Tuesday, August 3, 2010

"This will all feel like shit to you, I can assure you that. Right now, you're doing draft after draft, getting the information and all the facts straight, and you're revved up on confidence and people are telling you how great they think your work is. You feed off of the attention like a butterfly outstretched towards the warmth of the sun, or some similar colourful, textured, and poignant metaphor that you have littered all over your pages. But in about three or four weeks, when your piece is all but a distant whisp of a memory, you'll find the pages, red-marked with comments in the margins, folded into a textbook or shoved in your laptop bag. You'll pick it up, smooth it out, read it with fresh eyes, and... you'll hate it. It's the worst thing ever. You'll ask yourself why you spent the hours slaving over it, what people saw in it, and in you, and why you had to keep this shit around instead of throwing it in the trash where it belongs. But it's not shit- let me assure you this. And I know, because I've read shit. I've written shit, and I knew it was shit as I was writing it, too. And your harsh and jaded eyes will seldom allow you to appreciate your creation, but remember that you kept at it, that you were flying when those fingers hit those keys, pumped for every edited copy. You weren't just salvaging, you were polishing. So keep this now, keep the excitement, and keep going, because when all of this is done, all you can rely on is the memory of finally tackling something you were once proud of."

6 comments:

Jon Ashton said...

Who said that? I want it to have been somebody with both a black beard and a wheelchair.

Jessica said...

The black-bearded paraplegic that lives in my head....
Perhaps the voice of reason in a screenplay that I'm sort of working on. Which is the most non-committal, lazy kind of creative "excuse" ever, but... yeah.

Jon Ashton said...

You wrote that?! +5 respect.

dried said...

+5 empathy.
(the image link on my captcha was broken for 2 refreshes)

Jessica said...

I don't know what that means.

dried said...

I had to refresh twice before the word verification would actually show up. in hindsight, not actually that noteworthy.