Thursday, May 12, 2005
The Curse of the Five Year OldNo, this actually isn’t a post about my 5 year old gone wild, mainly because I do not have a 5 year old. It is about those days you are just sure your writing sounds like it was strung together by a 5 year old. For me this always seems to happen on send off day.
Is it just me who feels this way? Do the rest of you look back at your finished product the day or two after you have written “The End” and think, “Wow, I am so good!” I will admit, there have been times I have gone back to read some of my work a year or two down the road and thought, “Wow, I wrote that!” But the “Wow, I am so good!” thought rarely hits me early on and often not all.
I ponder why it is that I feel this way. Is it simply a matter of being too close to my own story, of thinking this no longer reads like a book but merely words on the screen or paper. And, yes, I care about the characters, laughed until my belly ached when she stole his clothes and forced him to walk buck naked in front of all his employees and cried until my eyes were swollen when I thought she was really going to leave him, but will anyone else? Perhaps the curse isn’t about my writing ability at all, but another stem off that ugly little flower known as rejection.
Huh, and here I always thought of flowers as a good thing...
