i just stumbled across this, i must have written it quite late some evening. it's a bit rambly, and there's even a half-finished sentence in there, but still, quite insightful
"...to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. ‘Mighty poets in their misery dead’— that is the burden of their song. if anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived."Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.
Conceiving a blog lying in bed at night is piss easy. It's fun, and you feel like you're going to create something REVOLUTIONARY. But when you come to the actual thing you're seized by a crippling notion that I think the extract above sums up. Admittedly, I'm writing a blog, not poetry. I feel like I should put some sort of disclaimer here, assuring you that I don't see myself as a young Keats or Flaubert, but you neveIt's not laziness. It's certainly not a lack of self-belief. It's the knowledge that what you're doing will look like a ripple in a tsunami not the ripple in a pavement puddle you fantasize about.
I saw this quote the other day on some photographer's blog whose name I forget and he said he mistrusts people who are more excited about being successful than doing what they're excited about.
I should be excited about writing about what I love, not discouraged by its insignificance.
Ironically, writing about loving to write but feeling insignificant is something that makes me feel significant.
