The Infinite Build
This was waiting for me in my mailbox when I got home today. The headline in pink is something my friend Veeraj has been trying to drill into me every since we met a few years ago. I’m old school, he’s new school. I want to sit on my stories until I’m ready to turn them into a book. He wants me to suck it up and just start releasing them one by one into the cyber-sphere. I’m print, he’s digital. I say nay, he says yea. I want an instant castle, he wants me to build.
The tough thing about writing, or about trying to be a writer, or about calling yourself a writer and living up to such an audacious self-proclamation, is that you’ll never think your work is good enough. Ever. Even if, by some glorious chance, you manage to get published, you still won’t think your work is worth a blind eye. It won’t matter if readers love your words, because even when a piece is done it’s still not done, and whatever they love is just something you wish you could take back and make better. But you can’t, so you agonize over the inevitable fate of your next piece and kill yourself to make it perfect even though you know that the idea of perfection is something that only teenagers and dreamers believe in. Writers are goddamn masochists.
I haven’t even creased the spine of this issue of Fast Company yet. For all I know, the articles inside it will talk about being weary of the internet, and will promote shoving the tiny proofs of my talent at the back of my desk drawers for years until I finally have the guts to do something with them. But I doubt it. I know what’s in store. They’re gonna side with Vee and tell me I have to get over my shit and just get more of my work out there.
Damn it, I hate it when he’s right.
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N.B.: Blame LG for the crappy photo quality.
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