Writers hear voices--a provocative
sentence or two bubbling up in the mind’s ear; a created, or remembered,
character beginning to speak autonomously.
These are gifts of the creative process to be cherished. Then there are the other voices, the ones
that chime in when we’re mustering the energy to get started on a project, or
when the first burst of energy has been spent and we’re trying to figure out
where to go next. “Why bother?” these
voices ask. “You’re not a real
writer. That was a dumb idea. You’ll never get it to come out right. What’s the point of going on?”
These doubts are the legacies of
childhood, when parents and other adults defined who we were and decreed what
we had to do. Back then, writing meant
navigating a tangle of rules—spelling, grammar, and “what the teacher
wants.” There is safety in all these
obsolete limitations; they maintain the status quo. But they have nothing to do with our creative
abilities or the vitality of our writing.
We must laugh them off our mental stage, embrace the freedom, and forge
on.
No one ever postpones or stops
writing because of lack of talent or technical expertise. The talent is always there to be tapped, and
solutions abound for any technical writing problem. There’s only one thing that can stop us from
writing if we let it, and that is self-doubt.
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Molly Tinsley left the English
faculty at the US Naval Academy to write full-time. Her story collection Throwing Knives
won the Oregon Book Award; her most recent release is the memoir Entering
the Blue Stone. Three years ago she
donned the editor/publisher hat, co-founding the small press Fuze Publishing (www.fuzepublishing.com). She facilitates the workshops, Crafting
Lively Dialogue and The Second Draft.
For more information about the conference, visit http://www.willamettewriters.com/wwc/3/
For more information about the conference, visit http://www.willamettewriters.com/wwc/3/
