It occurred to me that, in all my rush to confess the sometimes-overwhelming cloud of self-doubt and anxiety involved with trying to be any kind of artist, I did neglect to add the last little bit of it.
Because, yeah, putting yourself out there, getting on stage, setting what you’ve done up into a spotlight for all to see… well, yes, it’s terrifying. There are always going to be people waiting for the opportunity to pounce on Those Who Do, for no other reason than because They Do Not. A show just got recognized recently - “Ted Lasso” - and for one brief moment, everyone was celebrating the shared experience of being moved by this project. But of course, then comes the armchair critics - and I use the term “critic” pretty loosely, because frankly those people never did a single creative thing in their lives and thus lack even the most basic qualities of critical evaluation. And this isn’t a surprise - it’s always been easier to destroy than to create. Learned that in a movie, and you get a nickel if you can tell me what movie it’s from.
I was in a writing session with an enormously talented friend of mine just this morning and we were talking about this whole process of recognizing and coping with self-doubt, and it became obvious that this one final kernel was missing from my blog. I did address why it is so difficult to write, but I didn’t spend enough time talking about why we try to do it in the first place.
Why DO we put ourselves out there? Why DO we write these stories? Why subject ourselves to the inevitable condemnation or, worse, oversight and isolation of artistic creation? I gotta be honest, one of the worst things I’ve ever been told at any shows I’ve attended was when a fairly successful author (I won’t say their name because I don’t think they realized how much their statement hurt me at the time) looked over all my books and, after talking to me at length about the whole process, said, “Honestly, how have I never heard of you??”
I didn’t have a good answer for them at the time, and I probably still don’t. Why hadn’t they heard of me? Well, I don’t have a publicist, so maybe that’s part of it. But it also touched on my personal hell, which is that I believe it’s easier to be insulted than to be ignored.
But anyway - again, why do I do it? Do I want to be the next J K Rowling? Not really, she’s got some baggage to deal with that I’d never want. I wouldn’t hate her money, but I’d be happy with, like, a tenth of it, I guess. But that’s also not why I do this.
Do I want crowds of cheering fans? Adulation? Nope. That would be…awkward. I do kind of miss audiences, though - it’s an enormous sense of validation to play a song and get applause at the end of it, and you don’t generally get that as a writer. From time to time on panels or signings, yes, but it’s not on the same page of being an actor or a musician, and again, awkward.
So here’s the reason, and I’ve quoted this before so forgive me when I do so again:
“Many people look at the world as it is and ask, Why? While I prefer to imagine the world as it could be, and ask, Why Not?” (paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw)
I grew up with shows like the Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Star Wars, the Outer Limits. I read Tolkien, Dragonlance, Earth Abides, Neuromancer, and also studied philosophical tomes like The Prophet and the Celestine Prophecy. I took apart religious texts and analyzed humanity’s path from its origins through a thousand world events which should have either prevented our emergence or stifled it entirely. We’re a band of rebellious nomads on a blue speck on one edge of a galaxy that might not have even noticed us. And even now we seem to teeter on the brink of self-annihilation. Here’s a fun little game of nihilistic bliss: imagine how the world will end!
Seriously, I do that, like, all the time. I’ve written an entire novel on the robot revolution, but I’m just not yet ready to publish it, mostly because we keep skipping through the minefields and it’s hard as hell to write about the end of the world when it’s entirely possible we might decide to jump off a different cliff than we’d originally intended.
At the same time, it was Star Trek Day yesterday.
Star Trek… ah, I’m so grateful my father got me watching that show at a young and impressionable age. Forget Kirk and his intergalactic machismo, all of that other stuff aside, it was a bold and courageous implication that we might actually overcome the odds and go out into that final frontier. And Space isn’t the actual literal frontier, though the metaphor holds true with the tales of the wild west of early Americana. But the deeper promise is one that seeps into the spaces in between all my words and in each of my stories.
Why do I write? It’s because I believe that we’re not actually as without hope as we often think ourselves to be. We can do powerful things. We can invent wonders. We can surpass our expectations. We can boldly go out into the unknown and beyond, and we can even overcome our own worst intentions. We can be selfless. We can be magical. We can. WE CAN.
That’s what I write. I write stories of hope, of imagination, of small heroes who overcome the odds and in spite of the wounds they take along the way, rise and succeed.
We are, in point of fact and fiction, better than we know. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. Some days, it’s all we can do to crawl out of bed and face the new side quests the world has waiting for us. Sometimes, we just find ourselves too tired, too sad, too angry, too exhausted to hope. To believe. To take in that next breath in defiance of the odds.
Well, to quote our good friend Han Solo, never tell me the odds.
Because we have a history to understand, and a future to create.
Who’s with me?
