[Caption: “It must be yours. I have no imagination.”
Cartoon by Charles Barsotti in The New Yorker, November 27, 2006]
The end of a year heralds all sort of soul-searching not just among writers, of course, but among everyone else. Did I do everything I could do? Did I do it as well as I could? What did I overlook? How did I fail? And so on.
And yet — at least for (re-)beginners — the professional angst of writers and other creative people seems especially exquisite. We have a product, after all, a product we’ve spent many lonely hours producing. With no assurance of “success” (however we choose to measure that). With no firm idea, in many cases, why we embarked on the latest project (or the career itself, for that matter).
We have to finish the work in order to sell the work — just to find out if it’s at all salable or even remotely interesting to people in a position to get it “out there.”
I mean, I myself know this is how it works but it terrifies me.
