I hate to admit I'm a quitter, but...

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Sat, 02/26/2011 - 22:17

Jake Was Here

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Joined: 07/24/2009

Not too long ago I made the wholly comprehensible error of asking several people for an honest critique of my art. All of them, with only one exception, thought that it was shit and I couldn't draw.

Which, I've decided, is the truth. I have no inborn talent for art or writing at all -- having failed to comprehend everything that any other artist or writer has tried to teach me, what little ability I have is entirely the result of time and experience. And I do mean "little". I can't write good dialogue to save my life, and despite two decades of practice my ability to draw anatomy is still as sloppy as a moderately talented eighth-grader's.

I think the main reason my drawing and wordsmithing have failed to improve is that I am, ordinarily, too much of a coward to ask for honest criticism; to merely think of letting anyone in the outside world take a look at my work is enough to get my hands trembling and eyes watering with genuine fear. And there seems to be no happy medium anymore between a polite, noncommittal lie and a blunt, brutal, vicious honesty, so why subject myself to that?

I don't know what I'm doing trying to write or draw, anyway. Knowing what I know about myself, I doubt I belong in any profession of which critique is a natural and necessary adjunct. My mind runs in severe and awkward grooves, and it's too easy to get stuck in a bad pattern. The words won't come out right, or the hand won't cooperate with the eye and the mind... and everything that escapes is terrible, just terrible, to the point that I can only imagine my work being torn to shreds if I make the mistake of ever showing it. I am wracked with paranoia -- it seems like every time I have stuck my head out, I got slapped. And the ones who didn't slap me were just being politely dishonest.

I hate my bad art, then I hate myself for hating my bad art, then I hate myself for hating myself, and the cycle continues from there. I think it's self-loathing and self-pity (an even more repugnant emotion) in about equal amounts. It's to the point where I can't even try to write or draw anymore -- even look at a blank Word document or a sketchbook -- without feeling nausea and impotence and rage, and finally abandoning the thing in disgust. Why did I ever dedicate my life to this crap if I can't do it?

Oh, right, because I'm autistic and my head is too fucked to be used for anything else.

Sun, 02/27/2011 - 13:05

neorandomizer

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Joined: 06/27/2009

Art and people

Look if you enjoy writing or drawing do it their is no need to show your work or seek approval if you get pleasure from the act of creation. One other thing to think on van Gogh was universally told his work was crap during his life but now he is considered one of histories greatest artists.

Phillip K Dick was thought of as a hack writer for most of his life yet now he is thought of as one of America's greatest 20th century writers. What other people think of your work should not be the primary motivation but what you think of your work is far more important.

I have always had problems showing my work to people so their are stories I have written that only I have seen. I have gone so far as to destroy manuscripts or drop works because of my fear of criticism. Always remember your art is for you and if other people like it than that is just gravy.

Never stifle yourself because of what other people say.

Sun, 02/27/2011 - 20:34

Republibot 3.0

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Joined: 12/27/2008

Creativity is the inability to copy what other people are doing.

I don't know if this'll be useful for you or not, but I used to have the same problems, Jake. I tried for years, arguably decades, to write stories or songs, novels or music. Failed endlessly. I could never understand it. It was exactly as you say, the hand doesn't coordinate with the mind, the words are mangled by the mouth, things don't come out the way you want, or, if they do, somehow the impetus is lost. A great idea doesn't come out as a great story. This lasted for a long time. I gave up writing several times because of it. I gave up music, too.

I came back to them...why? Not sure. A sense of masochism? The Simpsonian "If I give up now, I'll never know how badly they would've beat me" thing? (That'll haunt you.) I dunno. Bottom line, I think, is that I felt compelled to do it. I could stave it off for a while, but I felt compelled to do it. And if I *DIDN'T* have the compulsion, then my utter lack of talent wouldn't have bothered me, you know? I can't fly a plane. I don't give a crap. I'm lousy at any videogame. So what? I only play for the scenery, anyway. I'm a crap outfielder because I can't get over the irrational fear that the ball will hit me in the nads from sixty feet up. Again: I don't care. Those things aren't important to me.

Writing is. Music is. Dammit. It just nagged at me for such an incredibly long time, most of my life, just out of grasp.

And then, suddenly, after forty years I could do it. I'm not a brilliant writer by any stretch of the imagination, but suddenly I could do something. It wasn't what I was intending, but it was something and it wasn't terrible.

I *THINK* what happened was that I stopped trying to force the story to go where it didn't want to go. I had these images in my head of what a story should be like, and it was pretty much exactly like every other story I'd read by some *real* author. I can't do that. I don't have that talent. I shouldn't have been trying to do that. HOWEVER, not having *that* talent didn't mean I don't have any, just that I can't play someone else's game.

It was a loooooooooong hard lesson that I didn't *have* to.

I started being able to write at the moment I gave up any illusions about writing the Great American Novel, or creating the next Known Space. I just told stories that interested me, and suddenly, freed of all that professional crap, shackles taken off, I could be more intuitive, I could let things go where they felt like they needed to, rather than where the "Writing Fiction For Profit" manual said.

I'm not a very good technical writer. I break grammar rules all the time. I tend to ignore narrative rules if it gets in the way of a good story. I seldom proofread. I'm fond of first person, which R2 and Orson Scott Card and a bunch of others are horrified by. So what? Screw them. It works for me. I edit for clarity after the fact, but that's about it. If a story rambles, it's because it has to ramble, because I can't *not* ramble, and it's *my* story.

I write and play weird songs. This, too, was after 30 years of trying to do love songs like everyone else. I thought I sucked. In fact, I don't suck, I'm just no good at love songs, which is just as well, as there's too many of them already.

The point is that eventually I realized something, and invented my own mantra: "Creativity is the inability to copy what's popular."

Your limitations - and mine - are what make you unique, even if they're a pain in the ass (And believe you me, my own limitations are pretty substantial. If I can go two days without a complete meltdown and utterly losing my shit, it's a good month.) - are also your greatest asset because it keeps you from being a cookie cutter.

David Byrne (Not to be confused with David Brin) once said that he felt people who can sing well have it a bit too easy. They can sing the phone book and it sounds good, whereas people like him have to work a bit harder, but that causes them to go in places where a better singer wouldn't look, causes them to do new and innovative things. The same is true of writing.

I got scores of negative reviews of my "The Truth about Lions and Lambs" story. Seriously lots and lots of bad reviews from friends, from family, from published writers, from fops, from hacks, from people who pointed out my each and every technical error, no matter how trivial. In the end, though, everyone agrees that it was a pretty good story,(Albeit pretty icky in places) and what I lack in crossing Ts and dotting Is is made up for in other ways.

That doesn't mean that my experiences are universal, or that they'll necessarily help in your situation, of course, but I offer it for moral support. At the end of the day, I, personally, am writing for myself. I do it because while I'm creating I feel like more than the sum of my parts, I feel like I'm not being dashed around by outside forces at random. And what I come up with - even if it sucks - is something that never existed before in the history of the universe. It's here because of me, even if no one ever reads it, or listens to it. That's enough for me. I mean, I do hope to get published and it'd be great to make money, don't get me wrong. But if I end up writing to just put it in a footlocker, that's still enough for me. The joy is in the doing.

So what I'm saying is this: write for yourself first, and other second. Write what interests you, and screw everyone else. If the story wants to go in a different direction than you were planning on, let it run for a bit. It might go somewhere neat. And if it doesn't, you can always chop it out later.

I've talked to you on and off for like a year now. You're perfectly articulate, and I've never had any problems understanding you, even when we're discussing complex ideas. If you can pull that off in Email form and on a forum, then you can do it in longer narrative form. Writing is just talking frozen in ice. If you can talk, you can write. If it's fighting you, then fight back. It'll come eventually.

The Artist Formerly Known As Republibot 3.0

Mon, 02/28/2011 - 02:59

Jake Was Here

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Joined: 07/24/2009

The flaws in my work are

The flaws in my work are never obvious to me at the time. It's only in looking back at something I've already done that I can see that something has gone wrong. (I would have said "see where I went wrong", but that would be inaccurate.)

Take the novel I'm working on. Reading over it, I realized that it took me the entire prologue and half of the first chapter to find the rhythm that suited the story. I did fall into the groove eventually, but everything leading up to that point was so stilted and professorial -- so Asperger-ish, if I'm to be honest -- that it was really a chore to read. It took the shock of introducing a conlang into the text to make it actually grab my interest as a reader. What's it going to be like for other people to flip through this thing if that's the author's reaction to it? (Granted, the prologue's written by a different character and was meant to sound rather ponderous and self-important in comparison to the more relaxed style of the actual narrator, but some irritating traces of the prologue remain after the voices are switched out. The change in narrators is meant to be something of a relief, but I don't seem to have got that across very well.)

And the annoying thing is that as much as I feel that changes should be made, I can't find anywhere to begin making them; there's not a word I can bear to alter. I can find nothing that works better than what I have there now. I suppose the sudden shift in style could be defended as an artistic choice, but that would only be a half-truth; my only real choice is whether or not to retain the stodgy writing.

Mon, 02/28/2011 - 08:50

Republibot 3.0

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Retain your writing, stodgy or not

You need to hold on to all your writing, stodgy or not. Literary mistakes are easier to fix than to avoid, so don't worry about it. Tell the story, finish the story, and *THEN* smooth over the bumps in the 2nd draft.

Creation is largely a subconscious process, which is why the ancients attributed it to Muses and other similar supernatural entities. You know what you want to say, over all, so just say it, and don't sweat any detail, just *do.*

*AFTER* you're done telling the story, that's where your ability to see mistakes pays off, because you can fix 'em if they need it. But all your mistakes won't need it: some mistakes will end up being better than you'd hoped for. Tell the story. Pretty it up afterwards.

If there's one think I've learned since 2006 it's this: don't seek criticism before the story is done.

The Artist Formerly Known As Republibot 3.0

Tue, 03/01/2011 - 17:12

10000li

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Joined: 10/23/2009

It’s ALWAYS up to you.

Let me introduce my comments by pointing out that I am someone who has had depression for more than 30 years. I am often depressed that I never became a famous hard SF author like my heroes. I have spent time and money consulting with psychological professionals, more often than not ending up feeling resentment that quacks like they are not tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

I have learned some things along the way about depression and how to deal with it:

#1 Reality is a Harsh Mistress (to turn a phrase)

Most people who have chronic depression, myself included, are very good a creating, nurturing and justifying false beliefs about themselves and the world around them. The biggest false belief that depressed folks create is that we are losers and can't do anything right (so why bother?). Depressed people create this belief by looking at a small part of the data that is our personal history and over-emphasizing the negative aspects. At the same time, we know that our negative self-image is based on an inaccurate assessment of reality, so we feel even more depressed that we have been lying to ourselves for so long!

So why do we do continue to cling to a knowingly inaccurate self-image? Because we are invested in that self-image and changing it means that we have been wrong for so long. People do not like to be wrong, even when we know we are wrong, so we use every mental trick we can to justify our wrong beliefs. Let me explain it like this:

*I have a low self-image and believe I can never achieve my important goals.
*I know this self-image is based on a negatively biased reading of my own history.
*If I acknowledge the inaccuracy of my self-image, then I will have to acknowledge the fact of all the things my negative self-image prevented me from doing and take full responsibility for not living up to my full potential.
*That would suck.

There is only one way off of this hamster wheel:

#2 A Leap of Faith

This is not a term that I use lightly - being an atheistic free-thinking materialist. We have to take the leap of faith to do the things we really want and believe we will succeed, in spite of all the evidence we have accumulated that we will not. There are some ways to make the leap easier such as following the path taken by someone you admire and surrounding yourself with supportive and honest friends.

Finding the right people to emulate is difficult but not impossible. One must develop realistic expectations of what one would learn from one’s heroes. It’s not “What Would (fill in name here) Do?” but “What Would My Idealized Version of (fill in name here) Do?”

I recommend reading the blog of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, http://kriswrites.com/.
I don’t even need to argue on her behalf. Go there. Read her work. You will learn.
I also recommend The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which I quote from, below.

Surrounding yourself with supportive and honest friends is even harder. Americans have this dysfunction of pretending derision is honesty, because we have been trained to believe that being nice is a necessary dishonesty. You need to find people who know how to be encouragingly honest. While you are looking, join Toastmasters, where you will learn what being encouragingly honest means.

#3 Quit Whining

Being cynical is for losers, and we aren’t losers. However, our dysfunctional culture also pretends that anyone who sees the bright side of life is naïve, so we are misled into believing that snark and disparagement equal wisdom.

Not.

Here are two words that few people ever put together:

Rational Optimism

See? They can sit side-by-side and the universe has not imploded.

To learn to be rationally optimistic, create a list of things, people and ideas you are thankful for. They must be real things that actually affect your daily life, and they have to be things YOU are thankful for, not things you have been told to be thankful for. Like any other kind of exercise, it is very difficult at first and gets easier with practice. The more adept you become at listing things YOU are thankful for, then the more masterful you become at showing gratitude for those things, and there is nothing that encourages a repetition of a good action like gratitude.

Here is a passage from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

Having heard that [a member of the Assembly] had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says:

"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."
(emphasis added)

What I have learned from this passage is that people in particular and life in general are more willing to do good on your behalf if they have already done good for you, and you have sincerely expressed your gratitude.

My recommendation is to start making a list of all the things you are grateful for, and read it first thing every day the moment you awaken and at the end of the day, as close as possible to the moment before you fall asleep.

The fact is, depression is a form of mind control. Your mind is being controlled by your tendency to see negative aspects of yourself. You have to retrain you mind to see reality. It is unrealistic to focus on the negative to the exclusion of the positive.

Thinking about the good in life is one tool to help you retrain your mind.

Another is doing the things you really want to*, even though you don’t believe you can.
(*so long as you don’t intentionally or negligently harm others, of course)

Sure, you have things in your life that you “have to” do. But we all have the same 24 hours in every day, and wasting them telling yourself you are a loser serves no one: Not you, not your family or friends, and not whatever you consider to be the “higher power.”

Check out Tim Ferris and his book, The 4 Hour Workweek for ideas on how to control your time so you can spend most of it on things that really matter to you.

I started my comments by describing my own situation in order to provide some background for them. I wanted to establish my credibility as someone who has experienced depression, so that when I say the things I do, the reader will know that I have “been through the war.”

At the same time, I don’t pretend that I follow my own advice all the time. Yet another dysfunction in our society is that we often reject the advice of others by saying, “Well, you’re not perfect, so why should I listen to you?” When you examine that objection rationally, you can see quite quickly that it is meaningless. If someone’s imperfections were all that were needed reject their advice, then none of us could ever learn from any other person, and, obviously, we do. We just have to be careful about whom we choose to be our mentors.

This is my gift to you, dear reader. What you do with it from here is up to you.

It’s ALWAYS up to you.

Let me leave you with a final thought from Dr. Franklin:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Tue, 03/01/2011 - 17:57

Republibot 3.0

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Thank you, 10000li

Thank you, 10000li. That was very personal, and I'm sure very helpful, if not to the person it was aimed at, then to someone as yet unknown who'll stumble by here in the future. Actually, to increase the chances of that, with your permission, I'd like to reprint it as a blog article someday, giving you full credit of course.

Cognitive therapy - summing up the situation, and logically thinking your way around whatever's bothering you - is very helpful, and I make use of it every day. In some situations, however, for me, personally, it's not enough. There are limits (different from person to person) on how well it'll work. For people beyond those limits, therapy is helpful, but, again, there's limits to what it can and can't do. For people beyond that, there has to be a medical solution. In my own case (not to let the cats out of the bag) it was hugely, hugely, hugely helpful. It's not for everyone, and it's not for anyone in every situation, but for some it's needed. For me it was. I wouldn't be alive today without it.

The Artist Formerly Known As Republibot 3.0

Wed, 03/02/2011 - 18:21

10000li

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Yes you may,

But no just yet. To merit a column, I need to clean it up a bit. Particularly the section about "WW(?)D?" that part doesn't really say what I want it to say.

Thank you so much for your praise of my post.

Wed, 03/02/2011 - 20:06

kristine N

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Joined: 11/05/2009

Totally agree

Thanks for that comment. I struggle with feeling inadequate much of the time and it's always good to get a little kick in the pants reminding me that I'm the one making the choices that either leave me feeling good or bad. Great reminder.

Thu, 03/03/2011 - 09:57

Republibot 3.0

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No, no, no, thank you

>>>Thank you so much for your praise of my post.<<<

Praise and gratitude are hand in glove. Thank you for posting it.

The Artist Formerly Known As Republibot 3.0

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