you begin to wonder why you came

My short story was critiqued in my creative writing class tonight, and the feedback was pretty positive. It picked my spirits up considerably; it's funny how often during the week I wondered what my classmates' reactions were going to be to my story, and I was nervous walking in tonight because I didn't like waiting for the proverbial axe to fall on my baby. However, people seemed to like it, even though it wasn't one of those 'deep hidden meaning' stories and even though it turned into an introductory chapter to a much larger story. I got some good feedback on things I could modify, and encouragement to continue it, which indicates that the story was intriguing. Yay.

I think I took the class to alleviate a bit of my deep-seeded (seated? who knows?) insecurities about my writing, and tonight helped a little. However, there are two problems with that: a) I need to be secure in myself, rather than searching for security for others, or else I'll never truly be happy, and b) I feel more secure about what I've already written, but I don't feel confident about whether I can finish the story. I start panicking about whether it's going to turn into meaningless drivel, or whether the story will just dry up and disappear--I don't know what the ending is yet, so what if it's lame?

All of my doubts and insecurities start bubbling up to the surface as soon as I start worrying that something might turn out to be 'lame'--and maybe it's because so much of my social identity is tied up in how my sense of humor attracts others. If a joke falls flat, if a story doesn't hold interest, if people aren't laughing with me, I feel one step closer to losing them, and so this clawing sense of desperation sometimes under some of my more casual interactions. It's not so necessary to make my close friends laugh, perhaps, but by then it's so engrained in the relationship that it's natural. The act of storytelling in writing is so much more dangerous because it's impossible to know whether your readers will laugh with you, or whether they will brush you off entirely.

Anyway, despite all that, despite the inherent misery in coming up with a story and worrying about sending this little reflection of yourself out into the world, I do like writing, and I enjoyed encouraging my imagination to find a whole story out of an image of a public storage facility. I'm really glad I'm taking this class--it seems to have had a positive effect on me in general, it makes the week go faster, and I have 'something to live for', to use a cliched and disturbing phrase. Perhaps I'll take another one next quarter, if I don't think I've developed the self-discipline necessary to force myself to write every week. I should be writing every night, but that's an issue for another day. Now, it's time to go to bed so that I can go to work at seven and catch up on all the stuff that I should have done tonight--but I'm boycotting tonight so that I can relish the feeling of accomplishment that came out of tonight's class. Work can wait another eight hours.