The Fear.

I've been having some trouble thinking of anything to blog about recently. I've got ideas for scripts that I want to write, but I don't really want to write too much about that here. Not that I think anyone is about to run off with my ideas, but I'd just rather keep all of that contained until I'm ready to unleash it onto an unsuspecting world.

Writing is a funny thing. It's something that I've wanted to do all of my life, yet it's also something that I've struggled with for much of my life. As the saying goes, I don't like to write, I like to have written. And that's not uncommon for successful and talented writers, so I believe. For me, writing isn't this enormous, overpowering passionate endeavour - the sort of thing that it pains me not to do. It's simply the way I communicate and engage with the world. It's not all that dramatic, it's just the way I best express myself (I hope, anyway) and the way my head works. I hope that's a vaguely positive thing for my ambitions to be a writer, I don't really know.

I've always had a bit of a fear about writing as well. I was good at academic writing - really good. And one day, when I finally find my dissertations from uni, I'll throw them up here and prove that. I wasn't any kind of a genius, but I was a good writer when it came to essays and dissertations on arts subjects. But I've always struggled with anything more personal and more creative. There's several reasons for that. A great deal of it is simply laziness and lack of motivation. Part of it is that I don't do well without structure and deadlines imposed externally for this sort of thing. But a really big bit of it is just fear. Fear of failing. I've wanted to be a writer my whole life - what if I try and it turns out I'm shit? Easier to just make excuses about why I can't write, n'est-ce pas?

But I'm sick of that. I'm sick of living in limbo all the time, in some sort of suspended animation. And I've finally realised that it doesn't have to be so all or nothing. A huge part of my problems are that I make everything black and white; all or nothing. It's perfect or it's the worst thing in the world. I'm slowly starting to see that things aren't quite like that. Insert some cliche about life being about the journey, not the destination, here. I don't have to be a perfect writer right now. I don't have to sit down, write the most amazing script in the world, have it commissioned and win a bunch of awards for it. At least, not right now. I need to practice. It's a muscle that needs exercised, whichever part of my brain that deals with the writing end of things. The only way that I'll get to be a good writer is to keep trying and to learn.

And that's how I feel about a lot of things now. I've spent so much of my (adult) life with these ridiculous perfectionist standards. Either it's perfect, or it's shit. No in between, no second chances. But that's just beyond daft. Life doesn't work that way - and nor should it. We have to continually strive to be better, to get better, to learn. To not beat ourselves up for not being the perfect person that we want to be right.this.second, but to keep trying to be the person we want to be. We won't ever reach perfection, but we might at least get to something approaching happy. And that's got to be worth trying, right?

Hmm, this was supposed to be about writing and it ended up being about my head, again. I'm not sure if that's because writing is so tied into my personality, or because I'm in danger of becoming obsessed with the inner workings of my mind. It may not appear obvious, but I truly am trying not to be self-involved with this - I'm trying to be self-aware instead.

Anyway, if any of the two or three of you reading this feel like giving me writing assignments to try to give me some sort of deadline or structure, please feel free! I'm not writing your essays for uni, though. Not without payment, at least.