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Today I was taping old roller-derby posters to my office walls for inspiration and I found this quote I’d ganked off the interwebs from a meme:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase: they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just gotta fight your way through. – Ira Glass
My observation of my own craft progress, and the craft progress of many, many other authors, is that an author figures out how to write a novel without scratching her head and wondering how the heck she painted herself into this craft corner only after she has written six to eight novels. If she hops genres, it can take even more novels.
I had meant to write more about Ireland and Dublin (as if you haven’t already heard enough, but I’m still processing), but I was going through my trip photos and stopped at this one, taken through the window of my return flight.
