Insecure Writers' Support Group (#9)

Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

As some readers of my blog may already be aware, I've had problems crashing and burning when it comes to my writing in the recent past. It has not been pretty nor fun. I had gotten to the point where writing was so painful, I began to really dislike it and prefer doing anything else besides. And I want to do this for a living!

I had to do some realizing about why this was happening to me, since it hadn't ever happened before. So, I let this issue percolate in the back of my mind for a while, as I tend to do when trying to do damage control in my life (when am I ever NOT doing damage control?!).

I found a book on how to become more prolific (The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: [...] by Hillary Rettig) and the section on perfectionism really stuck out for me. I definitely needed to get over my perfectionism issues and just let myself write crap when composing my first drafts. Why I wasn't doing this, I'm not sure. I just didn't want to make mistakes, period. But, I realize now that it's okay to make them when first writing a draft, and even afterwards. I think I made an important breakthrough there.

But, that was hardly all I needed to do. I still felt very stuck and very unhappy when writing. Just my perfectionism alone wasn't all that was stifling me, clearly. I thought more and more about what made me love writing back when I was doing it for fun. And, something I had heard J.K. Rowling say in an interview once about why her Harry Potter books are so popular popped into my mind and wouldn't leave: she said, according to thousands of fan letters, it had to have been the characters she created that made her books endearing.

I thought about all that I had been writing since I wanted to write with the intention of publishing. It wasn't that I hated what I had been writing. It was that I wasn't writing characters that I could fall in love with anymore. That was the difference. It all occurred to me after figuring out that I used to write characters that made me love to write about them, and I had somehow, without realizing, stopped doing it.

When I love any book I read, truly love it, it's always, always, always because there's at least one if not more than one character in the book that I liked a lot, or even loved. That's it. That's why I read and that's also why I write. I'm a character-person above everything else.

I decided to zero-in on my newest characters in my current work-in-progress to ensure they were making me find them endearing. With a little effort on my part, I've been writing better characters, at least as far as I'm concerned, and really loving to write again! 

In the end, I don't even care if my characters don't enchant anybody else. Maybe everyone else will find them boring--who knows? For now, they need to be right for me and make me happy. All I've been wanting is to love writing again and I had to rediscover what it was that made me love it in the first place. Now, if I could only make myself remember this in the long run......