My Virtual Nail in the Wall

I knew even while writing yesterday's post that it wasn't particularly something Pollyanna would write, but I'm following the advice of a sage friend who told me to always write from my heart. I believe I've done that since I started this blog. I guess it's been working, because I'm almost to 1000 views on the blog, and a whole lot more than that on the Facebook page.

Some of my posts are about my journey with MS, but some are so much more random. For me, it's crucial to write about things irrelevant to MS for many reasons. The most important reason being that while MS affects my entire body, my entire world; MS isn't the only thing about me, or my world.

When I start to write, always in the back of my mind is “write what you know”, which has been attributed to Mark Twain, Hemingway, William Faulkner, and others, I'm sure. Whoever (or is it whomever? I'm leaving whoever) said it originally, it's always with me.

While searching for the origin of that quote, I came across these gems: 

“Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.” ~ Joseph Joubert

And “And by the way, everything in life is writable about, if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt” ~ Sylvia Plath

I follow both of those ideas, though I didn't know they existed until this morning. I write what I like to read, and everything is a possibility for a story, or at least the basis or idea for a story.

Right now I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I've already learned many interesting things about him, and I'm not too far into the book yet. One thing that really sticks in my mind is that when he got his first rejection letter, he drove a nail into the wall, and each time he got another rejection notice, he stuck it on the nail. As he acquired more notices, he replaced the nail with a spike, and kept on saving them.

On a much smaller scale, it's the same for me, except I don't submit to publishers and get rejected; I get rejected by the blogger count telling me how many people read that day's post. Still, I keep writing.

I've always enjoyed writing for fun. Poems, short stories, essays, and now blog posts are a release, an escape, and just plain fun to me. It was nice to be told by an English teacher that I had a talent for writing. Still, I lacked the confidence to pursue my dream of being a writer. Half-finished, barely started, and just notes for story ideas sit collecting dust. I have all the stuff I ever started on discs. I don't know why I saved them, exactly. Maybe it's because one day I hope to have enough chutzpah to finish one, and say to the world, “Yes, I have something to say, and you should read it.”

For now, I'm content to keep writing my little blog, and watching the rejection on a daily basis, on a small scale. My virtual nail in the wall. Who knows? I may get back some of my muchness, and submit a finished manuscript somewhere, sometime.

An explanation of the photos:

Buffalo Public Schools used to publish a yearly collection of essays, stories, art projects and poems. I'm not exactly sure of the specifics or the mechanics, but I think how it worked was like something this:

A teacher would submit a student's work (poem, story, art project, or essay) to “somewhere”, and then “someone” would decide whether to accept the entry in the yearly publication. Usually, you didn't know (at least I didn't know) that you were being considered for publication, until one day toward the end of the school year, a teacher would show up with books for the students who had a project published in the book.

My entry that was selected happened to be a poem. A poem about daisies. Daisies. I never liked that poem (as evidenced by the lack of sharing it here), and never thought it one of my better writing samples. Even in sixth grade, I was my own worst critic. I still agree with my sixth-grade self about that poem, though. Anyway, now you understand why I included the photos.