“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone 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 its 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 will finish one story. It is 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 awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ~ Ira Glass.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating this blog and I finally got around to doing it. Of course, once it was created I realized that I'd be the one to write it. That was an entirely different matter. I found myself incapable of finishing the draft of the greeting note. Even now that it’s finally published, I can't imagine what it will be like to write the actual entries.
To tell you the truth, I’m scared. I'm scared of being disappointed at my own work, at what I can create. Having read such marvellous articles with great insights into Shakespeare's work, frankly, I don't quite see what I can bring to the party yet (that'd be a very serious Party of Knowledge, mind you).I'm fighting that feeling, though. As Mr. Glass says - as I read it - the only way to stop feeling frustrated is doing something about it. Write it out. Fight the blank page.
By unleashing my insecurities I'm trying to get to the core of my identity as a writer, as a (dare I say it?) future scholar, as someone whose enthusiasm has transcended the boundaries of reading and wants to experience writing about it.
This is meant to be a blog with Shakespeare at its centre, but I expect it to derive to other areas of literature as well. Despite this first entry, it's not meant to be a self-help blog for writers, but I thought it would be interesting to voice what I've being carrying with me all this time. Thus, by questioning and attempting to answer myself (and yourselves!), maybe by accident and only for a moment I would be so lucky as to extract, in Virginia Woolf's words, a nugget of pure truth.
It will not be an easy road, nor a straight one, filled with setbacks and self-set traps. Though the journey of discovering ourselves, let alone Shakespeare, is not as easy as playing a pipe, I greet you: Welcome to The Heart of my Mystery.
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