annundriel | Creative Fear (Reply)

The other day I was looking for title-inspiration for "whatever we lose" and my eyes happened to fall on my copy of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which I read a couple of years ago in Modernism in Art and Literature. It contains a quote that spoke to me so clearly at the time I was amazed:

She could see it so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.
- p. 22-23

I get a lot of things out of that passage, and I understand it through my own various experiences involving fear of creative failure, that horrible moment between having an idea and pulling out a blank page to make that idea something more than just a thought, an image in your head. Fear of creative rejection, dismissal.

To borrow a quote from one of my other favorite things, The History Boys, that moment in reading for me was one of these:

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something--a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things--which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

I think I've gained a lot more confidence since then. I'm not afraid to start things much anymore for fear they won't live up to the vision in my head. Though I'm sure

ginnith would have interesting things to say on my various writing related neuroses and how the have/haven't changed. She's been there through it all, the lucky lady.

Speaking of writing, back to editing I go.