{"id":70,"date":"2011-09-27T21:39:03","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T02:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jackcampbelljr.wordpress.com\/?p=70"},"modified":"2011-09-27T21:39:03","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T02:39:03","slug":"you-are-not-a-beautiful-and-unique-snowflake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/2011\/09\/27\/you-are-not-a-beautiful-and-unique-snowflake\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Not a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club<\/em><\/p>\n

Writer’s are a fragile bunch.\u00a0 We are primarily solitary creatures, except when we are gathering with other writers to talk about writing.\u00a0 We spend most of our lives dancing to music that exists only in our heads, talking to characters no one else can hear, and trying to effectively communicate what they say to everyone else.<\/p>\n

That can be a lot of pressure.\u00a0 Sometimes it can be overwhelming.\u00a0 In Bird by Bird<\/em>, Anne Lamott writes about the delicate psyche of the writer and the oppressive gravity a blank page can place upon them.\u00a0 I think sometimes we let ourselves get frightened by the gravity and scope of what we are trying to do.\u00a0 There are so many things to worry about.\u00a0 There is plot, characters, theme, setting, dialogue, grammar, spelling.\u00a0 We may invest hundreds of hours in a work of fiction that sucks and no one will ever read.\u00a0 We want to write something special, something that means something.\u00a0 We want to write the great American novel.<\/p>\n

Anne Lamott deals with this by telling herself she only has to write what she can see through a one inch window.\u00a0 What I do is far less romantic, and likely the by-product of a blue-collar upbringing.\u00a0 I remind myself that I am not special.\u00a0 I cannot sit and watch a beautiful masterpiece flow from my fingertips.\u00a0 I am working.\u00a0 That requires practice, attention to detail, stubbornness, and the little bit of skill I possess.<\/p>\n

I am not special.\u00a0 Thousands of writers are facing that same blank page at this moment.\u00a0\u00a0 Hundreds of thousands of writers have faced millions of blank pages, and amazingly they have managed to be filled.\u00a0 The Library of Congress has 33 million books, not even a small percentage of all the writing done when you include magazines, screenwriting, playwriting, etc.<\/p>\n

I am facing the same problem as everyone else.\u00a0 My answer will be the only thing different.\u00a0 When I stopped writing for awhile, a lot of it was about pressure.\u00a0 Some people around me who had read my stuff said I had talent.\u00a0 I felt pressure to perform and to do so immediately.\u00a0 Write a best-seller, my ex-wife used to say, so we can live on the money.\u00a0 She was trying to be supportive and encouraging, but a few rejection letters later, I stopped submitting.\u00a0 It was one thing for Ray Bradbury and Stephen King to say to persevere through rejections, they could literally crap on a sheet of paper and a publisher would buy it.\u00a0 But I am not either one of them.<\/p>\n

Lately, I’ve been going to writer’s groups, and that has made the difference.\u00a0 I realized that I am not special.\u00a0 I am not the only writer struggling to start a literary career.\u00a0 I’m not even the only writer in my sub-genre in this city.\u00a0 Hell, for all I know, I’m not the only writer on my block.\u00a0 Somehow, that all makes me feel better.\u00a0 It calms my agoraphobic social phobia enough to get to work.<\/p>\n

You don’t worry about mowing your lawn correctly because everyone does it.\u00a0 You don’t worry about shoveling snow the right way.\u00a0 You just shovel it.\u00a0 If you are working on a car, you know other people have done the same repair before and you just go do it.<\/p>\n

When I approached writing this way, suddenly the blank page wasn’t near as offensive.\u00a0 Writing is just another thing I do.\u00a0 I love doing it, but in the end, it’s just another project.\u00a0 A blank page is nothing.\u00a0 I’ve filled them before.\u00a0 My colleagues are out there filling them right now.\u00a0 My fellow writers of the Dead Horse Society, the Writers of the Weird, and the Lawrence Writer’s Group are out there punching keys along with me.\u00a0 Some of our stuff will be good, some of it great, some of it God awful, but it will be there.<\/p>\n

I’m not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and that is fine by me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club Writer’s are a fragile bunch.\u00a0 We are primarily solitary creatures, except when we are gathering with other writers to talk about writing.\u00a0 We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[29,41,72,96,134,253,277,296,350,416,418,420],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-anne-lamott","tag-blank","tag-chuck-palahniuk","tag-creativity","tag-fight-club","tag-page","tag-pressure","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-stephen-king","tag-writers","tag-writing","tag-writing-groups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}