![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/barsottidragon_sm.jpg?resize=500%2C185&ssl=1\" "\\"Cartoon")
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[Caption: “It must be yours. I have no imagination.” 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?<\/em> And so on.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n We have to finish the work in order to sell the work<\/em> — just to find out if it’s at all salable or even remotely interesting to people in a position to get it “out there.”<\/p>\n I mean, I myself know this is how it works but it terrifies me<\/em>.<\/p>\n (This explains why writers slip quite easily into blogging mode. Of course it’s “writing” or at least “practice,” so we offer that excuse (barely a reason). But it also and I think more importantly offers at least the tiny hope that our work will be validated, immediately, post by post by post. Thank God for commenters, eh?)<\/p>\n In recent days, I’ve read numerous posts by blogging writers which allude to this problem — too numerous to enumerate, too flat-out thick. The whole gaggle of questions hangs in the air, like excessive humidity.<\/p>\n Omigod I just wasted a whole year… Can’t believe NaNoWriMo came and went and since then I’ve done absolutely nothing… Not a single agent has requested even a partial from me… Every story or poem or non-fic proposal I’ve sent out has come back with a “Sorry, not for us” note… A black hole… Productivity? Ha!<\/em><\/p>\n All the second-guessing would depress and alarm me even more if I myself hadn’t already thought along these lines.<\/p>\n But you know what? Maybe it’s not so bad after all.<\/em><\/p>\n One reason why the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy succeeds so well, I think, is that it grants us access not only to the events of the quest but to the minds of the questers. More than the action, the characters’ re<\/em>actions matter. Frodo’s finally accomplishing his goal might be just as thrilling if he’d never looked back, never hesitated or wavered or tried to duck responsibility… but it would be one seriously sucky story by contrast — exactly because we know how difficult it was for him psychologically.<\/p>\n
\nCartoon by Charles Barsotti in The New Yorker, November 27, 2006]<\/em><\/p>\n