Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Critic Inside

I have strep throat...but I will finish my edits before Monday...

I think the hardest thing to do as a writer is to overcome the voice inside that says you won't be as good as the writers on your bookshelf...but I think they probably felt that way too...
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ~Sylvia Plath
“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught,” - says Walt Whitman.
"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair the sense that you can never completely put on the page whats in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
' - Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000

10 comments:

Debra Lynn Shelton said...

Thanks for this post, Pen Pen. We writers are all plagued with self-doubt. I wonder if it has anything to do with those damn rejection letters? Hmmm....

Danyelle L. said...

Great post. I hope you get feeling better!

Pen Pen said...

Debra-- :) for sure part of it, but the prevailing negativity in my head is just my own voice. My idea of perfection in writing is pretty high up there.

drollgirl said...

strep throat is BOGUS! i hope you have meds and that you are better soon!

and these quotes are fantastic. i am not a writer, and i feel for them. i feel for all artists. i think the creative process is many times just hard and painful, and there is no way around it.

lotusgirl said...

I hope you get better soon. It's so true that self-doubt can ruin our writing.

Anonymous said...

Oh, take good care of yourself, and thank you for visiting, I Hope you come by again! These quotes are just fab, fab, fabulous! I am a wannabe writer.

Jessica Nelson said...

Awesome quotes!

I hope you feel better.

Awesome Sara said...

feel better penny!!!

Kitty Stampede said...

love these quotes!!! strep throat sucks..you'll appreciate your voice big time when its all over though!

jennifer from pittsburgh said...

Hope you're better by now!
Writing is its own animal. You can't worry about the other animals. Learn from their behavior and move on ;)