Collecting Things (Reader Response 1)

Ever since I was small, I've collected words.  Little bits and pieces.  Advice, prose, a verse of a poem, a moment of poignancy.  It didn't matter.  If I thought it was beautiful, I wrote it down somewhere for safekeeping, some inspiration for a rainy day.  These days, I've been finding scraps of paper as I clean through old homework and notebooks, little bits of advice and love from a younger version of myself.  perhaps that's why I love listening to the advice of writers.  It is like finding those papers, but this time, they are collected and more refined.  What I'd expect from myself if I could send the little papers back in time and instead was finding notes from me in twenty, thirty, or forty years.  Neil Gaiman and John Steinbeck, two authors I read growing up, offered advice that really resonated with me.

Gaiman's advice is a step by step model, how to start writing and never stop.  How to take criticism and how to approach your own writing.  How to deal with what you've created and move towards that satisfying near-perfection you've been striving for.  I think his eighth bit of advice hit me most.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

It's never easy to write.  I won't try to pretend otherwise.  But writing with confidence can feel next to impossible.  I self-correct constantly and question what I'm trying to say and wonder if I'm any good constantly.  It doesn't take much to get me off track.  But sitting down and saying I am good enough and ignoring all the comments I'm making in my head, that is strength.  In rare moments when I can do that, I feel like I am writing my masterpiece.  And it doesn't matter that I'm wrong.  At least I can feel it.

John Steinbeck's words of wisdom help create a mindset that can help to develop a better creative mentality.  My favorite piece of advice is on finishing.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

I like to surprise myself.  To defy my expectations.  I like to call it cautious optimism.  A friend told me she likes to 'walk in hope'.  Regardless of what you call it, expectations, especially your own are the worst kind of pressure.  Losing yourself in the writing and the feeling you have is a stronger foundation for your work.  Or at least it is for mine. His advice urges to forget the audience, the advice, whatever else might clutter our minds and write for the sake of writing.  This list, put up against his earlier anti-advice advice portrays to me the significance of determining what advice and criticisms are useful to us and discarding anything that does not help us.  No one is going to find that every person's advice to them is helpful.  There are too many contradictions, too much to focus on, that we will never finish out work if we fixate on it.  Instead, gather together the parts that make you better.  When I was younger it was scraps of paper.  I collected words.  I like to think this is kind of the same thing.