Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Image stuck in your head?

Do you ever have this image that you are trying to describe and the word combination alludes you. You write, they don't work, you delete, and you puff out your cheeks and blow out air in frustration.
Do you then question yourself and try to tell yourself that maybe you've no talent after all? I guess I do this. I start to reason that if I can't write about this image, it must be me!

Even though I try to squash it, the yearning sits quietly rising up whenever I hear about some debut author getting some 2-4 book deal.


My sister, artist Diann Izzie said that talent is a curse. People look at her creations and tell her how lucky she is, I was surprised when she told me how much work might go into some of her pieces and she doesn't always enjoy it.

Are there many times in your writing when you really aren't enjoying yourself?

2 comments:

Carole McDonnell said...

I think you're a really good writer and really good writers tend to be perfectionists. Sometimes a person hates a scene they've written and they think it just doesn't convey the image they have in their heads....but someone else comes and reads the book and yay!!! they see wonders in the scene. I had a dream once in which -- can't describe it so I'll just have to wing it-- I was shown copies of copies of copies of a story. The original story as it existed in the ether was so bright and wondrous and then the author got an idea of the story...and that was a shake less bright than the original story in the ether. Then the author wrote the story and the final product was a shade less bright than the story idea in his mind (and two shades less bright than the original story in the ether) and then people read the story but their comprehension of the story was one shade less bright than the copy in the novel. That dream really freed me. Just as readers don't manage to get the perfect idea/image behind a novel, so the author doesn't really show the perfect idea she saw when she first started to write the novel...and so the perfect story in the ether isn't quite seen by the author. It was a great dream and it really blessed me. -C

Lisa said...

Dream does a good job of making your point.