work: what I write tomorrow might be the best thing I've ever written; what I write in a month might be the worst. But after going to both EPGY and CSSSA I now know that only a small portion of the experience was geared toward cultivating actual technical skills. Most of it was about the process and the approach, and in these areas I am confident I have grown.
Writing scares me. Terrifies me. That's the main reason why I used to keep putting it off, procrastinating on projects until just before the deadline, then slapping together something crappy that I would sheepishly call "art". It's a weakness of mine, trying to hide from things that scare me. But the programs, CSSSA in particular, forced me to sit my ass down and just puke my guts out (metaphorically) no matter what prompt I was facing. The process of writing is not some mysterious beast with rainbow-colored wings. It's just writing. Ideas are gold nuggets, words are nothing but things that shape the gold into jewelry. Got something to say? Then say it! (EPGY had a rather more scholarly answer to writer's block: first becoming one with a character, and then simply letting the character carry the story, which leads to a very natural flow and more often than not surprises even the writer with a resounding conclusion.) Refinement and polishing can come later.
Of course, if you aren't double-checking every sentence in the first draft, the rewrite and revision process becomes much more important. EPGY had a pretty heavy emphasis on this. I wrote a character sketch that I had absolutely no intention to use as an actual story, but then I rewrote it and touched it up a little, and everybody loved it. (It's little Tito's story.) CSSSA's workshop model helped me learn a great deal about how to evaluate other people's work and how to take criticism myself. For long works especially - I used to nitpick like crazy when reading other people's novels-in-progress. Now I know that, for the moment, grammar and stylistic differences really aren't that important, and comparing someone else's writing to your own writing is the worst thing possible you could do. What's important is the big picture, and the integrity of that person's idea and voice. I really like that phrase, so I'll repeat it: integrity of the writer's idea and voice. It's the soul of the writer's work.
Okay, that's enough blabbing for now. I'll get off my ass and do something fun, like, oh I don't know, blowing up the kitchen. Now, where to find that cake recipe...
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