SpiralTruth

Wow. Copyblogger’s How Your Emotions Are Strangling the Life Out of Your Copy is right on the money. I struggle with this all the time.

Whenever you feel like you’re taking a risk, an emotional response is triggered. Your emotional needs feel threatened. The filter is engaged, and your bold copy turns into a big puddle of boringness.

Yep. Been there, done that. And I know that this article is directed more towards editorial style blogging articles, but it is also true for prose and poetry. In fact, the problem is especially pernicious in prose and poetry because you can hide the fact that you just censored yourself behind a bunch of metaphors and neat literary devices.

I don’t worry about random people judging me so much as friends and family. You get this awesome idea or insight, and maybe it’s a bit weird or a bit dark. Even if you’re exploring the idea with a completely fictional character, you’re the one who’s thinking about it, who’s putting it on the page. It’s in your brain. Somewhere. And what does this say about you? I wonder if a guy like Stephen King worries about this stuff. He manages to write some of the most fucked up characters imaginable and I’ve often heard people say, “Thank God he’s a writer,” even after praising his imagination. The suggestion, of course, is that if he wasn’t a writer, he’d be one of those fucked up characters. And, when you look at it that way, what a nasty thing to say about a writer…

I’ve noticed in myself and humanity as a whole that even the best of us feel this need to undercut anyone who’s successful. We have to find the faults. We have to take them down. That’s one way of bringing them to our level. The other way would be empathy – realizing that no matter the talent or success of somebody, they still love, hate, fear, and worry about what people think of them, just like we do. It’s hard, when someone like Stephen King makes it look so easy. But next time, instead of saying, “Thank God he’s a writer,” I’m going to simply thank him for doing what he’s doing, which is paving the way for other writers to think strange thoughts and write about the possibilities those thoughts open up… and not feel guilty about it.